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No, I Don’t Have An Immigration Limit In Mind And Neither Should You
I am an unashamed, unabashed “open borders type.” I’m not a communitarian, so I don’t see the issue in utilitarian terms (although if I did, I’d still be an “open borders type”). I am an individualist, so I see things through the lens of the rights of the individual: an individual’s right to engage in non-violent actions, including to move without restriction, and my right to associate freely with whomever I damn well please.
In another thread, the question was put to me what, if any, maximum number of immigrants would be acceptable. The implied alternative to a numerical limit would be an infinite number. I don’t have a specific number in mind, nor should I.
We’re talking about people who come to America to work and live in freedom and peace and be productive. They leave their homes and travel to another nation because their home country is so terrible and America is awesome.
But why does there have to be a number? Frankly, any number would be arbitrary.
And no, it’s not infinite. It couldn’t possibly be infinite. As pointed out in that other thread, 40% of illegal immigrants come here by plane and hundreds of millions of people would come to America if they could.
Well then, why haven’t they? If the borders are as open as immigration hawks claim they are, why hasn’t everyone else in the world come here already?
The answer is that magic doesn’t exist. There are costs involved in immigrating to the United States. If you live in some terrible third world country on a dollar a day or less, you can’t afford a ticket to LaGuardia. It’s obvious, but I guess it needs to be said, that the number of people who immigrate to the United States in a given year is constrained by reality.
But even the idea of a specific arbitrary number is statist nonsense. In any other context, if we weren’t talking about illegal immigration, an arbitrary numerical limit would be seen for what it is. Andrew Cuomo think that six is enough rounds in a magazine. Barack Obama thinks that at a certain point you have enough money. There are plenty of liberals who think that people who own more than one gun are terrifying. Each of those is an arbitrary numerical limit on freedom.
People want to come to America. It’s awesome here and we all know it. A man can say and believe anything he wants. He can work at a trade and be prosperous. Anybody can own a plot of land with a house on it.
The whole seasteading movement is really a way to get around limits on visas for high tech work. Think about that: It’s the policy of the United States to keep people out who:
1. Want to come here
2. Want to work
3. Possess labor so valuable that there’s a movement to create artificial islands to get them here.
People are going to come to America. We can make it easy for them or we can impose arbitrary limits and keep out people who we actually want to come here.
I get it. Freedom is scary to people. They want the government to come in and limit things. I understand the psychology behind it. Just don’t expect me to agree with it or to participate in applying your statist shackles to freedom.
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That’s something we can agree on. It would also be helpful to Americans who don’t own (or manage) major corporations.
If those things were done, it would improve the economy and the job market to the point where I’d be much more open to increased immigration.
Those numbers are based on studies of immigration from 1980 – 2000 and study the impact of 10 million immigrants over 20 years. Fred wants to admit more than that number each year.
That’s an inherently flawed metric, though. You can’t know what wages people would have under alternative policy scenarios. Researchers end up using models to simulate the effects, which are highly susceptible to bias.
Here’s a simple example. If we restricted immigration, but ran larger fiscal deficits, the effect on wages would be negative, since employers would lack the resources (pool of savings) to respond to the higher cost of labor by increasing capital investment. They would raise prices instead, leading to inflation.
On the other hand, if the government did run surpluses, or if households and/or the corporate sector saved more, employers would be able to make larger capital investments, and productivity (along with wages) would rise.
Thus, by changing one assumption — the estimated future savings rate — one can get different results.
Morality certainly does have objective dimensions, but circumstances make all the difference. There are few, if any, categorical imperatives. As you grant, there are times when it is moral to stop someone from immigrating. It this one of those cases?
I think so. It is simple math. The US cannot take in all the world’s poor people. We must set some limit. That limit is way, way short of the mob scene at the border and the 11 million illegals already present.
Admitting an immigrant benefits him, but imposes costs on others, including costs to our rule of law and to our civil society and culture. Those costs must be considered in determining whether the decision to admit or deny is moral.
True, that’s why I use a metric of an immigration restrictionist (I wish I could find the source). It at least heavily mitigates the susceptibility to bias.
And immigration restrictions imposes extreme costs on others, but we’re the only ones imposing costs at the point of a gun. I don’t like talking about illegal immigrants because I really care about people who are not here yet, but if illegal immigrants were always defined as legal, would it still impose cost on our rule of law, specifically? Because if it was that simple, I can’t imagine the current impact on our rule of law could be that great.
I agree, but the benefits to the immigrants average something like 10x their current income, so they would have to impose very serious costs to make up for this gain on top of the fact that allowing immigration would be a huge expansion in world freedom. I know most people see huge costs to society, and it’s massively complex, but I am confident that the costs are low, especially compared to the benefits, and it would make the world a better place.
The costs strike me as very high, but it’s not easy to quantify.
An easier (but not necessarily easy) case to judge is France. There, the immigrants are mostly unassimilated Muslims. Huge numbers are unemployed and maybe unemployable. Vast swaths of suburban Paris are no-go zones for non-Muslims, even police. Cars burn in their hundreds all the time. Pogroms against Jews are becoming the new normal. French society is asked to bend to Muslim sensibilities and Sharia law.
I don’t think too many Americans actually confronted with massive 3rd world immigration in their own neighborhoods would be all that philosophical about it.
Pardon me, but if we could do all that we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
We’d have a functioning government that was actually interested in competing with our rivals, not merely stuffing the pockets of the politically connected or pretending to be global hegemon. And we’d likely have an immigration policy that made sense.
I remind you that within living memory the GOP controlled both Congress and the White House, yet we did not get the sort of policies you propose.
We did, however get free trade and effectively open borders, while the endless growth of the regulatory state continued without pause.
That’s failure. Open borders wouldn’t make any of that better.
At the risk of repeating myself, if we could do that we wouldn’t be having this discussion, for multiple reasons.
But we can’t, so we are.
You have much more faith in the political class than I do.
I expect if the Sherman Antitrust Act was repealed it wouldn’t be because it hurt the interests of small-town grocers.
It would be (for example) because Comcast wanted to buy AT&T.
Finding the way blocked by the Act, suddenly the media would be blanketed by Sowell’s criticism of the act, accompanied by stories of how wonderful it would be once we didn’t have to waste scarce resources maintaining duplicate cable systems.
Then, once Comast took over, we’d rediscover all the reasons why monopolies are bad , but any reforms would now be blocked by an army of Comcast lobbyists. As would any would-be competitor.
Leave the Sherman Antitrust Act alone.
Thank you for admitting that your concern is the world, not the United States.
That’s says all I need to know about your arguments.
My concern is my family, then friends, then acquaintances (including you), then strangers. Despite this hierarchy, I will not cheat a stranger to help a family member. I would not slash their tires to help my child get a job. I would only do what I could to give the people I care about help without sabotaging anyone else. Yes, I believe my positions would make the world a better place, but that doesn’t mean my concern is “the world.”
The problem with this is that the United States and the blessings that come with citizenship did not happen by chance. My personal presence may be an accident of birth, but I’m pretty sure my parents had something to do with it, and theirs before, including those immigrants who came here for a better life. LEGALLY. They learned English, they worked hard, they assimilated, fought in wars, and earned me the right to be here. I will defend what has been given to me, and pass it on.
And still you cannot say that Americans have a right to America.
Many fought and died to give us this gift, and that’s what it takes. America is not just a place, it is an idea, and we defend that idea in a place marked with borders. Those who refuse to assimilate are not Americans, and those who come illegally are not welcome.
You oversimplify there at the end, drastically.
There are vast swarms of strangers to choose from. I choose the descendents of those who fought places such as Breed’s Hill, Antietam, Bataan, and Khe Sanh, plus later arrivals, including some who have now fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We are not cheating the other billions to treat them as non-citizens, because that’s what they are. China is not cheating me by taking no account of my interests, and neither is Mexico.