IUPUI‘s Scott Pegg assigned Open Borders this semester, and kindly gave me permission to post the following essay questions on the book. Enjoy!
Please answer one of the following four questions. Because this is an open book, open time assignment, I expect to see some detail and specificity in your answers. References to Caplan and Weinersmith’s book Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration should be made whichever question you choose. Your answers should be somewhere in the vicinity of 3-5 pages double-spaced typed in Times New Roman 12 point font. Take as much time as you need to answer the question. This is not a timed exam.
1) Explain why Caplan and Weinersmith believe that “open borders has jaw-dropping potential to enrich migrants and natives alike” and “is a shortcut to global prosperity.” Upon what causal logic or what empirical findings do they base these claims? How does open borders compare in this regard to other potentially enriching policy changes like freer trade or greater global financial integration that we could pursue? Indicate whether you find Caplan and Weinersmith’s arguments that open borders potentially offers the prospect of “trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk” convincing or not.
2) In 2016, Americans elected Donald Trump as their president. One of his central campaign promises was to restrict immigration into the United States and build a wall to keep immigrants out. In 2020, President Trump faces a tough re-election battle but will likely carry the state of Indiana where we live easily. Given that, it’s probably not unreasonable to assume that give or take a majority of students in this class share views on immigration that are closer to President Trump’s than they are to the views expressed by Caplan and Weinersmith in Open Borders. Highlight which arguments put forward in Open Borders you most disagree with or find the most problematic and explain why. Make, develop, and support the best critique of the ideas put forward in this book that you can.
3) In attempting to make their case for a more open and less restrictive system of immigration, Caplan and Weinersmith consider several objections to open borders including immigrants threats to low-wage workers, freedom, our government’s fiscal position, our culture or way of life and even lowering our average national intelligence (IQ) score. Give specific examples of how Caplan and Weinersmith undermine these critiques or sources of opposition to their ideas or what they suggest as solutions to overcome these fears. Indicate which criticisms, if any, you think they effectively address and which criticisms, if any, are still strong or effective arguments against open borders.
4) Open Borders is premised upon the idea that “we live in a world of global apartheid. An apartheid based not on the race of your parents but on the nation of your parents.” Caplan and Weinersmith go on to argue that “It’s wrong to tell people where they can live or work because they are black… or women… or Jews. Why isn’t it equally wrong to tell people where they can live or work because they were born in Mexico, Haiti or India?” While these sentiments appeal to our better angels, they are completely unrealistic at a time when the US doesn’t even have open borders with Canada. Explain why Caplan and Weinersmith believe that “even if open borders never wins, the ideal can still serve as our moral compass.” What kind of progress can we or should we make short of fully opening borders?
READER COMMENTS
Joe Denver
Dec 14 2020 at 2:56pm
I’m no longer in college, so I don’t have to write big long essays. But here are my short answers to these questions (just as an intellectual exercise).
1. Even someone who is less productive in literally every activity when compared to others, still can add tremendous value to our lives. Why? Because every second he spends doing an unproductive task is (up to) a second that another person can spend doing more productive tasks, and not that unproductive task. The world’s best surgeon, who is also the world’s best secretary, should still hire a secretary, as every second he is doing secretarial work are seconds he could spend doing surgery.
If we take this principle, and combine it with the fact that many people reside in very unproductive countries, where even productive people are largely engaging in largely unproductive tasks. It’s easy to see how allowing these (both productive and relatively unproductive) people to move to the first world, where they can then engage in significantly more productive tasks greatly increases the productivity, and wealth, of the nation as a whole.
2. Honestly, I don’t buy the argument that the biggest reason immigrants vote democrat is because Republicans make immigrants feel unwelcome. I think how people vote have a lot more to do with peer effects (e.g. I’m going to vote a certain way to make my peers like me) and fundamental differences in the way people seek and process information (e.g. where and why do you watch the news), than vague emotional references (e.g. “feeling unwelcome”).
To the extent that minimum wage laws hurt people, they are hurting the poorest and most vulnerable in society. Does this make poor people feel unwelcome in the democratic party? I doubt it. If anything, they are more likely to feel welcome in the democratic party, because the democrats are vocally signalling that poor people deserve more money. Likewise, why wouldn’t republican’s anti-immigration message (to the extent that it actually exists) make immigrants feel more welcome? After all, coming to the USA is like winning the lottery, do you really want to cheapen that victory?
How then can we explain the fact that immigrants used to vote more Republican than they do now? I don’t know, but I think there are plenty of plausible explanations that hold just as much merit as Bryan’s theory. For example, couldn’t the selection effect in favor of republican-leaning immigrants have been stronger in the past. Who is more likely to just intrinsically vote republican, a Cuban who travels to America in 1958 fleeing communist takeover or a Cuban who travels to America in 2020? Another example, social media has likely had an effect on the way we vote. Younger generations are more likely to vote democrat, perhaps in part because they log into social media and see all of their friends signalling about voting democrat, which makes them more likely to vote democrat. Whereas before social media, they wouldn’t have been exposed to peer effects this strong. Perhaps immigrants, who have different peers on their social media accounts (e.g. their relatives outside of the country), are subject to these peer effects to a degree that’s even stronger than natives.
3. I think on the questions of basic morality and economics, minus institutional impacts, their arguments are stellar. When it comes to the more institutionally minded economic arguments (culture, IQ, voting patterns), their arguments are less sound, though to be fair, these are just hard questions and Bryan and Zach probably do much better than their opponents at trying to represent the issues.
4. How about opening the borders with Canada, for one?
Putting the cheek aside, I’m particularly interested in the idea of a country just setting a hard-line date for open borders. For example, what if the US Federal Government just said “On January 1st 2070, we are opening our borders, this is a constitutional amendment, it cannot be overturned, it’s happening, there’s nothing that can be done to stop it, go.” In such a situation, what would happen? I would hope that we would slowly, over time, modify our institutions (to the extent that they need to be modified) such that they would be resilient to open immigration. My fear is that people wouldn’t modify their institutions, and simply wait and complain when the immigration did happen, and start resorting to more primitive measures of constructing institutional resilience (e.g. racism, xenophobia, actual apartheid, etc).
Lord Canes
Dec 15 2020 at 3:18am
At rock bottom, libertarians often have feet of clay or seem, well, irrelevant.
Immigration.
OK, suppose we move to a privatized system of self-government, that is cities, and even regions, are privately owned and operated. Libertarian nirvana.
If you are allowed, you can live in a particular private city or region. Perhaps birthrights would be respected, or at least for the first 21 years of life, etc.
So, a privately owned city or region could bar access to anything or person it wanted. No imports, no immigration, if that is what the charter or rules of the private city/region hold. I imagine most, if not all, cities and regions would have somewhat strict rules on permanent residency.They would have to, or suffer from adverse selection. Non-residents would have to show their permits quickly and plainly, or get the boot.
Libertarians would have no problem with this arrangement.
Even roads between regions and cities could be private toll-ways.
All of this acceptable to libertarians.
But the minute a government upholds a border…wrong, wrong, wrong!
In a curious way, libertarians are calling for the US to engage in adverse selection of residents.
Jens
Dec 15 2020 at 7:25am
Yes, strongly deontological and absolutistic libertarianism is definitely a self-contained immunizing strategy. And that is also a problem that radiates. In a certain way, libertarians are in constant dialectical conversation with the government and the state about how these should respect, guarantee, define, protect and frame their property rights without violating them. Just as Marx was in a crazy conversation with capital to prevent the alienation of labor that capital produces.
Jose Pablo
Dec 15 2020 at 8:31am
That is a text book example of a ¨straw man falacy¨.
Lord Canes
Dec 15 2020 at 8:52am
A straw man fallacy? How so?
Are you allowed to enter a large private-housing development? Why would you have open access to private city?
Would it not make sense to sell all roads to private operators?
If you actually owned shares in a private city, would you want to control who lived in the city? I would. I imagine, like a co-op, there would be extensive examination of applicants.
We might allow residency, without share ownership, in certain worker dorms, within conscribed areas. A version of this goes on in Singapore.
Explain your thoughts further.
Jose Pablo
Dec 15 2020 at 12:15pm
The post does not say a single word about “private cities”
robc
Dec 15 2020 at 11:31am
I think your scale is all wrong. I doubt you would get any or not very many organizational structures larger than the HOA level.
You wouldn’t have privately owned cities or regions, at most privately owned neighborhoods. Sure, there might be some chains, so you might have a Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong neighborhood franchise in every city – if you are a citizen of one, you are a citizen of them all.
Mark Z
Dec 15 2020 at 1:20pm
All of which is entirely beside the point as far as the question of whether your community, be it a privately owned a city or state-governed country, should open its borders (for utilitarian reasons). That’s the important question.
Whether a state has more of a right to than a privately owned polity depends on whether the people deciding who gets in has the right to do so (e.g., do they have a valid claim of ownership over the area from which they’re excluding others). Maybe that’s irrelevant in practice, but if we accept the idea that there is such a thing as just ownership (and many people, not just deontological libertarians, believe there is), then a justly privately owned city refusing to let people in is no more comparable to a modern state not letting people in than someone not letting anyone into their house is comparable to someone stealing someone else’s house and not letting anyone into the house they stole.
Thomas Hutcheson
Dec 16 2020 at 12:17pm
Although possibly subsumed in #2, I’d like to see exploration of the difference between “open borders” and vastly greater but still selective immigration.
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