Month: September 2021

Where did all that money go?

PNRJ ethics, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 26 JDN 2459484

Since 9/11, the US has spent a staggering $14 trillion on the military, averaging $700 billion per year. Some of this was the routine spending necessary to maintain a large standing army (though it is fair to ask whether we really need our standing army to be quite this large).

But a recent study by the Costs of War Project suggests that a disturbing amount of this money has gone to defense contractors: Somewhere between one-third and one-half, or in other words between $5 and $7 trillion.

This is revenue, not profit; presumably these defense contractors also incurred various costs in materials, labor, and logistics. But even as raw revenue that is an enormous amount of money. Apple, one of the largest corporations in the world, takes in on average about $300 billion per year. Over 20 years, that would be $6 trillion—so, our government has basically spent as much on defense contractors as the entire world spent on Apple products.

Of that $5 to $7 trillion, one-fourth to one-third went to just five corporations. That’s over $2 trillion just to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. We pay more each year to Lockheed Martin than we do to the State Department and USAID.

Looking at just profit, each of these corporations appears to make a gross profit margin of about 10%. So we’re looking at something like $200 billion over 20 years—$10 billion per year—just handed over to shareholders.

And what were we buying with this money? Mostly overengineered high-tech military equipment that does little or nothing to actually protect soldiers, win battles, or promote national security. (It certainly didn’t do much to stop the Taliban from retaking control as soon as we left Afghanistan!)

Eisenhower tried to warn us about the military-industrial complex, but we didn’t listen.

Even when the equipment they sell us actually does its job, it still raises some serious questions about whether these are things we ought to be privatizing. As I mentioned in a post on private prisons several years ago, there are really three types of privatization of government functions.

Type 1 is innocuous: There are certain products and services that privatized businesses already provide in the open market and the government also has use for. There’s no reason the government should hesitate to buy wrenches or toothbrushes or hire cleaners or roofers.

Type 3 is the worst: There have been attempts to privatize fundamental government services, such as prisons, police, and the military. This is inherently unjust and undemocratic and must never be allowed. The use of force must never be for profit.

But defense contractors lie in the middle area, type 2: contracting services to specific companies that involve government-specific features such as military weapons. It’s true, there’s not that much difference functionally between a civilian airliner and a bomber plane, so it makes at least some sense that Boeing would be best qualified to produce both. This is not an obviously nonsensical idea. But there are still some very important differences, and I am deeply uneasy with the very concept of private corporations manufacturing weapons.


It’s true, there are some weapons that private companies make for civilians, such as knives and handguns. I think it would be difficult to maintain a free society while banning all such production, and it is literally impossible to ban anything that could potentially be used as a weapon (Wrenches? Kitchen knives? Tree branches!?). But we strictly regulate such production for very good reasons—and we probably don’t go far enough, really.

Moreover, there’s a pretty clear difference in magnitude if not in kind between a corporation making knives or even handguns and a corporation making cruise missiles—let alone nuclear missiles. Even if there is a legitimate overlap in skills and technology between making military weapons and whatever other products a corporation might make for the private market, it might still ultimately be better to nationalize the production of military weapons.

And then there are corporations that essentially do nothing but make military weapons—and we’re back to Lockheed-Martin again. Boeing does in fact make most of the world’s civilian airliners, in addition to making some military aircraft and missiles. But Lockheed-Martin? They pretty much just make fighters and bombers. This isn’t a company with generalized aerospace manufacturing skills that we are calling upon to make fighters in a time of war. This is an entire private, for-profit corporation that exists for the sole purpose of making fighter planes.

I really can’t see much reason not to simply nationalize Lockheed-Martin. They should be a division of the US Air Force or something.

I guess, in theory, the possibility of competing between different military contractors could potentially keep costs down… but, uh, how’s that working out for you? The acquisition costs of the F-35 are expected to run over $400 billion—the cost of the whole program a whopping $1.5 trillion. That doesn’t exactly sound like we’ve been holding costs down through competition.

And there really is something deeply unseemly about the idea of making profits through war. There’s a reason we have that word “profiteering”. Yes, manufacturing weapons has costs, and you should of course pay your workers and material suppliers at fair rates. But do we really want corporations to be making billions of dollars in profits for making machines of death?

But if nationalizing defense contractors or making them into nonprofit institutions seems too radical, I think there’s one very basic law we ought to make: No corporation with government contracts may engage in any form of lobbying. That’s such an obvious conflict of interest, such a clear opening for regulatory capture, that there’s really no excuse for it. If there must be shareholders profiting from war, at the very least they should have absolutely no say in whether we go to war or not.

And yet, we do allow defense contractors to spend on lobbying—and spend they do, tens of millions of dollars every year. Does all this lobbying affect our military budget or our willingness to go to war?

They must think so.

Hypocrisy is underrated

PNRJ cognitive science, ethics, heuristics and biases, politics , , , , , , ,

Sep 12 JDN 2459470

Hypocrisy isn’t a good thing, but it isn’t nearly as bad as most people seem to think. Often accusing someone of hypocrisy is taken as a knock-down argument for everything they are saying, and this is just utterly wrong. Someone can be a hypocrite and still be mostly right.

Often people are accused of hypocrisy when they are not being hypocritical; for instance the right wing seems to think that “They want higher taxes on the rich, but they are rich!” is hypocrisy, when in fact it’s simply altruism. (If they had wanted the rich guillotined, that would be hypocrisy. Maybe the problem is that the right wing can’t tell the difference?) Even worse, “They live under capitalism but they want to overthrow capitalism!” is not even close to hypocrisy—let alone why, how would someone overthrow a system they weren’t living under? (There are many things wrong with Marxists, but that is not one of them.)

But in fact I intend something stronger: Hypocrisy itself just isn’t that bad.


There are currently two classes of Republican politicians with regard to the COVID vaccines: Those who are consistent in their principles and don’t get the vaccines, and those who are hypocrites and get the vaccines while telling their constituents not to. Of the two, who is better? The hypocrites. At least they are doing the right thing even as they say things that are very, very wrong.

There are really four cases to consider. The principles you believe in could be right, or they could be wrong. And you could follow those principles, or you could be a hypocrite. Each of these two factors is independent.

If your principles are right and you are consistent, that’s the best case; if your principles are right and you are a hypocrite, that’s worse.

But if your principles are wrong and you are consistent, that’s the worst case; if your principles are wrong and you are a hypocrite, that’s better.

In fact I think for most things the ordering goes like this: Consistent Right > Hypocritical Wrong > Hypocritical Right > Consistent Wrong. Your behavior counts for more than your principles—so if you’re going to be a hypocrite, it’s better for your good actions to not match your bad principles.

Obviously if we could get people to believe good moral principles and then follow them, that would be best. And we should in fact be working to achieve that.

But if you know that someone’s moral principles are wrong, it doesn’t accomplish anything to accuse them of being a hypocrite. If it’s true, that’s a good thing.

Here’s a pretty clear example for you: Anyone who says that the Bible is infallible but doesn’t want gay people stoned to death is a hypocrite. The Bible is quite clear on this matter; Leviticus 20:13 really doesn’t leave much room for interpretation. By this standard, most Christians are hypocrites—and thank goodness for that. I owe my life to the hypocrisy of millions.

Of course if I could convince them that the Bible isn’t infallible—perhaps by pointing out all the things it says that contradict their most deeply-held moral and factual beliefs—that would be even better. But the last thing I want to do is make their behavior more consistent with their belief that the Bible is infallible; that would turn them into fanatical monsters. The Spanish Inquisition was very consistent in behaving according to the belief that the Bible is infallible.

Here’s another example: Anyone who thinks that cruelty to cats and dogs is wrong but is willing to buy factory-farmed beef and ham is a hypocrite. Any principle that would tell you that it’s wrong to kick a dog or cat would tell you that the way cows and pigs are treated in CAFOs is utterly unconscionable. But if you are really unwilling to give up eating meat and you can’t find or afford free-range beef, it still would be bad for you to start kicking dogs in a display of your moral consistency.

And one more example for good measure: The leaders of any country who resist human rights violations abroad but tolerate them at home are hypocrites. Obviously the best thing to do would be to fight human rights violations everywhere. But perhaps for whatever reason you are unwilling or unable to do this—one disturbing truth is that many human rights violations at home (such as draconian border policies) are often popular with your local constituents. Human-rights violations abroad are also often more severe—detaining children at the border is one thing, a full-scale genocide is quite another. So, for good reasons or bad, you may decide to focus your efforts on resisting human rights violations abroad rather than at home; this would make you a hypocrite. But it would still make you much better than a more consistent leader who simply ignores all human rights violations wherever they may occur.

In fact, there are cases in which it may be optimal for you to knowingly be a hypocrite. If you have two sets of competing moral beliefs, and you don’t know which is true but you know that as a whole they are inconsistent, your best option is to apply each set of beliefs in the domain for which you are most confident that it is correct, while searching for more information that might allow you to correct your beliefs and reconcile the inconsistency. If you are self-aware about this, you will know that you are behaving in a hypocritical way—but you will still behave better than you would if you picked the wrong beliefs and stuck to them dogmatically. In fact, given a reasonable level of risk aversion, you’ll be better off being a hypocrite than you would by picking one set of beliefs arbitrarily (say, at the flip of a coin). At least then you avoid the worst-case scenario of being the most wrong.

There is yet another factor to take into consideration. Sometimes following your own principles is hard.

Considerable ink has been spilled on the concept of akrasia, or “weakness of will”, in which we judge that A is better than B yet still find ourselves doing B. Philosophers continue to debate to this day whether this really happens. As a behavioral economist, I observe it routinely, perhaps even daily. In fact, I observe it in myself.

I think the philosophers’ mistake is to presume that there is one simple, well-defined “you” that makes all observations and judgments and takes actions. Our brains are much more complicated than that. There are many “you”s inside your brain, each with its own capacities, desires, and judgments. Yes, there is some important sense in which they are all somehow unified into a single consciousness—by a mechanism which still eludes our understanding. But it doesn’t take esoteric cognitive science to see that there are many minds inside you: Haven’t you ever felt an urge to do something you knew you shouldn’t do? Haven’t you ever succumbed to such an urge—drank the drink, eaten the dessert, bought the shoes, slept with the stranger—when it seemed so enticing but you knew it wasn’t really the right choice?

We even speak of being “of two minds” when we are ambivalent about something, and I think there is literal truth in this. The neural networks in your brain are forming coalitions, and arguing between them over which course of action you ought to take. Eventually one coalition will prevail, and your action will be taken; but afterward your reflective mind need not always agree that the coalition which won the vote was the one that deserved to.

The evolutionary reason for this is simple: We’re a kludge. We weren’t designed from the top down for optimal efficiency. We were the product of hundreds of millions of years of subtle tinkering, adding a bit here, removing a bit there, layering the mammalian, reflective cerebral cortex over the reptilian, emotional limbic system over the ancient, involuntary autonomic system. Combine this with the fact that we are built in pairs, with left and right halves of each kind of brain (and yes, they are independently functional when their connection is severed), and the wonder is that we ever agree with our own decisions.

Thus, there is a kind of hypocrisy that is not a moral indictment at all: You may genuinely and honestly agree that it is morally better to do something and still not be able to bring yourself to do it. You may know full well that it would be better to donate that money to malaria treatment rather than buy yourself that tub of ice cream—you may be on a diet and full well know that the ice cream won’t even benefit you in the long run—and still not be able to stop yourself from buying the ice cream.

Sometimes your feeling of hesitation at an altruistic act may be a useful insight; I certainly don’t think we should feel obliged to give all our income, or even all of our discretionary income, to high-impact charities. (For most people I encourage 5%. I personally try to aim for 10%. If all the middle-class and above in the First World gave even 1% we could definitely end world hunger.) But other times it may lead you astray, make you unable to resist the temptation of a delicious treat or a shiny new toy when even you know the world would be better off if you did otherwise.

Yet when following our own principles is so difficult, it’s not really much of a criticism to point out that someone has failed to do so, particularly when they themselves already recognize that they failed. The inconsistency between behavior and belief indicates that something is wrong, but it may not be any dishonesty or even anything wrong with their beliefs.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say you should stop ever calling out hypocrisy. Sometimes it is clearly useful to do so. But while hypocrisy is often the sign of a moral failing, it isn’t always—and even when it is, often as not the problem is the bad principles, not the behavior inconsistent with them.

Unending nightmares

PNRJ current events, ethics, market failure, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 19 JDN 2459477

We are living in a time of unending nightmares.

As I write this, we have just passed the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Yet only in the past month were US troops finally withdrawn from Afghanistan—and that withdrawal was immediately followed by a total collapse of the Afghan government and a reinstatement of the Taliban. The United States had been at war for nearly 20 years, spending trillions of dollars and causing thousands of deaths—and seems to have accomplished precisely nothing.

Some left-wing circles have been saying that the Taliban offered surrender all the way back in 2001; this is not accurate. Alternet even refers to it as an “unconditional surrender” which is utter nonsense. No one in their right mind—not even the most die-hard imperialist—would ever refuse an unconditional surrender, and the US most certainly did nothing of the sort.)

The Taliban did offer a peace deal in 2001, which would have involved giving the US control of Kandahar and turning Osama bin Laden over to a neutral country (not to the US or any US ally). It would also have granted amnesty to a number of high-level Taliban leaders, which was a major sticking point for the US. In hindsight, should they have taken the deal? Obviously. But I don’t think that was nearly so clear at the time—nor would it have been particularly palatable to most of the American public to leave Osama bin Laden under house arrest in some neutral country (which they never specified by the way; somewhere without US extradition, presumably?) and grant amnesty to the top leaders of the Taliban.

Thus, even after the 20-year nightmare of the war that refused to end, we are still back to the nightmare we were in before—Afghanistan ruled by fanatics who will oppress millions.

Yet somehow this isn’t even the worst unending nightmare, for after a year and a half we are still in the throes of a global pandemic which has now caused over 4.6 million deaths. We are still wearing masks wherever we go—at least, those of us who are complying with the rules. We have gotten vaccinated already, but likely will need booster shots—at least, those of us who believe in vaccines.

The most disturbing part of it all is how many people still aren’t willing to follow the most basic demands of public health agencies.

In case you thought this was just an American phenomenon: Just a few days ago I looked out the window of my apartment to see a protest in front of the Scottish Parliament complaining about vaccine and mask mandates, with signs declaring it all a hoax. (Yes, my current temporary apartment overlooks the Scottish Parliament.)

Some of those signs displayed a perplexing innumeracy. One sign claimed that the vaccines must be stopped because they had killed 1,400 people in the UK. This is not actually true; while there have been 1,400 people in the UK who died after receiving a vaccine, 48 million people in the UK have gotten the vaccine, and many of them were old and/or sick, so, purely by statistics, we’d expect some of them to die shortly afterward. Less than 100 of these deaths are in any way attributable to the vaccine. But suppose for a moment that we took the figure at face value, and assumed, quite implausibly, that everyone who died shortly after getting the vaccine was in fact killed by the vaccine. This 1,400 figure needs to be compared against the 156,000 UK deaths attributable to COVID itself. Since 7 million people in the UK have tested positive for the virus, this is a fatality rate of over 2%. Even if we suppose that literally everyone in the UK who hasn’t been vaccinated in fact had the virus, that would still only be 20 million (the UK population of 68 million – the 48 million vaccinated) people, so the death rate for COVID itself would still be at least 0.8%—a staggeringly high fatality rate for a pandemic airborne virus. Meanwhile, even on this ridiculous overestimate of the deaths caused by the vaccine, the fatality rate for vaccination would be at most 0.003%. Thus, even by the anti-vaxers’ own claims, the vaccine is nearly 300 times safer than catching the virus. If we use the official estimates of a 1.9% COVID fatality rate and 100 deaths caused by the vaccines, the vaccines are in fact over 9000 times safer.

Yet it does seem to be worse in the United States, as while 22% of Americans described themselves as opposed to vaccination in general, only about 2% of Britons said the same.

But this did not translate to such a large difference in actual vaccination: While 70% of people in the UK have received the vaccine, 64% of people in the US have. Both of these figures are tantalizingly close to, yet clearly below, the at least 84% necessary to achieve herd immunity. (Actually some early estimates thought 60-70% might be enough—but epidemiologists no longer believe this, and some think that even 90% wouldn’t be enough.)

Indeed, the predominant tone I get from trying to keep up on the current news in epidemiology is fatalism: It’s too late, we’ve already failed to contain the virus, we won’t reach herd immunity, we won’t ever eradicate it. At this point they now all seem to think that COVID is going to become the new influenza, always with us, a major cause of death that somehow recedes into the background and seems normal to us—but COVID, unlike influenza, may stick around all year long. The one glimmer of hope is that influenza itself was severely hampered by the anti-pandemic procedures, and influenza cases and deaths are indeed down in both the US and UK (though not zero, nor as drastically reduced as many have reported).

The contrast between terrorism and pandemics is a sobering one, as pandemics kill far more people, yet somehow don’t provoke anywhere near as committed a response.

9/11 was a massive outlier in terrorism, at 3,000 deaths on a single day; otherwise the average annual death rate by terrorism is about 20,000 worldwide, mostly committed by Islamist groups. Yet the threat is not actually to Americans in particular; annual deaths due to terrorism in the US are less than 100—and most of these by right-wing domestic terrorists, not international Islamists.

Meanwhile, in an ordinary year, influenza would kill 50,000 Americans and somewhere between 300,000 and 700,000 people worldwide. COVID in the past year and a half has killed over 650,000 Americans and 4.6 million people worldwide—annualize that and it would be 400,000 per year in the US and 3 million per year worldwide.

Yet in response to terrorism we as a country were prepared to spend $2.3 trillion dollars, lose nearly 4,000 US and allied troops, and kill nearly 50,000 civilians—not even counting the over 60,000 enemy soldiers killed. It’s not even clear that this accomplished anything as far as reducing terrorism—by some estimates it actually made it worse.

Were we prepared to respond so aggressively to pandemics? Certainly not to influenza; we somehow treat all those deaths are normal or inevitable. In response to COVID we did spend a great deal of money, even more than the wars in fact—a total of nearly $6 trillion. This was a very pleasant surprise to me (it’s the first time in my lifetime I’ve witnessed a serious, not watered-down Keynesian fiscal stimulus in the United States). And we imposed lockdowns—but these were all-too quickly removed, despite the pleading of public health officials. It seems to be that our governments tried to impose an aggressive response, but then too many of the citizens pushed back against it, unwilling to give up their “freedom” (read: convenience) in the name of public safety.

For the wars, all most of us had to do was pay some taxes and sit back and watch; but for the pandemic we were actually expected to stay home, wear masks, and get shots? Forget it.

Politics was clearly a very big factor here: In the US, the COVID death rate map and the 2020 election map look almost equivalent: By and large, people who voted for Biden have been wearing masks and getting vaccinated, while people who voted for Trump have not.

But pandemic response is precisely the sort of thing you can’t do halfway. If one area is containing a virus and another isn’t, the virus will still remain uncontained. (As some have remarked, it’s rather like having a “peeing section” of a swimming pool. Much worse, actually, as urine contains relatively few bacteria—but not zero—and is quickly diluted by the huge quantities of water in a swimming pool.)

Indeed, that seems to be what has happened, and why we can’t seem to return to normal life despite months of isolation. Since enough people are refusing to make any effort to contain the virus, the virus remains uncontained, and the only way to protect ourselves from it is to continue keeping restrictions in place indefinitely.

Had we simply kept the original lockdowns in place awhile longer and then made sure everyone got the vaccine—preferably by paying them for doing it, rather than punishing them for not—we might have been able to actually contain the virus and then bring things back to normal.

But as it is, this is what I think is going to happen: At some point, we’re just going to give up. We’ll see that the virus isn’t getting any more contained than it ever was, and we’ll be so tired of living in isolation that we’ll finally just give up on doing it anymore and take our chances. Some of us will continue to get our annual vaccines, but some won’t. Some of us will continue to wear masks, but most won’t. The virus will become a part of our lives, just as influenza did, and we’ll convince ourselves that millions of deaths is no big deal.

And then the nightmare will truly never end.

Realistic open borders

PNRJ core principles, development economics, ethics, inequality, personal, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , ,

Sep 5 JDN 2459463

In an earlier post I lamented the tight restrictions on border crossings that prevail even between allied First World countries. (On a personal note, you’ll be happy to know that our visas have cleared and we are now moved into Edinburgh, cat and all, though we are still in temporary housing and our official biometric residence permits haven’t yet arrived.)

In this post I’d like to speculate on how we might get from our current regime to something more like open borders.

Obviously we can’t simply remove all border restrictions immediately. That would be a political non-starter, and even ethically or economically it wouldn’t make very much sense. There are sensible reasons behind some of our border regulations—just not most of them.

Instead we would want to remove a few restrictions at a time, starting with the most onerous or ridiculous ones.

High on my list in the UK in particular would be the requirement that pets must fly as cargo. I literally can’t think of a good reason for this; it seems practically designed to cost travelers more money and traumatize as many pets as possible. If it’s intended to support airlines somehow, please simply subsidize airlines. (But really, why are you doing that? You should be taxing airlines because of their high carbon emissions. Subsidize boats and trains.) If it’s intended to somehow prevent the spread of rabies, it’s obviously unnecessary, since every pet moved to the UK already has to document a recent rabies vaccine. But this particular rule seems to be a quirk of the UK in particular, hence not very generalizable.

But here’s one that actually seems quite common: Financial requirements for visas. Even tourist visas in most countries cost money, in amounts that seem to vary according to some sort of occult ritual. I can see no sensible economic reason why a visa would be $130 in Vietnam but only $20 in neighboring Cambodia, or why Kazakhstan can be visited for $25 but Azerbaijan costs $100, or why Myanmar costs only $30 but Bhutan will run you over $200.

Work visas are considerably more demanding still.

Financial requirements in the UK are especially onerous; you have to make above a certain salary and have a certain amount of savings in the bank, based on your family size. This was no problem for me personally, but it damn well shouldn’t be; I have a PhD in economics. My salary is now twice what it was as a grad student, and honestly that’s a good deal less than I was hoping for (and would have gotten on the tenure track at an R1 university).

All the countries in the Schengen Area have their own requirements for “financial subsistence” for visa applications, ranging from a trivial €3 in Hungary (not per day, just total; why do they even bother?) or manageable €14 per day in Latvia, through the more demanding amounts of €45 per day in Germany and Italy, to €92 per day in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, all the way up to the utterly unreasonable €120 per day in France. That would be €43,800 per year, or $51,700. Apparently you must be at least middle class to enter France.

Canada has a similar requirement known as “proof of funds”, but it’s considerably more reasonable, since you can substitute proof of employment and there are no wage minimums for such employment. Even if you don’t already have a job you can still apply and the minimum requirement is actually lower than the poverty line in Canada.

The United States doesn’t require financial requirements for most visas, but it does have a $160 visa fee. And the H1-B visa in particular (the nearest equivalent to the Skilled Worker visa I’ve got in the UK) requires that your wage or salary be at least the “prevailing wage” in your industry—meaning it is nearly impossible for a company to save money by hiring people on H1-B visas and hence they have very little incentive to hire H1-B workers. If you are of above-average talent and being paid only average wages, I guess they can save some money that way. But this is not how trade is supposed to work—nobody requires that you pay US prices for goods shipped from China, and if they did, nobody would ever buy anything from China. This is blatant, naked protectionism—but we’re apparently okay with it as long as it’s trade in labor instead of goods.

I wasn’t able to quickly find whether there are similar financial requirements in other countries. Perhaps there aren’t; these are the countries most people actually want to move to anyway. Permanent migration is overwhelminginly toward OECD (read: First World) countries, and is actually helping us sustain our populations in the face of low birth rates.

I must admit, I can see some fiscal benefits for a country not allowing poor people in, but this practice raises some very deep ethical problems: What right do we have to do this?

If someone is born poor in Laredo, Texas, we take responsibility for them as a US citizen. Maybe we don’t treat them particularly well (that is Texas, after all), but we do give them access to certain basic services, such as emergency services, Medicaid, TANF and SNAP. They are allowed to vote, own property, and even hold office in the United States. But if that same person were born in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas—literally less than a mile away, right across the river—they would receive none of these benefits. They would not even be allowed to cross the river without a passport and a visa.

In some ways the contrast is even more dire if we consider a more liberal US state. A poor person born in Chula Vista, California has access to the full array of California services; Medi-Cal is honestly something close to a single-payer healthcare system, though the full morass of privatized US healthcare is layered on top of us. Then there is CalWORKS, CalFresh, and so on. But the same person born in Tijuana, Baja California would get none of these benefits.

They could be the same person. They could look the same and have essentially the same culture—even the same language, given how many Californians speak Spanish and how many Mexicans speak English. But if they were born on the other side of a river (in Texas) or even an arbitrary line (in California), we treat them completely differently. And then to add insult to injury, we won’t even let them across, not in spite, but because of how poor and desperate they are. If they were rich and educated, we’d let them come across—but then why would they need to?

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”?

Some restrictions may apply.

Economists talk often of “trade barriers”, but in real terms we have basically removed all trade barriers in goods. Yes, there are still some small tariffs, and the occasional quota here and there—and these should go away too, especially the quotas, because they don’t even raise revenue—but in general we have an extremely globalized economy in terms of goods. The same complex product, like a car or a smartphone, is often made of parts from a dozen countries.

But when it comes to labor, we are still living in a protectionist world. Crossing borders to work is difficult, time-consuming, and above all, expensive. This dramatically reduces opportunities for workers to move where their labor is most valued—which hurts not only them, but also anyone who would employ them or buy products made by them. The poorest people are those who stand to gain the most from crossing borders, and they are precisely the ones that we work hardest to forbid.

So let’s start with that, shall we? We can keep all this nonsense about passports, visas, background checks, and customs inspections. It’s probably all unnecessary and wasteful and unfair, but politically it’s clearly too popular to remove. Let’s just remove this: No more financial requirements or fees for work visas. If you want to come to another country to work, you have to go through an application and all that; fine. But you shouldn’t have to prove you aren’t poor. Poor people have just as much right to live here as anybody else—and if we let them do so, they’d be a lot less poor.