Immigration laws don’t merely allow discrimination; they require it. As the result, such laws are deeply anti-meritocratic. Employers may be allowed to hire the best citizen for the job, but not the best person.
Even more strikingly, the injustice ripples down through the generations. When you trap a foreign-born father in a Third World country, you don’t just stunt his prospects; you stunt his children’s prospects as well. Indeed, this physical and mental stunting is often plain as day.
These truisms came firmly to my mind when I recently re-read the title essay of Thomas Sowell’s Compassion Versus Guilt:
Many years ago, in a Third World country, I noticed by the side of the road a ragged and forlorn little boy, who bore an uncanny resemblance to my son. It was a momentary but penetrating shock – followed by a sober realization that that was what my son might be like, if we had been born there instead of in the United States.
The essay continues:
Even the most ardent believer in individual merit must recognize that where you happen to have been born, how you were raised, or where you happen to have been located when opportunity or disaster came along, can make all the difference in the world.
Sowell then wisely warns that we should not let pity drive us to rash, counter-productive remedies:
People are different, and these differences have consequences… Many of our attempts to share our good fortune with others, at home and abroad, have undermined the very efforts, standards and values that make that good fortune possible. Trying to ease our own guilt feelings is very different from trying to advance those less fortunate.
Many of Sowell’s fans will take this as a thinly-veiled critique of open borders. Nowadays, Sowell himself might do the same. But that’s an unreasonable reading of what he meant at the time. No, Sowell’s top two worries were: (a) labor market regulations will disemploy the poor, and (b) redistribution will lead the poor to make bad long-run decisions. Neither remotely applies to simply deregulating labor markets so the global poor are free to accept job offers in the First World.
Notice, moreover, that Sowell is pushing the classic libertarian/conservative argument that government intervention is ultimately bad for the poor themselves. But when pressed, even the angriest critics of immigration usually admit that deregulation makes the immigrants themselves better off. They just care a lot more about relatively poor natives than absolutely poor foreigners – and want government to enforce this perverse priority on our whole society.
READER COMMENTS
Pierre Lemieux
Nov 12 2018 at 10:56am
I am always puzzled by the argument that if individual A were born in another country, he would be better off or worse off. This is true if he was given the same soul at birth in both scenarios, that is, if A is the same person. (Then, Christians or other believers would favor open immigration, except if they think that God punishes or rewards the unborn by deciding where they are born.) If however, A’s identity depends on his genes, he would not be A if he had been born in another country–nor, for that matter, if the bed in which he was conceived had been tilted by 5 degrees, or if he had been conceived a second later.
This of course does not change the argument that if A were allowed to move internationally or simply to trade freely, he would be better off.
Kurt Schuler
Nov 12 2018 at 11:30am
You have certainly failed your Turing test this time. “The angriest critics of immigration”, “perverse priority” — such language indicates that you that you are appealing to emotion more than to reason.
Critics of unlimited immigration such as me think that it is better to try to make relatively poor natives richer than to possibly make them poorer by letting in possibly very large numbers of immigrants (for the United States, tens of millions within a decade) who will compete with them and depress their wages. We also have an answer about how to make absolutely poor countries rich: their governments should allow and support the freedoms that have made rich countries rich, and that have put some countries that were poor a generation ago on the path to riches. That is a cultural as well as an economic task. Immigration by sufficiently large numbers of people who are unwilling to absorb rich-country culture fully could make rich countries more like poor countries instead of successfully inculcating rich-country culture into immigrants.
Although there are no internal migration controls in the United States and I do not advocate any, one sees something like what I just described when New Yorkers or Californians move to lower-tax, better-run states and then start agitating for the kinds of policies that made them leave their home states. And those are cases where the cultural differences are much smaller than those between most potential immigrants and existing Americans.
Floccina
Nov 12 2018 at 3:18pm
The following reasoning comes from a circumstance with a low income friend of mine:
Suppose you are a black male child in poor neighborhood in Chicago with a murder rate of 80/100,000/year. Then the boarders are opened middle-class people in their own countries (Honduras/El Salvador/Haiti/Vietnam etc.) start to flood into your neighborhood taking the vacant homes first and then subdividing and building more housing around you but bidding down your wages a bit and rent up a bit, your appt get smaller, but dropping the murder rate to 4//100,000/year. Are you better off?
Proverbs 17:1 Better a dry crust with peace and quiet than a house full of feasting, with strife.
Kurt Schuler
Nov 12 2018 at 4:28pm
If they are middle class people, they are not the absolutely poor that both Bryan Caplan and I were referring to. The economic and cultural implications are both different. I have no wish to hijack the thread, so that’s all for now.
Weir
Nov 12 2018 at 5:48pm
But Bryan, a policy of “simply deregulating labor markets so the global poor are free to accept job offers in the First World” is definitely not your policy.
Your policy is open borders for young and old, for everyone with two legs and without.
Alzheimer’s, infants, everybody. I’m not failing the Intellectual Turing Test when I say that open borders is open borders, right?
So if you start now to discriminate between people who have been offered a job and people who haven’t, you’re not a true libertarian. You’d be guilty of the same crime as all the millions of impure, compromised, middle-of-the-road, pro-immigration people who talk about specific details like jobs and roads and housing. All that boring, ground-level political stuff that takes up so much time, trying to get practical results.
Once you start talking about introducing some kind of selectivity into immigration policy, you’d be making practical progress. But at the cost of your libertarian purity.
Bryan, step back from that swamp. Stay pure.
Bedarz Iliachi
Nov 12 2018 at 11:59pm
The nativist concern with immigration goes beyond the economic welfare of the poor natives. The nativist cares about preserving the nation, a concept that is beyond the competence of economics. He cares about the norms, the specific historical memories that the non-natives simply can’t be brought on to care.
Jon Murphy
Nov 13 2018 at 8:25am
I disagree that norms are something beyond the scope of economics. One thing that Adam Smith stressed, and I stress in my lectures, is the importance of norms (or, to use a bit more of a broad term, law). Norms shape people’s behavior which influences their economic interactions. Indeed, I and many other economists argue that the problem with top-down approaches to economics is precisely the fact they ignore norms.
But regarding limiting immigration under the guise of preserving norms, I think it’s important that a major reason these people wish to immigrate to the US is precisely that our norms that value human life and dignity. They may bring other cultural traditions, yes, but those are largely innocuous. Of course, if someone brings violence, they should be punished, but that is true of anyone.
It’s also important to note that there’s nothing unique about immigrants and changing norms. They change from generation to generation, too. My parents were a lot more “conservative” than my generation. Things like casual profanity were not used. Topics like sex were not discussed publically. You dressed up when you went to church (and God help you if you skipped!). For my generation, casual profanity is acceptable, including the F-word, in conversation. We dress very casually, and if we go to church regularly, it’s usually in a casual manner. The generation after me is even more casual. This has nothing to do with immigrants and everything to do with life.
The America of 2018 is radically different from the America of 2008 which is radically different from 1998 and so on. Just watch the Simpsons and you’ll see. To preserve a nation, you’d need to freeze time. You’d need stagnation.
Jon Murphy
Nov 13 2018 at 9:38am
In my first sentence to you, I should have quoted you properly and said “…something beyond the competence of economics.” My comment doesn’t change much after that. But, I’d like to add on, if I might.
There’s a lot of fascinating work on norms by economics. Perhaps the best place to start would be Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and his Wealth of Nations. Norms play heavily into James Buchanan’s Limits of Liberty. Armen Alchian and Ruben Kessel explore how regulations can affect people acting on their norms and preferences in their paper Competition, Monopoly, and the Pursuit of Money. There is also the great work by Gary Becker, such as The Economics of Discrimination, not to mention many of Gordon Tullock’s writings. More recently, Virgil Storr has been writing some fascinating books on cultural economics like How We Came Back and Community Revival in the Wake of Disaster.
Economics has lots to say on norms.
Hazel Meade
Nov 13 2018 at 5:12pm
Agreed. I think i remember hearing a quote , something to the effect of “the past is always a foreign country”. Conversely, so is the present if you’re old enough – you’re born in one country and by the time you hit 80, the vast majority of the population has changed, and all sorts of social norms with it. It seems like complaints about changing norms are a common feature of humanity, going back thousands of years.
Mark Z
Nov 13 2018 at 2:04pm
“He cares about the norms, the specific historical memories that the non-natives simply can’t be brought on to care.”
Being a a native doesn’t make one care about ‘historical memories’; being taught (indoctrinated, one might say) to care is what makes one care about them. A foreign-born person can be trained to identify with a nation as well as a native.
Of course, the fact that people whose parents or grandparents came here from other countries describe Americans from before they came here as “we” just the same as those who are descended from the Mayflower voyagers illustrates the fiction of shared historical memories and collective identity. There is no historical “we.” The people who fought the revolution or the Civil War no more includes me (or probably most Americans, even in the sense that their ancestors were there) than the ancient Romans or Ming era China.
The only thing that’s shared is the choice to identify with the rather arbitrarily defined abstraction of the nation-state. Which not all natives choose to do to. Nationality is really a chosen identity some people choose not just or themselves, but to impose on others living within the same state and deny those living outside of it.
Hazel Meade
Nov 13 2018 at 5:07pm
Hear hear. I was born in Canada. We moved back and forth and my father was a US ex-pat born in Buffalo New York. Long before I immigrated to the US, I identified as “American” – to the consternation of my Canadian peers! Nationality is a matter of subjective identity and loyalty. You can be loyal to any nation you want, not just the one you were born in.
Hazel Meade
Nov 13 2018 at 5:02pm
<i>he specific historical memories that the non-natives simply can’t be brought on to care</i>
Why do you think that? All of that historical stuff happened before any of us were born. Native, or non-native.
Why would geographic location of birth determine what “historical memories” people care about? Can’t a person born in (say) Canada learn about American history and come to identify with American ideas and the history of the American revolution? If an person born in the US can identify with events that happened before they were born, why can’t a person born anywhere in the world?
Bedarz Iliachi
Nov 14 2018 at 12:10am
Nation isn’t just geographical boundaries. People matter too and norms and memories are mostly passed along cultural lines and here transmission through families is important. I refer you to the poem The Stranger by Kipling for a concise statement of my point.
Amy Willis
Nov 14 2018 at 11:16am
Just as an FYI, you guys might be interested in this recent EconTalk episode with Yoram Hazony…
Jon Murphy
Nov 14 2018 at 2:51pm
I found that EconTalk most fascinating, Amy. I bought Hazony’s book for my Winter Break reading because of the podcast
Amy Willis
Nov 15 2018 at 12:53pm
Wonderful!
Hazel Meade
Nov 14 2018 at 2:38pm
That might have been true before television and the internet but now you can immerse yourself in other cultures by consuming their media and entertainment products, not to mention travel. Indeed, that’s why many Arab Muslims complain about “Westernization”.
The entire world has been becoming more culturally “Western” especially over the last century. Is a young Japanese person really so different from an American teenager today?
Comments are closed.