My interview on Open Borders aired last night on the PBS NewsHour. Check it out!
My interview on Open Borders aired last night on the PBS NewsHour. Check it out!
Jun 17 2021
A few weeks ago our microwave went on the blink. It still worked but when we opened the microwave's door, a fan immediately started up. The GE repairman showed up today. After examining it quickly, he was pretty sure he could fix it. But, he warned us, it was about 8 or 9 years old and the typical life expectancy of t...
Jun 17 2021
In the late 1940s, Milton Friedman was considered an important economist who had made significant technical contributions. At the beginning of the 1950s, however, he moved away from Keynesian economics and as a result was increasingly viewed as a bit of a nut. Two decades later, however, Friedman had become far and awa...
Jun 17 2021
My interview on Open Borders aired last night on the PBS NewsHour. Check it out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRRpMyqzW6w&ab_channel=PBSNewsHour
READER COMMENTS
Floccina
Jun 17 2021 at 12:34pm
How great is that, Bryan Caplan on PBS.
David Henderson
Jun 17 2021 at 12:52pm
Very nicely said.
Parrhesia
Jun 17 2021 at 2:29pm
The economic benefits of immigration outweigh the negative effects to low wage earners. If we consider goods falling and price to establish net negative effect, I wonder how many people this would be.
Another keyhole solutionw would be to classify “American workers” and “Immigrant workers” prior to opening borders. Then if an “American worker” loses their job and an “Immigrant worker” gets it they get monetarily compensated. We could have a federal program that compensates employers for hiring American workers. Or we could subsidize American workers wages. Maybe say that you have to maintain the number of American workers you have now if your company is growing. Whatever keyhole solution is necessary, I would be fine with it because the returns to immigration are so large.
If you want to prevent people from losing their job, you have to stop all technological adoption and protect industries from competition. But if you do this for long enough, your nation is in poverty relative to others.
Speed
Jun 17 2021 at 9:56pm
At the very end of the piece, this was on the screen …
“There were almost 45 million immigrants living in the U.S. as of 2019.
SOURCE: USAFacts”
Unsaid but also from USAFacts, “Excluding tourism and unauthorized arrivals, most people who come to the US on visas or green cards are temporary workers, students, or coming to be with their families.”
https://usafacts.org/state-of-the-union/immigration/
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Jun 18 2021 at 2:02pm
I think it ought to be possible to attract millions of highly educates and skilled workers. That’s nothing like “open borders.”
Daniel Hess
Jun 18 2021 at 9:38pm
How are we doing so far?
Life expectancy in America has been declining for the last five years, deaths of despair are at an all time high, inner cities are becoming lawless. The wealth and life expectancy gaps are enormous and national unity is incredibly low. The ideas of free capitalism and small government and economic freedom are suddenly not winning anymore, and the immigration-driven demographic shift of the electorate is a big part of the reason why economic freedom isn’t winning the way it used to. Who looks at this and says moar please? Someone who believes in liberty? Surely not.
Bryan Caplan strikes me as fundamentally hard leftist and Marxist, not Libertarian as he presents himself. Why? Open borders in practice ends up being a taking by people who have not been able to build from those have successfully built. Why not build where you are? Why not learn from American systems and methods and technology and apply it? There is nothing magical about our soil. It would be FAR more beneficial for world GDP to replicate the American model as much as possible. In fact, that is what China has done with money and corporations and technology to the great benefit of China and the world.
But Bryan Caplan, Marxist in drag, doesn’t advocate people in other countries learning from America and following its ways. Instead, he advocates that America should be chopped up and given away wholesale to the global poor. All while cloistering himself within an elite neighborhood and within a selective university. The Communists of the world rejoice.
Latin America shows us that when the inequality gets too large (and the demands of the have-nots dominate) and the crime gets too high the economic engine breaks down generally. You wind up not with an open society but a closed one. You may end up with much less GDP in the end. But maybe that shouldn’t be surprising. That is how Marxist takings always end.
Mike W
Jun 19 2021 at 1:55pm
I think you may watch too much news.
Daniel Hess
Jun 20 2021 at 10:52am
I don’t watch any news. And I am not fundamentally against immigration and have close relationships with more immigrants than most Americans. I am certain that I know more immigrants well than Bryan Caplan.
But open borders would manifestly undo America. Without a border, there is definitionally no country. The hard left embraces open borders because undoing America is the goal.
Already the politics of economic freedom is losing throughout America because on average recent immigrants and their children vote overwhelmingly against economic liberty.
Bryan Caplan is no fool: he understands that even far lower levels of immigration are already leading to big political defeats in the realm of economic liberty. And yet he advocates tirelessly for open borders because the undoing of America is apparently so emotionally satisfying to him that it matters more. (I don’t believe that this is really about simply uplifting the global poor, for as the past three decades have shown, that can happen beautifully — and more efficiently — when other countries emulate our free market model).
I don’t know what the word is for the kind of sentiment that seems to yearn America’s undoing but it is real and common these days. In my experience, that sentiment is the calling card of Marxists and the hard left.
When I judge that Caplan is led by some negative emotions best described as Marxist, I don’t do so lightly. He does not seem to wish America well. That is my view based on long reflection over many years.
Daniel Hess
Jun 20 2021 at 12:07pm
Responding to Caplan on Twitter:
“My pre-Twitter Open Borders haiku:
Markets champ at bit
To end global poverty
But statists say no.”
Responses:
(1) Open borders seems like a global leveling, whereby the global poor are elevated by migrating to the places of the global rich (where they can and do vote themselves the wealth of the rich). And Marxists and the hard left know the score on this. That is why they are all for open borders.
(2) “end global poverty” — That is far-out utopianism and should sound terrifying to those who know the destructive history of idealists who talked about ending poverty once and for all. It was written thousands of years ago, “the poor will always be with you.” Don’t we know that already?
(3) The reality is that bringing people to the United States has had almost nothing to do with eradicating global poverty. The number of people elevated by US immigration in the last generation is perhaps 1% of the number of people elevated by the spread of free market principles (say 30 million vs. 3 billion). But the electoral shift brought by immigration in the US has already ended the free market consensus that was the rule here until recently.
(4) Incomes are rising far faster outside of the US that inside the US. Life expectancy skyrockets around the globe but has been declining in the US since 2014. Doesn’t that belie the whole argument?
Henri Hein
Jun 20 2021 at 12:30am
Nice piece. Kirk Doran called out the shock from the increased trade with China as an example of something that hurts workers. I’m not sure that is correct, but assuming it is, it strikes me as an argument for more immigration, not less. A larger and more diverse work-force makes the economy more robust, allowing it to absorb various kinds of shocks with less impact.
Walter Boggs
Jun 20 2021 at 7:16pm
I see the phrase “open borders” as similar to the phrase “legalize drugs”. It’s a challenge meant to spark discussion, not necessarily a literal goal. Grownups understand that legal limitations may need to be applied to immigration, for reasons we cannot foresee. We’ll always have to do the hard work of getting the rules right, and we’ll have to compromise.
The point of “open borders” is to move the discussion in the right direction, and I think it’s clear that the right direction is toward allowing people to come here to live, work and thrive if they wish. I haven’t found the various arguments against that to be persuasive.
Comments are closed.