Open borders, wages, and economists

“One author, Michael Clemens, raises the possibility of a doubling of global income”

Sure. Just moving to a different place makes people more productive, creates jobs, etc. While that may be true under some circumstances, as a recommendation for large-scale economic development it’s so absurd it could only come from an economist. “If only everybody had a college degree, we’d be doing so much better” – “if only everybody moved to the US or Western Europe, we’d be doing so much better”. Yikes.

Clemens and Kennan, like so many other anti-restrictionists before them, fail to realize that “suitable taxes and transfers” are never going to happen, at least not in the United States. These claims can only be considered a mendacious distraction at this point.
Chang fails to realize that what he is thinking of as “open borders” is actually a form of trade and labor flow control that is specifically designed to hurt the working class and aid the privileged. As Dean Baker has pointed out, the working class is relentlessly exposed to worldwide competition over jobs and wages, while many other parts of society are not. Doctors, lawyers, and accountants don’t currently face the same competition from cheap immigrant labor that blue-collar workers do. Hollywood, Microsoft, Apple, et al. are protected from the disruptive effects of technological change by active government policy (copyrights and patents).
The problem which Clemens, Kennan, and Chang all fail to see is that our existing system is socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. The wealthy and well-connected are insulated from market discipline while everyone else is exposed to its full rigor. Until and unless this is fixed, the working class in America and other First World countries will, quite rationally, continue to oppose immigration, trade with the Third World, and other forms of disruptive change.

First principles, folks: should labor have more, the same, or fewer rights than capital? If capital gets to dissolve borders for its own purposes, should labor be imprisoned behind them?

If the only context in which Sven and Ram can potentially recognize their necessary mutual solidarity is the one in which a capitalist-funded-and-directed army keeps them thousands of miles apart, we may as well give up on the entire project of human liberation and accept our chains meekly.

Can you improve a bouillabaisse by purée?

It’s a strange model that would lead anyone to conclude that limitless migration would add much to human welfare. What’s the mechanism? What increases actual production/productivity?

Would it be congestion? Oh, wait, that reduces productivity!

Would it be the substitution of labor for capital? Doesn’t that just erase the basis for technical advance?

Open borders is just one more brand of neo-liberal idiocy. Beware.

The sort of assumptions required by Clemens (and Kennan to a lesser degree, I think) don’t even hold up within single countries, where there is no legal restriction on movement, and many fewer non-legal barriers, such as differences in culture, education, language, and so on. It seems very plausible that increased migration would be good for the global poor. That’s one reason why I support it (though not the only reason, of course.) But it makes me sad to see people who otherwise are rightly deeply suspicious of the sort of assumptions found in this sort of argument willing to buy them when they seem to support a position that they would otherwise like.

Tim at 8- the US in the 1880’s didn’t have free immigration- there were already restrictions on immigration from Asia at that point (the full Chinese Exclusion Act was enacted in 1882, and it was a strengthening of an earlier act from 1880. There was also some modest restrictions on others before this, though very mild by modern standards.) One major reason (though not the only one, of course) why the Chinese were feared was that they were driving down wages of other recent immigrants from Europe, so recent European immigrants and their immediate descendents were among the most vocal supporters.

I agree with Josh and Bruce. Opening borders without first getting the capitalists under control is a mug’s game. For one thing to the extent that it did have an effect in migration, it would reduce the likelihood of investment in currently poor areas, and cream off the most productive people from those areas. The impact on the current unit of such socialist and social democratic measures as still remain, the nation state, would be to weaken its obligations to citizens: jobs are available elsewhere, so on your bike. We have open borders, and non-citzen migrants don’t get unemployment benefits, for example, so why should citizens? And voting rights?

It may be that, according to one of those inconsistent triad arguments, the demise of the nation state would mean democracy and globalisation would be compatible, but that doesn’t mean democracy would in fact be forthcoming. Those arguments assert a maximum, not a minimum, of two out of three. And of course the ascendant Hayek/Nozick/etc tendency says that the unfettered capitalist market is the real democracy.

They’re dated now but a couple of representative papers in the debate on this subject are:

Borjas, George (1995) “The Economic Benefits of Immigration.” Journal of Economic
Perspectives. Vol. 9 (2): 3-22.
Card, D. (1990) “The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market.”
Industrial and Labor Relations Review. Vol. 40: 195-211.

Most economists find positive impacts on wages as immigrants end up being complements instead of substitutes. Borjas, who I believe is more critical, does find some downward pressure on wages for people with high school diplomas or less but its small. I take a lot of these estimates with a grain of salt though because they can vary widely based on the kinds of assumptions made in the models.

There is the assumption that the benefit is smooth and rising. That is, if letting 1 million immigrants in is good, then letting 100 million in, is much better.

That obviously won’t work, after a point, and no one knows what that point it. It is possible that the reason you haven’t seem big negative effects is because that point hasn’t been reached.

As a non-economist, it appears that these sorts of open borders ideas (free trade, free movement of capital, etc) are associated with the weakening of the middle and working classes in the richer countries. These ideas have already done severe damage.

I think economists should devote themselves to repairing this damage, rather than indulging their desire for fantasy play in the dungeons of neoliberalism.

From the perspective of a Canadian immigration lawyer, this is a very interesting conversation. Canadian immigration law is currently undergoing a serious re-focussing on recruiting a skilled labour force, with only some of the foreign workers having an opportunity to stick around for the long term i.e. permanent resident status). Labour is highly controlled — down to each individual employment contract, in fact — by the federal government. Foreign investment, of course, is free to come and go as it pleases (relatively speaking).

I’m not a neo-liberal at all, but I’m personally in favour of something like open borders — namely, an attempt to level the playing field between labour and capital. The idea expressed above that we should wait until the capitalists are brought under control is basically an ever-receding goal, at least in Canada. The capitalists own the system, and have burned the bridge to the past; there is no bringing them under control, because it is a basic belief here that if capital is threatened in any way, then all of society will collapse. At best, we could hope for a change in the system where people who were admitted into Canada had a chance to establish themselves on their own terms, and could remain if they could show they were established. Not quite the same as open borders, but more empowering to the individual immigrant, at least.

And yes, attrition was originally a Freudian slip, but I liked it, so I left it in.

Seems to me to be just more evidence for the idea that the value that one can capture in a relatively complex and interconnected economy is much more dependent on the amount of capital one’s efforts are amplified by (either through direct control or through indirect availability), than on anything else. This, to me, is what Chang is picking up on.

Re-deriving the world from scratch, it seems obvious that in order to maximise both fairness and economic efficiency, capital and labour must face similar (low) levels of restrictions on their freedom (though even in the total absence of administrative restrictions, labour will, unfortunately, still face cultural and language barriers in a way that capital will not). Of course, such an approach would also tend to suggest that all humans start out their economic lives (i.e. the point at which they are able to actually start earning or producing value) with similar amounts of capital under their control/deployed for their benefit. Kennan and Clemens describe special cases of economic improvement as a result of inter-generational decentralisation of wealth (no one inherits the wealth or poverty of their nations of birth any more), but this would be as true within countries as between countries. Indeed, with the poorer people in rich nations much more likely to owe their financial success to capital that is implicitly present rather than under their explicit control, it is difficult to imagine how a flood of similarly capital-poor people from poor nations would not devastate them economically.

A number of the comments (Tim Worstall, T. Bailey) have stated that open borders are advisable to level the playing field between capital and labor. Within the US, for example, capital and labor are both fairly mobile. When Boeing decides to move a plant to South Carolina, does it help workers in Washington that they could move to SC and apply for their jobs again? Will labor mobility actually counterbalance capital mobility? Generally, labor movements use the “mobile capital” idea to support international coalition-building, not free movement/transfer of workers.

aexpc: “it seems obvious that in order to maximise both fairness and economic efficiency, capital and labour must face similar (low) levels of restrictions on their freedom”

If that sort of nonsense seems “obvious”, then neoliberal propaganda has done its work well.

Turn it around, and imagine that Labour can muster levels of organization and (political) power similar to Capital, and, from that position, act as a genuine, balancing countervailing power. How can that happen, how could that manifest, without restrictions on Capital?

Bruce: if I am willing to do a union worker’s job for 8 $ an hour, and the union pushes for him to get 10, and the company cannot fire him and hire me because of the union, he is profiting at my expense – he is able to get more benefit, because I cannot get more benefit for myself (than otherwise, not necessarily than him) – that is perfectly coherent and correct. It is also, as I said in the next paragraph, not the whole story, as unions can improve the bargaining position of labor generally, but it is certainly coherent and true as far as it goes. Simply pointing to the fact that neo-liberals say something is not a refutation, and we will not get anywhere denying that these conflicts exist.

“Clemens and Kennan generally concede the possibility of some small depressive effect but argues that it would be temporary and/or could be compensated for at a policy level by suitable taxes and transfers”

They’re lying ; this will never happen.

Adding on to Matt’s comment @9, Tim – the USA spent the 1800’s acquiring a rather large amount of resources and redistributing them to Caucasians. Trying to run Simplistic analyses is – well, simplistic :)

Eric Titus @23 asks “When Boeing decides to move a plant to South Carolina, does it help workers in Washington that they could move to SC and apply for their jobs again?”

The history of internal migration in the US suggests to me that if you rephrase the question as “does it help workers in Washington that they could move anywhere else in the US to take another job?” then the answer is self-evidently “yes.” Minimally, I would love to see someone make the affirmative case that their lives would have been improved by requiring that they stay in Washington.

“The injustice of a global system that doesn’t allow children born in say, Haiti, to leave is far greater than any other type of injustice currently existent.”

I’d put it no higher than maybe 37th, in a 3-way tie with “Having to Live in North Korea” and “Forced into a Lifetime of Subsistence Farming at Age 8,” all of which are several spots below “Kidnapped into Pre-Teen Prostitution” and “Conscripted into the Lord’s Army.” But to be fair, it’s more of an injustice than “Didn’t Get Tickets to Taylor Swift,” so that’s something, right?

Martin – how are you defining rent @16? It is a central economic concept along with its close relative opportunity cost, and as with all these concepts is embedded in a framework of proprietarian market interaction, and would seem to eventuate in convoluted and as far as I can make out potentially insoluble counterfactuals (a bit like the idea of everyone being a price taker, there’s a problem with universalising a partial analysis). The idea of surplus, too, and of what counts as ‘voluntary’, baselines for deciding if a ‘game’ is positive sum, etc, all seem to have this aspect.

If we suppose the standard idea that a trade is positive sum, that there are ‘benefits of exchange’ to be divided up, then the idea that an employee receives a rent in the sense of a producer(?) surplus is only to say that not all the benefits of exchange go to the employer – so introducing sufficient competition between employees would remove the ‘rent’ accruing to the employee by bidding down wages to the point where all the bens of exch go to the employer.

You can go off into further flights of fancy about perfect competition bidding away the surplus/profit/benefits of exchange of the employer too, but then suddenly no-one gains anything from the employment contract, so presumably something has gone wrong. And I think the thing is that there is in the end no natural baseline against which to measure the (subjective) benefits of exchange to either party.

I’ve probably expressed that rather poorly, but I don’t think I’m missing anything (well I wouldn’t would I). And it is perhaps taking things rather far afield, but I think the answers to this kind of ‘puzzle’ are going to feed back into the more concrete issues under discussion.

Martin Bento: “than otherwise”

Whether you realize it or not, you’ve hidden a potentially unlimited mass of logical inconsistency behind that seemingly innocuous phrase.

Economists have generated volumes of controversy, and propaganda, on this, and related subjects. The confusions attendant to the controversies seem to be a setup for the propaganda. Instead of distilling genuine and valuable insight, we are fed carefully distilled poisons, such as the fable of an ideal market of minimal rules and restrictions.

I don’t think we should be so eager to buy tendentitious or specious reasoning, masquerading as counterintuitive insight. So, a union forms and imposes restrictions on trade in the course of negotiating with an employer, which have the effect of raising wages, and you want the “freedom” to be a scab tool of employers, to reduce those wages. Somehow, you want to be congratulated on the economic “insight” that those higher wages come at your expense, not at the expense of the Capitalist Employers or their economic rents.

What would have to be true about “otherwise” for the Union worker’s extra $2.00/hr to be “at your expense” (that is, at the expense of a worker ‘willing’ to take the job for less)? That there’s a reserve army of the unemployed, and you can trade places with the Union worker, by eliminating his income, while increasing your own by somewhat less — and that’s socially desirable, because . . . ? Or, that there’s a fixed fund of wages, such that the Union only seems to be negotiating with the Capitalist/Employer, but is, in fact, engaged in a conspiracy against the public and other workers? Or, that there’s an avalanche of additional product output available, in the space between marginal labor product of $10/hour and $8/hour? How plausible is it, really, that a Union would negotiate away an avalanche of output for a lousy $2/hour? As opposed, to pressing management away from wasteful practices and management shirking, which lower marginal product, and tend to lower total output — that is, unions move employers toward an efficiency wage, and a fairer division of economic rents.

I feel there’s a lack of clarity about the theory behind the prediction that open borders would lower rich-country wages but raise global income overall. Why is there such a big difference in wages in the first place?

I suppose the implicit story is that the North has a big stock of capital relative to its laborforce and the South has lots of L relative to its K. Pool the world’s K and L and global output rises; marginal product of L rises in the South and falls in the North, while marginal product of K rises in the North and falls in the South.

So we immediately run into the problems that we always have with these kinds of stories. It is not obviously true that the marginal product of capital is higher in poor countries than rich countries. It certainly is not the case that we see the big capital flows from North to South that this would imply. More generally, K is endogenous — why don’t we have convergence, why doesn’t investment rise in the South and fall in the North until we reach the golden rule path in each country, at which point there is nothing to be gained from pooling the world’s K and L?

Why is it more likely that free flows of L would deliver these gains, than that free flows of K (or even just of goods) will? Why isn’t full capital mobility enough?

Maybe there are institutional obstacles that reduce the return to K in the south and prevent convergence. But in that case, it seems to me, there is no reason to expect a long-term fall in wages in the North as a result of open borders, given that K in the north is endogenous. To the extent that the wage premium in the north reflects institutions, the rule of law, and similar public goods, why do we expect immigration to reduce wages in the North?

Why does the North have these public goods while the South doesn’t?

How can we reconcile the idea that an increase in the supply of labor will reduce wages with central banks that believe in a NAIRU? If — in normal times — monetary policy is maintaining the level of labor market slack thought to keep prices stable, wouldn’t an increase in labor supply just allow faster growth?

On the flip side, what if workers in rich countries are not more productive, but are just getting a greater share of the world product thanks to their better position to claim a share of the rents flowing to elites? How much of the wage difference between the North and South really reflects productivity differences?

It seems to me one needs answers to these kinds of questions to say much about policy.

And then there are the political questions, which are the interesting ones. It’s hard to see a future for democratic politics in a world without borders…

B Wilder,

Insistence?!?

That’s excellent, JWM- a much more careful version of what I was trying to get at above in my comment.

Why the emphasis on bus drivers? If you want an optimal immigration policy that benefits immigrants and screws a group nobody cares about, here’s a better plan: any graduate of any law school in the world can work as a lawyer in the US, provided he or she passes the bar. If the bus drivers had come up with a plan like that, I don’t imagine there would be much support among the lawyers, but of course there are far more lawyers in Congress than bus drivers.

JW Mason: “To the extent that the wage premium in the north reflects institutions, the rule of law, and similar public goods, why do we expect immigration to reduce wages in the North?”

A changing “ratio” of Labor to the “lump” of Capital plus Land, in all its various forms, including the public goods capital of institutions. Various mechanisms might trigger a cycle of entropy, which would erode the Capital or the productivity of the combination of Capital and Labor, or simply the capacity of Labor to negotiate a sustainable share of output.

Swamping of infrastructure, I think, is often imagined. Congestion effects, which reduce marginal productivity sharply, are a potential problem; some sectors, especially agricultural sectors, require an institutional mechanism limiting labor inputs, to maintain a large surplus to feed other sectors — the pressure for immigration originates in many middle-income countries, with a large legacy population in rural areas, whose very size depresses marginal productivity to subsistence levels; think about a country like Thailand, where almost one half of the population is stuck in dire poverty, down on the farm or on the margin in cities, without access to capital necessary to productive work. Thailand has First World capital to productively employ a lot of people, just not enough of it for the whole population, and as their agricultural sector advances, with investment in modern methods, it doesn’t require much labor; if Thailand does not have enough Capital to employ all its labor, why would we imagine some other country would have an available, idle surplus? The amount of Capital might vary, but the fact of a limit to Capital (severe limits to the effectiveness of substitution of labor for capital as a development strategy) must be universal, not subject to cure by migration.

JW Mason: “It is not obviously true that the marginal product of capital is higher in poor countries than rich countries. It certainly is not the case that we see the big capital flows from North to South that this would imply.”

Ha-Joon Chang, as I recall, is developing an interesting and multifarious story about how the terms of trade are affected by the sunk-cost, quasi-rent earning nature of Capital, in ways that make it a bit of a strategic challenge for a developing country to put in place a virtuous cycle of investment and development. His general thesis is that restrictions on trade and capital controls have been historically, and are now, vital levers for meeting that strategic challenge.

One might suspect that the neo-liberals are attempting to distract attention from the implications of that kind of strategic competititon, among nation-states.

JW Mason: “It’s hard to see a future for democratic politics in a world without borders…”

For the neo-liberal technocrats, this would seem to be a prime desideratum.

As a non-economist, it appears that these sorts of open borders ideas (free trade, free movement of capital, etc) are associated with the weakening of the middle and working classes in the richer countries. These ideas have already done severe damage.

I think economists should devote themselves to repairing this damage, rather than indulging their desire for fantasy play in the dungeons of neoliberalism.

Or maybe many of those economists just aren’t patriots? Living predominantly in cosmopolitan college towns where they meet more foreigners than NASCAR fans, they care about utility, not the share thereof captured in their country. To the extent that they care about inequality, it’s principally global inequality, not that within societies that are already rich.

Good for them!

JWM:
How much of the wage difference between the North and South really reflects productivity differences?

How much of the wage difference between North and South has ever reflected productivity differences, or at least in the last several decades? Wasn’t this one of the points of (a certain kind of) dependency theory? (I recall a discussion for non-economists in Harrington’s 1977 book The Vast Majority — one among many such sources, no doubt.) I’ve also never understood how the productivity of many service workers and professionals can be measured in a meaningful way, but that’s another question (and possibly/probably just a reflection of ignorance on my part).

When NAFTA opened the border, the first reaction was that the International Brotherhood of Teamsters claimed that Mexican trucks were unsafe. Then, when it was observed that some of them drove the same trucks and were subject to the same inspection criteria on this side, they said that the Mexican licenses were too easy to obtain. So while the borders were open, they weren’t exactly open; I see with a quick search that it is still going on a dozen and some years later, and it makes you wonder how many similar “safety” regulations have ulterior motives. I have no doubt that the Teamsters had financial backing from somewhere. The same thing is going to happen when Ram moves to Sweden.

“When NAFTA opened the border, the first reaction was that the International Brotherhood of Teamsters claimed that Mexican trucks were unsafe. Then, when it was observed that some of them drove the same trucks and were subject to the same inspection criteria on this side, they said that the Mexican licenses were too easy to obtain. So while the borders were open, they weren’t exactly open; I see with a quick search that it is still going on a dozen and some years later, and it makes you wonder how many similar “safety” regulations have ulterior motives. I have no doubt that the Teamsters had financial backing from somewhere. The same thing is going to happen when Ram moves to Sweden.”

I am curious what you feel would be an appropriate response to the destruction of their lively hood? Should they just shrug their shoulders and tell little Billy that he isn’t going to get to go to college when he grows up and little Suzzy that it is too bad she can’t have braces?

Democratic governments are elected to represent the interests of their constituents. I know neo-liberals don’t care about such things but it needs to be said.

My comment 2 would be incoherent to someone who had not read HJCs book. He does not think Sven is overpaid. He is not calling for open borders. He is trying to get first workers to understand that they benefit and have benefitted from protection even though their govts prevent weaker states from adopting the forms of protection and regulation that they need to develop. At one level Chang is reviving antiRicardian inf industry arguments, and he does not want to hear free trade propaganda coming first world countries that are protectionist in ways they refuse to recognize. don’t have C book with me but I think the op badly misrepresents Chang by claiming simply that Sven is overpaid and implying that Chang wants Svens wage reduced b open borders. This is not his point iirc. Will check tomorrow

Marginal product theory of wages + theory of subjective value = The theory of subjective productivity?

You are only as productive as rich people want you to be. Another one of capital’s magic powers.

Does Chang account for real wages in his calculations? Even if he does, individual productivity alone does not determine wages: average productivity is a huge factor.

Something missing from this story is the fact that many wealthy nations have welfare state policies that poor nations cannot afford. If we open our borders to immigration, then there is the potential for migrants to exploit those welfarist policies. We need to think carefully about this.

The very first sentence I wrote in this thread was: “The only thing that has ever brought working people, even including professionals, a decent income outside of short-lived booms is some form of rentier status. ”. Reading comprehension test: do you think the author of that sentence is arguing against the ability of most people to earn a decent income or in favor of rentier status for workers? Since some people somehow missed this, let me make it as explicit as I can: I favor granting workers rentier status. That doesn’t I’m going to deny that rentier status is what we are talking about. My second paragraph read thusly:

“Nonetheless, as the history of unions has shown, creating such rentiers can have spillover effects that raise general wages. When the unemployed guy finally does get a job, it will probably be at a higher wage if the local workforce is largely unionized, even if his specific job is not unionized. By making specific groups of workers rentiers, one can move towards strengthening the hand of other groups of workers and ultimately all ”

Here’s Bruce’s response to this:

“you want the “freedom” to be a scab tool of employers, to reduce those wages. Somehow, you want to be congratulated on the economic “insight” that those higher wages come at your expense, not at the expense of the Capitalist Employers or their economic rents. ”

Do I really? Is that what the paragraph implies?

Tim, the definition of “rent” I am using is: benefit that accrues to someone due to exclusive access to a resource. In the case of a union worker, or the denizen of a country, said resource is a job, which the institution of the union or the country prevents others from taking. One does not have to buy into the whole econ 101 ball of wax to accept this definition, and if the whole objection is just to this word, we’re just arguing semantics anyway.

Let me lay this out schematically:

We have two potential situations:
a)the union worker gets the job at $10 an hour, and the unemployed guy remains unemployed and
b) the unemployed guy gets the job at $8 an hour and the union worker becomes unemployed.

If the union did not interfere in how jobs are normally allocated in our economy, b would be the case. Because of the union, a can be the case. The employer will pay $8 an hour regardless, and pay an additional 2 to the union guy. That means the union guy will get $2 at the employers expense. However, the union guy will remain employed and the other guy won’t, which would not be the case absent the union, so the difference in benefit between making $8 an hour and being unemployed is something the union guy is getting at the expense of the unemployed guy. This difference is presumably not 8 an hour, as this job is sufficiently unpleasant that people must be paid to do it – therefore, working at it is a cost – but not so unpleasant that no one would do it for 8 an hour. So the union worker is extracting rent – some from the employer and some from the other worker. Since this is a net benefit to the two workers considered together, I generally favor such an arrangement, but I’m not going to buy into some fairy tale where it has no disadvantages for anyone among the workers.

Now this does, as Bruce insists, presume many things about the economy: that there are unemployed people, that employers generally choose their employees, that property exists, that people are paid in money, etc. But these things are all true in our society. Acknowledging that they are true is not the same as arguing that they are good or necessary; it is just an acknowledgment of fact. Any counterfactual has to be bounded. If I am asking what difference the union makes by looking at what would be the case if the union were not there, asking what would be the case if the union were not there and there were no unemployed people is changing the subject, not some brilliant critique of the question.

For example Bruce wrote:

“What would have to be true about “otherwise” for the Union worker’s extra $2.00/hr to be “at your expense” (that is, at the expense of a worker ‘willing’ to take the job for less)? That there’s a reserve army of the unemployed, and you can trade places with the Union worker, by eliminating his income, while increasing your own by somewhat less”..

Yes, all those things are in fact generally true in our society

“—and that’s socially desirable, because . . . ”

I never said any of it was socially desirable, but I am not going for that reason to fail to acknowledge that it is true. You seem to be reacting to any acknowledgment that unions may not always and everywhere be in the interest of every single worker as some sort of general attack on unions. Related to this is Eric’s objection that in the absence of the union “the worker” is making 8 an hour rather than 10 and therefore “the worker” has suffered. But there is no “worker” in the abstract; there are two specific workers, and for one to gain the other must lose. It is true that, in the case of the union, more is gained on net than lost – it is a postive-sum game from the perspective of the workers – but that is not the same as a win-win situation (conflating these two is one of the common tropes of free trade enthusiasts); there are still losers.

All of which is tangential to my main point, which is that national restriction of immigration is, in terms of its labor market effect, the same thing. Workers in an advanced economy have privileged access to jobs there, which enables them to bid up wages higher than they otherwise would be. To some degree, this is to the detriment of those excluded who would like those jobs, but to some extent it is also to the detriment of the employers whose options are constrained, which to me makes it generally net desirable, because employees are otherwise in such a weak position vis a vis employers. The question, then, is how to enlarge the number of nations with sufficient national wealth that citizens can gain this kind of leverage.

By chance this was mentioned at Econlog:

http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~jkennan/research/OpenBorders.pdf

“There is a large body of evidence indicating that cross-country differences in income levels are
associated with differences in productivity. If workers are much more productive in one country
than in another, restrictions on immigration lead to large efficiency losses. The paper quantifies
these losses, using a model in which efficiency differences are labor-augmenting, and free trade
in product markets leads to factor price equalization, so that wages are equal across countries
when measured in efficiency units of labor. The estimated gains from removing immigration
restrictions are huge. Using a simple static model of migration costs, the estimated net gains
from open borders are about the same as the gains from a growth miracle that more than doubles
the income level in less-developed countries.”

……

One conclusion of this paper is that open borders could yield huge welfare gains: more than
$10,000 a year for a randomly selected worker from a less-developed country (including nonmigrants).
Another is that these gains are associated with a relatively small reduction in the
real wage in developed countries, and even this effect disappears as the capital-labor ratio adjusts
over time; indeed if immigration restrictions are relaxed gradually, allowing time for investment in
physical capital to keep pace, there is no implied reduction in real wages.

Of course, any such paper is subject to the models used, the assumptions made etc. But he does seem to be saying that there is no (or very little) pain, only gain.

Another point to consider is that the legal restrictions on immigration are not the only restrictions. Just as with free movement of capital, we don’t find that all capital is suddenly invested abroad (as Adam Smith noted it wouldn’t be with the invisible hand comment). We’ve entirely free legal migration in the EU and we still don’t find that the entirety of Portugal is living in Sweden.

So if Chang is right, an open border policy would have a massive depressive effect on the earnings of non-migrant workers in wealthy countries since other people would be happy to take unskilled or low-skilled jobs for much less than the current wage (but more than they could get at home).

But that’s irrelevant. Sven’s wages aren’t set by the market — that’s why a bus driver is making decent wages in the first place! Sure, lots of immigrants would like Sven’s job, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be allowed to compete for it by depressing the wage, *because Sven lives in a country that has policies that protect worker incomes*.

Racing to the bottom isn’t inevitable. The countries that deliberately choose not to do/allow it *just happen* to be the high-wealth, high-productivity ones. Some people might consider this a lesson worth learning from, but not, apparently, economists.

Why compare Sven and Ram? Why not compare Jose and Juan within the same country? There are large productivity differentials within the same industry in the same country. Brazil has highly efficient supermarkets next to vast favelas where retail is conducted by expensive street vendors. If the goal is to increase productivity, that’s the place to start. Second, what reason is there to believe that Sven is productive at all? The bus service is probably government run and subsidized by taxpayers. I know the Santa Claus temptation is hard to resist, but turning Ram from a productive bus driver in India to a net tax consumer in Sweden doesn’t sound like a benefit to anybody but Ram.

Surely the first question that needs to be asked is : what is the sustainable carrying capacity of the land of the country?

As an example of the direction of my thinking, there are good estimates that Spain’s population uses water at an unsustainable rate, right now. That asks big questions about whether the act of immigration is costless (as assumed in all of these studies.)

Without this, we really are in the heart of economics fantasyland where it’s assumed that all problems fix themselves through some magical invisible hand mechanism.

If you had a decent estimate of the maximum sustainable population of each country, then you could say that up to that level, some of the assumptions in papers cited in this debate might hold. But then that rather automatically nixes open borders overall.

Surely nobody suggests that a workers marginal product is a suitable measure of their productivity? It represents the decision that managers face at the frontier of production, not the contribution each individual plays in a symbiotic process. Stylized example- you have nine workers trying to lift a precious but really heavy stone worth £100,000, Mr. Manager can see they can almost do it so he pays another man who joins the team and together they left the stone. The marginal productivity of that individual work is £100,000, but his actual contribution to production is probably something like £10,000 (under the assumption all the workers were roughly as strong) – since if he tried to lift the stone by himself he wouldn’t be able to do it.

If we want a measure of objective productivity to play a counter-factual role in debates over ‘fair wages’ it won’t have anything to do with marginal product.

“But it can’t be legitimate (imho) for governments to pursue those interests in ways that impose massive harms on outsiders as, arguably, hard borders policies do.”

The word impose is doing an awful lot of work here Chris. Are you imposing harm on the homeless by living in your house? Am I imposing harms on the unemployed by not offering to do my job for half the wages so my boss could hire another employee? We on the left should not be helping the 1% and the neo-liberals to destroy what is left of the labour movement which is exactly what open borders will accomplish.

@58 and 60
thanks for the answers to my question re productivity/wages

Writing the last comment reminds me that a lot of the living standards difference between Sven and Ram could be explained in terms of energy consumption. I think that creates a dynamic which probably needs to be factored in before we assume “double global income.”

The Open Boarders theory is making the assumption that cultural costs are not going to transfer with massive immigration. If 300 million Chinese where to move to the US tomorrow, one would assume that the area settled by the new Chinese immigrants would contain the good & bad culture of the homeland. The bad culture, namely massive government corruption at an estimated cost of $1 dollar out of $8 dollars of economy, might effectively eliminate the US advantage in this area and result in both the new immigrants and the existing populous living under the current Chinese economic conditions.effe

“MPA Victoria: yes “impose” is doing some work, but so is your unargued-for presumption of entitlement to exclude and your analogy that excluding the homeless from your house is like excluding would-be migrants from national territory. But accepting the analogy for the sake of argument, it is very strange for the left to be making an argument that when the very wealthiest people exclude the poorest from their land they are only doing what they have a perfect moral entitlement to do. If that exclusion also condemned the poorest to high risk of disease and premature death and permanently stunted their life opportunities then talking about the imposition of harm wouldn’t seem inappropriate,”

So now the working class are the “very wealthiest people”? I hesitate to bring this up Chris but you have to admit that you personally are unlikely to be negatively effected by any open borders policy where someone who works as a butcher or a carpenter probably will be. Don’t you think their views should be taken into account?

I would also argue that the working poor don’t impose anything on anybody. It is the 1% who are imposing.

I don’t think anyone has fallen for the illusion that the economists in question actually care about the welfare of the poorest people in the country. Economics is a tool for the 1%, and completely open borders would increase the power of capital at the expense of labour. What it would result in is a race to the bottom, with wages being undercut by immigrant labour until you have “factor price equalisation” in the words of neoliberal economists. Who does that benefit? Perhaps the immigrants would have small improvements in their situations, but the main benefits accrue to the capitalists, while the domestic working class would lose significantly. How can anyone on the left claim that’s a good thing?

Some on the soft left seem to dismiss these problems, by arguing that by unionising these immigrant workers, ensuring they know their rights etc, the undercutting of wages wouldn’t happen. However, they don’t seem to have considered that the immigrant workers may not want to be unionised, because they know that their willingness to work at a lower wage is highly attractive for employers. Once they get employment, they’ll be better off than they would have been back home, even if they are not being paid what a unionised domestic worker would have.

Do we really think that the migrant worker would feel a significant amount of sympathy for the displaced domestic worker? Some would, for sure, but in general I don’t believe we are at a stage where international working class solidarity is so strong as to undermine the collective power of capital. Perhaps it will be in the future, but it’s not the case now (one example: remember the Lindsey Oil Refinery wildcat strikes over the employment of Italian workers? How many of the Italian workers joined the British construction workers in solidarity? Very few).

It’s papers like these that make me despise the pseudoscience of economics. These snake oil salesmen do everything they can to dismantle the working class by pursuing policies in the interest of capitalists, like deregulation, privatisation, free borders etc. If we want to help the poor in the 3rd world, we should try to make scientific research more freely available, and offer technical assistance so that they can develop their own indigenous industries, improve crop yields, develop better infrastructure etc. These policies are what will truly help the poor in developing countries, not quick fixes like open borders.

@Chris Bertram

Land carrying capacity isn’t just about justice – it’s about the assumption that there is no cost to immigration – which is the underlying assumption in all the “open borders” = “double world income” stuff.

In justice we should all share equally, but even then, it’s not obvious to me why open borders should be the sharing mechanism – that seems to result in some kind of darwinian situation where the strong push out the weak in each territory.

@ Chris, you say that the working class in the wealthiest countries are wealthy in global terms, and that’s true, however they face a significant amount of exploitation in the workplace due to anti-Union legislation, the liberalisation of labour markets and having seen their pensions decimated, are now going to have to work longer due to the raising of the retirement age.

Furthermore, I don’t know if you’ve seen the documentary “Poor Kids” which was on the BBC, but that seriously highlighted that the conditions of the working class in some parts of the UK is genuinely appalling, not just relative to a person in India. Moreover, many of these people have been unemployed for a long time due to the failings of the neoliberal capitalist system. Surely putting more pressure on them by opening borders is hardly fair?

Having said all that, the basic point is that any policy to liberalise immigration, even slightly, would face enormous opposition. A February 2011 Ipsos Mori poll that an average of 75% of people in the UK believe that immigration is a “very big or fairly big problem”. Moreover, there is enormous support (over 70%) for the government’s cap on immigration, with opposition stronger amongst those in lower socio-economic groups than in higher. Even if more liberal immigration policies would have no negative effect on the working class, getting the people to support it would be close to impossible in the current climate.

Martin B: protecting incumbent workers at the expense of potential workers.

But when potential workers become incumbent workers, they too become ‘protected’. And when an incumbent worker becomes a merely potential worker, they will no longer be ‘protected’. (A description is being treated incorrectly as a rigid designator.) In the case of a unionised (closed-shop) workplace, no particular person is being excluded; they just have to join the union when they take the job, just as they have to sign up to all kinds of other things. The ‘unionisedness’ or otherwise attaches to the workplace, not to individual workers incumbent or potential – and it’s there to prevent the employer from playing off one employee against another and grabbing all the ‘surplus’ for itself, at the expense of workers-in-general.

If the argument is instead Bruce’s fixed wage bill, and the claim that higher wages will increase unemployment, that’s a different argument, familiar from the business lobby. The workers of the world should disunite and submit to total domination of investment and employment decisions by capitalists, gratefully accepting (and fighting over) whatever scraps they are thrown.

Also, to reiterate, I am not accusing you of this kind of bias. I wouldn’t expect it from someone writing the original post.

In theory, if an afflux of immigrant workers can lower the market power of indigenous workers, also an increase in population can: If Joe American’s job prospects are hurted by the competition of Juan Mexicano, they are also hurted by the competition of Tommy Newborn.
However, most people don’t see an increase in population as the cause of joblessness.
The reason is that, while Tommy contributes to the supply of labor, he also contributes to demand through his wage, so that if his wage has the same value of his productivity, there is no increase in joblessness.
The problem arises because Juan, for various reasons, is forced to accept a wage that is lower than his marginal productivity, and thus he produces a “lump of labor”. As a consequence, the solution to the progressive dilemma about immigration is, IMHO, very simple: “pay immigrants as much as natives”.

“lower than his marginal productivity” -> lower than his production
lapsus

@SR819

what’s wrong with showing some solidarity towards working class people from other countries who have lost their jobs due to international competition? Surely those on the left have been crying out for working class solidarity for a long time, rather than parochially only concerning themselves with what happens within their own country?

As posed, this question doesn’t address the problem, which is of greater solidarity with first world than with third world workers. The latter quite generically are poorer. As I said, the point is precisely to reject this kind of special affinity with those workers (from other countries; I’m stipulating the awesomeness of everything patriotic to make the ethical point) who look and talk like you do.

With regards to call centre workers in India, many of those who end up doing these jobs are university educated and belong to the Urban middle class. So, in effect, when foreign H1Bs take American jobs, or when call centres are offshored, it is the American working class losing out to the Indian middle class. Surely you see why Leftists should show sympathy towards the American in this case, and not to the Indian? It is nothing to do with “First World Solidarity”, and everything to do with Class Solidarity.

– Is it your impression that American IT workers are not college educated? In fact, they’ve had access to much better education than is available in India. That our lovable friends in Office Space are part of the American working class? We’re talking of white collar workers on both sides. But those in India are much poorer [in PPP terms, so don’t bother;) ]. Why do you care about one and not the other? Again, assume you’re not American, or if you are, think of British jobs going to India.
– Doesn’t it bother you that you’ve found a class argument that opposes redistribution of income between North and South?
– When you’re talking say auto or textile jobs moving this kind of argument will seem even less plausible. Because then, in addition to jobs going from working to working class, the beneficiaries will typically have been absolutely poor, so the transfer helps furnish them with basic goods.

Are workers who move shifting their economic position or their access to institutions?

When Ram moves to Sweden and gets a job driving a bus (or maybe as a backup bus driver because Sven already has the route), is he really adding to productivity? Maybe insofar as it could be said that he is driving more productive people to work, but how much productivity is the backup driver really adding (or alternatively a nanny/substitute teacher/yard worker). I’m not saying these jobs aren’t valuable, but the reason we are convinced that Ram would be doing more if he moved from India to Sweden is because our global economic system values the similar work differently depending on where it occurs. A part-time SAT tutor in the US is more valuable than a full-time teacher in many countries–would it really benefit the world if teachers, engineers, etc could move to the US and work on more trivial problems?

@Chris, you say that you personally do not want unrestrained immigration, just much higher levels than at the moment. What do you intend to happen if immigration flows are higher still than the levels that you consider good?

I don’t see how the policing should become any less problematic when it is combined with higher levels of permitted immigration.

Wow. 110 comments, and no one appears to be addressing the question of land rent.

Chris Bertram @82 wrote,

it is very strange for the left to be making an argument that when the very wealthiest people exclude the poorest from their land they are only doing what they have a perfect moral entitlement to do

Look, if you’re going to be making arguments that it’s unfair that the people in the first world exclude people in the third from access to first world land, then you ought to be sympathetic to the same point within the first world.

Namely, there’s plenty of valuable land in the first world. Why don’t the not-quite-so-wealthy in e.g. the US get access to it?

Of course, free access of all to all cannot work. Thus, the right thing to do is tax the rental value of land at close to 100% as is practical, and return the proceeds (variously estimated at 10–20% of GDP, although admittedly not by ignorant neoclassical economists) to the people, either as an annual dividend, or as funding for the State to act on their behalf (or some of both).

Simply opening up borders will not only drive down wages of most people in the first world; it will likely jack rents up, to be captured by (current) landowners, in exchange for doing nothing.

Of course, most progressives/liberals fall into the Marxist fallacy of not distinguishing land from capital. (Yes, I’m sure Marx understood the difference, but he was interested in attacking both rent- and non-rent collecting “capitalists” instead of distinguising the two, as Henry George does.)

As long as we’re opening borders and all that, can we send some people to e.g. Saudi Arabia? Under the moral premises discussed here, they’ve no more right to their petroriches than we do.

Chris Bertram @105:

Particularly, you need to inform yourselves about the coercion, violence, and brutality directed against poor would-be immigrant outsiders, about the risks they are exposed to under the current system, and whether it is consistent with your values.

Boy, that’s an extremely easy one to answer.

Place the burden on would-be employers of “illegal” immigrants. Immigrants caught entering (or having entered) without papers, as it were, will be deported, etc, but in a warm, cushy, humane way, and prior to being “caught” should be treated well, have access to basic services, etc.

OTOH, people who knowingly employ undocumented immigrants should face stiff fines and long jail terms.

Yes, it might be difficult to create a regime where employers could be so punished (how do they decide who’s undocumented?), but it’s hardly impossible. (Well, on the practical end. Politically is another matter.)

Chris Bertram @113,

@Zamfir my position for the ideal case is that states have the right to exclude people, where exclusion doesn’t deprive the excluded of significant valuable options.

Oh, come on, the ideal case is that there are no states, but rather a single world polity.

Hopefully, we’ll get to that someday (well, as long as things are constructed to be beneficial), but in the meantime, the State is what we’ve got.

As such, it’s pretty reasonable to hope that a State will act for the greater good of its members. We could ask that it not do things of questionable value to itself that harm others (like going into Iraq and murdering hundreds of thousands of people), but otherwise it’s not too unreasonable to ask that the state put the welfare of its own citizens above that of others in most cases. (This leaves out thorny issues, of course, such as solving collective action problems that exist at global scale, etc.)

Arguments for exclusion based on the effect inclusion has on those currently barely clinging to being (socially and economically) included seem widely applicable: exclusion of women from the labour market, exclusion of black people from certain jobs, etc.. And yet, no one thinking of themselves as a principled leftist would defend those exclusions (one hopes – there certainly used to be those considering themselves left who did defend such exclusions). So why make an exception for exclusion based on some nebulous concept of national belonging? It is simply weird to me.

The only principled position for a leftist to take with regards to immigration is open borders, coupled of course with demands that labour be fairly compensated, that productive capacity be used for the benefit of all and not just the few.

And this applies before even getting into any discussion of the way immigration restrictions colonialism and imperialism, as well as racism, are inextricably intertwined.

Sorry for the ugliness…I seem to be incapable of formatting my bullets to not collapse into one huge paragraph.

I’m not sure I get your point; I’m not saying that every single example of illegal workers being employed is simply the employer looking to benefit economically. However, surely it’s true that, for the vast majority of cases, they are being employed because illegal workers have no rights and can be used to undercut wages? And the wider issue is that this use of undocumented workers does have a cost because native workers become excluded from the labour market. I am absolutely not blaming the illegal immigrant for that, but it surely cannot be described as a tolerable state of affairs? Surely there are better ways of helping Asylum Seekers than using them as cheap labour?

“Wow. Actually, not far from where I’m typing there’s a guy whose asylum request has been turned down, but who can’t be deported because he has no documents and he’s at risk in his home country. He has no right to welfare benefits and no right to work: he is destitute. My view is that someone who illegally employed him would be doing a good thing; your view is that such a person should be fined and imprisoned.”

So basically what you are saying is “You would support open borders if you were a refugee about to be deported.” Should I direct you to the same John Holbo post you directed me to?

TIm, the primary technique the Union uses to protect the wages of its members is exclusion of non-incumbent employees from those jobs. The exclusion is not directed at specific individuals, of course, but it is still exclusion and it is still arbitrary in the sense that it does not reflect any superiority of the incumbent employee either as a human being or as an employee. It is just necessary to cartelize workers in this way to achieve what the union wants to achieve. Likewise, it is arbitrary that people born in a country gain some claim on its overall productivity(not just their personal productivity) and others do not, but the exclusion is necessary to the claim. In other words, it is the overall productivity of the economy of the country (or the profitability of the firm) that creates a potential for wages to be bid up, but it is the constrained pool of employees that make that bidding effective.

@ Chris Bertram, you’re right we need to know more about the distributional consequences of different immigration policies. However, the article I linked to in an earlier post suggests that immigration policy practised in the UK has led to a widening of income inequality, even if on average an increase in native wages is associated with more immigration.

Another study finds that it is in fact other earlier immigrants themselves that have seen their wages negatively affected by immigration:

http://personal.lse.ac.uk/manacorm/manacorda_manning_wadsworth.pdf

The few bits of evidence available suggest that the costs of more liberal immigration policy would be concentrated on those with the least power in British society.

Of course, the problem is that all these papers that we are quoting are economics papers, a discipline that has been completely discredited and deserves as much respect as Astrology. It would be good to see Sociologists or Demographists contribute to the debate, as they are likely to take a more holistic approach to understand the effects of different immigration policies (including, for example, socio-cultural, environmental effects), plus they are unlikely to be serving the interest of neoliberalism, as to much knowledge neither discipline has become as corrupted as economic (pseudo)science.

“I cannot honestly say that there has never been such an instance, but I can say that where Unions do succeed in raising wages, it is not normally the case that the higher wages are observed to come from reducing non-Union wages”

I remember reading a paper that linked unions with higher wages for non-unionized workers. Wish I could find it.

Bruce, “expenditure” is not the only possible meaning of “expense”, and it is not the meaning generally intended in the phrase “at the expense of “, rather the meaning is “to your detriment”. If I make a joke “at your expense”, it does not mean that I have cost you money. And the detriment to the unemployed worker I am talking about is not lowering his wages. I made clear, I think, that on average unions have the opposite effect, but also, as an unemployed person, he has no wages. It is maintaining him in a condition of unemployment. He is prevented by the union from taking the union worker’s job. That benefits the union worker, but is a detriment to him. IT doesn’t even matter for this argument whether higher wages create higher unemployment. In this particular situation, he is prevented from taking a job he otherwise could have. The benefit to the union worker exceeds the detriment to him, so I regard the situation as a net positive for the two workers considered jointly. But there is a detriment, there is a victim, there is someone at whose “expense” this occurs, and it is not solely the boss.

Bruce Wilder and MPAVictoria are correct that unions tend to increase wages and benefits for non-unionised workers, though not as much as they do for the unionised workers. Here is one paper:

http://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp143/

In any case, Martin’s use of the phrase ‘at the expense’ is symbolic of a usual neoclassical thought experiment, in which the purveyor of the experiment declares that it is ‘obvious’ within the confines of their fantasy that their conclusion is true. Unfortunately the fantasy is still a fantasy, consistent or not.

with respect to:

The main reason that Sven is paid fifty times more than Ram is, to put it bluntly, protectionism – Swedish workers are protected from competition from the workers of India and other poor countries through immigration control.

There certainly are places – Geneva is not far off, for example, and Dubai is definitely there – where there is practically no native-born working class and all the menial jobs are done by immigrants at much lower wages than a native would accept.

I wouldn’t go as far as SR819, but can Professor Bertram point me to a use of “incentive” that isn’t either a recipe for giving to the rich and powerful or taking/punishing those at the bottom, and not just at the bottom.

When I worked for the old AT&T and its immediate successors (responding to 135 and others), it was a truism among the first and second level managers (“What level are you?” may struck most sane observers as an insane obsession, but it was quite real) that they enjoyed far better wages, benefits, and work rules because of the unions.

there’s a guy whose asylum request has been turned down, but who can’t be deported because he has no documents and he’s at risk in his home country. He has no right to welfare benefits and no right to work: he is destitute. My view is that someone who illegally employed him would be doing a good thing

And so far as this is relevant to the discussion, presumably the idea must be that they shouldn’t be penalised. But rather than this decriminalisation of employing such people, wouldn’t legalisation be better on this account? And while we’re at it, why does this person – and indeed any immigrant under the open borders policy – not have the right to welfare benefits? Isn’t that unfair too? Is it really OK to create this class of people who are granted residence so long as they are working, but then effectively left to go home (whatever is left of it) when they are no longer required? The issue of what actually becomes of the nation state when the world’s population becomes cosmopolitan does need to be addressed, rather than sticking to one item taken directly from the supply-siders’ songsheet (like the wretch from the NIESR). As I and more recently piglet have pointed out, the exclusion of a class of workers who are not afforded protections and rights vis a vis employment is going to drive down hard-won conditions for all workers.

I note too that the point about creaming off productive people from underdeveloped areas hasn’t really been addressed – is this not going to reduce the likelihood of the place actually becoming developed? Even returning migrants in India have their NRI colonies. Why are these places not getting investment and development? Sticking to a policy of ‘free’ herding of itinerant workers because that provides them some short-term benefits, while ignoring the issue of unequal development seems a short-sighted goal, especially for those well-meaning types who have picked up this talking point because it appears to benefit some of the worlds (not-so) poor.

As Sen (who is not exactly a lefty extremist, perish the thought) points out:

the apologists of globalization point to their belief that the poor who participate in trade and exchange are mostly getting richer. Ergo–the argument runs–globalization is not unfair to the poor: they too benefit. If the central relevance of this question is accepted, then the whole debate turns on determining which side is correct in this empirical dispute. But is this the right battleground in the first place? I would argue that it is not.

Even if the poor were to get just a little richer, this would not necessarily imply that the poor were getting a fair share of the potentially vast benefits of global economic interrelations. It is not adequate to ask whether international inequality is getting marginally larger or smaller. In order to rebel against the appalling poverty and the staggering inequalities that characterize the contemporary world–or to protest against the unfair sharing of benefits of global cooperation–it is not necessary to show that the massive inequality or distributional unfairness is also getting marginally larger. This is a separate issue altogether.

When there are gains from cooperation, there can be many possible arrangements. As the game theorist and mathematician John Nash discussed more than half a century ago (in “The Bargaining Problem,” published in Econometrica in 1950, which was cited, among other writings, by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences when Nash was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics), the central issue in general is not whether a particular arrangement is better for everyone than no cooperation at all would be, but whether that is a fair division of the benefits. One cannot rebut the criticism that a distributional arrangement is unfair simply by noting that all the parties are better off than they would be in the absence of cooperation; the real exercise is the choice between these alternatives.

136:The key, IMO, is to ignore economics altogether, because it’s a subject that has nothing to offer the Left whatsoever.

Oh dear.

8:Or as Paul Krugman has put it, average incomes are determined by average productivity in an economy. As he’s gone on to point out, as soon as average productivity in China is the same as that in the US then so will wages be: Chinese wages will rise to American ones.

10:explaining that poor countries are poor because of the low productivity of their rich people (compared to top managers at Ericsson, Saab etc.)

I skipped this thread as nearly hopeless because what claims to be the left here, including Krugman and Chang, continues to follow the neo-classical paradigm and supply-side economics. Productivity my ass.

As soon as people move to a Keynesian/Kaleckian model in which national income is determined by the distribution of income and effective demand we can take a better look at open borders. People come to a place, buy stuff*, create investment and jobs. Wasn’t cheap labor built America circa 1900, was millions of new consumers.

Sven the busdriver is not paid more because he is more productive, or because he is surrounded by wondrous productivity, but because he is surrounded by bunches of folks with money to spend.

*Print/borrow money, give it to immigrants, tax it back. Whatever.

Tim 143 “I note too that the point about creaming off productive people from underdeveloped areas hasn’t really been addressed – is this not going to reduce the likelihood of the place actually becoming developed?”

Another good point, and one reason why I said (without elaborating) that mass migration has destabilizing effects and should not be mistaken for a solution to global injustice. Of course, the very fact that successful migrants tend to be individuals of above-average skill and initiative has been used as an economic argument in favor of immigration – especially selective immigration – for a long time. But it can hardly be said to work in favor of the global poor.

150:large influx of unskilled workers through migration didn’t lower the wages for unskilled workers generally

Certainly there may be a surplus created as the “economy” expands. The real point is, who gets the surplus?

“It’s time to break free from economics’ dismal framework, and argue based on concepts of humanity, justice and working class rights. We want union rights not because we care what effect it has on the “economy”, but because our allegiance is the working class and we wish to improve their condition and redress the balance of power between capital and labour. We are opposed to fiscal contraction because it inevitably means the poor are going to be hurt by cuts in spending to health, education and unemployment benefits, and our political philosophy demands that our first concern is to the welfare of the worst off in society. This is the sort of language we should be using to justify our policies, not by using neoliberal technocratic “cost benefit” calculus.”

Just figured that this deserved a repost.

Of course, the very fact that successful migrants tend to be individuals of above-average skill and initiative has been used as an economic argument in favor of immigration – especially selective immigration – for a long time. But it can hardly be said to work in favor of the global poor.

So what would the counter-argument be? Would you really want to deny someone a visa on these grounds? Freedom of movement should be a universal right that can only be restricted in such cases where it can be proven to cause major harm or is completely unfeasible – nothing said in this thread has convinced me it does.

“I would challenge anyone to name a single example where economics has been used to improve the lives of the common man and woman.”

What have the Romans ever done for us?

I also wanted to point out that the diaspora effects of migrant workers upon their home community is enormous. A Filipino nurse in Dubai repatriates much of her income. Carry on…

A lot of the Keynesian policies were developed by Neo-Keynesian economists like Hansen, Solow, Samuelson who were still operating within the neoclassical/neoliberal framework of classical economics, and only saw recessions as temporary deviations from the perfect world of full employment.

And remember, these economists were by no means “left wing”. Moreover, all they did was advocate government consumption; so many of the great advancements made in the post war years, like nationalisation of the steel, coal, car making industries, the greater recognition of trade union rights, the welfare state*, extremely high marginal rates of taxation would NOT have been supported by these economists, because within the neo-Keynesian framework they occupied, these microeconomic issues would all introduce “distortions” to the market system, so would be undesirable.

All the economists can be credited for in the post war era is government spending more money buying goods and services during recessions (mostly military hardware) or cutting taxes. Many of the humanising policies that governments put in place to ensure a “New Jerusalem” was built (as Clement Atlee put it) were not the result of economists, but the result of brilliant politicians, many of whom had seen extreme poverty in the Cities and knew that they could never go back to those conditions again.

Even if we accept that economists deserve some credit for the full employment policies (although I think governments would have pursued them anyway), that’s 1 achievement in a discipline that’s over 200 years old. Now let’s list all the times economics has been used to damage the working class:

= The classical economists’ justification for the free market system, and opposition to child labour laws.
= Malthus’ predictions about how the working class would be to blame for overpopulation, and how providing poor relief would actually be undesirable.
= Ricardo’s insistence that Britain pursue free trade, that at least partly contributed to us losing our status as one of the most technologically advanced and industrially powerful nations in the world, losing out to protectionist USA and Germany.
= Milton Friedman’s policies that led to mass deindustrialisation in the US, the destruction of a lot of the welfare state and the widening of income inequality.
= The ideological backing given to Pinochet by the “Chicago boys”, Chilean economists trained at Chicago to help devise the neoliberal economic policies of Pinochet.
= Most of Margaret Thatcher’s policies were created based on Hayek and Friedman’s economic ideas, which destroyed the industrial base of the UK, increased poverty and the gap between rich and poor.
= Jeffrey Sachs, Andrei Shleifer and other US economists who helped developed the “shock therapy” treatment for post communist Russia, that led to massive inflation, an increase in poverty and extreme hardship for a lot of Russians. Moreover, the Lancet has shown a link between “Shock Therapy” and suicides rates, due to the utter helplessness induced by these free market policies.
= As the film “Inside Job” showed, the corruption of the economics profession was a leading contributor to the financial crisis, with economists, funded by financial institutions, deliberately sung the praises of further financial liberalisation, and didn’t spot the problems with the system which has led to massive job losses for people who had no part to play in the crisis.

Based on that record, I think it’s quite clear that economists have caused more problems for the world than they have solved. So I hope you can see why the discipline is absolutely despised by other academics and increasingly by the general public. As I said before, it’s pure snake oil.

* (I know you’ll say Beveridge created the welfare state and that he was an economist, but he was actually a lawyer)

For example, attempting to work out whether infant industry protection or free trade works better in attempting enrich the working man?

You prove my point, because I don’t think economics can be used to see whether infant industry protection or free trade works better to “enrich” the working class. Enrichment as a concept includes many philosophical ideas like positive liberty, living life without insecurity, etc. Economists when looking at different trade policies would only analyse whether industry is more efficient under free trade or protection, and whether economic growth is hindered by using infant industry policies. However, like I said, the Left are concerned with the good society, and ensuring that the working class are able to enjoy the full fruits of their labour. These are not things that can be reduced to an economistic “cost benefit analysis” or variables that can be plugged into an ONS regression.

Whether communal or private property farming produces more food for the working man to eat? Whether state regulation, private property or voluntary communal agreements work best to preserve commons?

I don’t see why an economist is needed to help us answer that question (surely an Agronomist would do that?)

Smith’s point about not letting the businessmen conspire together seems to be a pretty good one.

When he meant businessmen he was probably talking about the Guilds, who “conspired” to restrict labour supply, reduce working hours and keep wages high. As Guilds were a precursor to modern unions (indeed they can be thought of as craft unions employing skilled labour) Smith’s opposition to them should not be seen as a progressive statement. In fact Smith wanted to destroy the spirit of these craft organisations, that used to produce high quality work because of the value of such work in itself, but due to industrialisation was forced to respond to market forces and incentives, that destroyed the focus on quality.

OK that’s my last word on this subject. Apologies if I repeated myself.

… heritage foundation. <,<

Clemens and Kennan are right and Chang is stupid.

The biggest problem with free immigration isnt that wages would fall (the marginal productivity of the lowest paid part of the native population wouldnt be reduced much, if any) . The biggest problem is that it isnt compatible income redistribution / the welfare state. You cant have a party with an open bar and an open door.

Lant Pritchett is basically right about everything: http://reason.com/archives/2008/01/24/ending-global-apartheid/singlepage

Doesn’t the creation of the welfare state in Britain coincide with large scale post world war 2 immigration? What role did ‘immigrant’ communities play in the Unionisation of the US working class? This seems to be one of those assertions, like the working class vote Republican or the Southern strategy destroyed liberalism, that are completly wrong.

“Clemens and Kennan are right and Chang is stupid.”

The claim that Chang is stupid rests on the assumption that you are right, which I’d like to question.

“The biggest problem with free immigration isnt that wages would fall (the marginal productivity of the lowest paid part of the native population wouldnt be reduced much, if any) .”

This requires that workers are simply paid their marginal productivity. Even marginal productivity theory doe snot claim that. It only claims the demand schedule is derived from marginal productivities. Here is Alfred Marshall:

“The doctrine that the earnings of a worker tend to be equal to the net product of his work, has by itself no real meaning… “

My view is that uncontrolled immigration would benefit some very poor people in the short term, hurt some ‘first world poor people,’ but overwhelm infrastructure and widen both the relative and absolute poverty gap over time.

Basically, like free capital, it just makes me envision a swarm flinging itself around the globe and destroying everything in its path.

Haha, yes I did not mean it in that sense. I just mean when you have that much of pretty much anything moving between countries ‘as it pleases,’ you’re going to create instability of one kind or another.

UnlearningEcon: “Basically, like free capital, it just makes me envision a swarm flinging itself around the globe and destroying everything in its path.”

Chris Bertram: “. . . perhaps not the best way of thinking about migrants?”

Idealization of “freedom” from control, structure, committment and constraint might not be the best way of thinking about economics and economic development.

Yet, that’s what “neoclassical economics”, in its neoliberal and libertarian variations, does: it posits a self-organizing, self-optimizing ideal market system, which needs government intervention only in the exceptional case of market failure, and even then, only when the market failure would otherwise be greater in magnitude than the burden imposed by the imperfect remedy of state intervention or regulation. In this framework of ideas, “it seems obvious that in order to maximise both fairness and economic efficiency, capital and labour must face similar (low) levels of restrictions on their freedom” (to quote another commenter).

This neoliberal idea about economics — a positive thesis about the functional economy, with normative implications — seems to fit a political leftist’s normative ideals of freedom as egalitarian respect and empowerment for the individual. The two seem to fit together like a virus attaching to a cell, in the course of infecting, reproducing itself, and killing its host.

It is actually kind of horrifying to watch, as various commenters have tried to sketch out various, fairly obvious-seeming reasons that immigration has to be controlled (as, also, financial capital has to be heavily controlled, contra neoliberalism — as UnlearningEcon suggests), and replies come back, to the effect that such controls are inimical to left committments to freedom and universal solidarity.

I marvel.

Inadvertent strikethrough. Don’t start words with dashes.

You only need to turn on your tv to see that.

…I’ll have to try that sometime … maybe I’ll start with Fox

The key issue for the left (and for any society that hopes to have a long-term future) is controlling the elites. Specifically, how ordinary people in each society control their particular elites. Each society needs to come up with its own ways here, and globalising labour is unlikely to make this easier (note that, over history, mass importation of poor foreigners has been a classic weapon of elites against the lower classes). A few more Ram the bus drivers is a good idea, a lot is a disaster. Since principles don’t reckon in numbers, this makes for an awkward discussion.

With regards to crime its undeniably true that its one of the major arguments against low skilled immigration. You only need to turn on your tv to see that. Even if immigrants commit less crime than citizens what Im saying is still true.

Isn’t the view that immigrants increase crime the same as the view that immigrants commit crimes at higher rates? What could it mean to say an incoming group could “commit less crime” but still have crime be a major argument against immigration? I’m supposed to turn on my TV and see…what exactly?

Also, second chrismealy’s question. Chris Bertram’s point, that the left’s commitment to social institutions and communitarianism is coming into conflict with its commitment to universalistic internationalism, this seems like an intrinsic conceptual tension. It’s not a conflict seen only from the vantage point of a neoliberal. It seems like many commentators here want to be nativists while also singing the internationale, and you’re not going to resolve that tension there simply by bashing your favorite neoliberal.

If we’re still talking about ‘uncontrolled’ immigration

I thought that was the whole point of this post: complete ‘freedom’ of movement of all human beings over the face of the earth.

Sidestepping – two-stepping – a selection of the actually interesting questions involved, then sitting back and waiting for the ‘foreigners are all criminals’ and ‘get orff my land’ crowd to turn up for a ritual kicking is a great way of eliciting soundbites in support of the position that it is teh Left that are the real racists – so well done for that one – but when the global working class’s toehold on left-wing policies is currently mediated by parochial citizenship rights – and global economic institutions are dedicated to consolidating the grip of international capital over the entire globe – there are obvious issues which, having raised the question, one really ought to make some attempt to address in a constructive manner.

You could say, for example: ‘obviously this would require a world socialist government’, and then that could be discussed; or ‘obviously this would require other forms of exclusive land ownership to be pulled down, otherwise we are just looking at the break-up of existing communities only for their erstwhile members to be chivvied on their Tebbitian bikes from ghetto to ghetto by the not-so-impersonal forces of the market’; or anyway make some attempt to fill in the details.

Failing that we just have the Ladd/Nozick style of argument from highy selective first principles, of the ‘how can Liberty possibly be bad’ style, unobtrusively buttressed by an unofficial doctrine of market Panglossianism.

Also that was (obviously) not aimed at rf, just hung on the peg of his remark.

SR819
Milton Friedman’s policies that led to mass deindustrialisation in the US

Deindustrialization would have occurred if Friedman had never existed. Certain government policies might have slowed deindustrialization, but it’s hard to see how it could have been entirely prevented.

So I hope you can see why the discipline [economics] is absolutely despised by other academics and increasingly by the general public.
Evidence needed.

I realize s/he’s no longer on the thread, but these statements have not been specifically questioned and should be. (for the record, IANAE)

I’ve wrapped up my heterodox economics phase (critiques get boring after a while)

OT but this is a big problem. We in heterodoxy need to spend a lot less time on critique, and a lot more on building up a positive alternative economics. A lot of us on the left tend to assume we already have one, if people would only listen to us. But we don’t.

The tension is, as usual, between ‘left’ and ‘liberal’. The Internationale calls for destroying the foundation, making a clean slate, and then building from there. That’s the goal, everything else is the means, and all the good things are supposed to come from that.

The liberals want to preserve the foundation (they like it), and to keep improving it. These are two radically different doctrines.

@193

“Deindustrialization would have occurred if Friedman had never existed.”

Umm.

“these statements have not been specifically questioned and should be. ”

Well, yes. Given that US industrial production is (leaving aside the current little depressionette) at an all time high it’s difficult to see what deindustrialisation there has been.

There’s been a decline in industrial/manufacturing employment, sure. But not in production. What has happened to industry is that it has been automated, not that it has disappeared.

The same is true for the UK BTW. Peak industrial output was sometime around 2005. For all the claims that Maggie, The Tories, neoliberalism and the rest eviscerated manufacturing output was higher in 91 than 79, higher in 98 than 91. It was employment in the sector that fell, not output.

I’m sorry, but I have to take issue with the “nativist” label that some have attached to my arguments, as if my views are akin to Pat Buchanan’s. I actually think the last Labour government’s point based system of immigration was completely sensible, and I certainly don’t believe that the UK should close their borders to people from developing countries. I believe in managed (controlled) migration, which is due to my belief that free markets in anything lead to instability and increased pressures on those least able to handle them.

The Left need to understand these issues. Some on the neoliberal right are using ideas about free migration and free trade to undermine the working class. However, they’re smart enough to try and bring in Left wing supporters as well, by framing the issue as if it’s to do with “solidarity with the poorest people in the world”. I remember Steven Landsburg (the economist) call John Kerry’s running mate John Edwards a “xenophobe” because he opposed free trade. By deliberately using language like this, the aim is to push progressives away from supporting protectionism because they don’t want to be seen as being xenophobic, even though xenophobia has NOTHING to do with it.

This sort of framing is hugely damaging to the Left’s cause, and it’s imperative we don’t debate within this framework. Opposition to free trade and migration is nothing to do with nativism or xenophobia, and we need to be clear about that. If the Left don’t shed their neoliberal clothing, you’ll end up with damaging coalitions forming, like how the future Socialist Party USA presidential candidate supported Pat Buchanan’s election run in 2000. Protectionism should be a bread and butter issue for those on the left, but if we abandon that territory, you end up with much more malign forces like the populist right claiming ownership of it, and their protectionism will be extreme and not purely based on economic concerns. Do we really want that?

Watson, I said protectionism, not anti-immigration, had nothing to do with xenophobia. By protectionism I primarily mean trade protectionism, so that domestic industries are supported by imposing tariffs and quotas on foreign produced goods, so that the working class are not exposed to international competition which would weaken their bargaining power in negotiations with employers. By protectionism I also mean managed immigration, which is completely different to anti-immigration. On the whole I am pro-immigration, as long as it is controlled and policies to combat the potential social, cultural and environmental problems associated with immigration are put in place.

There is plenty of difference between my views and Henry Lodge’s views. For example, this gives a taste of his views:

The immigration of the people who have settled and built up the nation during the last 250 years, and who have been, with trifling exceptions, kindred either in race or language or both is declining while the immigration of people who are not kindred either in race or language and who represent the most ignorant classes and the lowest labor of Europe, is increasing with frightful rapidity.

I find these sorts of views absolutely abhorrent and there is a world of difference between what this man believes and what I believe. I do not recognise the concept of Race, and don’t think the country of origin should have any influence on immigration policy. Moreover, Lodge displays a significant amount of class prejudice with his comments about the “ignorant” classes and the immigrants being the “lowest labor or Europe”. I believe in international working class solidarity and find these sorts of disparaging comments about the working class as reprehensible.

Like I’ve said before, my concern about free migration is that it leads to a redistribution of power from the working class to capitalists. This violates the principles of Socialism, to which I adhere to, which is why I cannot support the policy.

Watson Ladd, 204 says: “…the US did have mass immigration in the 19th century. Whatever you say about its effects, mass immigration has been tried.”

Indeed, it has. And it’s easy to attest to how it’d affected the host (Native American, in this case) population.

Tim Worstall @199:
Manufacturing output has not fallen, but in the US manufacturing employment has declined and manufacturing has declined as a percent of GDP, I believe.
William Tabb, in New Politics (summer 2012), notes that in 1960 the largest employers in the US were GM, the Bell system, Ford, GE, and US Steel. Today the largest employers are Wal-Mart, Kelly Services (temp placement), IBM, UPS, McDonald’s, and Yum! (which runs Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut).

john c. halasz @194:
I’m inclined to think firms would have moved manufacturing to lower-cost areas of the world even if exchange rates had remain fixed. Weren’t changes in ease of transport (containerized shipping etc.) one of the driving forces? You have to assume capital controls so strict, istm, that no money at all could have been invested in overseas production facilities, and controls of that kind weren’t going to be implemented even under Bretton Woods.

So what do you do when crossing a border means that a parent will have now access in the new country to medical facilities or resources to send back to the home country to reduce sharply the likelihood of a child dying before the age of 5?
*
Yet it seems that net migration to the US from Mexico has become near zero since the financial crash as the costs of illegal movement increase while the demand for labor remains weak. And then we find that immigrants probably pay taxes in excess of the monetary costs of the government services that they provide and often stimulate economic activity by the industries that they revive (meapacking in Iowa) and the demand that they create (David Card’s study), how are we to explain anti-immigrant politics except as symbolic politics?
*
We need to transcend the focus on the North as so much migration is from very poor or collapsing societies to only poor ones–from Haiti to the DR, Guatemala to the South of Mexico, Congo to Rwanda, Bangladesh to India.
*
Yes Simon Schama made an interesting point. What made America an integrated nation-state? The railroads. Who built them? Chinese-Americans. Their reward–the Chinese Exclusion Acts.

Chris Bertram @104
“there’s what justice requires, which isn’t a matter of opinion for voters or anyone else.”

Strewth. So in any case the just solution is not a matter of opinion, but entirely obvious?

Why do I suspect that the requirements of justice, being entirely obvious, will always and astonishingly coincide with the opinion of Chris Bertram?

Mao Cheng Ji: You need to provide a mechanism by which mass immigration to the Eastern Seaboard leads to the settlement of the West and the genocide. Given that supporters of one were often enemies of the other, I don’t think that’s the case. Furthermore, there were competing ideologies governing expansion: agrarian slavery in the South and free labor in the North. Sadly the US census for the years in question are woeful.

Note that the center of population of the US is only in Indiana by 1920. source. So the settlement in lands held by the Native Americans after 1830 was much less extensive then during the early 20th century, when immigration was effectively suspended.

Watson Ladd,
the mechanism, not just in this particular case but in general, seems fairly obvious. When newcomers arrive en masse, they have no chance to assimilate, in the way some Leatherstocking character would. Soon they begin feeling resentment towards the natives: why do they own everything? why are they overrepresented at the top of the social pyramid? how come they get to control everything? And that has got to be a much stronger sort of resentment than the nativist sentiment. And if there is a lot of them, as many as the natives, and if they manage to unite under some common identity, the natives are in trouble. After all, it really is true that they inherited most of the stuff they own, and how is that fair, if it wasn’t fair for them to control the border simply based on the accident of birth? I mean, I don’t really have an opinion one way or the other, but it helps to understand where the logic leads…

“Show me a historical case of resentment of newcoming immigrants leading to dispossession of the original inhabitants more recent then Attila the Hun”

Texas? Palestine?

CB @198: Yes there is a tension between free movement and popular sovereignty, but it doesn’t strike me as an insurmountable one. The first liberal democracies had open borders, for one thing. And within large federal states (such as the US, Canada, even Russia) no-one would think that it is impossible to combine a high degree of devolved power of democratically governed sub-units with unrestricted internal movement throughout the federation.

1. It’s not just a question of formal ‘popular sovereignty’, it’s (also) a question of whether the relatively recent improvements in the conditions of the working poor and the unemployed in some countries are going to be salvaged and survive long enough to stand any chance of spreading farther afield, or whether instead globalised ‘laisser faire’ neoliberalism is going to carry all before it. Once that happens, the sideshow of electoral politics will not reconstruct the labour movement – and, among other things, the kind of direct action that was involved in building it is not going to work too well this time around. The view of unionised labour as ‘at the expense of’ the ‘excluded’ finds an application to migrant labour in pressure to reduce job security for citizens, so as not to ‘exclude’ non-citizen workers.

2. Regardless of whether the model of those ‘first liberal democracies’ is in fact something one would wish to emulate, it seems unlikely that they have much to tell us about current conditions and those in the near future.

And 3. if the analogy is with a federal system, what takes the place of the federal government – which is responsible for things like labour laws, most redistribution, etc.? Institutions like the IMF, the World Bank and, dare I mention it, the Bilderberg Group?

While you might be right not to suppose the problem insurmountable, we still, as Sen says in the same article quoted above, need to make sure that surmountable obstacles are actually surmounted. There is after all an extremely powerful constituency which is pretty well bent on keeping them unsurmounted, and if at all possible making them irreversibly insurmountable.

So what is the surmountation strategy? A strong international union movement doesn’t seem to be in prospect, and more pertinently in the first instance, certainly hasn’t been discussed here.

(Suggesting that the open borders policy will not actually have any significant effect on migration is not really an option here, since the policy is surely premised on the supposition that it will; that the status quo does indeed mean that people will be driven to leave their homes and communities in search of jobs. As piglet – and Sen – point out, migration is in many cases a fairly extreme response to what are therefore presumably fairly extreme circumstances; and as JW Mason points out, we need to ask why the necessary investment is not being made in migrants’ home countries. Will open borders encourage such development? Will it remove the incentive from capitalists to make it? Improve the likelihood that states will bootstrap their own industry without inward capitalist investment?)

—–

Rakesh – What made America an integrated nation-state? The railroads. Who built them? Chinese-Americans. Their reward—the Chinese Exclusion Acts. But if sovereign states are indeed under threat (with ‘open borders’ – moving the Mohamed of labour to the mountain of global capital – being one avenue of attack) and the prospect of full global ‘laisser-faire’ (corrupt) capitalism looms, exclusion from land and employment will devolve to private owners: the hundredth percentile (or the 0.1%, 0.01%…) will still be able to exclude people from its land, and from employment in its unregulated operations, at will, without limitation. And that does, on the current trajectory, appear to be the kind of future that is just around the corner.

One aspect of a full open borders policy, planned for by capitalists and workers alike, may be that economic migration becomes normalised; as the distinction between citizen and non-citizen, losing its basis in residency, comes to appear increasingly arbitrary, the possibility that the inequality will be resolved by levelling up rather than down seems a remote one. Instead we are likely to see the power of the global prole reduced further, with a One World Army of the unemployed on call at a moment’s notice to undermine any move by labour to claim part of the industrial surplus product.

—-

what do you do when crossing a border means that a parent will have now access in the new country to medical facilities or resources to send back to the home country to reduce sharply the likelihood of a child dying before the age of 5?

This is getting dangerously close to making some progress – treating migrant and transient employment as a real, fine-textured phenomenon rather than a single abstract concept. (The latter kind of approach underlies things like the right-wing propaganda/received wisdom that paints unionisation as an exclusionary measure that victimises the little guy. Unionisation is obviously different in this respect from immigration restrictions, which are exclusionarty – at least in the absence of adverse discrimination in hiring – and thus raise the hard questions under discussion.)

So this means we consider the difference between relocation and transient work; the related question of unemployment and other state benefits; the impact on communities from which migrants depart, and so forth.

—–

Sen on migration and the market: http://www.hindu.com/2006/12/21/stories/2006122107641300.htm

A sample of writing about migration which goes some way to addressing its realities: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/wbs/research/irru/publications/recentconf/gm_-_ilera2012_3.pdf

(I’m not even suggesting these provide arguments against open border policies: at this point at least I’m more interested in realistic discussion than winning an argument. In fact if it should turn out that open borders were a good plan both politically and technically, even implemented on plutocrats’ terms, then so much the better. It’s not much fun being called a racist, after all.)

Watson Ladd asks: “So why does California still have more generous Medicaid then other states?”

I don’t know why, or what this question may have to do with the topic being discussed, but here’s a relevant except from the wikipedia article on California:

“In 1848 the non-native population of California was estimated to be no more than 15,000. After gold was discovered, the population burgeoned with U.S. citizens, Europeans and other immigrants during the great California Gold Rush. By 1854 over 300,000 settlers had come. […] Like in other states, the native inhabitants were forcefully removed from their lands by incoming miners, ranchers, and farmers. […] As a result, the rise of California brought great hardship for the native inhabitants. Several scholars and Native American activists, including Benjamin Madley and Ed Castillo, have described the actions of the California government as a genocide.”

Clearly the “incoming miners, ranchers, and farmers” who forcefully removed “the native inhabitants from their lands” were, for the most part, those you (and others. Hey, including me, I suppose) tend to sympathize with: your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. And yet, under these conditions, a combination of open borders and strong incentives to migrate, they, apparently, went on to perpetrate a genocide, or something close to it.

Liberalisation of Texan immigration laws led to an influx of North Americans and to the eventual secession of Texas from Mexico. Something similar with Jewish immigration to Palestine. There are two examples, no?

Given how well the Euro is doing I’m rather pessimistic about currency union. Restricting capital movements is great in theory, but inevitably comes apart as shown by the Eurodollar market. And the advantages are unclear: domestic capitalist and international capitalists are both capitalists.

John Redican: In the nineteenth century mobs went around killing Catholic immigrants who were seen as taking jobs. Is that the sort of reaction you want to endorse? And it’s not even clear immigration decreases wages: immigrants spend more on US goods then if they stay home.

As for the decline in wages since 1973 trade is only a small factor. The decline in unionization, together with a policy environment against income redistribution plays a significant role as well.

Free immigration sounds great for debtor nations. The citizens can all leave. Then nobody has to pay.

I simply think our country should not be expected to solve all the world’s problems, especially when ours are so acute.

I think this is true for the UK as well. There’s no question that British imperialism has had a lot to do with certain developing countries being poor, but the empire ended over half a century ago, and to keep asking developed countries to single handedly bring developing countries out of poverty is not realistic. Indeed, if the demand was that we should tax the rich until the pips squeak, and then use that revenue to aid developing countries, I’d be all for it. However, it seems some on the left want to lift up the global poor on the backs of the “first world poor”, which is exactly what the capitalists want and is not a progressive idea.

And you cannot argue that some developing countries’ leaders also have to take responsibility for the fact that there is massive poverty and inequality in their nations. Ramachandra Guha, the Indian historian, has admitted that a lot of the problems India face is due to it’s own corrupt officials. This is not to undermine the role of empire as an explanation for the poverty in developing countries, but to use our imperial history to justify policies that will hurt the first world poor cannot be right. It’s not as if the working class in the UK had anything to do with the British Empire, they were simply pawns being used by their capitalist exploiters (the East India Company for example) in the same way the Indians were.

” In the UK, for example, business has been massively annoyed at the way in which the new rules introduced by the coalition prevent them from hiring whom they want.”
I simply don’t believe that in a country of 60 million people there is not one person who is qualified for the position being staffed. They just want to be able to import people who they can pay less. Yay for wage suppression!

@MPAVictoria
The CBI (Confederation of British Industry) are extremely transparent yes. They frequently bemoan the so called lack of quality of the UK workforce (and they’ve been joined by some right wing Tories recently) even though our universities are some of the best in the world, and we have a large pool of unemployed graduates with higher level degrees. For example, the unemployment rate of Computer Science graduates is higher than average for graduates, and yet companies bemoan that not enough UK graduates are taking STEM subjects. Of course, that’s a convenient lie, as the real reason for the CBI’s complaint about immigration restrictions is that it cuts of the supply of cheap labour from developing countries who can be employed on lower terms to increase their profit margins.

Open borders are impossible in capitalism, in terms of the way it has historically developed. The nation state is absolutely vital to the bourgeoisie for the reasons Ha-Joon Chang alluded (though not for the benefit of bus drivers.)

US college students would like to do the same job in Europe. This is why temporary travel/work visas exist. The assumption being made here is that migration is bad and people would prefer to do the same job where they live. I doubt that that is universally true: historically migration has been the result of political issues as well (see Pogrom and Irish Potato Famine for details)

I’ve known plenty of South Asian and East Asian and European and Haitian engineers with “regular” jobs, so it certainly isn’t impossible to get a work permit. At one point, there were equal numbers of permits for “stars,” top manager, middle managers, skilled workers, and unskilled workers–so obviously it’s easier to work in the US if you are closer to the beginning of that list. But that requires having a job or an offer ahead of time and there are some difficult and expensive requirements.

B. Steele:
I have a little less for Irish and French college students who’d like the same jobs, however. Is it really the case that US college students can’t do the same job adequately, though?

Heard a relevant piece on this the other day — P. Solman on PBS NewsHour, I think (though i was listening to it on radio, so i didn’t get the visuals). The issue was: do foreign college students and other young people taking summer jobs deprive some US kids of work? And the conclusion: possibly/probably “but” — with the “but” being someone from the State Dept defending the program on grounds that it improves the image of the US abroad, etc etc. It’s apparently a PR and cultural education thing, basically, and maybe there are reciprocal arrangements w some other countries. Not sure on that.
And also there were US employers w different views of the visa program. I’m sure one can find the piece on the NewsHour site.

@chris

Fair enough, although I didn’t mean to imply that business interests are ‘in charge’, just that they drive current immigration policy to a greater extent than post imperial guilt or multi-cultural Utopianism

rf:
I didn’t mention Greek students. I think hotel maids’ jobs should go to unemployed hotel maids, not to students, in general. I don’t think there’s such a surplus of jobs that hotelkeepers have to routinely advertise abroad. There may be, as the OP suggests, a right to look for work in other countries if there’s extra jobs there and no work at home, especially for people without other resources. I don’t think there’s a similar right for middle-class people to take gap years working menial jobs in vacation spots in areas with high local unemployment (or for visas to be made available to them for the purpose).

(In the past these jobs were often taken by local college students until–in part–the available students were no longer seemed enough like people who would vacation there.)

There is a point that I think is important, and that I think has been overlooked in the thread, so I’ll try to put it forward in a better argued way than I did at 99.
Many people believe that immigrants “steal” jobs from natives, but this idea implies that there is a fixed number of jobs in a country, so that if, say, an Albanian gets a job in Italy, some Italian loses that job.
But the idea that there is a fixed amount of available jobs is a nonsense in itself. For this reason, the comparison of European immigrant in America who displaced natives in order to get land (which is a limited resource) with, say, Albanians who come to Italy in order to get jobs (which are neither finite nor a resource) makes no sense.
This confusion comes, IMHO, from the weird semantic habit of speaking of employers who “offer” a job, as if they were the supply side, and unemployed who “search” a job, as if they were the demand side. In fact it is the opposite: the unemployed offer labor power and are the supply side, while businesses pay for the labor and are thus the demand side, although in a situation of oligopsony.
In fact underpaid immigrants, almost by definition, produce more than they consume, and the difference enters in the pocket of someone who lives in the host country. In this sense the idea “the immigrants will destroy our welfare system” seems stupid, the real story is “the employers who pocket the fruit of the wage arbitrage don’t pay enough taxes on their profit to make up for the lost taxes from wages”.
Thus the whole problem comes from the fact that the immigrant, generally, will settle for worse wages than natives.
But often strict immigration laws force immigrant to even worse positions, for example suppose that the Albanian of my example comes legally to Italy, maybe marryes with an Albanian girl who also works in Italy, then loses his job (and with it his visa). He will not like to go back to Abania, but also will have problems to find jobs here because he became an illegal, thus will be forced to work “in black”, for lower net wages, whithout paying taxes etc..
In this example the strict immigration rules are a disadvantage to the native Italian worker, who anyway will think that the Albanian simply shouldn’t be here and will vote Lega Nord (hence, stricter immigration rules and so on).

Bianca

Okay, I see your point. Just read your initial post a little quickly I think

I’m late to the discussion, and haven’t read all the above, but I’m surprised that my browser’s search feature finds no mention of Ecuador, whose borders are open almost to the degree that we associate with the nineteenth century. The current president, Rafael Correa, seems to be idiologically committed to the concept.

According to Ecuadorian friends and in-laws, results have been mixed: in addition to the skilled and affluent, who have always had an easy time gaining residency in the country, there has been an influx of the poor, seeking opportunities that are lacking at home. Quito now has neighborhoods largely populated by Cubans (Havana apparently takes a benign view of emigration to a nominally “socialist” nation), Koreans and even West Africans.

Rightly or wrongly, a rise in the crime rate has been blamed on the influx, and demonstrations like the rally a while back by Cuban immigrants, blaming Correa for “bringing us here and not giving us a job” indicates that there is some desperation among a segment of the arrivals.