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People Are Not Goods: A Response to Nick Gillespie
I’m an unabashed fan of Reason’s Nick Gillespie, but that doesn’t mean he’s always right. In a video released earlier today, he bats exactly .500, making an extremely persuasive case in favor of open trade… and a deeply flawed one regarding open immigration. Take a look for yourself:
There are two specific passages I’d like to address:
Gillespie: …Republicans routinely complain that the government can’t deliver the mail or educate children, but they’re convinced that government bureaucrats can perfectly adjust the mix of foreign workers in the vast and complicated American economy.
Yes, but the same United States government is also entrusted with our national defense, something Gillespie does not dispute. The question shouldn’t be whether the federal government can “perfectly adjust the mix of foreign workers” but whether it has constitutional authority to do so (it does) and whether its policies toward that authority are intelligent and wise (they are not).
Speaking of which, Gillespie goes on to say:
Yet even economists who are critical of immigrants with low skills recognize that they don’t take jobs from native workers. Instead, they head to the places where the economy is booming and employers are desperate for extra bodies. And they stop coming or go back home when the work dries up, especially if they know they’ll be able to cross borders safely and legally.
Gillespie isn’t so much wrong here as he is missing so much that his conclusion can’t follow (much like global warming alarmists are correct that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but wrong to try to end the discussion there). Consider how the following complicate the matter beyond recognition:
- US labor and welfare laws artificially raise the price of American labor over that of illegal immigrants, especially those willing to work in an under-the-table, cash economy. The combination likely has a lot to do with the strange circumstance Gillespie notes where we have low-skilled labor shortages and record-high domestic joblessness.
- Free-market economics is only one reason immigrants wish to come to the United States. The standard of living available here — or in similar countries — is different in kind from that available in much of the world. As such, a lot of people are motivated to come here because they (understandably) want to escape the poverty or violence of their native countries. Their priorities are (again, understandably) not necessarily ours.
- Our immigration and naturalization laws incentivize the wrong things. Chain immigration allows people to immigrate based less on their desire (or ability) to work than on whether or not they have family, loosely defined, already in legal residence. Birthright citizenship further obfuscates the matter. Unmarried, childless immigrants are likely to move back and forth across the border to follow jobs, but the same is not true of those with families, especially families born in the United States. People are often reluctant to move small distances (say from one school district to another) for the sake of continuity of their kids’ education and social life. How much more so if we’re talking about moving to another country to which your child has never been and of which he or she is not a citizen?
I wish all those who want to make a better life for their families well, and I sympathize with those who want to build a better life here. I’ll even say that we all should hope and work for a day when immigration anywhere is easy and legal for those who wish to work productively and peaceably, and become integrated members of their chosen society.
To get there, however, we first need to make our immigration laws sane, fight for free trade — which, interestingly, should reduce the demand to immigrate by making other countries more worth living in — and roll back the welfare state. Those policies are in our interest and, over the long term, the rest of the world’s.
Published in Domestic Policy, Economics, General
Strictly-speaking, in that video Nick did not argue that they should be naturalized. He merely argued that they should be allowed to freely cross the border, in both directions, to live and work .
They don’t have to be naturalized. They create a second generation that is.
If immigrant fueled homicide were as big an issue as is often assumed by the nativist (I’m using that term descriptively, not pejoratively) element of the right than it ought to show up in the measurable statistics and so far it hasn’t. Laredo, which is arguably ground zero for illegal immigration, has a homicide rate that hovers around 10 per 100K. By way of comparison, Detroit’s over 300. By and large homicide is 90% a native born US problem and, at most, 10% an illegal immigration issue.
Great – what are the overall numbers again? Also, isn’t there a great deal of policing in Laredo as a result of this?
Detroit, the South Side of Chicago, Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia… all of those places have obvious murder and crime problems, but I’m not touching the reasons for that with a ten foot pole. :)
Hi Valiuth. Re:
“Frankly the economic arguments for immigration restriction I think fall flat. Open labor laws and movement is necessary for a true free market. When did we stop wanting that? Or do we now believe that the invisible hand no longer knows what it is doing?”
(1). You cannot have both open borders and a welfare state. That couplet is unsustainable.
(2). If ALL countries had open immigration and free markets then the invisible hand will bring about the most effecient populations/workers. But. We are nowhere near that halcyon arrangement. We have to deal with the world as it is. And in that world, representative democracy and free market capitalism are confined to a relatively small geography. We are surrounded by nations that practice neither.
Tom’s title really hits the nail on the head.
Many of the problems that exist in other countries are inherent in the people. If you move the people, you move the problems.
We see this with lottery winners. You throw a few million dollars at a poor person, and after a few years, he burns through all the money and he’s poor again. It turns out, he wasn’t poor due to a lack of money; he was poor because he had the habits of a poor person.
Simply moving people to America does not make them prosperous. A better answer is for us to export to them that which made us prosperous and free.
This is another realm where Libertarians believe we should unilaterally disarm. No other nations are behaving in such a way. Why on earth should we have less restrictive immigration policies than a country like Mexico? Or Switzerland? I would prefer that we were much closer to Switzerland in that regard.
So, if you suddenly found yourself in Haiti with no way out, you would become just as prosperous as you are now? Moving to America allows people who are impoverished simply by being born in the wrong place to make something of their life. That’s not giving them anything, it’s just common decency of letting them lead their life the way they see fit.
Yes, the overall rate of homicide per the FBI was around 5. Again, that leaves us, in this one admittedly narrow example, with 10 – 5 homicides (max, we really don’t know) due, presumably, to illegal immigration and 300+ due to native born US citizens, illustrating my previous point.
And here’s one more data point.
I don’t buy the argument that foreigners will ‘take American jobs’. Workers are a resource – if you have more of them, you create jobs to take advantage of them. Cheaper farm labor means cheaper agricultural goods, which means more money available to spend on non-agricultural goods, which increases employment in those sectors.
This is the same failed argument used against automation – robots are going to take our jobs! No, Robots are going to take low-valued jobs that do not make good use of human intelligence, freeing humans to find other, more productive ways to work.
The mechanization of agriculture ‘took away’ millions upon millions of jobs from farm labourers. Does anyone want to go back and start scrabbling in the dirt with ox-drawn plows? If a person from Mexico gets a job picking lettuce, how is that any more damaging to the economy than if I buy a machine from Mexico that can pick lettuce?
That said, there are two big problems with open borders, but they are both ‘citizenship’ problems: Allowing people to come into the country and take advantage of social programs without having previously paid into those programs through taxes is unsustainable. And importing huge numbers of people who do not share your values and giving them the vote threatens what makes your country unique and special. The fabric of European society is being ripped open by such unlimited immigration today.
Note that Reagan in that clip wasn’t talking about citizenship: he was talking about work permits. That’s a very different thing. He was saying that Mexicans should be able to drive across the border and go to work at a job in America, but they would NOT be American citizens – just guest workers.
I would support a guest worker program, but not an open-border citizenship program. However, the Democrats desperately want the citizenship, because to them the whole point is to flood the south with people who will vote Democrat.
If Mexicans were reliable conservatives who could be counted on to vote Republican, the Democrats would be leading the charge to close the borders.
A few thoughts:
Again, I think the best thing we can do for the Haitians is offer to trade freely with them and to set-up, with their permission, economic free zones to help jumpstart their economy. That may not help the individual Haitian now but, again, not our responsibility.
Why are the 10 million people of Haiti poor?
Also, what if the government of Haiti were to purchase one-way plane tickets for their most destitute and then refuse them entry? Then, these people — who do deserve our sympathy — become our problem.
+1 Dan Hanson
The economic arguments against illegal immigration are the same tired, Malthusian zero-sum calculations that inevitably fail to pan out in reality. The economy is not a fixed pie (of jobs, resources, whatever) that must be divvied up to one person at the expense of another.
I think there are compelling law and order arguments to be made against illegal immigration and that’s where conservatives should stake their claim.
Valiuth. For the invisible hand to work globally, it requires global adherence to free market policies. From an economists viewpoint those illegal immigrants are just labor – a factor of production. Labor would be allocated across geographies in an effecient manor only if there are free markets across those borders as well. But there aren’t. There isn’t free trade either. So the conditions for the invisible hand to operate effeciently don’t exist. That is to say that regarding the current stare of international movement of labor – no, the invisible hand does not know what it is doing. There are too many distortions external to our borders.
And even a well run welfare state can be overwhelmed by needy immigrants/ refugees.
I think that I’ve read arguments in the past that possessing a pool of slave labor is what kept the South from modernizing its agricultural processes for so long, which in turn led it to being un-competitive with the rapidly industrializing North.
I actually think that the same thing is happening with illegal immigrant labor. Not only have we made our own citizens reluctant to work (they have better paying non-work alternatives AND a lot of time on their hands) but we have probably retarded a number of potential technological upgrades to our production capacity as a result of the managers/owners of agricultural and other low-skilled labor intensive companies having a cheap means of filling in demand for that work.
We continue to invite in this cheap labor at the cost of long-term economic and technological growth.
Short version: Skills are a resource which is expensive; brute force labor is cheap and plentiful. We get most of it from machines, but somehow we cling to the notion that we need millions of illiterate Guatemalan peasants to pick oranges and lettuce and man the counter at McDonalds.
tens of thousands = between 10^5 and 10^6
What was the most recent estimate of “amnestiable” illegal aliens currently in the US, something around 12 million if I remember correctly? That would make it something like ten million = 10^7
So at least one order of magnitude difference. Up to two orders of magnitude.
I’m not actually making an argument on this, just “blocking out” the numbers.
Carry on.
Quantum computing is on the horizon. If illegal immigration does indeed contribute to technological stagnation on the margin its coefficient is dust compared to the typhoon of innovation that is bearing down on us.
I don’t know people are getting very exclusive in their agricultural traits. Gone are the days of canned food and frozen vegetables. There is a growing market for traditional fare. The problem with this is that many of these fruits and vegetables require delicate handling in order to be picked in a manner conducive to long term storage. People and their hands are still the most sophisticated machines for this job. It would be great to have some crazy robot to do it, but why waste the money on building such a thing?
You say it is innovation. I say it is a waste of resources given an already existing technology. The most profitable solution is the right solution. Immigrant labor is nothing like slave labor because no one forces people to come and pick fruit. IF they could make better money doing something else they would, and we would get our Fruit Picker 3000.
The US government isn’t responsible for the wellbeing of citizens. It’s a myth to think otherwise. As far as it does anything for citizens, it’s as a means to sustain itself and to maintain a plausible hold on the monopoly of legitimate use of force.
“Let’s say a Haitian arrives in the United States with the best of intentions, but discovers that he lacks the skills to make it.”
Three things. 1.) No one has an obligation to save someone else. It’s nice to help people out, and it’s easier to help people in your proximity, but proximity doesn’t impart moral obligation. 2.) The risk that this might happen to the occasional person, even assuming a moral obligation to take care of them, is not sufficient to deny all the people who this would not happen to simply because of the risk. 3.) It would be better just to deny welfare to immigrants as a prerequisite to being allowed in. And as has been mentioned, welfare gets under people’s skin more than anything else, but it’s not at risk of breaking the federal bank.
It would be like we shipped people who were insufficiently productive to Antarctica just so we wouldn’t feel the obligation to take care of them.
Mike, I accept your premise that we should help those who aren’t born here. However, I think it’s reasonable to understand the problem before we jump to the solution of moving 10 million Haitians to America. Along with 33 million Venezuelans. And 25 million North Koreans. And 24 million Yemenis. And 1.1 billion Africans.
So I ask again, why are Haitians poor?
Really, I seem to recall stocked aisles of frozen food and canned vegetables. I recall Victor Hanson discussing how previously farmers demanded guest workers to harvest crop, saying they were necessary, and then ended up using machines when the supply dried up.
And why not hire rural or urban teenagers? Ag labor doesn’t have the same minimum wage, after all, and the money is great for kids. Because Mexican workers are disposable – you don’t have to worry about injuring them on the job, having them complain about breaking the law, etc.
Generally because they don’t have the stability and protection of property rights required to plan for the future and confidence that whatever they produce will not be confiscated by the powers that be or less than upstanding neighbors.
Sounds like a failure of government. Perhaps we should send the U.S. military over there, eliminate their government, and annex the island. Then, instead of just getting their people, we get the people and the land.
Aside from the reasons you’re avoiding, it also has to do with illegal and legal immigration. The south side and the west side of Chicago (and pretty much all areas of the city) have significant Hispanic populations. The two neighborhoods I lived in as a kid were transformed in short order; I saw what came before (it was pretty good) I and see what took its place and there is no doubt that crime, gangs, graffiti, and decay have increased. So, yes these changes have (unfailingly, in my direct experience) come with increased crime of all types on top of the normal pains associated with a changing neighborhood. These changes happened fast, but the effects are generational.
I think it’s probably more accurate to say that it doesn’t have to be a fixed pie or that it’s not always fixed. Sometimes the pie grows, and sometimes it shrinks. Sometime some regions of the pie shrink while other regions grow. Sometimes one region grows at the the expense of another. Sometimes innovation makes everything grow. Sometimes labor at the low end isn’t really capable of improving skills or being productive. Don’t the rise in public employment and debt at all levels count against the growth we’ve experienced? What about the wholesale cultural changes that have exacerbated the normal ebb and flow of neighborhoods and regions?
My point is that the entire premise of a “pie” is flawed. Wealth is created by work and there’s no fixed, upper limit defined by the boundaries of a pie. You’ll get no argument from me concerning debt and public employment. Not sure how that fits in with the current discussion, however. And your last point is a cultural value statement. Again, I concede that therein (in combination with the law and order case) lies the strength of the anti-immigration argument. The economic case against it is comparatively weak.
According to Richard Lynn’s and Tatu Vanhanen’s book IQ and the Wealth of Nations, the average Haitian has an IQ of 67.