Immigration: excluding those on whom we have imposed harms and risks

@SR819 at 1

But if you just send money to Bangladesh, you’ll end up benefiting capitalists in Bangladesh. The only way to oblige spending on causes that welfare states like is for welfare states to effectively displace Bangladesh’s own government.

(and the third arm of the the Rodrikian trilemma is… world government!)

@ Watson Ladd, there is disagreement I admit, but many of the studies that actually focus on the effect of migration on different sections of the wage distribution find that it has a negative effect on the least skilled workers:

US Evidence:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jdinardo/Pubs/comment_on_borjas_freeman_katz97.pdf

From the paper:
Immigration has had a marked adverse impact on the economic status of the least skilled US. Workers (high school dropouts and those in the bottom 20 percent of the wage distribution)

UK Evidence:
http://restud.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/05/09/restud.rds019.full.pdf+html

As for the effects on native wages, we find a pattern of effects whereby immigration depresses wages below the 20th percentile of the wage distribution but leads to slight wage increases in the upper part of the wage distribution.

@ David, you’re right there is a problem if the central government is Conservative and uses the funds to help businesses. However, that aid could be made conditional, while money directed more locally towards NGOs is continued.

I’m willing to grasp the nettle and say that when the well-being of U.S. workers conflicts with the interests of foreigners, so much the worse for the foreigners. We can’t simply pretend that nationalism doesn’t exist, and it is unacceptable for American workers to pay the full price of the bad decisions made by elites.

If elites really wanted to help the Hernandez family, they would end the drug war. If they really wanted to help the Masud family, they would institute cap-and-trade. (Politically impossible, you say? Well, so is removing all restrictions on immigration.) They don’t. The elites want to use the Hernandez family and the Masud family as weapons, both economic and ideological, to drive down wages and working conditions in the First World.

If the Hernandez family could make it over the border into the United States their children would have much better prospects (including a better chance of not being drawn into crime or murdered)

Ciudad Juarez is pretty bad, but it might be a toss-up whether Los Angeles is safer.

Isn’t it a bit much for the state that has made these people’s lives hell then to block their means of escape?

It’s actually perfectly clear from the context, but the use of “the state” in this sentence might seem to imply something like “these people’s lives are made worse by the state (full stop),” meaning their own state, which would be a very different question than the one you’re discussing. Arguably the problems of the Mexican state over the past hundred years had something to do with the problems in Mexico now, and putting equal responsibility on the US for its current interference seems to raise the possibility that future interference, of a different kind, would be okay.

I think it’s entirely fair to think about people in the sort of circumstances you describe when deciding questions about exclusion (or the terms of partial inclusion), and also about the role of government policies is the so-called first world in creating those conditions. I tend to link this with trying to challenge those policies (rather than treat it is as an either / or), to which I’d add neoliberal “trade” policies that make it difficult for people to stay afloat where they are. (See The Other Side of Immigration.)

Seems to me that the dynamics between low-wage (it’s a bit unclear what “unskilled” means) US workers and immigrant labour can’t be figured without accounting for race, which has long been a factor in the preference of immigrants over African American workers, whose labour automatically gets labeled as low-skilled. Notice what has happened, for example, to medical support professions as more African-American women have gone into this field. They are now being replaced by nurses and home-care aids from developing countries, because the nature of the work was changed just by virtue of its being done by black women (there’s a gender dynamic to this as well, obviously). Race and gender of the worker affect wages and prestige of certain kinds of work, and I wonder what kind of story wages would tell if we looked at the transformation of specific fields from predominantly white male workers to female or black or Latino and so on.

Also, the assumption operating here is that absent the tight immigration controls, every last Hernandez would be packing up their bags and heading for the United States. Sounds like the fear that all the Greeks/Southern Italians would flock to Berlin the moment the EU was established. As we now know, migratory behaviour changes when immigration laws change. Only certain kinds of people are inclined to move in the first place, and when they do move, they tend to move further and stay longer the more tightly their movement is restricted. “Rational” economic behaviour is deeply affected by other human considerations such as kinship ties, social status, familiarity with one’s environment, etc.

Finally, the whole question of our working class vs. theirs is a bit dated, isn’t it? I’m puzzled by the separation of the economic processes affecting workers in one country from those in another country. Why is historic injustice something that needs to be preceded by the word “mere,” when its effects are cumulative, compound, and therefore much stronger determinants of the life prospects of the Masud family than recent carbon emissions could be? And what about the historical determinants of the life prospects of the black Jones family and the white Jones family and the female-headed Jones family in the US? What makes “historical” injustices historical is that they are ongoing–carbon emissions wars are merely the latest iterations of much deeper structural relationships in the global economy, with differences within national economies being sometimes more interesting than differences between.

Just a question first: Who is the “McMahon” you mention in the 3rd paragraph? I’m not sure who you’re referring to.

Here’s something that I worry about with the way the case is set up, Chris. Cuidad Juarez is a pretty bad place, and the US bears some (but not total) responsibility for this. It should changes its policies and help improve the situation in Mexico. But many places in Mexico, while not the best in the world, are a lot better than Cuidad Juarez, and in fact pretty okay, and improving. Why not go to those places? And, can a workable principle be put in place that would, with some acceptable degree of reliability, pick out the group most plausibly wrongfully harmed by US policy as opposed to all the other inhabitants? Maybe, but it’s hard for me to imagine right now. But without such a principle, I don’t think the idea gets off the ground.

The Bangladesh case is even more complicated, in that the harm has been caused by a huge number of countries over a very long time. The UK and Australia are arguably fairly small contributors to the recent problem. Why do they get the burden? In the case of people driven from their homes by climate change, it seems that only a large scale scheme of burden-sharing will be fair. Without that we muddle by, but it’s implausible to say that each country must act as it would if there were such a scheme if there isn’t one, or that each country must take on all the burden. (I guess you might disagree with that claim, but that’s a more basic disagreement.)

James Refell,
Overall statistics aside, new immigrants who are extremely poor are likely to live in places where their children will be drawn into violence directly, and often with no real alternative, where if they’d stayed home, they would risk being victims, but likely not perpetrators, and with more social support for being non-violent themselves. This depends in part on ethnicity (Laotian immigrants more so than Chinese, for example), and in part on geography (which is why I picked Los Angeles as my example).

I dunno what the policy is on “Me tooing”, but my heart beats as one with MPAV’s on this issue. Bravo.

FWIW, the idea that you can build a sustainable political effort that protects citizens in first world countries while building exclusions against third world workers entering those countries OR address problems like the Drug War or Climate Change while maintaining such exclusions is not terribly convincing to me. There are ways to create policy that benefits all workers, and if those workers see each other as the problem it’s not clear how they can produce those policy changes. That such exclusion need not be racist or nativist in the abstract doesn’t mean it won’t be in practice, and pitting those at the bottom against each other is the central way those at the top prevent efforts to address inequality. And exclusionary (and punitive, rights-violating) policies are both a product and a producer of the preferences of citizens.

There was a time when most observers believed that American labor unions were necessarily supporting of immigration restrictions because it was in the interests of their members. And then an influx of migrant workers in the movement in the growing and vibrant service worker segments led the AFL-CIO to change its approach. It’s hard to see how most American workers would have benefited if union density have dropped even faster than it did (at the same time service worker unions were expanding, they were declining in most other sectors) or if the union movement was robbed of the energy that came from the confluence of the labor and immigrants’ rights movements. There is a political dimension to this – you can’t treat it as solely an economic concern.

But of course people fleeing war, persecution, or natural disaster must not be turned away. That’s been internationally accepted, since 1951.

Chris can I ask you if you consider yourself a neo liberal?

I think the moral case for allowing migration — and for granting migrants all the same rights as longer-established residents of the rich countries — is overwhelming, for many of the reasons you’ve given.

What I continue to worry about is a displacement of the politics of national development by the liberal solution of migration. Of voice by exit, in other words.

It is certainly true that the harms and risks imposed by the rich countries on residents of the poor ones are a good reason not to oppose migration. But also, maybe we should, you know, stop imposing those harms and risks? I’m pretty sure that in a more just world far fewer people would choose to leave all their social ties to move halfway around the world, even if they increase the return on their human capital a bit that way.

This post ‘… argues that those who have been placed at serious risk of harm by the actions of wealthy democratic states should not be barred, by those states, from fleeing to them. It does not preclude those states also following policies that relieve these harms in other ways. But so long as the harms are continuing and those policies are not actually in place, exclusion does those would-be escapees an injustice. Your willingness to throw these victims under the bus because you (perhaps erroneously) think this is necessary to protect first-world living standards strikes me as repulsive.’

In other words, the right of immigration is vested in those who have a claim for damages against a nation as a sort of ‘second best’ solution- the optimal one being that they are fully compensated.
How can the feasibility of a ‘second best’ solution become the basis of deontic argument?
The first best solution, on this line of argument, is to maximise the sinking fund for damages- for e.g. by letting healthy billionaires who agree to contribute to that sinking fund through taxes in to the country but keeping poor disabled people out.
That can’t be what Chris wants.

“Obviously I’m not a neoliberal, and raising that is a red herring.”

I apologize. It did not seem obvious to me and I am not familiar enough with your academic writing to say one way or the other. Chris do you believe countries have the right to set economic policies? For example create trade barriers or levy tariffs on goods coming from another country? For example I support leveling tariffs or even forbidding the import of good created with what amounts, in my opinion, to slave labour. Do you feel countries have an ethical right to do that?

@ Watson Ladd, in an ideal world birth shouldn’t determine income, but that’s a different issue compared to the OP, which seems to be arguing for a more open asylum policy for those fleeing harm directly caused by developed countries (which I support).

Exclusion in itself is not a good thing, but the problem is that we live in a capitalist society and free economic migration (which is what the previous post was about) would negatively affect the people whom the Left should be supporting (the working class). Exclusion is by no means a “good” policy, but in an imperfect world it’s an imperfect solution to ensure the power of capitalists over labour isn’t strengthened further.

When I hear of economic migration I think of the H1B visas that have been abused by companies in the US to increase their share of foreign workers on temporary contracts, who are paid a fraction of what a US worker would be willing to work for and therefore undercutting their rates. Or I think of the free migration within the EU, that has certainly damaged the position of the working class in certain trades (for example construction). However, if you’re arguing for a liberal immigration policy (as opposed to economic migration policy), where immigrants are actually given citizenship and therefore must receive the same rights as other workers, then that’s not something I would necessarily argue against.

If Capitalism was abolished, then I would have no issue whatsoever what anyone migrating to wherever they want. However, in that happy world, migration would be motivated by curiosity, intellectual enrichment etc, not the need to escape the conditions imposed on the working class by international capital.

I just want to sign on to pretty much everything that SR819 wrote above.

(by “most of us” in the first sentence of 39 I of course meant “most of us in this comment thread.” WHich shouldn’t be taken for granted, especially on a topic like this.)

If my house catches fire due to your negligence, we can discuss compensation later, but meanwhile don’t prevent me from seeking shelter on your land.

Yes, but it’s worth noting that this tells in favor of temporary protection for emergencies, not an indefinite right to remain. I think it’s important to try to think very carefully about what different arguments call for. I don’t think that’s been done very much in the posts or comments.

it is clearly immoral for the US to tell Mexico it must accept US agricultural imports, and also pressure or encourage Mexican governments to weaken the ejido system of collective landholding, and then to prevent the Mexican farmers displaced as a result from seeking a new livelihood in the US. But it would have been better not to have destroyed Mexican small-scale agriculture in the first place.

This is a side issue, but isn’t so clear, I think. (I’d like to hear D^2 address it, too.) These policies have mostly made food much cheaper for most Mexicans, making most Mexicans better off. It’s been bad for traditional farmers who haven’t been able to adapt to niche products (some have- some good stuff from them was sold in the local co-op grocery store where I used to live.) But why is that the US’s problem rather than Mexico’s? This is a bit like saying that Japan should have relocated displaced auto workers from Detroit. But, I think it’s important to keep these issues distinct from the ones Chris wants to discuss here, as they are importantly different, I think.

why is that the US’s problem rather than Mexico’s? This is a bit like saying that Japan should have relocated displaced auto workers from Detroit. But, I think it’s important to keep these issues distinct from the ones Chris wants to discuss here, as they are importantly different, I think.

These are very good questions! (And seem to be exactly what Chris wants to discuss — the fact that his two examples didn’t happen to involve economic policy in a narrow sense doesn’t mean that he wanted to exclude it, I don’t think.)

One answer is that in fact the Japan case is analogous, and yes, japan should have allowed US autoworkers to immigrate. (Hardly any would have, I’m sure, but set that aside.) the position, which I think has some merits, is that you cannot consistently demand that sellers of goods and capital can seek the highest return without interference from national borders but restrict sellers of labor to their own national markets. On this argument, if you think preserving national borders is important, you must accept a degree of economic dis-integration and (relative) autarchy. (I’m pretty sure this is where e.g. Rodrik ends up.)

A second answer is that US policy has far more policy autonomy vis-a-vis Japan than Mexico does vis-a-vis the US. The decline of manufacturing employment i the US was not an inevitable reaction to the increased cost-competitiveness of Japan — just look at the highly asymmetric responses to the rise of the dollar in the first half of the 80s (massive exit of US firms from many tradables sectors0 and the rise of the yen in the second half (acceptance by Japanese exporters of lower profit margins, financed by inked banks, in order to preserve market share.) So there is a much less direct connection between Japan and the problems of workers in Detroit than between the US and workers in Guanajuato.

A third answer would be that we are really talking about rich countries vs. poor ones, although then the specific compensation argument gets weaker.

the point remains that most of everybody is unsatisfied with their current economic conditions. There’s always a bigger house, better neighborhood, better school for your children. If you think the difference in wages between Swedish and Indian bus drivers is outrageous, what about the difference between you and Lloyd Blankfein?

Again, I don’t think this is right. I think it is generalizing a specific capitalist drive for endless accumulation into a universal human nature. But competitive acquisitiveness is a historically specific and limited motivation. I think for the vast majority of people economic goals are limited to reaching a level of reasonable prosperity defined by one’s immediate social universe.

I hate Lloyd Blankfein and I want all his money taken away. (After that I won’t hate him any more, he can get a job as a bus driver and be a respectable member of the community.) But that’s not because I want to have his money — I don’t — I’m sure it would not make me a bit happier.

I said that when the countries that have caused the harms prevent the victims of those harms from fleeing into said countries, they do those victims an injustice.

Doesn’t this get swept into the definition of the original injustice? It’s like a mass killer barring the doors to a theatre before opening fire. Obviously worse than the alternative, but it would feel weird to say, “at least that other killer was kind enough to let people escape.”

If a country causes hundreds of thousands of people to become victims and then offers them an opportunity to exit the victim zone, it’s not appropriate to evaluate each of those policies separately. Just like if someone held you at gunpoint and said “get in the car or I shoot,” you wouldn’t evaluate “he’s threatening me with death” and “he’s allowing me to get in the car” separately. I think this is part of what MPAVictoria & company are observing. A country that destroy’s a population’s home and then gives them safe passage to its own territory is still doing that population an equally grave injustice–a kind of forced migration. The original act of destruction confirms for us the state has no benign intent for these people; if it doesn’t intend to destroy them, then it intends to exploit them. The only conceivable reason the state would intentionally not prevent immigration with violence, is because in its original act of violence it was trying to trigger the immigration in the first place, so that the affected population is locally available for (mis)use.

So it’s hard to say, “oh it would be better if our state, which is bombing this country into rubble, at least allowed its victims to immigrate.” Allowing that would make our state’s act of violence a different sort of act–it becomes rounding up people at gunpoint, rather than killing them off or neglecting them. By saying the latter is worse than the former, we’re saying that the former is better than the latter. It sounds like the kind of argument you’d think the author of the “Philosophy, drone strikes, and conditional arguments” post would find tasteless and unacceptable.

On an individual level, you do indeed make it sound like the first world countries are being (brutally) unfair to the poor countries. But really we need to be asking different questions:

(1) What would happen if we allowed all people who wanted to move around the globe to do so? Would we not just destroy infrastructure, cohesion and create even more exaggerated inequalities? Would those left behind in the poor countries – for whatever reason – not be even worse off as people and wealth concentrated in select areas of the globe?

(2) Why do these people have to move in the first place? Surely we need to take a good look at an economic system that puts these people into poverty?

JW Mason, again, fair enough, well played.

But then “defined by one’s immediate social universe” seems to be the key here. Indian bus driver doesn’t get the opportunity to go to Sweden, but he could get a job at one of those customer service call centers. Of course someone would have to drive that bus anyway, but maybe this is how we shift the focus from individuals to their environments: India, Mexico, Bangladesh.

I don’t buy the “why can’t we do X instead” line. People are fleeing drug wars and environmental catastrophes NOW because of policies that the governments of wealthy states have been and are pursuing.

While I think the specific arguments of this post are persuasive, in general I am not happy with arguments of the form that we should not talk about the structural roots of some problem because we need to address the immediate crisis. (In other contexts a similar argument is often made in favor of the “humanitarian interventions” you oppose as much as I do.)

Whatever your intentions here, the question of environmental migrants from Bangladesh can’t be cleanly separated from the issue of South-North migration in general. And there is no question that there is a powerful liberal position that does exactly what MPAVictoria and others in this thread say — dismisses the goal of national development in favor of the right of migration, so addressing the problems of the global poor in the way most beneficial to the interests of the global rich. You personally don’t take that view but you can hardly blame the rest of us for engaging on the terms that we see dominating actual policy debate. (Again, the analogy with humanitarian interventionism — pro-war liberals always stipulate exactly the terms on which they are supporting this or that war, but those of us on the other side have every right to oppose the war we think will actually be fought.)

On reflection the humanitarian intervention analogy is unfair since migration actually does address the immediate crisis, while wars (pretty much always) don’t even do that. So consider it withdrawn.

“Proponents of highly liberalized migration policies are often chastised for being insufficiently alive to the political realities. But a fair response to the self-styled realists is to ask, given the way things are, what they are actually prepared to countenance.”

In this post, and your most recent three or four other ones, you use the constraints of political realities in an uneven fashion. When talking about objections to your suggestions, these constraints loom large–cap and trade isn’t particularly feasible, rational approaches to the drug war even less likely. You are right, those are hard sells. But when you’re talking about your own proposals, the political objections appear to recede and it isn’t clear why.

In the current political environment (in the US) I would rank in order of difficulty–easier to harder–cap and trade, large steps toward rational drug policy, with dramatically more expansive immigration policies being clearly the least feasible. And that is in the relatively (please not “relatively”) immigrant friendly US. Someplace like Japan is definitely going to have more trouble with more open border policies than with cap and trade or what have you.

The unfortunate answer to “given the way things are, what they are actually prepared to countenance.” is ‘a huge amount so long as the costs fall on people in other countries’. But “given the way things are” is truncating the question. You are suggesting a politically difficult change to the way things are which looks more difficult to change than “the way things are”.

If we have bad policies (and we do) which are hurting people in other countries (which they are) a good rule of thumb would be that it is going to be easier (which still might be VERY VERY hard) to change the bad policies rather than change the immigration policies to try to make up for the damage.

This rule of thumb is relevant for all sorts of discussions–idiot US ethanol policy, farm policy, drug policy, global warming non-policy. Take even sweatshop policies. You might be able to get a majority to make a sweatshop factory product ban. You aren’t going to be able to get a “sweatshop workers get to immigrate to the US” policy.

And I say this as someone who thinks that immigration policies are much too tight in the US.

On the specific case of Bangladesh, it seems to me that Pakistan, in particular, has an obligation to help out Bangladesh. Since it was the most recent colonial power and in fact fought a genocidal war to keep control of the country, it bears some obligation for the current state of the economy there. It is also richer and more developed than Bangladesh, so it seems like it should be considered as a place for immigration from Bangladesh.

On the specific case of Bangladesh, it seems to me that Pakistan, in particular, has an obligation to help out Bangladesh. Since it was the most recent colonial power and in fact fought a genocidal war to keep control of the country, it bears some obligation for the current state of the economy there. It is also richer and more developed than Bangladesh, so it seems like it should be considered as a place for immigration from Bangladesh.

Unfortunately, it’s also dealing with a huge influx of Afghan refugees, which, if anyone were to be aware of it, would explain many of its actions in relation to Afghanistan…

““Moreover, I don’t buy the “why can’t we do X instead” line.””

On that I noted earlier (on the other thread):
“The argument above, better fight the misery that drives mass migration, can obviously serve as an easy fig leaf for those who don’t give a damn about global injustice. On the other hand, advocating open borders can also turn into cheap posturing. One can advocate open orders in the safe knowledge that it’s never going to happen.”

It’s not clear to me what really the topic of this post is. Do you want to debate what immigration policy, in concrete policy terms, the left should advocate? Or do you want to debate what principles should guide that debate Or do you want to debate how the left should position itself in the public debate in order to change immigration policy in the best possible direction?

I should slightly correct the last sentence: “Or do you want to debate how the left should position itself in the public debate in order to change policy in the best possible direction?” Because we have already agreed that this isn’t only and maybe not even primarily about immigration policy. GHG emissions, drug laws, trade liberalization, IMF restructuring, agricultural policy, etc. etc are all implicated. My point is that you are right to insist on First World (including to some extent the working class) co-responsibility for Third World poverty but then, the main question is how to address that directly.

“What ought to give them pause, I think, is the responsibility of the states and societies claiming the right to exclude for the plight of the excluded. The reason why the situation of the Hernandez family is so desperate is largely because of the domestic demand for illegal drugs in the United States, the violent policies used to suppress that demand and trade (the “war on drugs”) and the supply of weaponry into Mexico from the United States. Isn’t it a bit much for the state that has made these people’s lives hell then to block their means of escape?”

This isn’t a moral issue. I think you’re trying to make it one by foreclosing other options.

The people of the United States could, without losing any sleep, say that no Bangladeshis or Mexicans are immigrating to our country, but we are going to take other measures needed to mitigate our contributions are to your country’s problems. The US has no moral obligation to take the measures that Chris Bertram or the people of the Third World think are the best way to deal with crime or global warming. The US can consistent with justice decide that it wants to transfer money to Bangladesh, or legalize marijuana and cocaine, or whatever else it wants to do, and keep every single Bangladeshi and Mexican out.

Agree with Piglet, there’s something slippery about the OP. Chris wants us to talk about moral responsibility in terms of a whole range of issues – climate change, drug law, eyc. But he wants us to talk about policy choices simply in terms of migration. I don’t think that works.

If we want to discuss climate change, we will agree that the rich countries beat the biggest responsibility, historically and today. But I don’t think any of us will say that encouraging migration out of the worst-hit areas is anywhere near the top of the list of most urgent policies to deal with it. On the other hand, if we are talking about migration then the case for relaxing restrictions on movement from South to North will depend on the moral and practical case for this specifically. Not on whether the South would benefit from some unrelated policy change by the North.

Bargaining requires the actual presence of (representatives of) the two parties at a table. In the absence of actual bargaining, it cannot be the case that X owing A to Y implies a duty of X to give Y some unrelated B or C.

The OP has not proven that the indirect harms committed by the first world toward the Hernandez family and the Masud family have outweighed the indirect benefits. The posts suggests a moral right to immigrate be granted to these families based on indirect, unintended, and unproven harms (not making any implications on global warming) by the suggested first world nation.
For the Hernandez family, the violence they live in is committed by individuals who have chosen to violate a morally neutral series of laws against drug smuggling. Is any just law, made by any first world nation, automatically unjust because of violence is used to side step the law? One does not suggest that due to violence over oil in Nigeria, Denmark has a moral obligation to towards Nigerian immigration.
The Masud family is suffering from climate change. Most of CO2 production is used for builds (heating, cooling, and construction). Much of this is necessary to keep people alive outside of the tropical regions. Does this become a moral obligation for those living in the harsher regions – maybe. A portion of the CO2 production is used for food production. This level of production is necessary to maintain the current world population level. Does this food good cancel out the moral obligation to the Masud family? What about the other moral goods created in the process (penicillin for example)? Can you show that the goods produced in the process have been outweighed by the harms?

Who is ‘we’ . It’s not like steel workers wanted their jobs shipped off to China.

The notion we are a nation that acts in democratic consensus is touching.

Total tag fail. “The actual fact is that those other policy choices are not being pursued” was supposed to be bold, and the second paragraph was supposed to be italics.

I’m going to take that as a sign it’s time to end my participation in this thread.

I think JW Mason gets right to the heart of one of the problems with your argument. If anything your policies are much less politically feasible than the ones I suggest, yet you only want to talk about “feasibility” when it comes to my policies. Very easy to win this sort of argument but it doesn’t really prove much.

Marc @85
Individuals don’t have personal property rights to the entire soil of the country of which they happen to be citizens. The pitching-a-tent-on-the-mansion-lawn analogy is inapt.

Chris,

So in practical terms where does this leave us? Are you saying that, in general, no one should be prevented from migrating to the first world country of their choice, or are you saying that there are particular harms committed by countries that give rise to particular migrant claims (e.g., as many Mexicans as want to should be allowed to settle in the US, but they have no right to settle in Australia, Norway or Argentina)?

I don’t know much about Bangladesh or its current relations with the UK and Australia (which I know is not to my credit), but Mexico is much closer to the US than Bangladesh is to Sydney. Another reason, not mentioned in the OP, why the US can be said to have created Mexico’s problems, is that it has long alternated between welcoming workers from Mexico and deporting them. Under normal circumstances, a better case for mitigating harm might be that the US (in cooperation with the Mexican government) has long held out migration north as a normal thing people might do and not be thought unusual. The issue isn’t whether to let people in, in many of these cases, but to let them stay when they have lived here for decades, though without the paperwork recognized by the government.

@MPAVictoria
“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?”

Hyperbole much? There is no destruction by the Hernandez of the IBT livelihood, and nobody is starving because of it. Mexican trucking poses little real downward pressure on over-the-road truck costs. What there is is the use of one set of bogus rules (safety enforcement by ethnicity) being used in place of the real agenda. If you are going to argue that these people have a right to freedom from competition, are you also going to stand up to the Locavores, farmers’ market enthusiasts, and railroads in defense of these CO2 emitters and the Wal-mart model? There are few simple paths here.

Chris, I have long been interested in this quandary. Ideally, we would repeal the policies that led to the situation to begin with, but I think your point is to determine what to do assuming these policies will not change. Those policies include not only the drug war but also the Washington Consensus policies that encourage developing nations to switch over from sustainable practices to export-oriented policies in search of the almighty GDP per capita growth. Once you’ve enclosed the land and required tax payments in cash, what choice have you left for the people than to seek wage labor? And once they have embarked on that path, why shouldn’t they seek higher wages? Some of them happen to live in a place where they can crank out must-have products for Foxconn, which the voting masses love to have at the prices Apple can sell them (thanks to the low wages paid at Foxconn) and will probably not willingly vote against. Some of those wage laborers, however, happen to live in a place where (a) they’re undercut by Foxconn and can’t find similar work and (b) the border with a much wealthier nation is within a short enough distance to allow them to simply move to better paying jobs. Given the policies and the opportunity, I think it is fair to allow them to work here. And then there’s the 1848 War of Northern Aggression.

An interesting side issue here is that part of the electorate is completely fine with importing goods from foreigners but not terribly fond of visits from those foreigners (usually on the rightish end of the spectrum), while another part of the electorate is fine with immigrants but against importation (usually on the leftish end). On rare occasions, you run into someone who is against both imports and guest workers; these tend to be populists on either the extreme right or left who tend to be useful mainly as Baptists for some manufacturing Bootlegger who wants to control his foreign competition as well as his domestic, non-unionized competition. What to do?

Yet another issue is the fact that the existing immigration policies prevent the immigrants from complaining, organizing, and bargaining wages up to the local standards, so they paradoxically reinforce the very price competition that is the source of the complaint against them.

As to which policies are feasible for pursuit, I would note that it is rapidly becoming possible for Mexican workers to vote, practically if not legally. And given that some of them are long term inhabitants, why shouldn’t they be able to influence policy that way?

“Two small questions about the responsibility argument about climate change.

1) Is it enough that the developed world caused the rise in atmospheric CO2 levels, or do they have to have been negligent in doing so? ”

Tom Hurka – I don’t think we need to smuggle in notions of culpability to motivate the thought that the cumulative CO2 emission matters, not just the year-by-year total going forward. I remember doing a rough calculation to persuade myself that just building a first world type road network (extent and quality) in India would cost the world something like 5 ppm of CO2. And the corresponding emissions for the first world are in the air. Unless climate change fighters expect to prevent poor nations from having roads, either you exclude road construction from climate carbon calculus, or you take into account the historical emission. It comes to the same thing…

“As I’ve said, the question I’m posing is about the moral status of the the state’s intention to prevent the Hernandezes and Masuds from immigrating, not about the political feasibility of a policy that would allow them to do so. The fact that no combination of just policies is in the “Overton Window” isn’t a reason not to think about what justice requires.”

You sound like a libertarian in this post with all of your talk about justice requiring the state to cease meddling. What in the world do you mean by “what justice requires”? Do you mean “we must change our currently existing immigration laws to allow their immigration” or do you mean something else? If you mean “justice requires that we change our currently existing immigration laws” why couldn’t you even more powerfully say “justice requires that we change the laws and policies that are harming them”?

The status quo is that we have nasty policies and strict immigration rules. It makes no logical sense to say “given the nasty policies” when changing the nasty policies in question is more politically feasible than changing the strict immigration rules. You could more rationally say “given strict immigration rules” the state has a moral responsibility to quit implementing policies that are harming people enough to spur large scale immigration.

The problem is that you have one set of analytic tools you use for looking at non-immigration policies and another for looking at immigration policies. You’ve given no reason whatsoever for doing that, and it makes you appear to be shifting the goalposts whenever people don’t march in lock step with your thinking.

As it happens I can think of a potentially good reason to favor immigration reform without unfairly stacking the analytic tools the way you have been doing–there are so many externality dumping policies that changing enough of them in aggregate to make a positive impact on less fortunate countries would be harder than just changing the immigration laws.

I’m not sure I buy that argument, but it seems to be a better starting place for analysis than the ‘your arguments are politically difficult, and mine don’t have to worry about that objection’ tact that you have taken in the original post and follow up comments.

@ Chris- two questions-
1) Is that ‘what natural justice requires’ or what the rule of Law (Rechtsstaat) requires (i.e. a State that doesn’t compensate foreigners who have suffered damages by its actions by permitting them to settle within its borders is somehow on a slippery slope to the ‘State of Exception’).
If the argument is from natural justice it fails because the restitution offered is of a vastly different type than the damage inflicted. Indeed, under plausible assumptions (viz. that those who want to immigrate from Country X have similar preferences- including the desire to contribute more to Global Warming- to those inflicting the damage on Country X) it is adversely selective in a perverse way. It is like saying Vampires are required by natural justice to compensate the humans they prey upon by admitting any human who wants to become a Vampire to their fold.
If the argument is Agambian in some sense it fails because Agamben is clearly some sort of unclean Continental type who probably eats horse flesh and is nasty to donkeys and wears too much cologne and sports a gold medallion on his hairy chest and is currently sleeping with my wife.
2) Is Rawls’s difference principle relevant to similar arguments you have made elsewhere and if so are you sure it isn’t implicit in the reasoning behind your OP?

ISTM idle to discuss moral obligations to do the impossible. People who might be reached by this thread can change neither drug, nor energy, nor immigration policies; but speaking only for myself, if I could, I’d rather change the first two first. Is that really wrong?

If the impossibility of solution A is taken as a given, and therefore justice requires us to do B, how can we just ignore the fact that B is equally impossible?

If impossibility matters then we can only be required to do things we actually *can* do (like personally not call the cops, which won’t change the policy but it might delay its workings a bit for some individuals); if it doesn’t then we might as well tackle one infeasibility as another, and the non-immigration policies are obviously the bigger prize.

P.S. I take it it would be considered out of order to ask whether you can prove justice exists in a sufficiently objective sense to talk about what it requires, let alone how anyone is supposed to come by knowledge of the specific requirements? (Lots of people have intuitions about what justice requires but they point in all sorts of conflicting directions…) The fact that these problems have been unsolved for millennia would certainly give some people pause before slinging around phrases like “what justice requires”, but you seem afflicted with no such doubt.

Chris and others:
Do you support the right of countries to in act tariff barriers to nurture domestic industries?

This is all sounding a bit People’s Front of Judea/Judean People’s Front.

Which is not to belittle the arguments, but just to point out that most people taking part in this discussion are actually coming from very similar basic positions – treating poor people badly is bad, First World countries are, to a greater or lesser extent, responsible now or in the past for much poverty and unhappiness in developing countries, things should be done to alleviate the general unfairness of it all.

And just to foster a bit of we’re-all-in-it-togetherness, I want to say that I am supremely glad that the arguments here seems to be about the best way to make life better for poor people, whilst there are many many (oh, too many!) places on Teh Internetz where the argument would be about whether to make life better for poor people at all.

“Sorry, I know that was trite and sentimental.”
Don’t be sorry at all Katherine. You raise a good point that is important to remember.
/And now I am going to take a break from posting as three of the last 7 posts have been mine.

@Katherine- ‘This is all sounding a bit People’s Front of Judea/Judean People’s Front.’ LOL!
The problem is that righteous indignation jus’ feels so damn good that the market will support products that actually address the root cause of the underlying injustice and others that have no interest in addressing that cause and concentrate instead on maximising the feeling of outrage and moral superiority that dwelling on the topic induces. This ‘second order’ Public Good (i.e. not the provision of a Public Good but the demand for it) can crowd out the Public Good whose deficiency gave rise to it.

The Psychoanalyst, Christopher Bollas, has written of the psychic violence done to the insulted and injured when their pain and suffering are, as it were, confiscated by someone in a superior position- a parent, a politician- for their own self-dramatization leaving the victim inwardly empty and no better off.
Worse than this ‘extractive introjection’ is Munchausen’s Syndrome where the supposed care-giver causes or aggravates harm to the person they claim to care for so as to attract attention to themselves.
Bad Political Philosophy has great appeal to those whom, were they in loco parentis, we would accuse of extractive introjection or, worse, Munchausen’s Syndrome. For this reason, it is worth making the attempt to communicate with people who produce bad Political Philosophy though, of course, anything sensible one might write would be far too much work for them to extract a clear meaning from.

CB: Personally, I say good luck to the families. I’ll help them if I can and I won’t help the immigration authorities to pursue them, because I believe the state’s desire to thwart them is wrong.

Well, okay, this clears some stuff up. I think we should talk about state policy and personal policy separately, accepting the conclusion that it’s okay and sometimes morally imperative to undermine a legitimate state’s legitimate authority. So I’m with you on personal policy. But would you only neglect immigration law for citizens of countries you feel have been wronged by your country? I wouldn’t turn in an illegal immigrant from Afghanistan, but I wouldn’t turn in an illegal immigrant from Brazil or China, either. If asked why, I wouldn’t come up with anything more specific or intelligent than “because shit is fucked up and bullshit.” That’s a perfectly coherent personal policy.

If state policy was to bomb the crap out of a country while allowing its citizens to immigrate, I think my concern upthread still obtains; the motive for the latter policy is necessarily suspect because it’s tied to the former policy. So we ought to adopt the wary skepticism that MPAVictoria has been championing (advocating? exemplifying?).

It still feels like you’re coming at this topic from an approach asymptotic to “we should condemn states that draft their own citizens to send into war as troops, because they could be sending in drones. So, we should undermine the draft whenever possible, we should refuse to assist draft enforcers, and we should exercise whatever influence we have to end the draft.” I’d readily accept your conclusions on their own terms, but there’s something problematic in the logic you used to get there.

@Watson Ladd- I agree with you. Also I have the highest respect for both Bangladesh and Islam and certainly did not mean any sort of slight. Great Bangladeshi Muslim thinkers have shown how true Islam enables rather than denies all the virtues of liberal democracy with functioning institutions. Plenty of British people including Bangladeshi origin British ers visiting ‘Sonar Bangla’ for the first time, fall in love with it and scheme to make their home there.
This is not to say that Bangladeshis are stupid or perverse if they want to leave. On the contrary, It makes sense for people with the same preferences or endowments to move to a Schelling focal point where the provision of Public Goods and infrastructural Social Capital is optimal for that preference set. However, such movement does not need Chris’s brand of polemics to come into existence. On the contrary, the history of Bangladeshi immigration to the U.K (which increased under the voucher scheme after the earlier clampdown on free migration) shows that immigration in line with preferences/endowments is best left to those who actually have an interest in the matter. They can strike bargains with Govts. Britishers like Bangladeshi food. Bangladeshi restaurants needed more Sylheti cooks. They spoke, the Govt. listened. Everybody was better off.
Chris is using an argument for lifting migration controls which has no merit and poses significant dangers to precisely the cause he has himself shown genuine dedication.
Since he is a Professor of Political Psilosophy (or whatever) and (I’m guessing) he is using this forum as a sounding board, it is worth our telling him that Bad Political Philosophy is not the solution to this or any other problem arising from grievous injustice. My own principled refusal to have any truck with the number 6 or 9 led to my failing my Accountancy exams while at the LSE even though I explained that the terrible sufferings of the Palestinians made it incumbent on Accountants everywhere to, like, stop counting stuff and just sign the Audit report already the way Arthur Anderson would later gain acclaim for doing.
Alas, I was ahead of my time.

I said I wouldn’t comment more but I feel I have to respond to 93.

I understand the logic of the post fine, I just don’t agree with it. As far as that goes, there’s no point in debating further. What I do want to reply to is this:

I say good luck to the families. I’ll help them if I can and I won’t help the immigration authorities to pursue them, because I believe the state’s desire to thwart them is wrong. I’ll also support any proposals for liberalization of migration rules, amnesties, and other things that make their lives (and those of others like them) easier. As I asked MPAV at 23 above ” You want them arrested and deported? Would you call the cops yourself?”

I’m sorry, but this is really insulting thing to say.

I would never hep the immigration authorities pursue anyone, never. If I could help someone facing deportation avoid them, I would. I will put my commitment to that on the line against yours any day. The fact that I don’t agree with the particular argument you are making here for higher immigration does not in any way, shape or form mean that I condone the coercive police tactics used to limit migration. Anyone who knows me knows I find that stuff appalling and in fact when I was with the Working Families Party I worked hard to see that we supported measures to make it easier for undocumented immigrants to remain in the US (like local policies to accept Mexican-issued IDs.) And yes, I believe the US should adopt much less restrictive policies toward immigration from Latin America and elsewhere.

I do not want anyone arrested and deported. I would never, ever do anything to bring someone’s immigration status to the attention of the police. That is a disgusting thing to accuse someone of. It’s a bullying, dishonest style of argument that you should be ashamed of.

“As I asked MPAV at 23 above ” You want them arrested and deported? Would you call the cops yourself?””
No I would not. See Mao Cheng Ji’s post above.
And since we are posing hypotheticals let me ask one of you:
Would you report a business owner who fired all of his unionized staff who were making 15 dollars an hour and replaced them with undocumented workers making 8?

Vivek’s invocation of Schelling, Rawls etc constitutes, in this context, nothing more than obfuscation.

Not all Bangladeshis are poor, but a poor Bangladeshi is likely (perhaps not certain, but likely) to be better off materially in the UK than if he stayed in Bangladesh. You don’t need focal points, preference orderings or primary goods to reach this conclusion. Now, if a poor Bangladeshi doesn’t want to emigrate, nothing CB has said would force him to do so. And on the point that the poor Bangladeshi would produce more CO2 in the UK than if he stayed in Bangladesh, this seems to me sort of a side issue partly b/c, as a practical matter, a lot of poor people in poor countries I think probably don’t want to emigrate, for a variety of reasons.

One would need some sense of the numbers involved, which I don’t think anyone knows for sure, but clearly many poor inhabitants of poor country X would not want to uproot themselves. Some would, but many would not. So the implicit premise in much of this discussion that the entire population of the global South below income level X would move to the North if given the opportunity is, I would suggest, incorrect.

P.s. I have some personal acquaintance with, and a longstanding interest, in Bangladesh. I lived in the country for several years as a child, when the country was still E. Pakistan, and returned for a visit as an adult, albeit some years ago. No doubt Vivek’s ties to Bangladesh are much deeper than mine, but I wanted to mention this anyway. (Btw a v. interesting piece in the NYT the other day about labor struggles in the Bangladesh garment industry. Sorry no time to link it right now.)

Chris Bertram@102; you wrote
“Some aspects of justice are controversial. Imposing serious harms on innocent parties for my private benefit is an example of non-controversial injustice. If we don’t agree about that, then there is no basis for conversation.”

Well, you and I agree completely on that point, and I hope you will allow the conversation to continue, rather than saying “please go away”.

If you harm an innocent for your private benefit, no doubt at all, that’s unjust. But what many commentators have been trying to get across to you is that the problem, even in the examples you have given, is not so simple.

Granted that the US Government’s War Against Drugs is foolish, futile and ultimately I hope unsustainable. (Sorry if this conflicts with your erratic telepathic insight that I must support the viewpoint of the Daily Mail.) But there are a couple of things which you seem to think follow, and others do not think follow, from that truth.

First: all US citizens are more or less responsible for their Governments’ follies. You say ” if there were massive public demand in those countries for an end to the war on drugs … those things would happen.” I fear you are neglecting two important things. Very few citizens of the US (or in normal peacetime elsewhere) care anything like as much about politics as you do. Massive public demand for any policy, however intellectually desirable, is likely to be far less than public interest in all sorts of other things. Ain’t democracy a bitch? And more important: the average US voter, having to choose between the Democrats and Republicans, both of whom are publicly in favour of the WoD (whatever their private habits), has no real way of expressing opposition to the WoD, just as neither you nor I in the UK have any such way.

If you agree with me on this – and I would be interested to know if and why you disagree – it seems to me to follow that most US citizens are not, in justice, uniformly responsible for their Governments’ follies.

Second, the indisputably distressing position of the Hernandez family in Ciudad Juarez due to the US government. There are rational grounds for dissent. Given that the US WoD offers irresistible temptations to (a few) Mexicans to engage in smuggling and to murder their competitors: how is blaming the US for that different, logically, from blaming girls in short skirts for offering irresistible temptations to (a few) men to rape them? Are not the problems in CJ due, in a large part, to the Mexican criminals?

And are they not also in part due to the incompetence of the Mexican government, independent since 1810?

So why should the US government alone be made to compensate the virtuous Hernandez family? And can you not see that, by allowing the Hernandez (and an enormous number of others) into the US, the people who will in fact be suffering to compensate them for the US government’s incompetence are other relatively poor US citizens who had no choice in the matter?

You may perhaps wish to reply: greatly increasing the supply of unskilled labour in the US will have no effect at all on the wages of unskilled workers in the US. Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it.

Query: in 1945 there were may millions of Japanese and Germans who could reasonably say that they were suffering quite abominably (far, far more than contemporary Mexicans or Bangladeshis) from American or, for Germans, British actions.

Should they then have been allowed to emigrate without restriction to the US or (for Germans) to the UK?

Bearing in mind that most of them had no wish, or in a totalitarian system had no possibility whatever, to dissent from their governments’ policies.

Politically impossible in 1945, of course, but this thread is entirely ignoring political impossibilities where they conflict with the preconceived ideas of Prof Bertram.

I only ask because I want to know.

Sorry, s/novakant/Stephan/g. I got confused.

I think this debate is too abstract. It would be interesting to hear for example from those actually working in the immigrant/sans papiers solidarity movement. I was involved in that briefly some twenty years ago and I’m sure these same debates have already been had many times. What frustrates me is that this post has been triggered by the writings of neoliberal quacks, not by the writings of those on the left who actually know and care about global injustice and Third World poverty and the plight of migrants and refugees. There should be better inspiration than that for this blog community. And yes you can accuse me of only criticizing without making much of a contribution myself. I can stand by that.

It’s a tangent, but the refugee situation in Afghanistan is very different from that in Iraq. The huge departures from Afghanistan came during the Soviet war. Since 2001, ~5.7 million refugees have returned to Afghanistan since 2001, per UNHCR, but that’s slowed over the last few years. UNHCR also claims about 100,000 internally-displaced persons from the fighting with the Taliban over the last year (and half-a-million IDPs overall).

#131

I agree that citizens in our so-called democracies are pretty powerless – the system is largely a scam.

That said, both Bush and Blair were reelected, which means that a plurality of voters were endorsing a bunch of incompetent war criminals, who should have ended up in The Hague rather than get another term office – and that’s pretty pathetic (whatever other policy preferences might have plaid a role).

I thought rf’s 127 point about the Iraqi refugees was rather weak. Is there any evidence that a significant number of them actually wanted to get to the US and Europe? I doubt it.

In addition, almost any resettlement of refugees anywhere (Jordan, Syria, etc) is heavily financed by various UN agencies, and those are bankrolled mostly by the US, Europe, and Japan. Granted, their motives probably are overwhelmingly geopolitical, rather than humanitarian (the US, for example, would hate to see its client state of Jordan destabilized), but nevertheless.

CB: The OP does not say that there are no policy choices other than migration policy that could address the harms. The actual fact is that those other policy choices are not being pursued. Given that they are not, the states perpetrating the harms do not now have the moral right to exclude the Hernandezes and Masuds, that’s the claim.

Philosophers will typically then say that the argument is merely conditional, and that therefore, if the antecedent is false then the conclusion doesn’t follow. Clearly that’s right. But does it get us off the hook in a world of propaganda, mass media, think tanks and the like?

Of course this kind of problem, involving the escape of the argument from the seminar room into the wider world, isn’t limited to just war theory. So, for example, I’ve heard it argued by philosophers that IF sweatshops improve opportunities for poor people in poor countries THEN they are on-balance justified: so people shouldn’t campaign against sweatshop labour.

The last one was actually the wrong link, as its testimonies from Saddams years, Ill try find the right one. Or thats probably enough anyway

UNHCR has targets, they are not met, that’s clear. That doesn’t exactly address my doubts, however, about the proportion of the 2 million of them who would prefer the US over, say, Jordan. All I’m saying is that ‘1 million ended up in Syria, but only 100K in Europe’ is not necessarily a strong indictment. Let’s not quarrel about it, though.

[aeiou] So, to sum up, Prof Bertram makes a bunch of hysterical, empirically false and imperatively flawed claims to advertise his own moral superiority. He ignores or says that ‘it is too much work’ to extract a clear meaning from statements such as this. Not one single person finds he has said anything worthwhile. But that does not matter.
After all, this White Man, whose bad faith is revealed by the mealy mouthed manner in which he deals with even not wholly adverse comments, is in no way discommoded if the cause he pretends to advance is not totally scuppered by the very maladroit manner in which he expresses himself.
Nunc dimmitis thou good and faithful Servant. Do us all a favour and join the National Front.

novakant says: “nuff said”

It’s not that simple. For example:

Suppose country A accepts a refugee, and in 6 months gives her the status of a permanent resident, at which point she doesn’t count as a refugee any more.

Suppose country B accepts a refugee, and keeps her in a refugee camp subsidized by UN agencies, without a work permit, till the rest of her life. Say, 40 years.

In this hypothetical case, in order to keep up with the statistics produced by just this one country B’s refugee, country A would have to accept 80 refugees in that 40-year period. Plus, by financing those UN agencies, it might be paying most the costs of housing refugees in country B.

I’m not saying that this is exactly what’s happening, but it could be a part of it.

I’m simply offering skepticism towards some of the claims expressed with certainty that I find unwarranted, that’s all. Like I said in the previous thread: I don’t have a strong opinion, one way or the other. Mass immigration could be a bliss or a disaster, depending on the circumstances. One set of consequences short term, another long term. Or, more likely, joy to some, disaster to others. Dealing with refugees is, to a large degree, a political game; the agency is often led by a politician, the current one is a former prime minister of Portugal. And so on. I don’t think there can be a fixed, universal point of view on this.

144: good point. There’s also the point that a lot of people have, to an extent, the choice of whether to be officially “refugees” or not. An Afghan might want to get out of Afghanistan because he has a well-founded fear of persecution or harm. If he goes to Pakistan, he’s a refugee. But if he goes to Oman – where there are a lot of Afghans working in the service sector – and sorts himself out with a job, he goes down in the figures as a foreign worker, even though he’s still left his country through fear for his life.

Here I wasn’t arguing anything, just suggested that there could be alternative explanations.

For example, suppose you said: ‘death certificates in town X for the last 10 years have been examined, and 45% of them list the same place of death: 15 Main Street. There must be a hell of a murderous activity going on at this address’. And I relied: ‘why, it could be a hospital or a nursing home.’ Does it mean I argued something? I don’t think so.

rf 151, totally agree.

WL 147: The US immigration figures are not as high as you might think. They are only proportionally high and that is because the continent in question had recently been depopulated of most of its native population, mostly by infectious diseases. A fact you somehow manage to ignore in the whole discussion.

From wikipedia:

“Historians estimate that fewer than one million immigrants—perhaps as few as 400,000—crossed the Atlantic during the 17th and 18th centuries.[13] The 1790 Act limited naturalization to “free white persons”; it was expanded to include blacks in the 1860s and Asians in the 1950s. In the early years of the United States, immigration was fewer than 8,000 people a year, including French refugees from the slave revolt in Haiti. After 1820, immigration gradually increased. From 1836 to 1914, over 30 million Europeans migrated to the United States. The death rate on these transatlantic voyages was high, during which one in seven travelers died. In 1875, the nation passed its first immigration law. The peak year of European immigration was in 1907, when 1,285,349 persons entered the country.”

Compare that to the mass refugee movements experienced in recent decades in Asia, Africa and the Near East.

OK, one problem with this sort of discussion – a lot of empirical stuff gets screwed up, because correcting the errors distract from the abstract case. For example:

>Just as a majority of US voters voted for GWB twice; they had to know what they were getting the second time but did it anyway. Agency counts for something.

No, a majority of US voters did not vote for GWB twice. GWB LOST the popular vote to Gore. But he won the electoral college (assuming Gore did not win Florida, which is by no means certain.)

Also upthread, there was some discussion over how unfortunately cheaper food prices in Mexico have hurt a few farmers but benefited the majority. However if you look at income distribution, and increase in hunger, empirically the majority of Mexicans have actually been hurt by many of these changes.