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Immigration Götterdämmerung
In the past, Ricochet has hosted point/counterpoint articles — a phenomenon I was pleased to take part in. My desire is to revive that tradition and the opportunity has presented itself with a new interlocutor: Fred Cole.
The subject we are going to discuss is the contentious topic of immigration. I also believe in telling you where I sit before I tell you where I stand. So, in the spirit of full disclosure, my readers should know that I work for a firm which is owned in part by a legal resident alien – a legal resident alien in possession of a Doctorate in Geotechnical Engineering who immigrated to the United States via legal processes.
I reject utterly any assertion that my positions derive from Xenophobia, Racism or any other “ism” or “phobia.” Over the years, I have tried to make my position here at Ricochet clear: I am in favor of a skills-based immigration policy in the mold of Canada’s or Australia’s points-based systems. I am opposed to all low-skill and illegal immigration. There are other forms of immigration as well, such as those applying for refugee status or asylum. I am generally opposed to these as well with a few exceptions that I will explain.
Having cleared the ground for this argument, it seems to me that the first question which needs to be answered with regard to the topic of immigration is: What is the purpose of having such a policy in the first place? The primary purpose of immigration in my estimation should be first and foremost to help Americans. By that, I mean that the position of the Government of the United States should be strongly biased towards improving the lot of Americans’ lives, with the secondary consideration being how that affects the lives of potential immigrants. An immigration policy reflecting that principle would only invite people to participate in our country who have a strong likelihood of adding to the nation’s economic might and moral capital. How would we accomplish this?
Now, I’m a Baseball fan and I try not to have a lot of sentimentality about individual players. The bottom line for me is “wins” because that is, in the end, the only metric that helps you win you the last game of the season. So, when thinking about how to assess a player there are a variety of metrics one can use to judge whether or not that player is likely to be a net addition to your team or a net drain. The relatively new metric WAR (Wins Above Replacement) is a handy means of comparison between any given player and a theoretical average of players at that position (a theoretical “replacement”) across the Major Leagues. In a similar sense, a prospective immigrant to America who is going to accomplish the goal of adding to the nation’s economic might ought to have a WAR greater than that of the median American. How we measure such a thing can come via a variety of means – perhaps an individual seeking citizenship or residency is already wealthy, or perhaps they are a professional athlete or entertainer who stands to earn millions of dollars. Perhaps they have extraordinary technical skills of one type or another which will allow them to earn a large salary in a profession which is in great demand.
To complete the baseball analogy, the United States is the biggest and most successful Major League Franchise in history, and we have the prerogative to pick and choose whom we allow to come into our country and play for us. It makes perfect sense to only select those people whom we have reason to believe will make life better for existing Americans by contributing their energy, know-how and financial resources to the country.
This statements of general principle are, I think, entirely reasonable and free of arbitrary and capricious bias. It’s worth comparing these notions to the policy we currently follow, which is one focused primarily on “family reunification,” irrespective of financial or other considerations. Family Reunification is largely responsible for what is known colloquially as “chain migration” and has led to net legal immigration to the United States of near or more than a million persons per year since the 1990s.
The result of this unprecedented level of legal immigration (for an unprecedented period) is that we are approaching the largest share of foreign-born residents in our country’s history, with the absolute number of foreign-born residents exceeding the population of the State of California:
(See the Migration Policy institute for original data)
Given this huge influx of people from a huge variety of countries, it makes perfect sense for the government to ratchet down the net inflow of immigrants – if for no other reason than to allow the current crop of foreign-born to assimilate to life here in America, as a continuous flow of ethnically native persons arriving in a community has the effect of actively inhibiting the process of assimilation.
Who said that? Why, immigrant Reihan Salam did:
“The danger, as I see it, is that as the logic of the melting pot fails to take hold, and as more newcomers are incorporated into disadvantaged groups, the level of inter-ethic tension will skyrocket, to the point where we’ll look back wistfully on the halcyon politics of the Trump years. Preventing this nightmare scenario should be our number one priority. Instead, we are sleepwalking right into it.” (Melting Pot or Civil War?, pp 65)
Indeed, if you’re the sort of person who disdains things like “nativism” the path towards increased balkanization and more of that lies in force-feeding the people who are saying “enough!” more of the same.
So, we’ve covered what immigration’s goals ought to be, and what it should consist of. That begs the question: what ought it not be?
The answer is three-fold: Immigration ought not be the lawless situation we currently have with regards to illegal immigration and it ought not be the fraud-riddled disasters we have in the form of “diversity lotteries” and fake asylum and refugee claims. These are actually somewhat different things and we should handle them separately.
The first prong that needs to be tackled is the question of asylum and refugees. The United States Government recognizes the right of certain persons to request asylum or refugee status in the US for a variety of reasons. The very notion of asylum or refugee status implies first and foremost that you are a person seeking temporary shelter from some natural or man-caused disaster. The key word here is “temporary.” The trouble is, once people achieve these forms of legal status, there seems to be very little that is “temporary” about it.
For instance, in 2001, El Salvador was struck by a 7.6 magnitude earthquake. Over 200,000 El Salvadoreans were granted refugee status of one kind or another and resettled here in the United States. Again: this status was supposed to be temporary and as such, was subject to renewal at 18-month intervals. It’s now 2018… 17 years later. Presumably, the earthquake and the conditions which precipitated the need for people to flee from El Salvador have abated? Yet only now, after interminable renewals of their temporary status through 3 Presidential Administrations is the Trump Administration considering not renewing it, which could result in these refugees finally going home. This is merely the tip of the iceberg when considering the number of such refugees from a variety of places around the world such as Haiti, Somalia or Burma.
Applications for asylum and refugee status are rife with fraud and abuse – a simple scan of ICE’s news feed will reveal multiple enforcement actions where such schemes are hatched and carried out. Again, these are merely the stories that we hear about.
When you add up the number of asylum-seekers and refugees that the US takes in from the panoply of disasters around the world over the course of decades, the numbers become pretty striking in and of themselves. Note within that link the graphic discussing the number of asylees and refugees who converted their temporary status into legal permanent resident status over time – not a massive number, but curious nonetheless for the fact that so many of these people have simply stayed, rather than go home. This isn’t to say that all of these people have come here in an unjust or dishonest fashion – it is to say that their means of arrival are decidedly not premised upon the notion that their presence should improve the lot of our nation and its citizens.
This raises the appropriate question of what the United States’s policies with regard to displaced and persecuted people ought to be. The most famous case that many people are familiar with is that of the St. Louis, where over 900 people (mainly Jewish) seeking asylum from Nazi Germany were turned away in 1942. It isn’t overstating the case to call this situation “monstrous.” The Roosevelt State department knew very well the fate which awaited those people upon their return to Germany, where the death camps beckoned.
Fortunately, Nazi or Soviet-style evils are considerably rarer in today’s age, and the black mark of that failure of moral temperament should not mean that we have to compensate for it in perpetuity with make-up calls and mea culpas.
The ideal number of refugees America should accept today is fairly close to “Zero,” barring some truly extraordinary circumstances. There are many reasons for this including the fact that resettling refugees in places much closer to their homelands is considerably cheaper than resettling them here, and that location adds to the likelihood that they will ultimately return home after the crisis in their nation is over.
In this day and age, America should only accept refugee or asylum requests from those who have a genuine claim of persecution at the hands of their home government — a person like Liu Xiaobo comes immediately to mind — as a means of shaming our geopolitical adversaries by highlighting their crimes. This is the aspect of improving “moral capital” which I mentioned earlier.
Speaking of programs which neither improve moral or economic capital, The Diversity Visa Lottery is a truly bizarre program crafted with no eye towards economic development whatsoever. It should be scrapped immediately and with prejudice. Several Diversity Lottery Visa all-stars are famous names like “Omar Mateen” and “Sayfullo Saipov.”
I’ve gone on at length here about these programs and how they’re abused, but the reality of the situation is that these programs are romper room in comparison to illegal immigration in the forms of visa overstays and illicit border-crossings. DHS estimates that there were some 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States in 2014.
In reality, the only means by which the US will ever get its arms around such a massive problem is by attacking it at the well-head; by that, I mean at the place of employment. Various studies of employment verification have revealed that some 6.5 million Social Security numbers of people who would now be 115 years old or older are currently active. By that, I mean that people are either using the SSNs of these extremely old (and presumably dead) people to either conduct banking or pay payroll taxes. Simply getting a system in place which biometrically ties a person to their SSN alongside E-Verify would weed out those who are illegally using those numbers now and mostly put an end to illegal presence in this country by cutting them off from work – be they visa over-stayers or border-jumpers.
You might ask: why am I so insistent that we severely restrict low-skill immigration? Again, I’ll quote Reihan Salam’s “Melting Pot or Civil War?”:
NAS (the National Academy of Sciences) found vastly different net present value flows for immigrant groups depending on educational attainment. The average immigrant with less than a high school degree can be expected to cost $115,000 over a seventy-five-year period. That immigrant’s descendants, if they also have less than a high school diploma will cost $70,000. Meanwhile, the net contribution of an immigrant with a bachelor’s degree is $210,000, with descendants making net contributions of $42,000, assuming they also have bachelor’s degrees. (pp 55)
And:
The NAS Study projects that of the children of foreign-born parents with less than a high school education, only 6.2% will graduate from college. Low incomes in one generation risk extending to the next.
It is beyond obvious that low-skill immigration not only has disproportionately negative impacts upon low-skill Americans in the form of depressing wages, but it is also the case that the prospects of future generations of low-skilled immigrants are not positive either. There is no reason for our nation to “lose money on the unit price” for immigrants and try to “make it up in bulk.”
Throughout the crafting of this piece, I’ve tried to remain as neutral and fact-based as possible. I’ve tried to employ statistics in marshaling the argument that while immigration can serve a positive economic role for this nation, it is nonetheless not a free lunch. The costs of immigration (particularly illegal immigration) are diffused across a wide spectrum of people who bear an asymmetric share of them, while an equally asymmetric share of the benefits accrue to those immigrants and those in search of marginally cheaper labor. This is the classic definition of a Concentrated/Diffused interest problem in economics, whereby a relatively small, but highly interested group of people are able to free-ride via spreading the costs of consuming a set of rivalrous public goods across a separate, yet relatively less-interested group.
The trouble is that the costs ultimately come due, and they emerge in the form of bifurcated communities and lower levels of public trust. We, as a nation, must wrestle and come to grips with the notion that even though we rightly consider ourselves to be a land of opportunity, there is nonetheless nothing magical about our dirt.
The secret sauce that has made America into the titan that it is has come largely in the form of improvements to human capital. Our immigration policy should reflect that reality, and the reality that unless responsible people tackle the question of immigration, irresponsible ones will ultimately fill that role.
Let us hope we choose responsibility.
Published in Immigration
Its worse in Kuwait. 2:1 guestworkers/sexslaves:kuwaitis.
I like the Wins Against Replacement analogy. About 80% of Americans get more in direct payments than they pay in taxes. Perhaps that is a level to aim for. Or maybe folks that raise per capita GDP?
If the first question is who to admin into the club, the next question is how many to let in. My gut instinct is 10% foreign is a level than can be integrated well. At current 15% assimilation will be a struggle. We have had 15% in the past, but many of those were English-speaking and culturally part of English common law, which makes them much easier to integrate. We also used to push things like patriotism, the Pledge of Allegiance and Americanism in general. With those things purged from the education system, assimilation is harder.
In my city? Yes.
I don’t know a single person who will hire a lacking-pallor native as a cleaner. Those who lack pallor from the Caribbean or elsewhere are often fine. But the professional illegal immigrants have a lot to lose, and they are widely trusted. They have earned that trust.
I once oversaw a local construction job which had a mixed crew of blacks and Hispanics. The Hispanics openly mimicked and mocked the work ethic of the former. And they had a point.
Who are we to decide what other people can afford?
I am not being sarcastic.
I have lived many places. The UK, for example, has many faults. But the availability of lots of hard-working, inexpensive labor is not one of them.
Why does California continue to defy never-ending predictions of economic ruin? Because they have a massive third-world labor force.
Sure. But they CHOOSE it – working in Dubai or Oman beats the socks off of staying in Mumbai. It is a path of mobility for them and their families, even if it does not lead to citizenship where they work.
Is this discussion about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? The design defect (actually deliberate sabotage by Democrats with much Republican collaboraton) was the 1965 Immigration Act. The iceberg was Diversity.
David Brooks worries about this:
Paul Mirengoff:
Nice idea. Not scalable.
Vox Day, who elsewhere asserts that Millennials and Gen Z resent Boomers for among other things, sucking up Gen Z earnings via Social Security, thinks the US is past the point of no return:
Discuss among yourselves. He continues:
Uhhh… that wasn’t my point. You are the one griping about affordability and I pointed out my lower middle class income didn’t prevent me from being able to afford it. Absolutely, better situated people can afford more.
But rather than arguing the people pay a wage suitable to attract the help they want *based on supply and demand* you are advocating for circumventing it by going immediately for cheap labor whose very limited constitutional rights to recourse make them beholden to the whims of their employers – they HAVE to accept what is willing to be paid because they have no other choice.
It is creating a new slave class – except instead of housing and feeding them, we pay them a pittance. Instead of flogging and hanging for theft, they get deported.
So, is it your view that our rights are a grant of the government, and not innate to our beings by virtue of our humanity?
Guarantor, not granter.
Does a government have rights? It has duties I would argue. A duty to protect the rights of its citizens and a duty to not unjustly infringe on the rights of people in its jurisdiction. But the government or polity at large I don’t think can be said to have rights of its own.
What duty is the US government fulfilling by denying people the “right to work” in the US? And under what justification. That they aren’t citizens? It takes a lot more than that to deny them other rights in the US. Why is labor so different than speech? Or do you think that the US government could also legally block communications between Americans and foreigners if those communications “cross” the border?
I don’t ask for complete liberty in all things. I simply ask that restrictions to liberty all use the same rubric of judgement, and in economic and immigration matters our society employs far less rigorous standards of discernment about the abrogation of human liberties.
I’m beginning to believe that our loss of Freedom of Association is ultimately going to cost us all our rights. It’s the number one thing I teach my kids if someone bothers them – walk away.
Immigration is our right to freely associate with who we want to. A country has that right. We, as that country, have that right.
Our government is supposed to guarantee and defend the collective rights of its citizens. That includes our right to freely associate.
If you don’t like that the majority in this country choose not to associate with a certain group, you have options available – try to convince us otherwise (we have a right to not be persuaded), suck it up, or freely disassociate.
No. Not living in America is a choice for someone from outside the US.
We live in an information-rich world. Would-be laborers also share notes.
More importantly: if we pay them enough to make it worth their while, why is that a problem? Free markets.
In the UK, people come to work to learn English. They earned almost nothing (room and board, basically) – but if they learned English, then they could go back to their home countries and get much better jobs. Who loses?
This is an open borders argument.
I can understand how someone from Mexico or India might find living in a run down flat (that they can’t complain about) would be a better living situation then where they came from.
But that is not the case with Americans. We have a standard cost of living. If you want our low skilled employees to live lives marginally better than third world countries have to offer, by all means continue to argue that our low skill workers need to work for impoverished wages driven down by people who think a rutted, paved road and flushing toilets are an upgrade.
You are demanding Americans compete with standards of living that are far and away worse than anything we should want in this country.
No. Americans are far better at many things than are any of these would-be guest workers. I see this professionally all the time.
But as much as I value hard work (including hard physical labor that I delight in every chance I get), it is senseless to have to iron one’s own clothing because a trustworthy and hard-working labor pool is not available at an affordable price.
A generous welfare state and open borders is not workable.
California does OK, because it the HQs of a few very profitable companies. It is temporary fluke that there are so many billionaires, where the top 1% pay half the taxes. Cali cannot build infrastructure anymore and the pension crisis will destroy it too. I used to live the most prosperous city in the world. Now Detroit is a depopulated has-been.
One of government’s fundamental tasks is to protect the integrity of its territory from both military and civil incursion. This is why nations have borders – to provide security, primarily but for other reasons as well. A border is a notice that a certain set of laws and rules apply to people who cross it.
See, the problem is that even though we have good intentions and recognize (generally) that our rights are things that we have no matter what, this notion is not respected by other governments or people. Try working illegally in Mexico, for instance to see how this lack of reciprocity functions.
When you take an abstract principle like the notion that we have inalienable rights and attempt to extrapolate that to all people everywhere under every circumstance it inevitably results in absurdities, because everybody doesn’t share the same framework of principles. Take the example of Israel. If they were to follow your abstract principle blindly, they would necessarily be required allow every jihadist from the West Bank or Gaza into Tel Aviv or the larger nation of Israel. Logically, Israel restricts the “immigration” of Palestinians to their country by a variety of means even though it violates “the right to work” of a huge number of people – this is a non-existent right, BTW. You don’t have a right to a job. You don’t have a right to commit the crime of illegal presence without consequence.
Now, you could say that the question of Israel is a special situation (it’s not, really) and once you’ve conceded that the principle really is violable then all we’re haggling over is the price and the extent to which it is violable. For example – you have the right to keep and bear arms… up to a point. You don’t have the right to own ordnance, or a Panzer, or anti-aircraft artillery. Why? Because it’s absurd. You have the right to apply for a visa to travel to another country. You don’t have the right to enter another nation arbitrarily and do whatever you please. Why? They too have territorial integrity and the expectation that their government will monitor the comings and goings of foreigners, fair or foul. To do otherwise would be absurd.
It seems to me that the “rights fundamentalist” position would be more at home on the zanier spectrum of anarcho-capitalism – which denies the notion that government serves any purpose whatsoever or is anything but a fell and evil institution.
Why should your domestic professional’s housecleaning bill drive a policy of artificially distorting the cost of low skilled labor (not to mention assimilation difficulties and financial strain) by importing more low skilled labor? Why import when we just need to set up U-Haul services to get marginalized domestic workers out of their decaying middle American wastelands to where suffering highly-skilled professionals are shoveling their own snow and washing their own dishes?
I don’t know the answer, but isn’t this a relevant question: which do we have more of in this county –
Also, the individual is not the only political entity. Individuals incorporate politically to further political ends (see towns, counties, states, and the USA for local examples). Each of these entities has different purposes, obligations, and rights. Subsidiarity is a beautiful thing, and diminishing it in either collective or anarchic directions is ultimately harmful to civilizations and societies which value both prosperity and individual worth/dignity.
I’ve often thought: we’ve never figured out how to deal with modernity. Used to be that the material difference between the wealth and the poor wasn’t nearly as large as the material difference between the modern poor and the oldentimes-wealthy. Plumbing, electricity, gas, oil – these things cost and these things are now considered basic staples whereas not too long ago those were not universal requirements. With utilities we embarked on an experiment of communal provision of basic needs like heat and water; neither plunging further into that communalism nor pulling back seem like good options. Perhaps choosing the least worst option is simply a fact of life in more ways than any of us care to admit.
Chicago is following Detroit, sadly.
Responding to a David French column, Stacy McCain brings it today. RTWT:
French:
McCain:
McCain continues
Two points to raise about this. Clearly many people don’t mind or even want to associate with immigrants legal or illegal. If anything, government immigration restrictions are denying freely chosen associations between would be employers and their immigrant employees. Furthermore it doesn’t seem to me that immigration restrictionist represent a majority (Trump didn’t even get a plurality of the popular vote), and even if they did, doesn’t our Constitution guard against majoritarianism?
So, it doesn’t really seem to me that our Government in this case is protecting freedom of association. In fact the regions of the country most opposed to immigration are ones that also have the fewest immigrants. It rather seems to me that a small minority is trying to restrict the free association of a majority.
Is the Swiss Federation acting in an evil or immoral fashion by severely restricting immigration and having strict employment ID checks to prevent illegal employment?
That would be weird, because Switzerland is the best place in the world to live and work – at least partially because they’re incredibly selective about whom they allow to live and work there. At the very minimum, it hasn’t seemed to harm them in such rankings.
The flip-side of “freedom of association” is “freedom of Dis-Association” or the freedom to not associate with people whom you don’t want to be pestered by. The Swiss have determined that they don’t want to be pestered by people who just come into their country willy-nilly. That seems both fine to me and constructive for them. We ought to be more Swiss in that regard.
And yet…
There exist Americans who, for whatever reason there might be, can not find decent paying jobs and are willing to do whatever they possibly can to get money to pay their bills. And some of them do, indeed, do the jobs you think they will not do.
And maybe, if you can’t find anyone to do it at the price you are willing to pay (or can afford), you do it. Just like everyone else who can not afford the nice things in life.
A previous comment provides a link that shows that around 65% of Americans favor immigration restriction. This holds stable across party lines. Just because they didn’t vote for Trump doesn’t mean they don’t agree with him on this issue. It just means they prioritize other things. As was shown in the 2016 polling data, immigration was not the top priority for the majority of voters. However, a majority of voters do favor immigration restriction.
And Denmark has like 50% tax rate and is also really pleasant, place perhaps we should raise taxes too? It seems to me America with our lose immigration laws (and they are rather lose by world standards if not by our own historical ones) is also not a bad place to live over all. Perhaps we don’t get ranked as highly as Switzerland, but then again perhaps we should have a weight class to these comparisons. I would think the size effect of Switzerland as well as its position geographically, and a whole host of other factors outside of its immigration policy or any policy play into its particular pleasantness. Things that could never be scaled up to the size of the US.
For large multi ethnic nations the US works and has worked amazingly well. In fact orders of magnitude better than any other nation of our geographic size and population. So I would argue that even out haphazard immigration policy that I generally approve of and you do not can’t be said to have hurt us. At least no more so that one can say Switzerland’s has helped it. And, isn’t that the catch in all of this the idea that we need more restriction isn’t really supported by any objective facts, at least no facts more compelling than those used to oppose restriction. Thus it becomes as with so many cultural questions a matter of aesthetics. At least this is the way it appears to me.
I think though the question of the limits of basic human rights is the more interesting aspect of the discussion so far. At least to me. You say you have no right to a job, but don’t you have a right to accepting a job or offering it to someone? The US legal work requirement would seem to clearly infringe upon both of these basic aspects of self autonomy and freedom. What is the rational basis for this restriction? You argue that nations can do this because they are nations, but that is arbitrary.
What an absurd argument. We could implement the exact same workplace ID requirements as Switzerland tomorrow – what is lacking is nothing other than political will. Of course, the trouble is as I explained: this is a concentrated vs. diffused interest problem. Cui Bono in the situation with illegal and low-skill immigration? Not average Americans, surely.
Switzerland has the highest per capita GDP in combination with some of the tightest immigration restrictions. There’s no reason we shouldn’t emulate that.
My observation would be that mass immigration invariably drives a nation’s politics leftward, creating a fait accompli. Immigrants inevitably want political suffrage, and their voting habits reflect those they came pre-programmed with from their old countries. More authoritarianism. Higher taxes. More redistribution… you know, things that I thought Conservatives were opposed to. You know: the stuff that made them want to flee their outhouse nations in the first place?
There’s nothing arbitrary about it. National boundaries are set by right of conquest and treaty. The argument you’re making here is that somehow, the third most populous nation on the Earth is not large enough to satisfy your need to contract for work. That is completely ridiculous. What is the limiting principle here? Should you be able to contract with terrorists to do work for you because they’ll do it cheaply? I mean, really: there is a limit to how far you can take a principle before you have to concede that the tradeoffs being made in the name of liberty become too costly.
No, this isn’t about high-minded principles of “human rights” for the people who abuse this – this is about stone-cold cash. To quote Adam Smith:
The rational basis for this restriction is many-fold, but primarily consists of an economic argument: many immigrants add more cost than benefit. Full Stop. You must address this point before asserting that principle trumps this practical consideration. As with everything else in life, people are distributed on a more-or-less Gaussian distribution, and my argument would be that at the very worst, we shouldn’t have people who are in the left-hand side of that bell curve come into our nation.
I completely agree.