Immigration: Comments

There were enough interesting comments on my immigration post that I decided to devote a second post to the comments and my responses.

Two had to do with Hoppe’s proposal to let immigrants in if and only if they had a citizen sponsor willing to take responsibility for any costs they imposed. One commenter quoted my criticism of the idea:

Unless he intends immigrants to function like slaves or indentured servants, working for a single employer or those he lends them out to, they will be engaged, like other people, in a multitude of voluntary transactions with lots of different people. It makes no sense for all of those transactions to hinge on the permission of a single sponsor who could withdraw that permission any time he chose or, if he cannot, is liable for acts over which he has no control.

and pointed out that we already have something rather like that, although with much more restricted application:

… this is how H1B visa in USA currently works. An individual can come in legally only because an employer has sponsored him with government permission which can be revoked any time. The individual can not change his job or nature of the job, not job location nor job duties without explicit permission from both employer and the government every time there is a change. Such an employee is also barred from working or investing in non passive investments or starting a business etc.

Another commenter suggested that Hoppe’s proposal was not one that anti-immigration conservatives would be happy with. He quoted my description of the proposal:

Hoppe’s proposal along these lines was that any immigrant should be allowed in if a citizen is willing to sponsor him, where the sponsor would then be responsible for any costs the immigrant imposed on others, paying fines for any crimes he committed, damage payments for any torts, presumably also paying the cost of sending the immigrant’s children to a public school.

And responded:

This is a pretty much open-border proposal that any anti-immigrant GOP or those from Tanton Network (CIS, FAIR, NumbersUSA etc.) would instantly oppose as "open border amnesty".

Here is how this proposal play out:

A lot of naturalized US citizens would instantly be able to bring their old parents/ spouses/children from other countries. Today there is a lengthy process and wait time involved. This basically replaces a huge chunk of family based immigration with this better Hoppian system.

If this rule is implemented soon there will be a massive market that would match willing sponsors with willing immigrants. For example Big Agro Co. can pay $1000 to a US citizen to sponsor a Mexican farm worker. 1000 such farmworkers are flown in and kept in company town where they work for 6 months under company law enforcement supervisors and fly back to Mexico once the job is done. US citizen earns $1000 as risk premium, Big Co saves $$$ by bringing cheaper labor and Mexican worker is happy to get paid. This basically replaces entire H2B visa system with something that is vastly better and cheaper and has no caps.

With some modifications this principle can entirely replace our otherwise broken asylum process. Say a person wants to escape his high crime country. He offers $20K to a US citizen instead of a cartel. Flies in legally and then straight goes to a Big Co managed meat processing plant. Where he is monitored 24x7 for all his activities, his freedom is completely restricted by Big Co at the behest of his sponsor (this is all voluntary and the person can go back to his country any time he wants). He though can earn a good wage, eat good food and watch netflix in the evening. Life of lot of Afghani women is worse than this. So they might actually prefer to come to USA under this program and lot of well meaning Americans would be willing to sponsor.

If the Hoppians are willing to dilute this principle a bit, say such immigrants become naturalized citizens after 5 (or 10, or 20) years of clean life in USA then the market will be even bigger for such sponsorship. I expect such a system would bring in far more people to USA legally than it currently does while making American citizens richer and creating a strong bias for high compliant non criminal migration.

Now will the Hoppians be genuinely happy at such an outcome or angry that it brings in more people ? Will they demand that ALL Hoppian principles be applied or none ? (In which case they prove my argument that it is a mere dog whistle ?).

Another commenter quoted my summary of a different argument:

Since public property includes almost the entire highway system, that makes it hard for an immigrant not approved by the government to do anything in the country much beyond employment in a farm on the border.

And pointed out that I had badly oversimplified the situation:

Well, actually... America is a federation and hwhilst most roads are owned by some government. But not necessarily the federal government. Yes, the interstate is owned by the federal government. But most local roads are not. And you can actually get around quite a bit without taking the interstate. (I can attest to this as my girlfriend is too scared to drive on the Interstate!)

Consider the San Francisco Bay Area (which I believe you are familiar with):

* SFO airport is owned by the City and County of San Francisco

* The streets of San Francisco are owned by the city of San Francisco

* BART trains are owned by the BART district.

* Other local streets in the Bay Area are owned by local cities and counties in the Bay Area

* State roads are owned by the State of California

* Bay Area businesses are private entities owned by individuals, partnerships or shareholders

* There are many private landlords in the Bay Area and perhaps some public housing owned by the State of California, local governments, etc. Little, if any, housing in the Bay Area is owned by the Federal government.

* California is a "Sanctuary State"

* San Francisco and Berkeley are "Sanctuary cities."

So, if an immigrant named Juan were to fly into SFO airport and take a BART train into San Francisco, take a job from a private employer willing to hire them and rent from a landlord willing to rent to them (assuming the BART district has no objections to fare-paying, rule-abiding immigrants riding their trains), what business is it of the Federal government or voters in Arizona, for example? None!

Obviously, this isn't a slam-dunk argument in favour of open-borders across America, but, simply if Joe the "bordertarian" is opposed to immigration along the lines of the third argument you mentioned, he should not block one or the State of California, private landlords, private businesses, BART or the city of San Francisco from interacting with Juan. He should allow open borders in San Francisco if that's what San Francisco wants! And that is hwhat San Francisco (and San Franciscans) wants. Even if Joe happens to live in San Francisco and doesn't want this, too bad! Majority rules, right Joe? If the majority owners of a corporation vote to allow something, it's allowed. If the majority owners of San Francisco vote to allow something, it should be allowed. Right, Joe?

Another commenter wrote:

The world is not culturally homogeneous. So what happens when a very large number of immigrants eventually change the native culture? The US is a Christian nation. What would it be like if, say, Muslims immigrate to the US in significantly large numbers to adversely affect the Christian culture of the US?

That was an issue in the 19^th century; opponents of immigration argued that large numbers of Catholic immigrants, initially mostly Irish, would corrupt the culture and leave America under the control of the Pope.

I think people successful in a laissez-faire economy are likely to have the cultural characteristics that make for a functioning economy whatever their religion. Hindus in India are poor but the Hindu diaspora, not only in the US but in Africa, does very well for itself and the economies of the host companies. Iranian immigrants to the US seem to function fine. I don't think the Christian nature of our culture is critical. What matters is respect for property rights, honesty, and the like.

Two other commenters raised a different approach to controlling immigration. First:

A different movement toward free immigration can be modeled on customs unions. Have free immigration with selected countries, where the probability of abuse is low. I'm thinking any country with at least 70% of US GDP per capita.

To which a second commenter added:

The migration-union thing has been tested successfully in the EEA for some decades now, where GDP/capita ranges by more than factor of seven (from Norway to Bulgaria), so I think your 70% may be a bit unnecessarily strict. I'm personally a beneficiary of this policy, having moved countries with minimal hassle. One thing that libertarians/anarchists should like about this (and any other policy that makes migration cheaper), that I don't hear being talked about much, is that it increases competition between countries for residents, which one would expect to make residents better off and governments worse off (as a zero-sum approximation, at least).

That is an approach to immigration control that Donald Trump might actually approve of.

Possibly the most interesting comment, economically speaking:

The most relevant arguments from economics and libertarianism, respectively, can be expressed in two short sentences. 1) If you have open borders, then people will inevitably keep arriving into your country until it is as bad as the countries that they are coming from (as perceived by those immigrants taking all costs and benefits into consideration). 2) All of the land that the government has monopolised or regulated would otherwise have belonged to the populace who would not have allowed unlimited immigration.

The U.S. had effectively open borders to most of the world until the 1920’s, yet remained more attractive than the countries immigrants were coming from. Arguably the explanation is that the cost of immigration, not merely the travel cost but the cost of leaving the world you knew for a strange world where people spoke a language you didn’t know, had different customs than you had grown up with, were strangers, was high enough, for those who did not come, to more than balance the advantages. Technological improvement has reduced the travel cost and, while the other costs are still there, they have been reduced by the spread of something close to a world culture.

The conclusion is still wrong, for two reasons. One is that the same opportunity, whether to migrate or to take a job, is worth more to some than to others. The marginal immigrant neither gains nor loses by immigrating but the average immigrant gains.

The second reason is that the argument implicitly assumes that there is some fixed resource being divided among more and more people so that increasing the number reduces the amount available to each. The obvious candidate is land. But land, in a market society, is private property; the new immigrant doesn’t get handed a per capita share on his arrival. Most land belongs to present residents, some will be bought or rented by new immigrants, so an increase in the price of land benefits the former at the expense of the latter. That might make migration less attractive,  might eventually make “your country … as bad as the countries that they are coming from” from the standpoint of new immigrants, but not at the cost of those already here.

This reminds me of an error I discussed some fifty years ago, when the issue was not immigration but population growth. One reason why many assumed that an increasing population would make people poorer was that it meant a smaller amount of fixed resources, such as land, per person. As I wrote then:

Another externality is the effect of increasing population on fixed resources of land, raw materials, and so on. But this is only a transfer effect. Any fixed resources that the additional child consumes he gets by exchanging the product of his labor (or money inherited. or something else that is his) for them. The person giving up those resources receives something he considers of equal value: otherwise he does not make the deal. The additional demand for fixed resources raises their cost, but this merely causes a transfer from those who buy those fixed resources to those who sell them.

Adding productive people to a society does not make those in it poorer but richer, since it increases the opportunities for gains from trade. That is especially true if those people are very different from those already present, Mexican farm workers happy to work for a wage that is high for them, low for their employers, or the Indian small scale manager/entrepreneurs who, by casual observation, run at least half the motels in America.

Which is an argument against limiting migration to people from rich countries.

All of this assumes immigration into a laissez-faire United States. Immigration into a United States with substantial income redistribution available to new immigrants could have the effect described by the commenter. That is not the society I am recommending open borders for.

Population Arithmetic

A lot of people imagine mass immigration to the US leaving us practically living on each other’s shoulders. It isn’t true. If half the population of the world moved to the US that would give us a population density about equal to the Netherlands, substantially below Taiwan or South Korea. To put the point a little differently, the entire population of the world, packed at the density of New York City, would occupy about 8% of the land area of the US, still less than 10% even if you exclude Alaska.

The reason that doesn’t seem believable is that our impression of population density is averaging over people, not acres. Most Americans live in places with a population density much higher than the population of the country divided by its area — because most people choose to live near other people.

Some even choose to live in New York City.