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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.
Published in General
Seriously?
People value their free time too much for that to be a likely outcome. A lot of people choose to earn less money – some near to the point of poverty – just to work fewer hours in the day.
Seriously. And a flood of immigrant workers who don’t value their free time as much would only hasten the process.
It’s always to an employer’s benefit if he can work a smaller crew longer hours. That’s why they did it that way back in the day. Less paperwork, less training cost, etc. Especially if the job has one or more peak seasons. Fewer employees during slack periods and fewer temp workers during peaks. Hire a crew that’s just big enough for the slack times and run them into the ground during peaks.
It might take a while, but we’d get there. It’s just too much more profitable for employers. The thing that stopped it back in the day was unions. Unions have mostly faded away because they’ve improved the legal norms of working condition enough that most people don’t need them, anymore. I’d rather not make them necessary, again.
Only for high school dropouts, and then it’s been calculated to reduce the lowest skilled wages 5% in the long term (10% in the short term), and be negligible to a small positive on the wages of higher skilled workers. Basically your instinct, while understandable, are not corroborated by the research. It’s such a small reduction in wages that we could compensate the workers who lose out through the tax code, even by taxing the immigrants.
If it’s always to an employer’s benefit if he can work a smaller crew longer hours, then it would benefit employers to work their employees literally 24/7 so that they could employ as few people as possible.
Even “back in the day” (in the Lochner era), there were people who wanted only part-time work and got it – without the benefit of unions. Women with children to care for have always been a good example.
Not all immigrants are unskilled, or you unfamiliar with the H-1B visa? It allows foreign professionals to come to the US, work for substandard wages, learn American methods and go back home to work for foreign companies competing with Americans. Hell of a deal for American workers.
So let’s say I’m running a sweatshop garment factory, hiring only immigrants and making them work 12 hours shifts, 7 days a week, with no overtime pay in blatant violation of employment law. Someone tips off the Feds, how can I know who it was? If the abuses are systemic, there’s not going to be details to distinguish one case from all the others.
Maybe I fire an employee because he keeps showing up late and does sloppy work, and in retaliation he’s the one who rats me out.
Or a law firm finds out and files a class-action suit for treble damages. Or the press gets hold of the story and suddenly Walmart and Target are dropping their contracts with my firm to avoid bad publicity.
It seems awfully risky for a business to operate in such blatant violation of the law.
Unfortunately for employers, people can’t work 24/7. And some businesses don’t stay open 24/7. But the fact remains that it is cheaper for an employer who needs 1000 man-hours of work per week to pay 20 people to work a 50-hour week than to pay 25 people to work a 40-hour week, if he doesn’t have to pay overtime after 40 hours. Less bookkeeping, fewer people to train.
And those part-time workers got even less than the wretched wages paid full-time employees. Why would anyone other than an employer want to bring those days back?
Sounds like a reason to let them stay. Might as well have them compete here instead of from overseas, no? Being at the highest skill level, I am acutely aware that open borders more closely approximates the regime I am competing under than the vast majority of people, and I’m glad for it because even if my wage is slightly lower I benefit from the innovations from foreign workers.
You make it clear to every employee that if anyone rats you out to either the government or a law firm, the factory is closed, they’re all fired, and they all go back home. As for the lazy worker you fired, he loses his visa and goes home.
It’s only risky to violate the law when the people you harm know the law.
One possible reason:
Because you’re a worker whose productivity is limited in some way, and you’d welcome the chance to make a little extra money in an unorthodox way. Say, for example, a mom with kids who can only work part time, or who could use the freedom to catch up “unofficially” on her hours after suffering a temporary productivity hit when one of her kids was sick.
I actually know what it’s like to be one of these workers, not because of children (yet), but because of an illness that could leave me unproductive for days at a time. I made up for the relatively unproductive days by working extra-hard off-the-books to catch up once my health improved. I suppose this made me a criminal in the eyes of the US Department of Labor. But why should it have?
You may be far enough up the wage scale that you can afford a pay cut, but many Americans aren’t. Should they take a pay cut so you can feel better about yourself? If so, then why?
You have a starkly different view of how free market economies operate than I do. You view economics as a zero-sum game, where every immigrant takes a job away from an American worker whose only alternative is unemployment, and where other nations growing more prosperous and Westernized represents a threat to our interests because it means more competition.
But aren’t we better off today because Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan learned American methods and now compete with us in the marketplace instead of on the battlefield? Wouldn’t we be better off if Iraq and the Middle East somehow miraculously did the same?
I believe a rising tide lifts all boats, and spreading free market capitalism and “American methods” around the globe benefits everyone, including us.
Many employers offer part time work, and always have. Usually at reduced pay and benefits. Regarding an employee with health issues that makes normal working hours impractical, many companies contract work out, and as long as it’s done on time and up to standard, it’s all good. Others pay a monthly salary and are flexible about office hours as long as the employee is available for meetings and keeps up with their work.
The personal situation you described sounds like you did about 40 hours worth of work per week, and you got paid for 40 hours. I have no problem with that, but I don’t want a system where workers are pressured to work godawful hours just to keep their jobs.
Don’t you find it a little odd, though, that irregular working hours for the same average pay should be legal for workers on contract or salary, but not legal for people paid by the hour?
Just because economics is a non-zero-sum game doesn’t mean everybody wins. If foreign workers get a +1 result and employers get a +1 result, and American workers get a -.5 result, it’s a still a non-zero-sum game.
Even in a two-sided non-zero-sum game you can have a lose-lose result.
There’s a reason economics is known as the dismal science.
The sheer existence of “the warm loving clutches of the welfare state” means we have something other than “the wonderful free market”.
The world is full of odd occurrences and situations. but you you make policy based on the common cases, not the exceptions.
I find this a fascinating statement.
Both nations were competing with us in the marketplace before WW2.
Bluntly, we’d have been much better off if they hadn’t been, because maybe we wouldn’t have had to fight that war.
And yes, the United States would probably be better off.
Germany and Japan learned American ways after they competed with us militarily. Germany got trashed and burned, and Japan got nuked. No miracles were involved. If you want to apply the same process to Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc., I think you might be on to something. I’d like to see us increase our domestic oil production and get the Keystone XL pipeline built first, but I’m flexible about the timing.
So I presume you want no welfare state, but also want to keep government policies that give Americans and American businesses no preference over foreigners.
And- contradicting Joseph Stanko- you also believe we do not have a free market in the US?
Am I correct?
“Free market” can be used in either a relative or an absolute sense. A market with a welfare state is not absolutely free, even if it’s noticeably freer than most markets in human history. Nonetheless, to call it free is an acceptable, practical abuse of terminology.
No, I do not want a welfare state. I also think a lot of policies designed to prefer one group over another have ended up hurting the preferred group – rent control, antitrust laws (which allegedly prefer “the little guy”), labor laws, “equal opportunity” laws… even welfare has hurt the poor more than it’s helped.
So what do you propose we do about it? Besides immigration, I mean. Will closing the borders alone fix the problem?
Certain jobs can’t be outsourced or automated, but many can. American firms can move factories and call centers overseas, in fact recently many have been re-incorporating overseas to evade the IRS. And foreign companies like Toyota continue to build better cars than Detroit.
What’s your remedy? Should we withdraw from all free trade treaties and bring back protective tariffs?
Perhaps the goal of our foreign policy should be to destablize our competition. We could end our Pacific Rim alliances, withdraw our navy, and hope that China invades Taiwan while North Korea attacks the South. That might force Silicon Valley firms to move their factories back to California.
Maybe Obama is a foreign policy genius after all…
This sounds awfully utopian. Some day in that golden future it might actually be immoral to have borders. I can’t say. But it’s definitely moral to have them now.
Similarly, slavery was not always immoral, though it is considered to be so now. There were times and places where slavery was a more moral choice compared to the genocide of one’s conquered enemies, when merely letting them go was not feasible.
My suggestions don’t matter. It’s too late. Too much damage has been done, and I expect we’re headed for a disruptive collapse.
You want to repeal the Sherman Antitrust Act?
Forgive me for focusing on that, because I agree with a lot of you post- but repealing the Sherman Antitrust Act- well, I find that problematic.
For example, I can just imagine the wonderful service we’d get if Comcast was the only cable company.
No thanks.
Well, I’m of the opinion that objective morality is timeless. I guess it’s possible there was a time when “slavery” of some sort was the most moral option, but it would entirely depend on the circumstances. Similarly, there are plenty of cases where it is moral to stop someone from immigrating, but this is not true in the majority of cases. Similarly, “open borders” doesn’t mean “no borders” or else that’s what it would be called. The people are still subject to the rule of law inside the borders, but stopping Starvin Marvin from buying groceries on this side of the border is simply wrong.
Have you read Sowell on the Antitrust act? Turns out it’s less likely to discourage the big businesses with deep pockets and high-class lawyers than it is to discourage small businesses that can be declared “monopolistic” in some way, like the only grocer or baker in a small town, or a small firm that manages to provide the consumer a great deal through “underpricing” its merchandise.
Cable providers are not a natural monopoly, but rather one enforced by local governments: local governments typically award monopoly cable franchises in exchange for tribute.
I see. You might be right, only time will tell, but in the meantime my suggestion is that we focus on things that put American companies at a disadvantage relative to their global competition, such as the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world. Like cutting red tape and overregulation. Like a dysfunctional legal system that permits filing meritless class-action lawsuits as a shakedown strategy. Like regulatory capture schemes where big business colludes with the bureaucracy to write laws that burden small business and startups. Like mandates that companies buy free contraception for all their employees.
P.S. I forgot a huge one: cheap energy. More domestic oil production would help make American firms more competitive globally.