Kevin Drum on “the left and illegal immigration”

Right before the quoted passage, I wrote:

“It should do it humanely, it should do it efficiently, it should do it without trampling on civil liberties, and it should do it without mistakenly scooping up lots of citizens and legal immigrants in its net and putting them through hell. These are, obviously, all big caveats and they’re all hard things to pull off. When we fall short, we should yell about it. Like here, for example. But they aren’t impossible.”

This is pretty obviously *not* a root and branch endorsement of current policy, so I really have no idea why you say that my post plainly endorses the current regime. Especially since in the last paragraph I explicitly endorse a different one. And I imagine you can guess my position on separating same-sex partners, right?

I don’t know, if you think that these laws are unjust, why don’t you actually work to repeal them?

What this looks like to most people is that the elite have simply decided to ignore laws passed with majority support so that they have all the access to cheap labor that they want. It’s of a kind with NAFTA and other free trade deals, which were passed against the overwhelming sentiment of the electorate, and which this so-called ‘democracy’ ensures remain in place by not allowing any candidate that opposes them to come up for a vote. Only to a far more extreme degree because you haven’t even bothered to maintain the charade of democracy by making it actually legal.

Kevin, what you do is endorse enforcement of the current regime – enforcement in a humane etc. way, but enforcement nonetheless. And you claim that anyone supporting immigration laws of any kind should be logically required to support enforcement of current law as well. Which is nonsense, as Chris points out.

I see absolutely no reason to support the enforcement of borders drawn violently by white colonial settlers now keeping the descendants of peoples who have lived in North America for centuries out of large parts of it. An anecdote to illustrate the point: a couple years ago I was part of a picket at UCLA with some grad students. A white man walks over to us, points to the only Latino among us and says “you’re not from here!” The comrade in question was the only one of us born in California. Any support for enforcement means throwing in your lot with that man, whether you want to or not.

Soullite (4.): If you want to join me on a trip to East L.A. I can introduce you to members of the “elite” you are talking about. The truth is that immigration laws reducing immigrant labour’s bargaining power, in combination with NAFTA’s destruction of small agriculture in Mexico serve to create the cheap labour you mention in the first place.

What’s the principled defense of weak enforcement?

Well, sort of what I tried to get at in my initial comment. Any level of enforcement that would actually keep large numbers of undocumented workers out of the country is either practically or at least politically impossible — there’s too much support for having a desperate class of workers with no legal rights in the country.

So if effective enforcement isn’t an option, the choice between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ enforcement is a choice between harassing and immiserating undocumented immigrants more or less. At which point ‘less’ looks like a principled position to me.

I have never seen anybody cut to the chase on this hypocrisy-drenched subject half as well as LizardBreath is doing in this thread. Thank you LB.

Open borders would drastically force down the wages of working people. Particularly unionised working people. I would have hoped that contributors to Crooked Timber would care about that.

Open borders would drastically force down the wages of working people. Particularly unionised working people. I would have hoped that contributors to Crooked Timber would care about that.

Along with the fact that nobody has figured out how to actually keep economic migrants out (apart from having a deep recession, which one hopes is temporary), rather than merely making ineffective and cruel gestures in that direction, I think this assumption is nowhere near as unquestionable as many people seem to think. Why do you suppose illegal immigrants are so popular with employers? Would the employers have the same leverage to force down wages and worsen working conditions if these workers had the legal right to be here and to leave for another job? To what extent does the presence of a large pool of workers with no recourse actually enable the immiseration of the working class?

Chris’s position appears to be that some laws are unjust, that he gets to decide what those laws are, and once he’s made that decision he no longer has to follow them. Interesting.

@1 “I think immigration should be permitted at about the rate at which people want to immigrate to the US.”

In China right now there are about 100 million or so internally displaced Chinese. Suppose they decided they wanted to come to the US tommorrow. Would you support providing them with citizenship?

Steve if you drastically increase the number of people in the labour force won’t you force down wages through the forces of supply and demand?

Again, the flaw in this argument is that we already have a very large cohort of illegal immigrant workers and as I explained above I suspect this may have at least as strong an effect as a somewhat larger (how much larger? Does anybody really have a good estimate?) cohort of workers with legal rights would have, along with the damage to honest political discourse of everybody pretending that things are the case which manifestly aren’t.

I accept that this is true but couldn’t the answer be to provide amnesty to undocumented workers currently here and then crack down with much stiffer border enforcement and documentation checks?

Where is the evidence that the latter every really works for long? Or that big business wouldn’t, as it always has, successfully fight against documentation checks that had real teeth on a large scale and made serious inroads into its ability to find cheap labor?

“I don’t have any problem with rules excluding particular people for sane reasons, but I think immigration should be permitted at about the rate at which people want to immigrate to the US, and the citizenship process should be basically about recordkeeping.”

I think that’s a prescription for not having a country in a world with easy and fast travel. I hope you’re rich before they change the immigration laws. . .

I don’t think states have the moral right to impose such restrictions unilaterally

‘Control of the territory’ is, practically, the definition of ‘state’. This means that states don’t have the moral right to exist.

“I’m being realistic, not defeatist. The confusion between the two is typical of borked political discourses in which fantasy is widely assumed to be reality. Which is very much the case on immigration.”

Steve I disagree with you. Also you never really responded to the question regarding the 100 million Chinese.

My view of immigration laws is this:

Business really, really likes having access to cheap foreign labor. It’s like outsourcing for service industries.

Effective immigration laws are like an injunction, preventing businesses from getting the cheap foreign labor they want.

An injunction is for sale. Effective, enforced immigrant laws give the Left something they can trade to big business in exchange for things of value to the Left.

The present focus on illegal immigrants themselves is counterproductive, but benefits two groups. The first group is business. They get ineffectual laws that don’t prevent illegal immigrant combined with brutal enforcement that ensures the illegal immigrant community will be docile. The second group sees in immigration law another opportunity to demonstrate their moral purity and righteous alientation.

Would the employers have the same leverage to force down wages and worsen working conditions if these workers had the legal right to be here and to leave for another job?

I’m inclined, looking at the impact of H1-B visa contract workers on the IT sector, to say “yes”.

The best way to curb immigration to rich countries is to make rich countries poorer. They are currently quite successful in that endeavor. Maybe that is good news in the long run?

“My response? Another fantasy. I prefer to deal with real problems in a realistic way.”
I can’t say I am very satisfied with this response but such is life.
I am curious what your ideal immigration system would be? Open Borders? Rules that are not enforced? Some sort of wide spread guest worker program similar to Germany? .

@Steve LaBonne

“My response? Another fantasy. I prefer to deal with real problems in a realistic way.”

No. You just don’t have a good answer. Nice try, though.

I think the real question for progressives is this: Is there a way to shift the immigration debate towards businesses who benefit from hiring undocumented workers without inadvertently strengthening the racist anti-immigration discourse?

Adrian at 17: Yes, that does pretty much get me to open borders. If someone offered a believably enforceable (that is, that would effectively exclude all but an insignificant number of undocumented immigrants) immigration regime that wasn’t significantly unjust in detail, I’d take that as a compromise, but nothing like that is on offer.

It would be easy to dramatically reduce the undocumented labor force – by cracking down on their employers. But the government is corrupt and won’t do it. The solution is to drop any enforcement (whatever the consequences), because this will prevent businesses from taking advantage. The government is corrupt, but, for some unknown reason, it just may go for it. Because most of the population is dead set against it, I suppose? Is this the logic?

Adam, what was being kept out was not individual Germans but Germanic tribes which could destroy the Roman empire’s control of its territory. A Gaul may or may not be a citizen, but that didn’t keep him from going to Rome and living there. Even in the Republic there were no passport agents at the mouth of the Tiber stamping the documents of those aboard ship.

Why was Jewish expulsion necessary in the Reconquista if not that free migration amongst states was a fact of life in those times? When William the Silent announced that the Sephardim would be free to settle in the Netherlands without persecution due to religion it wasn’t in the form of giving them visas, but simply declaring Jews to be citizens and having them migrate like anyone else. Jacques Necker is a French minister, born in Switzerland. Benjamin Constant was also Swiss. Daniel Bandit-Cohen is German and lives in France (or the other way around). The British Royal Family changed its name in 1914 because of nationalist sentiment: It was previously the House of Saxburg-Comte-Gotha. Foreign nationality was never associated with any suspicion of disloyalty or impairment of rights in those times.

It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that the US even thought about introducing immigration controls. Furthermore, a world in which any country is only a plane ride away is far freer then one where traveling across boarders is dependent on the money in ones purse, or the religion one follows.

You’ve basically described pre-industrial states acting to control citizenship to the full extent of their limited abilities.

Not sure what your point is. Are you contesting the passport regime or the notion that states have a right to control their borders?

Another way to address Drum’s point is to say that enforcement can take a lot of different forms and this matters quite a lot. You can have many states where prostitution is illegal, but it makes a big difference on whether the state is oriented towards enforcement on the client or provider side. And especially how providers and their relationships with their ‘managers’ are dealt with. It is not nearly so simple as to say you favor enforcement.

” From the perspective of poorer countries, migration isn’t a solution to their problems.”

The massive flows of remittances would seem to argue differently. IIRC they’re much larger than existing flows of foreign aid.

“The truth is that the left’s opinions on immigration tend to be a mishmash that is largely driven by opposition to Republicans.”

Never was a truer statement made.

Taiwan might be the sort of example you’re looking for there, stubydoo@57.

And it seems like if wages in destination countries fall because there are suddenly so many unskilled, illiterate, or otherwise ill-equipped immigrant workers taking jobs, then plausibly those workers would otherwise be very badly off, and so their gain from being able to immigrate and get jobs would be considerable.

Yes. This whole debate is one where what’s good for the median worker already in a rich country is bad for the potential immigrants to that country. The question is whose interests are more important.

If there’s some path to political power in a democratic nation-state, for progressives, who will not protect the mass of wage-earning citizens from unlimited immigration, I’d really like to hear it.

To answer Luke R @ 59’s questions:

1. Economically, productivity depends on the capital stock and natural resources. It isn’t just a matter of the number of people, but of the number of people relative to the capital stock and available natural resources.

Much of the capital stock of a highly developed country is “lumpy”. Although economists sometimes posit the possibility of a smooth tradeoff between labor and capital, such that there are “labor-intensive” and “capital-intensive” ways to produce, it is not realistic. Technology is embodied in capital in such a way that so-called labor-intensive methods are completely dominated. Capital accumulation must supply enough tools, in order for people to find productive work, and until capital accumulation accomplishes that feat, lots of people will live in poverty, lacking effective tools.

The poverty and low-productivity, which are the consequences of an inadequate capital stock can, perversely, inhibit capital accumulation, because it tends to depress the returns on capital investment. Business doesn’t have to pay much for the marginal worker, and therefore doesn’t need to manage that worker in ways that yield high marginal productivity and wages. The impoverished sector is not a source of consumer demand or taxes to finance public goods investment. Impoverished workers do not acquire the education or skills, which would be necessary to make productive use of a technologically advanced capital stock. A cycle of immiseration can set in, that frustrates development efforts.

2. Politically, a nation-state is responsible to its electoral constituency, its citizenry.

Dan Miller 56: I don’t think remittances do a lot of good. They just exacerbate a state of dependance. Of course from the individual’s point of view they make a lot of sense but I don’t know of much evidence that they actually lead to societal betterment. I’m sure there is some research on that topic and maybe somebody with better knowledge can comment.

Chris 54: the refugee convention is designed to protect – to the extent that it offers any protection at all, which is very limited – individuals. So the parallel you are drawing isn’t clear to me.

51, 59 and 64 encapsulate the problem nicely. Open immigration is very probably in the interests of global social justice, at least if we are engaging in static comparisons. The welfare of immigrant workers is very likely higher than it would be in their home countries, else they would probably not migrate in the first place. Remittances that flow back home probably also help to ameliorate inter-national inequalities. The unskilled in the advanced industrialised world probably end up worse off, but the fact is that they are relatively privileged in the global scheme of things. The hard fact is that they reap locational rents purely through their citizenship status at birth.

The problem is that as 64 summarises, open immigration would likely undermine conditions for a social democratic political economy in the advanced industrialised world, meaning that the North also comes to resemble some of the dis-articulated, low-wage, low-productivity, low-public good economic regions in the South. The risk is that you capsize some of the social systems that made the North a desirable place to live and work in the first place.

Nonetheless, throwing up fences to protect the relatively privileged doesn’t sit well with egalitarian sentiments either. No easy answers, only the fudge of managed immigration and policies which protect migrants from unscrupulous employers.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/124028/700-million-worldwide-desire-migrate-permanently.aspx

700 million people would relocate if they had a chance. Let that number sink in. 165 million people would want to move to the US if there were open borders.

There is something almost obscene about rich and priviledged people talking casually about wrenching social change that wouldn’t affect them. None of the people commenting here would be likely to be in a position to lose their jobs, or have their wages collapse, in the face of the policies that they are advocating. I’m strongly in favor of liberal immigration policies for skilled labor (which would, in fact, impact people in my social class.) But there is a reason why large corporations are so enthusiastic about immigration of unskilled laborers. The economic arguments have the stink of free trade apologetics about them – the casual assertion that adding millions of people to an already depressed market for manual labor would have no impact.

And you might want to talk to gay folks in, say, the Netherlands about what happens when you bring in extremely culturally conservative populations into a liberal society.

A Left that does not advocate free movement of people is not a left Ii recognise. Wages in capitalism are determined in considerable part through class struggle, not through market prices; it is precisely the illegal status of many immigrants that depresses their wages.

But in any event, if you argue for keeping Mexicans out of Northern Mexico and indigenous Americans out of large parts of North America because not doing so would lower wages, why not argue that Jews shouldn’t own land (to lower land prices) or that blacks should be excluded from certain jobs? At various points in time those positions would have been popular in the working class, and the radical left at those times fought such reactionary beliefs, votes be damned. And so should we. If union bosses raise the slogan “British jobs for British workers” we should be the ones pointing out they’re pandering to racists and ultimately helping the ruling class keep us divided and weak – not applaud them for their common sense.

Perhaps you should too Christian.

See http://www.eurojournals.com/ejss_7_4_13.pdf

The hostility to immigration, even though it is declining, is absolutely real among white working class people who perceive an economic threat. Hell, it’s even a serious divide among Mexican-Americans (the “close the door behind me” mentality common in people who move to a popular place.)

You could make a Tom Friedman-style case that free trade has enormous benefits for poor people in third world countries. That doesn’t answer the argument that it has harmed manufacturing workers here in the US. If you can’t construct an open borders argument that differs from “workers in the US getting paid more than anywhere else in the world is unjust”, then perhaps you need to get out more.

700 million people would relocate if they had a chance. Let that number sink in.

I believe the standard answer to that line of argument is ‘700 million people would have sex with Jennifer Lopez if they had a chance.’ Vague aspiration is a pretty squishy foundation for policy, and it’s an even squishier basis for debate.

Shorter: “democracy, shmemocracy.”

I’m not sure who that’s aimed at, but as a general rule, born-and-bred citizens of a country are, for obvious reasons, badly informed as to the actual laws governing immigration to that country, which causes problems for the usual appeal to collective experience in an electoral democracy.

it seems to me like we should in fact not be talking about immigration policies. After all, the problem really is trade policies of various sorts

That’s right, this is about economics, labor and capital. Sort of like the act II of the industrial revolution. But it’s also about concepts like ‘welfare state’, ‘democracy’, and even ‘state’, as these things, as we understand them, probably can’t exist in a world with open borders.

A completely different world. And if it is a better world, it would be interesting to see some description of it, – and how to get there, because just opening the borders is not enough.

ought to be expanded to the point where those who are denied the most basic opportunities to live a decent life in their native countries have the right to live elsewhere

In this particular world, this neoliberal world, it doesn’t seem very meaningful. People are denied the most basic opportunities not because they live in certain countries, but for other reasons, having to do with the global economic system. I don’t think what you propose is a solution. And it might, arguably, make matters worse.

This is one of those issues where arguing from an individual rights perspective makes no sense. And arguing about economic impacts makes little more sense. Do people exist in collectivities (currently mostly states, before that communes, tribes, provinces, peoples….)? If so, do they have any just concerns with the character of those collectives? Surely so. And would a large influx of very different outsiders alter that character? Also surely so. I am quite happy for a few hundred thousand people a year to come to Australia – it gives them a better life, enriches the culture here, and seems (so far) to have few downsides. I would strongly oppose a million of more people coming to Australia each year – the place would no longer be my homeland – it would be some place I do not wish to live – it would not be Australia. If you doubt this ask an aboriginal Australian, or a Native American. There has to be a cut-off point. Yet nothing distinguishes in moral worth or desert the person who just gets in under whatever quota there is from those who just miss out. That’s life- it’s not about individual rights, it’s about the maintenance of the collectivities within which individual lives are lived.

On the historical side issue, until recent historical times (and right up to the last few decades in much of the world), the primary restriction on migration was that people weren’t free to leave the country (and often the city or estate) where they were born. As several posters have said, systematic restrictions on immigration were a rarity. The more relevant policy (still in place in some countries) was that immigrants and their descendants typically weren’t citizens and had few rights .

christian_h I would say it is you who needs to actually talk to some working people. Also you don’t know the background of everyone here so I would appreciate it if you did not assume that you did.

“If there’s some path to political power in a democratic nation-state, for progressives, who will not protect the mass of wage-earning citizens from unlimited immigration, I’d really like to hear it.”

This is probably the most important point that has been made so far. How can left wing politicians expect union members/workers to support them if said politicians won’t even fight to protect the wages and jobs of domestic workers? Can anyone name a political party on the left side of the political spectrum, or indeed any side of the spectrum, who won an election campaigning on open borders and depressed wages?

I would strongly oppose a million of more people coming to Australia each year – the place would no longer be my homeland – it would be some place I do not wish to live – it would not be Australia. If you doubt this ask an aboriginal Australian, or a Native American. There has to be a cut-off point. Yet nothing distinguishes in moral worth or desert the person who just gets in under whatever quota there is from those who just miss out. That’s life- it’s not about individual rights, it’s about the maintenance of the collectivities within which individual lives are lived.

So those collectivities are an absolute good? Or does the particular collectivity of Australia in 2011 deserve to be maintained because you happen to like it? Is the principle here that whatever collectivities happen to exist ought to be preserved? And, if so, why wouldn’t this rule have applied to Australia under the white Australia policy, South Africa under apartheid, the Jim Crow U.S. South, or (at the risk of going Godwin) Germany in 1938?

To a very great extent, one of the prices of maintaining our way of life in the U.S. or Australia today is the continued impoverishment of other countries. And closed borders (plus “free trade”) is one of the ways that relationship is structured.

Should the goal of the (first-world) left be to change that state of affairs, or should it just be to come up with less locally horrific ways of reinforcing it while providing a measure of greater egalitarianism strictly within our own collectivity (and thus abandoning any pretense of internationalism)?

I think this thread suggests that the incoherence of left positions on immigration come at least in part from a refusal to honestly face up to that question (combined with a good measure of learned helplessness from our utter inability to have any impact on the thoroughly hypocritical U.S. immigration debate that exists today).

And by the way, the claim made here repeatedly that open borders are supported by “neoliberals”, and “bosses” is also false. Bosses like temporary guest worker programs and such. They do not like open borders, a policy which would reduce their leverage over immigrant workers. (It is strange that those screaming the loudest about the impact immigration has on wages defend policies that are responsible for whatever impact there is in the first place – making people “illegal” – while opposing those that would minimize it.)

soullite 10.20.11 at 5:54 pm

” I don’t know, if you think that these laws are unjust, why don’t you actually work to repeal them?

What this looks like to most people is that the elite have simply decided to ignore laws passed with majority support so that they have all the access to cheap labor that they want. It’s of a kind with NAFTA and other free trade deals, which were passed against the overwhelming sentiment of the electorate, and which this so-called ‘democracy’ ensures remain in place by not allowing any candidate that opposes them to come up for a vote. Only to a far more extreme degree because you haven’t even bothered to maintain the charade of democracy by making it actually legal.”

Or, to pull out the really big example, Wall St and the corpocracy.

Marc (93.): First of all of course I do oppose private property. So? second you faith in that poll is utterly misplaced. It’s one thing to answer “yes” to a poll question – it’s quite another to actually pack up and leave.

Next, despite all evidence to the contrary, you persist in arguing as if open borders meant immigration would continue as now, only more so. This is precisely analogous to those who oppose drug legalization on the grounds it would just take the current problems with illegal drug trade and scale them up.

Third, the democracy argument. I assume you all support overturning Roe v. Wade as well? You support the death penalty? You were outraged how school integration was forced against the will of the majority of the population in the South? Or, do you agree that a left worth its name would, in the face of mistaken beliefs, racism, nativism, or sexism stand up and make its arguments forcefully – not afraid to be in the minority? That a working class left worth its name would work to overcome these artificial divisions created within the class through joint struggle (like those who argued for integrating unions did, for example)?

Finally, just to repeat, you are simply wrong when you imply that open borders don’t have support in significant parts of the working class, and are somehow an “elite” project. The actual elite doesn’t want open borders, as I pointed out. They are ecstatic every time someone blames immigrants for low wages letting the bosses off the hook. You may think you’re supporting workers – but in reality, you are playing right into the bosses’ hands.

“Finally, just to repeat, you are simply wrong when you imply that open borders don’t have support in significant parts of the working class, and are somehow an “elite” project.”

Would love some proof of this statement.

MPAVictoria, not so long ago millions across the US came out to demonstrate for legalization. Are you saying they were all members of the elite? Or that they don’t count because they were, themselves, immigrants (and their supporters)? I repeat, how about you visit L.A. and go into working class neighborhoods and talk to people.

It’s one thing to answer “yes” to a poll question – it’s quite another to actually pack up and leave.

This is a good point. We’ve been experimenting with open borders between countries with very different per-cap incomes for quite some time now over here in Europe. Romania is still not empty.

@96: Ok, I’m dealing with the equivalent of a libertarian arguing for private ownership of nuclear weapons.

Carry on.

If millions of workers aren’t significant I give up. Poll data is sadly hard to come by since all the neoliberals doing the polls think – contra claims here – that open borders is so outlandish they don’t even make it an option.

“If millions of workers aren’t significant I give up.”
Millions? And how many of those “millions” were actual citizens? Given that no politician of any stripe has actually run on open borders I think we can safely assume the policy is pretty much only popular with fringe elements such as yourself.

MPAVictoria: if you have a substantive response to the basic fact that immigration is, by definition, an area of governance where most of the electorate has at best second-hand knowledge and experience — as opposed to healthcare, education and most other areas of social policy — then make it, instead of resorting to misfiring snark.

“I’m sorry MPAVictoria, so what you are saying is that working people only count as working people if they are citizens? And you actually call that a “left” position? (Yes, it was millions. I was in Urbana, IL at the time – population about 100k – and thousands came out. In Chicago it was 300k, in L.A. 500k, etc.)”

I am saying that in a democracy what the actual citizens want should matter. While I accept that many people showed up to these marches I ask you again to point to any politician who has gotten elected on a platform of open borders. Or even one that has gotten a significant percentage of the vote.

I am not against reasonable immigration policy. I suggested upthread an amnesty for people already here followed by more vigorous enforcement. Open borders are simply incompatible with other policy aims of the left, such as universal healthcare, and increased wages for the working class.

Finally would you stop appointing yourself arbiter of all that is “left”. If anyone is out of the mainstream left here it is you not I.

“But this is missing the point (in addition to according power to a subclass of residents of a place based on arbitrary standards). The question is, what should we, as people involved in the political discourse, argue. You could as well say that we should support lower taxes for billionaires, because the parties supporting such have won elections. If people had followed your advice, women would not have the vote, for example. Good thing people didn’t just say “well, voters don’t like to have women vote right now so let’s just drop the issue”.”

What I was saying was that your response that the working class supports open borders lacks evidence and the absence of any elected official supporting that kind of platform could be seen as proof of that.

“You’re simply asserting this without evidence. That’s because what evidence we do have does not support your assertion.”

How is universal health care suppose to work with open borders?

Bill I am totally willing to accept some. She specified “significant parts of the working class”.

If I understand MPAVictoria’s argument correctly, there is a specific subset of the working class (unions) who have financial advantages (union contracts) only because this subset represents a super majority of the people who can or currently work at a specific job. If the job requires a higher level of skill or training (plumber, electrician, etc.) an influx of immigrants with those skills will have a noticeable but potentially limited effect on the hard won financial advantages. If the job requires little skill or training (SEIU, farm workers –yes I have worked these jobs) then an influx of immigrants will devastate or eliminate the hard won financial advantages. It is not reasonable to assume that the entirety of new immigrant population will wait in line just to get these jobs at prevailing union rates.

MPAVictoria: I’ll stop commenting at this point since I don’t want this to become a fruitless back and forth. Just one thing: it’s “he” ;)

‘How is universal health care suppose to work with open borders?’ (MPAVictoria)
That’s two counterfactuals. One is usually more than enough.

However the deeper issue raised by your comment is whether the democratic choice of the citizens of a state to exclude outsiders should be the trump card you take it to be. I don’t believe so… So… it isn’t up to the people.

I have to say, Professor Bertram, that I’m very glad you’re in a university and not the government.

At least you’re honest, though.

Eric, you are assuming that immigrants to the US will reduce the attributes that make the US attractive. There is something a bit wrong with this. Its true that in your school example students changing schools might not change the schools, but if you tied funding etc. that would be true. Migration is the ultimate check on tyranny.

Henri, not all migration is economic, and I don’t see a way to differentiate between the two. A law excluding economic migrants will exclude noneconomic migrants, and all a law against economic migration will do is make people worse off then otherwise.

Surely the idea that increasing the quantity of un- and low-skilled labour in the economy reduces the un- and low-skilled wage is an uncontroversial one.

If you are a high-skilled, high income individual, then unskilled and low-skilled immigration tips the distribution of national income in your favour. So,that’s good news if you’re a well paid professional, not so good if you run a dry cleaners or drive a taxi.

Perhaps the right of the professional to have his suited dry cleaned cheaply trumps that of the dry cleaner. Perhaps the right of the economic migrant to live in a country that provides a decent amount of public goods trumps the right of the dry cleaner to earn a decent wage, and the surplus accruing to the pinstriped classes is an unlooked for outcome and one ought not to bring it up in polite conversation.

But I would have thought that we can agree that there will be winners and losers from mass migration. Why should the free movement of labour automatically generate the best outcome for all concerned?

But vimothy, we need to consider immigrants in considering our immigration policy. I would have very few problems in admitting unlimited skilled immigration to the US, because the internet already made that happen except fro the whole freedom to migrate part. As for free movement giving the best outcome, it seems that Bastiat has something to say about that.

It’s one thing to answer “yes” to a poll question – it’s quite another to actually pack up and leave.

Indeed. Which is why the US State Department picks twice as many winners of the annual Diversity Visa Lottery for green cards as can actually be statutorily permitted to arrive. Because even among people who have affirmatively applied to come to the US, and who have attested in their applications that they are ready to pack up and leave with only a few months’ notice, there is significant attrition.

Migration isn’t easy, even when there are compelling economic or political reasons to attempt it. I have no doubt that the US could easily triple its current legal immigration numbers (1.1M today), but the fantasy that 165 million people are ready to pack up and move here demonstrates a profound lack of understanding of the migration process.

(Readers of 93 may wish to know that it is either carelessly or purposely ignorant: nowhere near all of the estimated 11 million undocumented people in the United States are Mexican; the number is more accurately assessed at about 6 or 6.5M.)

“Why should the free movement of labour automatically generate the best outcome for all concerned?”

This fairy tale which you mention … it is well regarded in the land of ideologues and simpletons, in particular that strange turf where liberalism and the free market begat the bastard, Neo-liberalism. Neo, the bastard, having sucked long and deep and hard on the corporate tit, has been striding across the land destroying democracy and institutionalizing corporatocracy. He has declared victory several times, and been right each time. We are going to have devil of a time getting our democracy back.

To Bruce Wilder @64

Thanks for the response (sorry I’ve been away from the thread for the intervening 70 comments).

If I understand right the point is that “productivity depends on… the number of people relative to the capital stock and available natural resources”, and is highest at some optimum, which present developed countries are fairly close to. 50 million more people would be too many to find efficient employment, and hence would constitute a burdensome and self-perpetuating excess.

But it seems that the converse of such an effect should also be possible: that there might be a society with a relatively large population and a very small capital stock, such that at present most of the people in that society can’t be efficiently employed, and this fact in itself holds back further capital accumulation of the sort you’re describing.

In such a society, massive emigration would seem to promise to relieve all the problems that massive immigration might cause in another society; most of the remaining people can get jobs, at higher wages, and businesses have a much greater incentive to invest in capital and technology because labour is so expensive. Those people can then get education, pay taxes to fund public goods, etc.

How do we tell when a given society has roughly the optimal capital;labour ratio, or too little capital, or even too much capital? It seems perfectly plausible prima facie that many developing societies are at present in such a situation.

That is, it seems like the underlying problem is that there’s not enough capital globally to efficiently employ everyone, given the normal mechanisms. By confining the excess people in developing countries, we at least keep them from clogging up the economy of developed countries; but don’t they then clog up their own economies in a similar way?

If not – i.e. if we’re in a situation where each country’s capital stock is close to the local optimum, so that any major shift in either direction would reduce efficiency – how do we know that?

On the point that a nation-state is responsible to its citizenry above all, I’ll say nothing.

why parties on the left have been losing ground the last 30 years.

If you want to find out why this happened, you might try the Occupy sight closest to you. Immigration policy it’s frankly not.

Occupy site, obviously.

Individuals are (usually) free to associate: to communicate/collaborate, to visit, to form a family. Those with with very deep connections (family members) are generally accepted; the problem with the same sex unions seems like a minor detail that can be easily fixed, and has been in some places already.

National economy and welfare provisions are collective institutions, affecting the whole community.

No matter how the immigration issue is analyzed from above by intellectuals of all persuasions with no personal investment, actual humans are being harmed and families ripped apart by the current catastrophic mess that is ICE.

My sister married a (legal) immigrant who is now a citizen; however, his siblings and their children who came legally are slowly and separately being deported back to their place of origin for such infractions as: a) immigration not processing their application until after the visa runs out, b) immigration losing vital pieces of paperwork and not telling the person until after their visa runs out, c) the person going in to renew their green card and being arrested at the immigration office because of paperwork lost by immigration (which they never notified the individual of being lost).

People say “go home and do it legally,” but the legal process takes 20 years, and once you’re out of status and go home you can’t ever enter again legally anyway. My sister’s brother-in-law and his wife had been married and in the US for 25 years. He was arrested as a passenger at a routine traffic stop and sent to a prison out of state with no notification of family and no access to legal aid. Within says he was back in the south Pacific and his wife (with legal status) struggles to raise the children on her own. The children born in the US work, go to college, get jobs legally – the ones born in their country of origin live in the shadows.

I realize that this is anecdote, not data, but at least it has the advantage of being real, not a philosophical abstraction. Knowing the actual people harmed makes it more difficult to take such conversations seriously. Supporting such efforts as the DREAM Act, small and incremental as they are, seems a lot more worthwhile.

Looking up the word “sovereignty” on Wikipedia, the first thing I read is this:

Sovereignty is the quality of having supreme, independent authority over a geographic area, such as a territory. It can be found in a power to rule and make law that rests on a political fact for which no purely legal explanation can be provided. In theoretical terms, the idea of “sovereignty”, historically, from Socrates to Thomas Hobbes, has always necessitated a moral imperative on the entity exercising it.

For centuries past, the idea that a state could be sovereign was always connected to its ability to guarantee the best interests of its own citizens. Thus, if a state could not act in the best interests of its own citizens, it could not be thought of as a “sovereign” state.

How quaint!

Chris: If not state sovereignty, then what?

“If you want to find out why this happened, you might try the Occupy sight closest to you. Immigration policy it’s frankly not.”

Sorry I must have been unclear. I was not trying to say immigration alone is the reason. I was trying to say that left elites ignoring the opinion and well being of traditional supporters in my opinion explains a great deal of the loss of support that leftist parties have been experiencing over the last 30 years.

The government won’t directly address popular anger on this score, but instead attempts to assuage it by dumping on legal immigrants.

I think that’s a stretched rationalisation. Easier to assume that politicians don’t mind dumping fees and bureaucratic nightmares on legal immigrants because those people can’t vote, and their citizen family members and employers represent a tiny constituency, and as such, there are no electoral consequences. I have trouble imagining any widespread motivation to reform the existing process, regardless of illegal immigration.

Well, then let me try to defend my caricature.

Perhaps I’m missing some subtle point of political philosophy, but this seems fairly straightforward to me: Either a state controls its own borders or it does not. If it does not, then someone else does.

Say we establish some set of norms that constrain the ability of states to set their own immigration policy. If there is a conflict between state and standards, then standards must take precedence. Otherwise, there is no constraint.

In other words, power is to be taken from the state and transferred to some international institution.

Now, control of the border is but one function of the state, which, of course, has other powers. But should it? Doesn’t the logic that leads you to restrict state sovereignty in fact lead you to think the that state, arbitrary and archaic, should be superseded by something a little bit more universal?

Consider, say, the migration of Moroccans to Spain. Presumably we can explain this movement of people via the relative provision of public goods in the two countries. But why shouldn’t Moroccans be able to enjoy Spanish public goods in Morocco?

That doesn’t seem consistent with what you wrote upthread, Chris, which was,

I’m not a big fan of the traditional idea of state sovereignty… States limited by international humanitarian law… The idea that states don’t have unlimited sovereignty is hardly something wildly radical, well not since about 1945 anyway.

That is, the idea that institutions like IHL limit the power of the state is uncontroversial and to be regarded as a good thing.

But here you write,

Well the Tory eurosceptic right think that this is the consequence of the UK being signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights. Sane people think that thinking of it like this is paranoid exaggeration.

Implying that the idea that institutions like the ECHR limit the power of the state is a nonsense only believed by readers of the Daily Telegraph.

How can both be correct? It’s got to be one or the other, at most. To my mind, it’s your initial claim: the whole purpose of both IHL and the ECHR really is to limit the power of the state. Otherwise, what are they there for? To confuse and annoy Tories?

Really, though–that these phrases have particular connotations is unfortunate but inevitable.

Clearly, you want to limit the power of the state in some respects. How this happens in practice is some power that the state currently possesses is taken from it and invested it an international institution. Where does this international institution come from? I don’t think that it is a stretch to say that it is created by a panel of experts. Perhaps there are more or less people involved than is strictly proper to refer to as a “panel”. Perhaps they’re not really experts but are randomly selected dudes off randomly selected street corners.

Whatever the case, the essential point is that, whoever they are and however they are arranged, they are not the state, because the whole purpose is to limit its power. You can’t simultaneously propose something that aims to limit the power of the state whilst claiming that anyone who says that the power of the state will be limited is wildly exaggerating.

Now, you will no doubt say that within the bounds set, the state has a certain amount of discretion to pursue the policies it desires. Well and good. But that’s not a relevant distinction with regards to state sovereignty. If you tell your child to be in before 8 o’clock, then there are obviously a whole set of times that satisfy this rule. But that does not imply that your child can determine his or her own bed time.

If an institution has the power to tell a state that it can’t do X, Y or Z, or that it must pick an X, Y or Z such that they satisfy some rule, then that institution has power over the state.

Well, to be honest I don’t see how we can disagree over this. The argument seems to have turned mostly connotative/semantic, whereas I was trying to argue that states should not surrender sovereignty in this area. But now I’m not sure how to even phrase it without sounding insane.

If the UK really does surrender some of its sovereignty to international institutions like the ECHR, and this is a good thing, why not just say that it does and that it is? Especially since this is precisely what you’re suggesting with regards to immigration policy.

Wow.

As Lenin put it “Who? Whom?”

I believe the quote is: “Freedom – yes, but for WHOM? To do WHAT?” Very cogent, actually.

To Bruce Wilder, @143:

“How does one know whether it’s raining? You look to see.”
So, what I meant was, what sort of indicators does one look at (I am not at all expert on economics). But to take this response on its own terms, I look at much of the developing world and, prima facie, it looks like they have too many people and not enough capital. So it looks like massive immigration from them to the developed world will be redistributive, worsening economic efficiency in the destination countries while improving it in the source countries, rather than a net reduction of efficiency.

More generally: it still looks to me as though open borders is (conceding that it will work like opponents claim) beneficial to as many people as it’s harmful to, and the beneficiaries are on the whole worse-off than those who lose out. (on the whole – if employers and professionals in developed countries benefit too, that’s a side-effect)

So it looks like egalitarianism and libertarianism (as broad value-orientations) are both in its favour; only nationalism (or nationalistic communitarianism, or nationalistic social democracy, if those terms are preferred) opposes it. Does that diagnosis seem correct?

Chris @161: You may very well be right that having an international body for negotiating trade policy did not play much of a role in causing people to oppose the WTO, but it still appeared frequently in their rhetoric, for some reason.

More generally, there are several other areas of policy other than immigration where global coordination is desired for one reason or another – e.g. trade policy, environmental policy… In the thread here on Australia’s carbon policy there were people complaining that it was useless because it was just Australia acting alone.

And then you get debates about whether something should be at national or sub-national level. For classic arbritrary-itis, see the American conservatives who insist that a health care policy similar to Obama’s health care plan is perfectly fine if enacted at the state level (e.g. in Massachusetts) but massively destructive if done by the federal government.

I consider the case for international coordination of immigration policy to be weaker than in many other areas. The legitimate objectives (whatever they are) of people who set immigration policy in the UK would only be marginally effected by US policy (though coordination between close neighbors certainly can help, for obvious reasons). And stepping up to a worldwide decision making process brings in a whole host of nasty complications.

People who complain about polical decisions being done at the wrong level of geographical aggregation, and couch that itself as a moral issue, are pretty much always just taking advantage of a cheap opportunity to put a wrench in the plans of their ideological rivals. Of course you are an exception (though you haven’t done much to convince me of this). You’ll be better off though – and more likely to get traction with people who aren’t already on your side – by making points regarding the specific content of immigration policies instead. The position that the legitimacy of a policy depends on the geographical aggregation level of its decision making process (absent any constitutional basis for such) is a very dangerous one.

Henri, economic migration isn’t distinguishable from other migration. Would you say that we should try to save Detroit even if everyone decides to take jobs in Phoenix and take advantage of the warmer climate, because leaving would decrease the welfare of those left behind? What’s needed isn’t assistance: its matching workers with jobs. Mexicans want to come north, employers want to hire them up here: why not let that happen?

Sorry. Late on this. But is Chris saying, “never set an example?”

Is this constitutive of “reasonableness?”

…except, of course, extending all those nifty rights to people born on the wrong side of an arbitrary line on a map.

No, in fact it’s you who are against extending all those nifty rights to people born on the wrong side of an arbitrary line on a map. You want people from the other side, if they have a strong enough desire to enjoy these rights, to leave their communities and move to your side. And then you pretend (or sincerely believe) that this somehow demonstrates that you care about their communities. But obviously you don’t.

” …except, of course, extending all those nifty rights to people born on the wrong side of an arbitrary line on a map.

No, in fact it’s you who are against extending all those nifty rights to people born on the wrong side of an arbitrary line on a map. You want people from the other side, if they have a strong enough desire to enjoy these rights, to leave their communities and move to your side. And then you pretend (or sincerely believe) that this somehow demonstrates that you care about their communities. But obviously you don’t.”

I was about to respond to your strawman chris but I saw Henri did a better job than I would have. As is typical actually.

Luke R @ 186

I did not argue, specifically, that a reduction in population would be detrimental to a developing country. I did not argue, either, that immigration would necessarily be detrimental to the receiving country. I think immigration can and has aided development of some countries, historically, when natural resources were abundant and economic development was driven by the expansion of industries exhibiting large increasing returns. The target community of such economic migrations benefits, and, under favorable (“liberal”) institutional circumstances, so can many of the immigrants.

I did argue, I thought, that an uncontrolled increase in population could also be detrimental to a developed country economically — a thesis I thought you accepted in the main — and institutionally.

The immediate question, it seemed to me, was why a political community should (in response to circumstance, but also in accord with moral or “liberal” principles) control immigration into its community or territory. You argued that emigration would benefit some territories in ways and to an extent that counterbalanced the detriment to those developed countries experiencing harm from uncontrolled immigration. It was up to you to come with some plausible mechanism by which emigration benefitted some countries to an extent that balanced the harm done to countries experiencing detrimental uncontrolled immigration, and the only thing you offered was an allocative efficiency argument, which I suggested was inadequate to the case.