Freedom of Movement

Heads up Iowa City folk. As part of Human Rights week at the University, Kerry Howley will be giving a talk sponsored by the U of Iowa Advocates of Liberty. Details:

“Migration and Human Rights: How Global Apartheid Keeps the Developing World Poor”

Monday, January 26th at 7 pm

1505 Seamans Center, University of Iowa

I’ll be there!

I confess that I agree with the Drunken Priest/Steven Pinker here:

Will Wilkinson has raised a fair amount of sand with a post on immigration.  Borrowing a page from George Lakoff, he attempts to recast the frame of reference: instead of nation states, now we will speak of clubs and membership.  The rhetorical aim is that such a reframing will put a downward pressure on moral inclinations involving xenophobia, in-group out-group biases, and other forms of patriotic fervor.  But as much I support Wilkinson’s moral views–I would prefer to abolish passports–I think Steven Pinker’s criticisms of Lakoff apply here as well. You see, clubs have membership fees; states have taxes. I can choose not to pay a membership fee. The club may fine me. They may even throw me out. But if I don’t pay my taxes, I am harassed, pilloried, fined, incarcerated. As Pinker said: 

If you choose not to pay a membership fee, the organization will stop providing you with its services. But if you choose not to pay taxes, men with guns will put you in jail. And even if taxes were like membership fees, aren’t lower membership fees better than higher ones, all else being equal? Why should anyone feel the need to defend the very idea of an income tax? Other than the Ayn-Randian fringe, has anyone recently proposed abolishing it?

It had even occurred to me that I was taking a page from Lakoff. Horrors. Anyway, I agree that the big difference between a country and a club is, as Pinker observes, the coervice nature of the “public finance” of  distinctively political communities. Unlike Lakoff, I obviously disapprove of the “country as club.” Like Lakoff, I suppose, I’m urging that we pause to note the very close schematic similarities in actual political discourse and theorizing between (here using the convention of mentioning concepts by capitalizing the words that express them in English) COUNTRY and CLUB, CITIZEN and CLUB MEMBER, LEGAL RESIDENT ALIEN and GUEST OF THE CLUB, etc. Leftwingers like Lakoff want to draw attention to commonalities in these shema so that we confuse state coercion — the fact that creates problem of political legitimacy, the foundational problem of political philosophy — with the fair reciprocity of paying dues for services. He wants to use the similarities to efface the essential difference, which I guess seems pretty slimy. 

My intention is to draw attention to the fact that people do tend to confuse the COUNTRY and CLUB schemata in order to challenge the terms of ordinary and theoretical political discourse. I want people to think of COUNTRY[GEOGRAPHIC] as LARGE PUBLIC GOODS JURISDICTION and COUNTRY[POLITICAL] as LARGE PUBLIC GOODS PROVIDER. When we see countries or nation states as public goods providers covering big jurisdictions, we open the possibility of seeing the United States of America as a very big version of Iowa that can itself be embedded within, or overlap with, other public goods jurisdictions. Jurisdictions need boundaries, but they can be a lot more porous than national boundaries tied up with club-like notions of national identity and sovereignty.

Certain kinds of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians all take the idea that a country is a big piece of real estate jointly “owned” by its citizens way too far. My complaint is that none of them say much at all about the justification of the principles that determine who becomes a citizen — becomes a legitimate part “owner” of the huge plot from which others may be excluded — and who does not.

So, enough with vacation pictures! Here are some riffs extending a few lines of argument in my forthcoming Cato paper on inequality… 

The pattern of wages and incomes at the level of the nation state is morally arbitrary. A fortiori, as Hayek notes, desert-based conceptions of national pattern are doubly hopeless. Wages are determined by demand in the labor maket, which is not really national and not at all under individual control. The best an individual can do to “deserve” a wage level in a certain neighborhod is to try to respond to labor market signals and acquire skill that pays. But the idea of justifying the differences between two individual’s wages is a classic category mistake. Maybe widget polishers earn more than dingus tighteners because there is a glut of dingus tighteners. That inequality is morally meaningless — completely irrelevant. Sooner or later, some dingus tighteners will learn to polish widgets and the gap will narrow. Now, if the widget polishers guild is creating barriers to entry, as cartels are wont to do, the wage gap would reflect an injustice. The injustice isn’t the gap, though; it’s the violation of economic liberty rights. Likewise, if all the widget polishing jobs are on the other side of a line that you are not allowed to cross, the inequality will reflect a prior violation of liberty. But assuming a (rare and precious) free market in labor, when it comes to wage gaps, deserve ain’t got nothing to do with it.

Do I deserve my salary? Of course I do. I’ve got an agreement with the Cato Institute. I give them certain services, they give me a certain salary. If I’ve done my job, I’ve got it coming to me. Do Cato Research Fellows deserve to make more than dingus tighteners? Again, the question is just a category mistake. Dingus tighteners deserve what their employers promise them. You can ask “What justifies the gap in pay between Research Fellows and dingus tigheners?” But what kind of question is this? Doesn’t it amount to:  ”What justifies the fact that employers of Research Fellows offer more than employers of dingus tighteners”? Or: “What justifies the fact that Research Fellows have labor market alternatives that pay better than the labor market alternatives of dingus tighteners”? Or: “What justifies the fact that certain skills are in shorter supply relative to demand”?

Do these questions make any sense? There are explanations to offer, but there is no room for questions of justification. To whom is this question supposed to be addressed anyway? Society? Whatever society is, it’s some kind of international network of cooperation, so, again, it’s super confused to attempt to address an already meaningless question to something, the nation state, which is not the kind of unit to which this kind of question of justification can sensibly be posed.

There are an indefinite number of sets of people bound by relations we might think are interesting. What’s the point of picking out one of those sets of people and then asking whether the pattern of incomes or wages among them tracks desert, or anything else? What would make you think this kind of tracking is even possible? What would make you think this is desirable?

If nationalist political theorists were to adopt a different vocabulary, they could start making sense, but then it would be clear that they’re not really doing moral philosophy in quite the way they thought they were. You begin to realize you’re doing something like the modern version of theorizing about the obligations of kings to the lesser nobility. It may seem extremely important at the time, but it lacks the universality of an authentically moral question. Anyway, my contention is that nation states really are just a special kind of club. This isn’t even a metaphor. It’s exact. Nation states are clubs. Citizenships are club memberships. Visas are club guest passes. Immigration debates are always at bottom about clubbability. It’s really not all that different to be told “Welcome home” by the U.S. immigration officer and to be kicked out by the Myanmar immigration officer. The point is that some people are members and some people aren’t, that some non-members are welcome as guests and some people aren’t. 

So back to inequality and distribution. As a matter of fact, many Mexicans and Canadians are in society with one another. Let’s say there is a pretty big difference in pay between Mexican and Canadian dingus tighteners. Part of the explanation for this, let’s suppose, is just like the difference between widget polishers and dingus tightener when the widget polishers guild uses the political system to restrict entry. Despite high demand, Canada keeps most Mexican dingus tighteners out, in effect subsidizing the wages of dingus tighteners who are members or guests of the Canadian club (not the whiskey.) So here is your intelligible question of economic and social justice. What justifies the barriers to entry that privelege some members of society at the expense of others. To draw the bounds of society at the border is a completely specious move to ignore the most basic question of justice by defining it away.

When I make this point, I get the sense that some nationalist egalitarian liberals think I’m trying to cleverly avoid confronting the allegedly baleful inequalities in the national pattern of economic holdings. But that’s not what I’m doing. I’m sincerely arguing that nationalist liberal egalitarianism is morally unserious arbitrary nonsense.

Kerry Howley reports on a new paper by the inestimable Michael Clemens examining a remarkable natural experiment in Fiji, the results of which further demolish “brain drain” arguments against skilled emigration. Kerry nicely captures the intuitive-once-you-think-about-it-a-second principle at work:

People locked in poor countries do not fail to invest years studying theoretical physics because they lack the appropriate imaginative capacity. If no one can afford to hire a cardiologist, no sane person is going to waste a decade studying to be one.  Migration increases the returns to higher education. It transforms a questionable investment into one worth making.

Daniel Larison writes:

Wilkinson would prefer instead morally bogus debates about whether caring for the poor means abolishing borders and swamping our country with millions of immigrants.  For my part, I get really tired of Wilkinson’s lectures about things and people he identifies as ”nationalist,” when he has made it quite clear over the years that he makes no distinction between nationalism and patriotism, lauds others who fail to make this distinction and in any case doesn’t understand what patriotism is.

It’s amusing how the defense of the human right to travel and associate freely is so often and so desperately cast as “abolishing borders.” But I don’t think I’ve ever defended “abolishing” borders. When Kerry I move to Iowa next month, we will cross the borders of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, and I have no problem whatsoever with any of them. Jurisdictions need to be bounded. I’m for borders. What I defend is making national borders more like state borders — making it easier to legally cross and to gain legal residency. I defend this on the grounds that the severity of the restrictions placed on freedom, the extent of the violation of rights to movement and association, and the amount of harm to human welfare, cannot be justified on moral grounds by any imagined compensating benefits. If Larison thinks such restrictions can be morally justified, then I am more than happy to have that debate, because I think I will win. Of course, if he thinks the need to justify coercion and harm is “morally bogus,” then we may share too little normative vocabulary to understand each other. But I think we do understand each other.

If Larison is right that I don’t even understand what patriotism is, then I’m probably right that he doesn’t even understand what morality or justice is, which would explain why he seems not even to grasp that he bears the burden of defending his moral chauvinism. But it might also be that we understand all these things fairly well and just disagree about them at a pretty fundamental level.

Until my recent upsurge in interest in migration issues, thanks to Kerry, I had assumed that relocation was something people did for good and that people came to America to become Americans. I wasn’t aware of the large masses of Poles, Italians, Irish, etc., who came to the U.S. to work for a while, and then left again. And there’s a good reason for that: those people’s ancestors didn’t write American social studies textbooks. Anyway, most Mexicans don’t care that much to be Americans, either. But a lot of them would like to work here. And then, eventually, go home.

This story from Reuter’s about Polish immigrants to England moving back to Poland does a good job of illustrating the dynamic:

Four years after Polish graphic designer Chris Rychter headed to Britain to find work and study as a citizen of the European Union, he and his wife have returned home.

Part of a swelling tide of migration back east, they are having a house built in a suburb of the Polish capital.

“It took me just three days to find a job back in Warsaw,” Rychter, 27, told Reuters. “We never saw Britain as home… We went for the adventure and to get some professional experience.”

[...]

the Rychters show how Europe has shrunk and that — contrary to a popular view — migrant flows are not all one-way.

Economists now see a turnstile or pendulum effect of people moving between countries after quite short stints, in search of better conditions.

Statistics on migration within the 27-nation EU are not precise, but around half of an estimated one million people from eastern Europe who moved to Britain since 2004 have already returned home, according to a recent report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a British think-tank.

Increased labor market integration with Mexico would help improve the Mexican economy, making it relatively more attractive for Mexicans to stay or return, just like it’s doing for Poland.

I have to say I was pretty surprised the first time I saw this OECD graph, which shows the foreign-born as a percentage of total population [Click for full size]:

Why was I surprised? Because it’s relatively hard to become a citizen of Switzerland. But that was me thinking a path to citizenship and residency and work rights were a kind of logical package deal. And that’s wrong. So maybe Switzerland’s lack of birthright citizenship and relatively arduous naturalization process help explain their receptivity to immigration. I don’t know. And I don’t know about Swiss welfare eligibility rules either. (Anyone?) But it now strikes me that my initial surprise was probably misplaced.

That said, it doesn’t seem all that tough to become a citizen of Australia, another America-shaming immigrant haven, although it does seem that getting born in Australia is no longer good enough.

Poking around looking for stuff about immigration and welfare, I found this 1997 Dallas Fed paper by Madeline Zavodny. Here’s her conclusion:

Much of the motivation for eliminating most immigrants’ access to federally funded public assistance benefits was concern that persons migrate to the United States because of the availability of welfare benefits. The 1996 welfare law makes noncitizens ineligible for food stamps and SSI payments and allows states to discontinue AFDC, Medicaid, and other public assistance benefits to noncitizens. Several states intend to continue extending benefits to noncitizens, whereas others are likely to cut off benefits, widening the already substantial differences in welfare benefits across states. These differences in policy create concern that immigrants will move in response to interstate differentials and that states that continue to allow immigrants to receive welfare payments will become welfare magnets.

In this article, I find little evidence to support the contention that new immigrants will choose their destinations based on welfare generosity. New immigrants are attracted to areas with large immigrant populations. Because earlier immigrants are disproportionately located in high-welfare states, it may appear that high welfare benefits attract immigrants. However, immigrants do not respond to interstate differentials in welfare generosity but rather to differences in the sizes of the foreign born populations. Immigrants are also attracted to a specific subset of states—namely California, New York, Florida, and Texas—and do not respond to changes in welfare benefits within states over time. The recent historical evidence gives little reason to be concerned that new immigrants will choose their destinations based on the welfare differentials created by the new welfare law.

This is notable for two reasons. First, it seems like most people don’t know that the 1996 welfare reform made most noncitizens ineligible for most federal benefits. I didn’t either, until fairly recently. Second, it supports the idea that welfare isn’t a significant factor in immigrants’ choices about where to go. Maybe this has changed in the last 10 years; I’d like to see a more recent study. But I’d guess this holds up.

Yesterday at Hit & Run, Kerry Howley put up a brilliant post on Milton Friedman’s most misused utterance (riffing off Bryan Caplan’s also outstanding post) which I thought was more or less dispositive.

But in the comments, MikeP (this man needs his own blog, if he doesn’t have one) points to this immensely useful post containing a partial transcript of a much more considered and representative discussion of immigration by Friedman from a lecture titled “What Is America.” It really puts the wall-builders’ favorite Friedman quotation in its proper context.

You had a flood of immigrants, millions of them, coming to this country. What brought them here? It was the hope for a better life for them and their children. And, in the main, they succeeded. It is hard to find any century in history, in which so large a number of people experience so great an improvement in the conditions of their life, in the opportunities open to them, as in the period of the 19th and early 20th century.

[...]

You will find that hardly a soul who will say that it was a bad thing. Almost everybody will say it was a good thing. ‘But what about today? Do you think we should have free immigration?’ ‘Oh, no,’ they’ll say, ‘We couldn’t possibly have free immigration today. Why, that would flood us with immigrants from India, and God knows where. We’d be driven down to a bare subsistence level.’”

“What’s the difference? How can people be so inconsistent? Why is it that free immigration was a good thing before 1914 and free immigration is a bad thing today? Well, there is a sense in which that answer is right. There’s a sense in which free immigration, in the same sense as we had it before 1914 is not possible today. Why not? “

Because it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promised a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.

Look, for example, at the obvious, immediate, practical example of illegal Mexican immigration. Now, that Mexican immigration, over the border, is a good thing. It’s a good thing for the illegal immigrants. It’s a good thing for the United States. It’s a good thing for the citizens of the country. But, it’s only good so long as its illegal.

That’s an interesting paradox to think about. Make it legal and it’s no good. Why? Because as long as it’s illegal the people who come in do not qualify for welfare, they don’t qualify for social security, they don’t qualify for the other myriad of benefits that we pour out from our left pocket to our right pocket. So long as they don’t qualify they migrate to jobs. They take jobs that most residents of this country are unwilling to take. They provide employers with the kind of workers that they cannot get. They’re hard workers, they’re good workers, and they are clearly better off.

Friedman’s point about free immigration and the welfare state, then, was simply that if the U.S. is going to offer welfare payments to anybody who legally migrates, then we’re going to have to put a limit on legal migration. But because free migration is such an unmitigated good, limits on legal migration make both the immigrants and the natives worse off. So, illegal migration, which severs the fact of residency from welfare eligibility, is therefore desirable in the context of a regime that guarantees welfare eligibility to all legal residents.

Friedman’s considered view is that free migration without a welfare state is first best. Welfare for all legal residents makes first-best free migration impossible. In that case, a high rate of illegal immigration is the second-best solution.

Now, Friedman’s discussion would have been much clearer had he recognized the logical and practical possibility of severing legal residency from welfare eligibility. It need not be the case that all legal residents are made eligible for welfare. Indeed, there are many actual effective restrictions on welfare eligibility based on legal immigration status. In the 1999 ISIL interview, Friedman says of this possibility: “I don’t think that it is desirable to have two classes of citizens in a society.” And then he admits that he had never thought about it before. Well, if he had, he would have grasped that illegal immigration — which, remember, he thinks is pretty great — ensures a very stark separation of classes. Because tight immigration restrictions hinder pareto-improving mobility, create underground economies that encourage corruption and abuse, and do much more to create invidious structural inequalities than would a formalized guest worker system, Friedman’s own logic clearly leads toward opening up labor markets while restricting welfare eligibility. It is no accident that Lant Pritchett, an economist very much in the Friedmanite mold, argues for precisely that.

But the important takeaway here is this: Friedman’s view is that a certain kind of unrestricted welfare state makes illegal immigration good, because it severs residency from welfare eligibility. Friedman is unequivocal about the desirability of free migration. Anyone really committed to Friedman’s stated view about welfare and immigration should by no means try to restrict immigration, but instead should try to enable illegal immigration. A devout Friedmanite should stand stoutly against every fence, every border cop, every increase in the INS budget, any proposed database check for a new workers’ legal status, etc. I think it makes more sense to argue first for a guest worker program. But if that is in fact impossible, then Friedman has it right: more illegal immigration is the best we can do.

Please direct your attention to this excellent post on the economics of remittances by YouNotSneaky! (for my money far and away the best anonymous econblogger):

But what about the argument that remittances are all biscuits and gravy with tiny bits of sausage in it? Welllll, no. Sort of. I mean, yes, but, let’s think about things more carefully here.

Exactly. But more technically…

Bottom line is that most of the so called “gains from remittances” are straight up gains from IMMIGRATION. Or in other words, they are gains from the fact that some person from a poor household in a poor county has managed to make their way to a rich country and now has a richer income. Strictly speaking the gain from remittances is just the gain from INTER-HOUSEHOLD reallocation of income between the migrant and those who stay behind, not the overall increase in household income due to migration.

A bunch of illuminating graphs intervene and then:

All that basically means that the observed benefits from remittances that people rave so much about are mostly just straight up benefits from LABOR MIGRATION. Which are huge, but somehow that just isn’t being said.

It is interesting that people fix on the humanitarian effect of migrants sending money back home. The immigrant, prior to migration, was presumably just about as poor as the people he or she is sending money home to. So if it’s so good for those people to get that money, then it was just as good for the migrant to make it in the first place. But I’m just saying the same thing.

There’s a lot more, all of it interesting.

[Hat tip: Ambrosini.]

The estimable Shika Dalmia, in a WSJ piece in favor of scrapping the current cap on H1-B’s, informs me:

In response, most industrialized countries, facing their own skills crunch, are liberalizing their immigration policies to make themselves more attractive. England recently scrapped its Byzantine work permit program in favor of a Canadian-style point system that will allow entry to some skilled workers even before they get a job. New Zealand has a remarkable program that gives accredited private companies fast-track access to work visas that they can hand to foreign workers along with a job offer. Australia is considering modifying its skilled visa program along similar lines.

Even more radical is the blue card program that the European Union proposed last year to bump up its skilled workforce by 20 million over 20 years. The card will admit not only skilled workers – but their entire families – and give spouses the legal right to work in all 27 EU countries within three months of applying. By contrast, the U.S. Congress recently questioned even a relatively modest suggestion by Bill Gates to raise or scrap the annual H-1B visa cap. Astoundingly, this cap was lowered to 1990 levels four years ago.

I want a blue card! The right to work in 27  other countries? Wow! That would be an immense increase in real freedom. I seriously want to look into this.

My own interest I guess is a clue to how this could work out in the long run, which is that an already stratified system of mobility rights will come to favor the wealthy and skilled even more heavily as jurisdictions compete for the most productive workers. I suspect that an increased volume of global migration among the skilled would do a good deal to acclimate incumbent residents to foreigners, thereby softening the ground for more general liberalization. But I’ll have to think about it. What do y’all think?

It looks like I’ve been unfair to Dean Baker. Thanks to Chris Hayes, I see that he’s generally been quite good on promoting skilled immigration as a means of lower national inequality. For example:

If Leonhardt and the NYT were interested in free trade, we could ask hospitals what barriers prevent them from hiring Mexican doctors who would be happy to work for one-half of the wages of their U.S. counterparts. We could do the same for law firms, universities, and even newspapers. We could standardize education and professional standards so that Mexican kids could grow up and work as doctors in Los Angeles or lawyers in New York, just as easily as kids born in Chicago or Boston. This would lead to huge gains to the U.S. economy and greater equality in the United States instead of greater inequality.

That makes a lot more sense to me, and I’m glad to see it. All apologies, Dean Baker. That said, the post I dug into below is now even more confusing to me.

Of course, I think allowing in foreign skilled professionals in order to bring down national inequality is silly. The reason to do so is that they are people, they should be free to work where they like, and allowing them in makes both them and incumbent residents better off.

Please absorb this extremely important advance in economic methodology and basic intellectual rigor:

Income Per Natural: Measuring Development as if People Mattered More Than Places

by Michael Clemens and Lant Pritchett

It is easy to learn the average income of a resident of El Salvador or Albania. But there is no systematic source of information on the average income of a Salvadoran or Albanian. In this new working paper, research fellow Michael Clemens and non-resident fellow Lant Pritchett create a new statistic: income per natural — the mean annual income of persons born in a given country, regardless of where that person now resides. If income per capita has any interpretation as a welfare measure, exclusive focus on the nationally resident population can lead to substantial errors of the income of the natural population for countries where emigration is an important path to greater welfare. The estimates differ substantially from traditional measures of GDP or GNI per resident, and not just for a handful of tiny countries. Almost 43 million people live in a group of countries whose income per natural collectively is 50 percent higher than GDP per resident. For 1.1 billion people the difference exceeds 10 percent. The authors also show that poverty estimates are different for national residents and naturals; for example, 26 percent of Haitian naturals who are not poor by the two-dollar-a-day standard live in the United States. These estimates are simply descriptive statistics and do not depend on any assumptions about how much of observed income differences across naturals is selection and how much is a pure location effect. Our conservative, if rough, estimate is that three quarters of this difference represents the effect of international migration on income per natural.

The bottom line: migration is one of the most important sources of poverty reduction for a large portion of the developing world. If economic development is defined as rising human well being, then a residence-neutral measure of well-being emphasizes that crossing international borders is not an alternative to economic development, it is economic development.

The whole paper is here.

Note that this isn’t an argument open to some kind of refutation. It’s just a better way of measuring things — a way that makes the way the world works clearer. Seeing this alternative metric in action should help us realize just how much of profound moral importance is obscured by the economic nationalism at the foundations of conventional welfare economics. Soon enough, it simply won’t be an option for honest intellectuals to ignore the perspective Clemens and Pritchett encourage us to adopt. Paul Krugman: hello!

Because I want to be certain not to argue against a strawman in my inequality paper, I’m arguing against Paul Krugman, for the most part. So I’ve been reading The Conscience of a Liberal for the third time. This is not pleasant work. Reading a John Bates Clark Medal winner shouldn’t feel this much like reading Ann Coulter. But it does. Liberal Fascism is a more intellectually evenhanded book, which says more about Krugman than it does about Liberal Fascism, I’m afraid.

But I digress before I even start. When Krugman talks about immigration, he has two points to make. One is that Republicans can’t win by being racists forever, because that’s sure to backfire once the Latin American population becomes large enough. The other point is that lots of low-skilled immigration makes it hard to politically mobilize the working class, since so few immigrants can vote. In Krugman’s view, if the working class contains many members without the franchise, it is itself disenfranchised. So it is that Krugman pretty nearly celebrates one of the most shameful chapters in 20th century American politics: the progressive (read: “racist”) imposition of strict immigration controls to keep shifty Asians and dirty Italian anarchists off our shores.

Krugman says that “a more fully enfranchised population” was an “unintended consequence” of the Immigration Act, but the effect that Krugman celebrates was not at all unintended by Samuel Gompers and the AFL, perhaps the most powerful driving force behind the law. And it is an effect Krugman thinks we should consider intending: “The disenfranchisement effect is, however, something liberals need to think hard about when confronting questions about immigration reform,” he delicately puts it.

What Krugman never says about immigration is that it is the most powerful engine of economic mobility and equalization there is. This make it obvious that Paul Krugman is not especially concerned with poor people or with economic equality. He is evidently not even especially concerned with poor people in the United States if they can’t vote. He seems to think it is at least worth considering keeping some of those people out of the country — keeping them poorer — if that would help achieve the redistributive politics he prizes. What kind of egalitarian is that?

Imagine a choice between two policies. Policy A would leave the level of redistribution just as it is, but would allow a much larger volume of immigration. Policy B would leave immigration as it is, but would increase the level of redistribution from rich to poor citizens. Which policy should a humanitarian favor? There can be no doubt: policy A. Which policy should an egalitarian favor? Well, Policy A will increase nation-level inequality by increasing the proportion of the population near the bottom of the income distribution. But why is this of any moral significance? If we take the set of people in the U.S. at time 2, and follow them all back in time to t1, when everyone is in whatever country he or she was in then, and see whether inequality has increased or decreased among this group of people, we will see that it has decreased a great deal, and that almost all of this decrease will have come from the poor becoming richer in real terms, and not from the rich losing income to taxes. If it were necessary to limit redistribution in order to make a greater volume of immigration politically feasible, then egalitarians and humanitarians ought to be for it.

Paul Krugman wouldn’t be for it, which is not surprising, since he appears to be neither a thoroughgoing egalitarian nor a thoroughgoing humanitarian. He is a nationalist social democrat, largely indifferent to larger concerns about equality and welfare. At this late globalizing date, “20th century Western European nationalist social democracy in yet another country!” strikes me as both a useless and unmoving conception of America’s ideal future.

My comments are teeming with racists good people who believe in the racial and cultural superiority of Americans of European descent clearly terrified by the prospect of the breakdown of Anglo-European cultural hegemony in America. The worry seems to be that with a slightly liberalized immigration regime the U.S. will swiftly devolve into some kind of squalid hell.

Like California?

[Click for bigger image.]

Presently, whites are well less than half the Calfornian population. Hispanics make up just more than a third. Asians at 12 percent are nearly double the black population. I’d guess it won’t be long before Hispanics pass whites to become a plurality.

Now, if my fearful commenters aren’t simply making things up in their paranoid dreams, wouldn’t California be a complete disaster already? Of course, we all know that, were it a country, California would be the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world. The median household income in California, $54,385, ranks 11th in the U.S., and would put California right near the top of the world rankings.

No doubt the browning of California has become unpleasant for some white natives. But according to the 2007 United Van Lines internal migration study, California just had another year of decline in out-bound intra-U.S. migration rates, leaving net migration about a wash. And the out-migration that exists is probably more a result of price pressure than white flight, given that California is the most expensive state in the country in which to live. Indeed, the fact that more people don’t leave due to such high costs is an indication of how desirable life in California must be. Arizona, a border state whose population is almost a third Hispanic (and that percentage is swiftly growing), is one of the favorite destinations for internal American migration, and in some recent years has been the favorite. So Arizona, which boasts a median family income right around the national median, is either doing just fine or the many thousands of Americans who move there each year are stupid.

So what gives my xenophobic friends? If the idea is that the U.S. will inevitably slide toward second-world status if the whole place comes to look a lot more like California and Arizona demographically, wouldn’t you expect California and Arizona to be much poorer and much less popular? I mean, given the claims I’m getting from some of you, these places ought to be nightmares. But instead they are … really nice places to live!

Anyway, I can’t say I’m looking forward to the explanation of how it is that, if suddenly cut loose from the Union, an independent California and its half-wit citizens would swiftly vote its way into conditions resembling the slums of Calcutta. But I’m pretty sure it’s coming…

So…, James Poulos had said:

The big problem with Gerson’s ‘moral internationalism’ is not that it has a big heart or a goofy smile. The big problem is that it’s inimical to citizenship. Gerson and his ilk long for the day that Americans don’t get a better shake in life just because they’re Americans.

I was a bit confused by the possibility of a decent person denying the fundamental moral equality of human beings, so I asked in comments:

Just to be clear, you think Americans ought to get a better shake in life just because they’re Americans?

In the comments, James ends up endorsing this view, from J.A.:

Whether you subscribe to the notion that America’s prosperity and stability are undeserved accidents of a less-than-honorable history, or, alternatively, happy results of the Constitution and better than average leadership — or, in fact, if you believe neither or a combination of these — do other peoples, less fortunate in their circumstances, have legitimate moral claims on us for access to them? If you take as a given that America is, comparatively speaking, a really good place to live, work, and raise a family — which I think is obviously a true statement — then the question is not whether Americans should get a better shake in life; they do get a better shake in life by virtue of being citizens in a “really good place to live, work and raise a family.” The question isn’t even one of just deserts. The question is, what moral claims can non-citizens make on American citizens given the fact of American prosperity and stability?

Yes, Americans get a better shake in life than most people in the world in virtue of having had the good sense to get born in the United States, which does have relatively excellent institutions. Yes, those institutions are a main reason so many people come to live and work here. But I cannot make sense of the concluding question. Does J.A. think that the fact Americans are so rich weakens the obligations of Americans to non-citizens? I guess that would be an… interesting thing to think.

There is no need for confusion about the question at hand, which is clear enough: What justifies state-imposed limits on the human rights to movement and free association?

A country is not a big plot of land owned by its citizens. It is a jurisdiction of government within which there are many free people and many pieces of privately-owned property — at least if the government is decent. But suppose one is simple and thinks citizens own countries in much the way a family can own a farm. What then?

First, back up to the question of the justification of a system of private property. The division of the commons into parcels, and the use of government coercion to enforce private claims over these parcels — which include the right to exclude — requires a justification. Dave Schmidtz provides that justification here [doc]. In short, dividing the commons leaves each with more than had it remained open. The right to exclude enables general prosperity.

So, think of the Earth as a big commons, and imagine borders as fences. Can we justify the system of nation-states and its migration controls in the same way? Evidently not. The welfare gains that would come from even a mild decrease in coercive limits on travel and free association are awesomely huge, which of course implies that the status quo system of limits does not leave most people better off than they would be in a feasible alternative system. And this suggests that the global-level system of division and exclusion lacks moral justification.

Citizens may have stronger claims on one another than they have on non-citizens. And they may have stronger claims one another than non-citizens have on them, because they share the burdens and benefits of a set of common institutions. But everyone, no matter who printed their passport, has equal claim to the respect of their basic rights. Citizens are under a strict obligation not to harm or violate the rights of non-citizens. The status quo system, which limits the freedom to travel and cooperation without benefiting most of those whose freedom is limited, amounts to both a substantive and moral harm; it denies some basic conditions for human flourishing and a thereby constitutes a violation of basic rights. What non-citizens have coming to them, is the recognition of their rights, moral respect as persons.

Limiting basic rights to travel and associate may be justified if it is necessary to maintain the integrity and stability of instutitions that tend to make people better off overall. The United States economy and its supporting institutions are hugely beneficial not only to those who live and work within them, but more broadly. I am open to serious, empirically-minded arguments about the location of the point at which additional openness to migration leads to diminishing benefits. But, I’m afraid, one sees very little of this.

Heads up, globalist pigs! Kerry’s interview with Lant Pritchett, now online, is full of great stuff about how to increase liberty and well-being at the same time! Here’s a taste:

Pritchett: [...] Being against migration to the United States is wrong for two reasons. One, I don’t think it gets the scale of the poverty in the United States vs. poverty in the rest of the world right. Second, if you are really concerned about inequality in the United States, there are many things you can do that would be better than blocking other people from coming to our country. I don’t want to say that people who are concerned about inequality in the U.S. aren’t right to be concerned about inequality in the U.S. But I think taking that concern and using it to keep people from coming to the United States is victimizing the world’s true victims in favor of people who happen to live closer to you.

Reason: It seems strange to worry more about inequality within the arbitrary boundaries of a nation-state than about much larger global inequalities.

Pritchett: Exactly. I’ve never understood a view of the world in which the place in which a person was born becomes the key factor in whether you care about them.

Pritchett is nice; he says he doesn’t understand this view of the world. What I’d like to think he means is that it is obviously a sign of a shamefully stunted moral sense to see shared national membership as the key condition for giving a damn.

The conclusion to Kerry’s prelude is great:

What’s keeping so many would-be migrants in place? “Men with guns,” Pritchett says. His message is less a call to arms than a call to lay them down, less a provocation than a vision of a richer, better, freer world.

That’s libertarianism right there.

Thanks to Kerry, there has been a great deal of stimulating cross-blog discussion of the desirability of an expanded American guest worker program compared to other policies. As far as I can tell, a good number of smart, well-intentioned folks see a big guest worker program as a second-best substitute for an increase in permanent migration and the supply of citizenships. (For example, Tim Lee here.) I think this is mistaken. While I also would like to see the United States mint millions of new passports, I think this is an entirely separate issue from the right of individuals to cross borders and enter into productive agreements with other human beings. It may be the case that the current public understanding of migration confuses these logically separate issues. And it may therefore be the case that the status quo, on-the-ground politics of immigration requires some kind of strategic trade-off between a new guest worker program and an upsurge in permanent residents and citizens. I have my doubts, but I really don’t know. The point I want to get across is that if we currently do have to make such a choice politically, we’re probably thinking about this complex of issues sloppily, and ought to do better starting now.

I suspect that some of us are talking past one another because of differences in political aims. My long-term aim regarding migration is the best feasible approximation of a single global labor market–a world in which people are free to travel the world in search of the most valued use for their skills. That this idea should seem shocking to some (most?) of us reveals how deeply-seated are our essentially illiberal nationalistic impulses. But there is nothing new here. Mises had this all nailed down tight in his chapter on “Liberal Foreign Policy” in Liberalism, written eighty years ago. A politics aimed at world peace requires an integrated world of peaceful cooperation. Here is your bracing refresher statement of ideals:

The starting point of liberal thought is the recognition of the value and importance of human cooperation, and the whole policy and program of liberalism is designed to serve the purpose of maintaining the existing state of mutual cooperation among the members of the human race and of extending it still further. The ultimate ideal envisioned by liberalism is the perfect cooperation of all mankind, taking place peacefully and without friction. Liberal thinking always has the whole of humanity in view and not just parts. It does not stop at limited groups; it does not end at the border of the village, of the province, of the nation, or of the continent. Its thinking is cosmopolitan and ecumenical: it takes in all men and the whole world. Liberalism is, in this sense, humanism; and the liberal, a citizen of the world, a cosmopolite.

As I’ve argued before, I think this conception of cosmopolitan liberalism almost got lost in the Cold War, during which cosmopolitan, internationalist ideals were largely ceded to the communists while liberalism rode out the red tide by tying itself defensively to nationalist feelings in those nations with a more or less liberal identity. The Cold War has been over for almost twenty years now. It is time to get back to the project of securing world peace through extending the scope of mutual cooperation. It is time to get back to the cosmopolitan ideals of liberal humanism.

So that’s the backdrop. Against it, questions of the American interest are instrumental, not ultimate. “What’s in it for us?” is such a pressing question because Americans need to see how their interests are compatible with the aim of a free, just, and peaceful world. For a liberal, it is not surprising that they are.

The U.S. has a serious problem regulating movement over the southern border by Mexicans and Central Americans. The main source of the problem is high U.S. labor demand and wage rates. The policy most likely to solve this problem is not a militarized border, which, as Douglas Massey explains, is completely counterproductive.

The net effect of our harsh border policy has been to increase the rate of undocumented population growth in the U.S. By lowering the rate of return migration to Mexico while leaving the rate of in-migration largely unaffected, it has increased net migration from around 180,000 persons per year in the late 1970s and early 1980s to around 368,000 per year over the past decade.

The increase in border enforcement has actually reduced the probability of apprehending undocumented border crossers to a 40-year low by pushing the flows into remote territory where fewer officers are stationed. But it has also tripled the death rate.

It is logically contradictory, and impossible in practical terms, to create a single North American economy that integrates markets for goods, capital, raw materials, services, and information but somehow keeps labor markets separate.

Nor is liberalization of permanent residencies and citizenships the ticket. There are simply too many people who want to work in the U.S., and the political will to hand out that many Green Cards just isn’t there. Even a significant liberalization on the path-to-citizenship front isn’t going to do much to regulate the flow of labor across the southern border. This is a real issue we need to address. Moreover, a large number of the people now crossing the border illegally don’t especially want to become Americans and would like to go home after a while. A large guest-worker program aimed specifically at these workers really is the best bet.

So a guest-worker program would have a real short-term benefit to the U.S. in terms of increased border security, return migration, and labor market efficiency. The medium-term benefit of a large guest worker program aimed at our neighbors to the south is this: Once the program is established and has demonstrated its efficacy, it will be possible to make a persuasive case for further North American labor-market integration, pushing toward a common North American labor market. In the long term, large regional labor markets, such as the EU and a North American market (and a South American market, an African market, an Asian market, etc.) can begin to integrate, moving us toward the ultimate liberal aim of an open world of mutual cooperation.

Thinking of this issue primarily in terms of the distribution of legal permissions to stay for good is a recipe for confusion. We need to build the infrastructure of a well-regulated system in which people are free to come and go in a dynamic global economy where the demand for various forms of human capital comes and goes. Thinking about in terms of Green Cards and passports seems to me to take for granted that if people are going to cross a border to work, they are going to do it just once, and to stay.

Kerry’s spate of recent writing on immigration is making me think differently.

First, prior to reading her interview with Laura Agustin, I had not occurred to me to think of a Mexican gardner as an “expat” or that relatively poor people might also be interested in traveling across borders out of curiosity or a sense of adventure. That really is shameful. My inner Kant, my inner Christian, recoils at my failure to see persons as persons as persons, all with reasons worth taking seriously, all very like my own.

Second, Kerry’s latest reply to Megan makes me realize that I have dated a guest worker! She was an au pair from Germany, in the U.S. under a J1 “exchange visitors” visa. She worked for a living, taking care of children. She came because she wanted to see America. A year later, she left, having lived the expat life while helping raise some small girls. Like most transient guest workers, she left America no worse. On the contrary. Now, if you think this case is different because she was (still is!) German, then clearly your problem isn’t really with guest workers, is it?

If you have yet to read Kerry’s Reason cover on guest-worker programs, you’re falling behind. It is simply the best thing anyone has lately done on guest-worker programs, beautifully written and brilliantly reasoned. This part is phenomenal:

As Americans struggle with the implications of immigrants who come to live but not to stay, their single greatest objection to a guest worker plan may have nothing to do with migrant well-being. The gains for immigrants are demonstrably too big and the need too great to lend credibility to those who cast all guest workers as victims. According to the Inter-American Development Bank, migrants send $62.3 billion in remittances to Latin American and the Caribbean last year, keeping 8 to 10 million families above the poverty line. The unexplored opportunities for mutually advantageous cooperation are massive and undeniable. But it seems dirty. “It simply feels exploitative and un-American to allow migrants in without giving them a shot at becoming citizens,” writes Jacob Weisberg in Slate.

The economist Lawrence Summers, a former president of Harvard, has expressed this objection in somewhat loftier terms. In a critique of Harvard’s Pritchett, Summers explains: “Lant’s kind of compassionate libertarianism carries the risk of a morally problematic coarsening that we resist in many other ways.” The problem with guest worker programs, in other words, has nothing to do with the good of guest workers, and everything to do with the moral harm that proximate poverty might cause to their hosts. Allowing workers entry to the United States might be mutually beneficial for employer and employee, all the while producing corrosive cultural externalities. Summers seems to think that guest workers will inure Americans to a system of class stratification and undermine a shared, naive sense of global solidarity.

The moral calculus, then, is to be weighed between the welfare of potential workers and the preservation of an idealized American narrative. Does it reflect better on the American character to lock poor people out than to permit them entry on limited terms? Guest worker programs do clash with deeply held mythologies about our relationship to the global poor. We live in a state of relative political equality nested awkwardly within a deeply unequal world, and it can seem better, kinder, to keep the inequality outside, walling it off and keeping our hands clean. Perhaps American egalitarianism, like a dress too precious to be worn, is a value too dear to expose to the real world. As the essayist Richard Rodriguez, himself the son of Mexican immigrants, has written, “Americans prefer unknowing.”

Do you prefer unknowing? Read it.

At VoxEu Esther Duflo outlines a new study on assimilation of Muslim immigrants in Britain by LSE’s Alan Manning and Sanchari Roy:

Manning and Roy rightly conclude that, on the basis of available evidence, Huntington’s pessimism - that Muslim immigrants will prove “indigestible” to non-Muslim societies, seems unjustified indeed. If anything, the constant reminders of “native” Europeans that there is “us” and “them”, the new, scary, Muslim immigrants and their offspring may do substantially more to create a rift than any religious or cultural feeling these immigrants have brought with them and transferred to their children.

So chill.

Brad Pitt is leading an initiative to build a bunch of houses designed by fancy architecture firms in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. That’s nice. But why not build these houses elsewhere, perhaps a place less likely to flood, a place with jobs?

Responding to critics who question the wisdom of rebuilding at all in an area likely to get hit again, Mr. Pitt said: “My first answer to that is, talk to the people who’ve lived there and have raised their kids there. People are needing to get back in their homes.”

I don’t think this helps Pitt’s case, exactly. People ought to be encouraged to move where the opportunities are, not enticed with designer accommodations to stay in a struggling place prone to disaster. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are and where we’re from can, through some good old-fashioned emotional alchemy, create pride from deprivation. When that’s all you’ve got—or all you can get—that’s a great thing indeed. But our narratives of place and tribe are too often an identity-arresting form of self-indulgence that can consign our kids to second-class lives.  We may fear that we will disintegrate or disappear if we leave the neighborhood, quit the church, forsake our roots, sell out, but we won’t. Those fears are deep, terrifying, and almost completely unfounded. Our allegiance to our stories and our enchanted places do not save us so much as comfort us against the specters of uncertainty and enable us to feel righteous in inaction. People are not needing to get back in their homes.

Writing about Clive Crook’s clear-headed essay on the downsides of homeownership, a, umm…, certain Economist blogger said something that could just as well apply to Pitt’s project.

Subsidising homeownership through huge tax breaks not only reinforces a cultural ethos in which home ownership is considered central to the American Dream, but also reinforces pernicious communitarian myths of the profound romance in seeing nothing and going nowhere.

This is an exceedingly unpopular thought, but it is a necessary one. Often, when we discourage people from leaving, we discourage them from thriving. When a better life is a bus ride away, it is obviously inhuman to slap a tax on tickets. And just how different from that is a subsidy to stay? I’ll be very pleased if the people who are given these houses thrive, but I also won’t be astonished if their lives aren’t transformed by their sleek new designer anchors.

Steve Burton helpfully lays out his version of the exchange between Daniel Larison and me. Isolated posts tackling complex issues are sure to lack the context of a broader set of assumption laid out across many different posts, no one reads every blog post, and anyway many of my posts are dashed off, unclear, and confused, so Steve bears no blame for mischaracterizing my argument:

In other words, maximizing the minimum (i.e., making the least well-off better off) should be our overriding moral goal. So Americans should welcome unlimited immigration from Mexico, Zimbabwe, etc., even if it makes most Americans worse off, because it makes the immigrants from Mexico, Zimbabwe, etc., better off — and Mexicans, Zimbabweans, etc. are less well-off than Americans. So, from a Rawlsian (or Rawlsish) point of view, their interests count for more than ours do.

I think this actually misunderstands the point of the difference principle in Rawls — or at least the way I like to interpret him. It is in everyone’s interest to live in a peaceful society of mutual advantage. A system of institutions requires that everyone living within it have reason to support it, and to comply with the terms of association it lays down, if it is to be well-ordered and stable. If the basic structure of institutions leaves some people much worse off than they could be under a feasible alternative, then they have no reason to accept its terms, or to comply with them. Now, I reject a strict maximin rule. I think it would be ridiculous to expect the wealthiest to make huge sacrifices to make the least well-off only marginally better off. The “strains of commitment” matter, and asking too much of the top can be as unjust and destabilizing as asking too much of the bottom. But, generally, asking if a system leave the least well-off better-off than the alternatives is simply a focused way of asking whether the system benefits everyone, and not only those with the most power to ensure that it benefits them.

In the post Steve references, I’m trying to draw attention to the fact that the basic structure of the global system of border enforcement and legal exclusion from labor market participation badly disadvantages millions and possibly billions. These people have no reason to accept or comply with the terms of the current dispensation, and in fact, many millions do not, crossing borders and working illegally. This non-compliance is a sign of the system’s injustice. Many millions of people are harmed by the status quo, which is why those people, who weigh their interests as heavily as we weigh ours, revolt against it by sneaking across borders and taking jobs that are offered to them. If we reject Thrasymachus, and seek justice and not merely advantage, we will take the harm we cause into account when considering how our domestic policies contribute to the justice of the overall global scheme.

I think our duties of beneficence are quite weak, unlike the utilitarian. We do not have great positive duties to others simply in virtue of their existence. We come to have strong positive duties due to our agreements and our special relationships. I deny that shared citizenship is a special relationship that confers especially strong positive duties. But however strong our duties to compatriots may be, they do not outweigh our negative duty not to harm or to respect basic rights. I may give my children everything, and others’ children nothing. But I may not kill anyone, no matter how much it helps my family. My argument is not so much that the policies of most wealthy countries represent a greedy parochialism, but that they actively harm and violate fundamental rights to physical movement and voluntary association. The essentially cooperative nature of justice is highlighted by the fact that we can ameliorate some of the harmful effects of the present system by implementing reforms policies that would make natives of rich countries better off on average. Though, of course, our strict duty not to actively harm others does not end when it begins to cut into our privilege.

There much more, naturally. For now, I hope that leaves things a little clearer.

Reason’s Kerry Howley (to whom I devote most of my energy for exclusive local attachment) introduced me to Lant Pritchett’s exciting and radical work on immigration, and knows way more about this stuff than I do, being a real journalist who covers this issue. So she’s got the goods on Larison’s ill-supported points about brain drain:

it’s probably not a great thing for a community to lose its most motivated members. But, this, too, is far more complicated than Larison wants to admit. We don’t know nearly as much as he pretends we do about the trade-offs, but we do know that people respond to incentives when they consider whether or not to pursue education. Thus, as the Center for Global Development’s Michael Clemens has shown, claims that the U.S. is stripping Africa of health care workers probably have it backward. Health care workers who immigrate to the United States may never have acquired those skills were immigration not an option. The countries Clemens studied didn’t suffer from a lack of health care workers, generally; they suffered from the fact that they could not employ the workers they educated. There is no incentive to acquire skills you have no hope of using, and the most motivated people in a community might not be motivated at all absent the hope of exit.

And Kerry’s analysis of Daniel’s analogy to domestic ghettos is spot-on:

Applied domestically, the alternate policy would be rather like forcing people to stay in undeveloped inner city ghettos. It would mean telling the children of poor parents that they could never leave the economically backward neighborhood they happened to be born in, even if that neighborhood offered no education or employment opportunities. It would entail prohibiting suburbanites from inviting inner city residents onto their property to perform an economic service.

You didn’t know it before now, but you are anxiously awaiting Kerry’s forthcoming Reason feature story on guest worker programs.