immigration

Conflict without shared reality

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, inequality, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 17 JDN 2460905

Donald Trump has federalized the police in Washington D.C. and deployed the National Guard. He claims he is doing this in response to a public safety emergency and crime that is “out of control”.

Crime rates in Washington, D.C. are declining and overall at their lowest level in 30 years. Its violent crime rate has not been this low since the 1960s.

By any objective standard, there is no emergency here. Crime in D.C. is not by any means out of control.

Indeed, across the United States, homicide rates are as low as they have been in 60 years.

But we do not live in a world where politics is based on objective truth.

We live in a world where the public perception of reality itself is shaped by the political narrative.

One of the first things that authoritarians do to control these narratives is try to make their followers distrust objective sources. I watch in disgust as not simply the Babylon Bee (which is a right-wing satire site that tries really hard to be funny but never quite manages it) but even the Atlantic (a mainstream news outlet generally considered credible) feeds—in multiple articles—into this dangerous lie that crime is increasing and the official statistics are somehow misleading us about that.

Of course the Atlantic‘s take is much more nuanced; but quite frankly, now is not the time for nuance. A fascist is trying to take over our government, and he needs to be resisted at every turn by every means possible. You need to be calling him out on every single lie he makes—yes, every single one, I know there are a lot of them, and that’s kind of the point—rather than trying to find alternative framings on which maybe part of what he said could somehow be construed as reasonable from a certain point of view. Every time you make Trump sound more reasonable than he is—and mainstream news outlets have done this literally hundreds of times—you are pushing America closer to fascism.

I really don’t know what to do here.

It is impossible to resolve conflicts when they are not based on shared reality.

No policy can solve a crime wave that doesn’t exist. No trade agreement can stop unfair trading practices that aren’t happening. Nothing can stop vaccines from causing autism that they already don’t cause. There is no way to fix problems when those problems are completely imaginary.

I used to think that political conflict was about different values which had to be balanced against one another: Liberty versus security, efficiency versus equality, justice versus mercy. I thought that we all agreed on the basic facts and even most of the values, and were just disagreeing about how to weigh certain values over others.

Maybe I was simply naive; maybe it’s never been like that. But it certainly isn’t right now. We aren’t disagreeing about what should be done; we are disagreeing about what is happening in front of our eyes. We don’t simply have different priorities or even different values; it’s like we are living in different worlds.

I have read, e.g. by Jonathan Haidt, that conservatives largely understand what liberals want, but liberals don’t really understand what conservatives want. (I would like to take one of the tests they use in these experiments, see how I actually do; but I’ve never been able to find one.)

Haidt’s particular argument seems to be that liberals don’t “understand” the “moral dimensions” of loyalty, authority, and sanctity, because we only “understand” harm and fairness as the basis of morality. But just because someone says something is morally relevant, that doesn’t mean it is morally relevant! And indeed, based on more or less the entirety of ethical philosophy, I can say that harm and fairness are morality, and the others simply aren’t. They are distortions of morality, they are inherently evil, and we are right to oppose them at every turn. Loyalty, authority, and sanctity are what fed Nazi Germany and the Spanish Inquisition.

This claim that liberals don’t understand conservatives has always seemed very odd to me: I feel like I have a pretty clear idea what conservatives want, it’s just that what they want is terrible: Kick out the immigrants, take money from the poor and give it to the rich, and put rich straight Christian White men back in charge of everything. (I mean, really, if that’s not what they want, why do they keep voting for people who do it? Revealed preferences, people!)

Or, more sympathetically: They want to go back to a nostalgia-tinted vision of the 1950s and 1960s in which it felt like things were going well for our country—because they were blissfully ignorant of all the violence and injustice in the world. No, thank you, Black people and queer people do not want to go back to how we were treated in the 1950s—when segregation was legal and Alan Turing was chemically castrated. (And they also don’t seem to grasp that among the things that did make some things go relatively well in that period were unions, antitrust law and progressive taxes, which conservatives now fight against at every turn.)

But I think maybe part of what’s actually happening here is that a lot of conservatives actually “want” things that literally don’t make sense, because they rest upon assumptions about the world that simply aren’t true.

They want to end “out of control” crime that is the lowest it’s been in decades.

They want to stop schools from teaching things that they already aren’t teaching.

They want the immigrants to stop bringing drugs and crime that they aren’t bringing.

They want LGBT people to stop converting their children, which we already don’t and couldn’t. (And then they want to do their own conversions in the other direction—which also don’t work, but cause tremendous harm.)

They want liberal professors to stop indoctrinating their students in ways we already aren’t and can’t. (If we could indoctrinate our students, don’t you think we’d at least make them read the syllabus?)

They want to cut government spending by eliminating “waste” and “fraud” that are trivial amounts, without cutting the things that are actually expensive, like Social Security, Medicare, and the military. They think we can balance the budget without cutting these things or raising taxes—which is just literally mathematically impossible.

They want to close off trade to bring back jobs that were sent offshore—but those jobs weren’t sent offshore, they were replaced by robots. (US manufacturing output is near its highest ever, even though manufacturing employment is half what it once was.)


And meanwhile, there’s a bunch of real problems that aren’t getting addressed: Soaring inequality, a dysfunctional healthcare system, climate change, the economic upheaval of AI—and they either don’t care about those, aren’t paying attention to them, or don’t even believe they exist.

It feels a bit like this:

You walk into a room and someone points a gun at you, shouting “Drop the weapon!” but you’re not carrying a weapon. And you show your hands, and try to explain that you don’t have a weapon, but they just keep shouting “Drop the weapon!” over and over again. Someone else has already convinced them that you have a weapon, and they expect you to drop that weapon, and nothing you say can change their mind about this.

What exactly should you do in that situation?

How do you avoid getting shot?

Do you drop something else and say it’s the weapon (make some kind of minor concession that looks vaguely like what they asked for)? Do you try to convince them that you have a right to the weapon (accept their false premise but try to negotiate around it)? Do you just run away (leave the country?)? Do you double down and try even harder to convince them that you really, truly, have no weapon?

I’m not saying that everyone on the left has a completely accurate picture of reality; there are clearly a lot of misconceptions on this side of the aisle as well. But at least among the mainstream center left, there seems to be a respect for objective statistics and a generally accurate perception of how the world works—the “reality-based community”. Sometimes liberals make mistakes, have bad ideas, or even tell lies; but I don’t hear a lot of liberals trying to fix problems that don’t exist or asking for the government budget to be changed in ways that violate basic arithmetic.

I really don’t know what do here, though.

How do you change people’s minds when they won’t even agree on the basic facts?

The inequality of factor mobility

PNRJ critique of neoclassical economics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 24 JDN 2460212

I’ve written before about how free trade has brought great benefits, but also great costs. It occurred to me this week that there is a fairly simple reason why free trade has never been as good for the world as the models would suggest: Some factors of production are harder to move than others.

To some extent this is due to policy, especially immigration policy. But it isn’t just that.There are certain inherent limitations that render some kinds of inputs more mobile than others.

Broadly speaking, there are five kinds of inputs to production: Land, labor, capital, goods, and—oft forgotten—ideas.

You can of course parse them differently: Some would subdivide different types of labor or capital, and some things are hard to categorize this way. The same product, such as an oven or a car, can be a good or capital depending on how it’s used. (Or, consider livestock: is that labor, or capital? Or perhaps it’s a good? Oddly, it’s often discussed as land, which just seems absurd.) Maybe ideas can be considered a form of capital. There is a whole literature on human capital, which I increasingly find distasteful, because it seems to imply that economists couldn’t figure out how to value human beings except by treating them as a machine or a financial asset.

But this four-way categorization is particularly useful for what I want to talk about today. Because the rate at which those things move is very different.

Ideas move instantly. It takes literally milliseconds to transmit an idea anywhere in the world. This wasn’t always true; in ancient times ideas didn’t move much faster than people, and it wasn’t until the invention of the telegraph that their transit really became instantaneous. But it is certainly true now; once this post is published, it can be read in a hundred different countries in seconds.

Goods move in hours. Air shipping can take a product just about anywhere in less than a day. Sea shipping is a bit slower, but not radically so. It’s never been easier to move goods all around the world, and this has been the great success of free trade.

Capital moves in weeks. Here it might be useful to subdivide different types of capital: It’s surely faster to move an oven or even a car (the more good-ish sort of capital) than it is to move an entire factory (capital par excellence). But all in all, we can move stuff pretty fast these days. If you want to move your factory to China or Indonesia, you can probably get it done in a matter of weeks or at most months.

Labor moves in months. This one is a bit ironic, since it is surely easier to carry a single human person—or even a hundred human people—than all the equipment necessary to run an entire factory. But moving labor isn’t just a matter of physically carrying people from one place to another. It’s not like tourism, where you just pack and go. Moving labor requires uprooting people from where they used to live and letting them settle in a new place. It takes a surprisingly long time to establish yourself in a new environment—frankly even after two years in Edinburgh I’m not sure I quite managed it. And all the additional restrictions we’ve added involving border crossings and immigration laws and visas only make it that much slower.

Land moves never. This one seems perfectly obvious, but is also often neglected. You can’t pick up a mountain, a lake, a forest, or even a corn field and carry it across the border. (Yes, eventually plate tectonics will move our land around—but that’ll be millions of years.) Basically, land stays put—and so do all the natural environments and ecosystems on that land. Land isn’t as important for production as it once was; before industrialization, we were dependent on the land for almost everything. But we absolutely still are dependent on the land! If all the topsoil in the world suddenly disappeared, the economy wouldn’t simply collapse: the human race would face extinction. Moreover, a lot of fixed infrastructure, while technically capital, is no more mobile than land. We couldn’t much more easily move the Interstate Highway System to China than we could move Denali.

So far I have said nothing particularly novel. Yeah, clearly it’s much easier to move a mathematical theorem (if such a thing can even be said to “move”) than it is to move a factory, and much easier to move a factory than to move a forest. So what?

But now let’s consider the impact this has on free trade.

Ideas can move instantly, so free trade in ideas would allow all the world to instantaneously share all ideas. This isn’t quite what happens—but in the Internet age, we’re remarkably close to it. If anything, the world’s governments seem to be doing their best to stop this from happening: One of our most strictly-enforced trade agreements, the TRIPS Accord, is about stopping ideas from spreading too easily. And as far as I can tell, region-coding on media goes against everything free trade stands for, yet here we are. (Why, it’s almost as if these policies are more about corporate profits than they ever were about freedom!)

Goods and capital can move quickly. This is where we have really felt the biggest effects of free trade: Everything in the US says “made in China” because the capital is moved to China and then the goods are moved back to the US.

But it would honestly have made more sense to move all those workers instead. For all their obvious flaws, US institutions and US infrastructure are clearly superior to those in China. (Indeed, consider this: We may be so aware of the flaws because the US is especially transparent.) So, the most absolutely efficient way to produce all those goods would be to leave the factories in the US, and move the workers from China instead. If free trade were to achieve its greatest promises, this is the sort of thing we would be doing.


Of course that is not what we did. There are various reasons for this: A lot of the people in China would rather not have to leave. The Chinese government would not want them to leave. A lot of people in the US would not want them to come. The US government might not want them to come.

Most of these reasons are ultimately political: People don’t want to live around people who are from a different nation and culture. They don’t consider those people to be deserving of the same rights and status as those of their own country.

It may sound harsh to say it that way, but it’s clearly the truth. If the average American person valued a random Chinese person exactly the same as they valued a random other American person, our immigration policy would look radically different. US immigration is relatively permissive by world standards, and that is a great part of American success. Yet even here there is a very stark divide between the citizen and the immigrant.

There are morally and economically legitimate reasons to regulate immigration. There may even be morally and economically legitimate reasons to value those in your own nation above those in other nations (though I suspect they would not justify the degree that most people do). But the fact remains that in terms of pure efficiency, the best thing to do would obviously be to move all the people to the place where productivity is highest and do everything there.

But wouldn’t moving people there reduce the productivity? Yes. Somewhat. If you actually tried to concentrate the entire world’s population into the US, productivity in the US would surely go down. So, okay, fine; stop moving people to a more productive place when it has ceased to be more productive. What this should do is average out all the world’s labor productivity to the same level—but a much higher level than the current world average, and frankly probably quite close to its current maximum.

Once you consider that moving people and things does have real costs, maybe fully equaling productivity wouldn’t make sense. But it would be close. The differences in productivity across countries would be small.

They are not small.

Labor productivity worldwide varies tremendously. I don’t count Ireland, because that’s Leprechaun Economics (this is really US GDP with accounting tricks, not Irish GDP). So the prize for highest productivity goes to Norway, at $100 per worker hour (#ScandinaviaIsBetter). The US is doing the best among large countries, at an impressive $73 per hour. And at the very bottom of the list, we have places like Bangladesh at $4.79 per hour and Cambodia at $3.43 per hour. So, roughly speaking, there is about a 20-to-1 ratio between the most productive and least productive countries.

I could believe that it’s not worth it to move US production at $73 per hour to Norway to get it up to $100 per hour. (For one thing, where would we fit it all?) But I find it far more dubious that it wouldn’t make sense to move most of Cambodia’s labor to the US. (Even all 16 million people is less than what the US added between 2010 and 2020.) Even given the fact that these Cambodian workers are less healthy and less educated than American workers, they would almost certainly be more productive on the other side of the Pacific, quite likely ten times as productive as they are now. Yet we haven’t moved them, and have no plans to.

That leaves the question of whether we will move our capital to them. We have been doing so in China, and it worked (to a point). Before that, we did it in Korea and Japan, and it worked. Cambodia will probably come along sooner or later. For now, that seems to be the best we can do.

But I still can’t shake the thought that the world is leaving trillions of dollars on the table by refusing to move people. The inequality of factor mobility seems to be a big part of the world’s inequality, period.

On the Overton Window

PNRJ core principles, ethics, heuristics and biases, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , ,

Jul 24 JDN 2459786

As you are no doubt aware, a lot of people on the Internet like to loudly proclaim support for really crazy, extreme ideas. Some of these people actually believe in those ideas, and if you challenge them, will do their best to defend them. Those people are wrong at the level of substantive policy, but there’s nothing wrong with their general approach: If you really think that anarchism or communism is a good thing, it only makes sense that you’d try to convince other people. You might have a hard time of it (in part because you are clearly wrong), but it makes sense that you’d try.

But there is another class of people who argue for crazy, extreme ideas. When pressed, they will admit they don’t really believe in abolishing the police or collectivizing all wealth, but they believe in something else that’s sort of vaguely in that direction, and they think that advocating for the extreme idea will make people more likely to accept what they actually want.

They often refer to this as “shifting the Overton Window”. As Matt Yglesias explained quite well a year ago, this is not actually what Overton was talking about.

But, in principle, it could still be a thing that works. There is a cognitive bias known as anchoring which is often used in marketing: If I only offered a $5 bottle of wine and a $20 bottle of wine, you might think the $20 bottle is too expensive. But if I also include a $50 bottle, that makes you adjust your perceptions of what constitutes a “reasonable” price for wine, and may make you more likely to buy the $20 bottle after all.

It could be, therefore, that an extreme policy demand makes people more willing to accept moderate views, as a sort of compromise. Maybe demanding the abolition of police is a way of making other kinds of police reform seem more reasonable. Maybe showing pictures of Marx and chanting “eat the rich” could make people more willing to accept higher capital gains taxes. Maybe declaring that we are on the verge of apocalyptic climate disaster will make people more willing to accept tighter regulations on carbon emissions and subsidies for solar energy.

Then again—does it actually seem to do that? I see very little evidence that it does. All those demands for police abolition haven’t changed the fact that defunding the police is unpopular. Raising taxes on the rich is popular, but it has been for awhile now (and never was with, well, the rich). And decades of constantly shouting about imminent climate catastrophe is really starting to look like crying wolf.

To see why this strategy seems to be failing, I think it’s helpful to consider how it feels from the other side. Take a look at some issues where someone else is trying to get you to accept a particular view, and consider whether someone advocating a more extreme view would make you more likely to compromise.

Your particular opinions may vary, but here are some examples that would apply to me, and, I suspect, many of you.

If someone says they want tighter border security, I’m skeptical—it’s pretty tight already. But in and of itself, this would not be such a crazy idea. Certainly I agree that it is possible to have too little border security, and so maybe that turns out to be the state we’re in.

But then, suppose that same person, or someone closely allied to them, starts demanding the immediate deportation of everyone who was not born in the United States, even those who immigrated legally and are naturalized or here on green cards. This is a crazy, extreme idea that’s further in the same direction, so on this anchoring theory, it should make me more willing to accept the idea of tighter border security. And yet, I can say with some confidence that it has no such effect.

Indeed, if anything I think it would make me less likely to accept tighter border security, in proportion to how closely aligned those two arguments are. If they are coming from the same person, or the same political party, it would cause me to suspect that the crazy, extreme policy is the true objective, and the milder, compromise policy is just a means toward that end. It also suggests certain beliefs and attitudes about immigration in general—xenophobia, racism, ultranationalism—that I oppose even more strongly. If you’re talking about deporting all immigrants, you make me suspect that your reasons for wanting tighter border security are not good ones.

Let’s try another example. Suppose someone wants to cut taxes on upper income brackets. In our current state, I think that would be a bad idea. But there was a time not so long ago when I would have agreed with it: Even I have to admit that a top bracket of 94% (as we had in 1943) sounds a little ridiculous, and is surely on the wrong side of the Laffer curve. So the basic idea of cutting top tax rates is not inherently crazy or ridiculous.

Now, suppose that same idea came from the same person, or the same party, or the same political movement, as one that was arguing for the total abolition of all taxation. This is a crazy, extreme idea; it would amount to either total anarcho-capitalism with no government at all, or some sort of bizarre system where the government is funded entirely through voluntary contributions. I think it’s pretty obvious that such a system would be terrible, if not outright impossible; and anyone whose understanding of political economy is sufficiently poor that they would fail to see this is someone whose overall judgment on questions of policy I must consider dubious. Once again, the presence of the extreme view does nothing to make me want to consider the moderate view, and may even make me less willing to do so.

Perhaps I am an unusually rational person, not so greatly affected by anchoring biases? Perhaps. But whereas I do feel briefly tempted by to buy the $20 wine bottle by the effect of the $50 wine bottle, and must correct myself with knowledge I have about anchoring bias, the presentation of an extreme political view never even makes me feel any temptation to accept some kind of compromise with it. Learning that someone supports something crazy or ridiculous—or is willing to say they do, even if deep down they don’t—makes me automatically lower my assessment of their overall credibility. If anything, I think I am tempted to overreact in that direction, and have to remind myself of the Stopped Clock Principle: reversed stupidity is not intelligence, and someone can have both bad ideas and good ones.

Moreover, the empirical data, while sketchy, doesn’t seem to support this either; where the Overton Window (in the originally intended sense) has shifted, as on LGBT rights, it was because people convincingly argued that the “extreme” position was in fact an entirely reasonable and correct view. There was a time not so long ago that same-sex marriage was deemed unthinkable, and the “moderate” view was merely decriminalizing sodomy; but we demanded, and got, same-sex marriage, not as a strategy to compromise on decriminalizing sodomy, but because we actually wanted same-sex marriage and had good arguments for it. I highly doubt we would have been any more successful if we had demanded something ridiculous and extreme, like banning opposite-sex marriage.

The resulting conclusion seems obvious and banal: Only argue for things you actually believe in.

Yet, somehow, that seems to be a controversial view these days.

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.

Migration holds together the American Dream

PNRJ development economics, inequality, public policy , , , , ,

Sep 29 JDN 2458757

The United States is an exceptional country in many ways, some good (highest income), some bad (highest incarceration rate), and some mixed (largest military). But as you compare the US to other countries, one thing that will immediately strike you is how we are a nation of migrants.

I don’t just mean immigrants, people who moved to the country after being born here—though we certainly are also a country of immigrants. About 99% of the US population descends from immigrants, mostly European—there aren’t a lot of countries that can even say the majority of their population migrated from another continent. Over 45 million Americans are foreign-born, which is not only the highest in the world; it is almost one-fifth of all the immigrants in the world. We experience a net inflow of immigrants averaging over 1 million people per year, by far the highest in the world. Almost half of the increase in our workforce over the last decade was due to immigrants.

But the US is full of migration in another way, which may in fact be even more important: Internal migration, from country to city, from one city to another, or from one state to another. Every year, about 12.5% of Americans move somewhere; about 10% move to a different state. No other country even comes close to this level of internal migration. According to the US census, about two-thirds of moves are within the same county, and yet each year there are ten times as many Americans who moved to a different county as there are immigrants to the United States. There are more cross-state migrants to California and Texas alone than there are immigrants to the entire country. There are about as many people who move each year within the United States as there are foreign-born individuals total.

This internal migration is central to the high productivity of the American economy. Internal migration is central to the process of urbanization, which drives a great deal of economic development. It is not a coincidence that the United States is one of the world’s most urbanized countries as well as one of the richest, nor that the ranking of US states by urbanization and the ranking of US states by per-capita income look very much alike.

Income_Urbanization

On average, increasing a state’s urbanization by 1 percentage point increases its average per-capita income by $270 per year (in chained 2009 dollars); since most of that increase is going to the people who actually moved, this means that the average income increase as a result of moving from the country to the city is likely over $20,000 per year. To put it another way, if Maine could become as urbanized as California, we would expect its per-capita income to increase from about $39,000 per year to about $54,000 per year—which is just about California’s per-capita income.

Indeed, migration is probably the one thing holding up our otherwise dismal level of income mobility, which still trails behind most other First World countries (and far behind Denmark and Norway, because #ScandinaviaIsBetter). Canada also does extremely well in terms of income mobility, and Canada also has a high rate of internal migration, with almost 1% of Canadians moving to a new province in any given year. Canada is probably what the US would look like with a European-style social safety net; our high internal migration rate might actually get us better income mobility than is currently achieved by say France or Germany.

Indeed, migration may be the main reason there is still some vestige of an American Dream. It’s not what it used to be, but it isn’t yet dead either. Two-thirds of American adults have more real (inflation-adjusted) income than their parents. Intergenerational income mobility in the US grew quickly in the 1940s and 1950s, grew more slowly in the 1960s and 1970s, and has been stagnant ever since. While the odds of moving to a different income bracket have remained stable, income inequality has increased over the last 40 years, which means that the differences between those brackets have become larger.

Privatized prisons were always an atrocity

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , , , ,

Aug 4 JDN 2458700

Let’s be clear: The camps that Trump built on the border absolutely are concentration camps. They aren’t extermination camps—yet?—but they are in fact “a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard.” Above all, it is indeed the case that “Persons are placed in such camps often on the basis of identification with a particular ethnic or political group rather than as individuals and without benefit either of indictment or fair trial.”

And I hope it goes without saying that this is an unconscionable atrocity that will remain a stain upon America for generations to come. Trump was clear from the beginning that this was his intention, and thus this blood is on the hands of anyone who voted for him. (The good news is that even they are now having second thoughts: Even a majority of Fox News viewers agrees that Trump has gone too far.)

Yet these camps are only a symptom of a much older disease: We should have seen this sort of cruelty and inhumanity coming when first we privatized prisons.

Krugman makes the point using economics: Without market competition or public view, how can the private sector be kept from abuse, corruption, and exploitation? And this is absolutely true—but it is not the strongest reason.

No, the reason privatized prisons are unjust is much more fundamental than that: Prisons are a direct incursion against liberty. The only institution that should ever have that authority is a democratically-elected government restrained by a constitution.

I don’t care if private prisons were cleaner and nicer and safer and more effective at rehabilitation (as you’ll see from those links, exactly the opposite is true across the board). No private institution has the right to imprison people. No one should be making profits from locking people up.

This is the argument we should have been making for the last 40 years. You can’t privatize prisons, because no one has a right to profit from locking people up. You can’t privatize the military, because no one has a right to profit from killing people. These are basic government functions precisely because they are direct incursions against fundamental rights; though such incursions are sometimes necessary, we allow only governments to make them, because democracy is the only means we have found to keep them from being used indiscriminately. (And even then, there are always abuses and we must remain eternally vigilant.)

Yes, obviously we must shut down these concentration camps as soon as possible. But we can’t stop there. This is a symptom of a much deeper disease: Our liberty is being sold for profit.

Government shutdowns are pure waste

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Jan 6 JDN 2458490
At the time of writing, the US federal government is still shut down.

The US government has been shut down in this way 22 times—all of them since 1976. Most countries don’t do this. The US didn’t do it for most of our history. Please keep that in mind: This was an entirely avoidable outcome that most countries never go through.

The consequences of a government shutdown are pure waste on an enormous scale. Most government employees get furloughed without pay, which means they miss their credit card and mortgage payments while they wait for their back pay after the shutdown ends. (And this one happened during Christmas!) Contractors have it even worse: They get their contracts terminated and may never see the money they were promised. This has effects on our whole economy; the 2013 shutdown removed a full $24 billion from the US economy, and the current shutdown is expected to drain $6 billion per week. The government itself is taking losses of about $1 billion per week, mostly in the form of unpaid and unaudited taxes.

I personally don’t know what’s going to happen to an NSF grant proposal I’ve been writing for several weeks: Almost the entire NSF has been furloughed as “non-essential” (most of the military remains operative; almost all basic science gets completely shut down—insert comment about the military-industrial complex here), and in 2013 some of the dissertation grants were outright canceled because of the shutdown.

Why do these shutdowns happen?

A government shutdown occurs when the omnibus appropriations bill fails to pass. This bill is essentially the entire US federal budget in a single bill; like any other bill, it has to be passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President.

For some reason, our government decided that if this process doesn’t happen on schedule, the correct answer is to shut down all non-essential government services. This is a frankly idiotic answer. The obviously correct solution is that if Congress and the President can’t agree on a new budget, the old budget gets renewed in its entirety with a standard COLA inflation adjustment. This really seems incredibly basic: If the government can’t agree on how to change something, the status quo should remain in effect until they do. And the status quo is an inflation-adjusted version of the existing budget.

This particular shutdown occurred because of Donald Trump’s brinksmanship on the border wall: He demanded at least $5 billion, and the House wouldn’t give it to him.

It won’t be much longer before we’ve already lost more money on the shutdown than that $5 billion; this may tempt you to say that the House should give in. But the wall won’t actually do anything to make our nation safer or better, and building it would displace thousands of people by eminent domain and send an unquestionable signal of xenophobia to the rest of the world. Frankly it sickens me that there were not enough principled Republicans to stand their ground against Trump’s madness; but at least there are now Democrats standing theirs.

Make no mistake: This is Trump’s shutdown, and he said so himself. The House even offered to do what should be done by default, which is renew the old budget while negotiations on the border wall continue—Trump refused this offer. And Trump keeps changing his story with every new tweet.

But the real problem is that this is even something the President is allowed to do. Vetoing the old budget should restore the old budget, not furlough hundreds of thousands of workers and undermine government services. This is a ludicrous way to organize a government, and seems practically designed to make our government as inefficient, wasteful, and hated as possible. This was an absolutely unforced error and we should be enacting policy rules that would prevent it from ever happening again.

The best thing we can do to help them is let them in

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

 

Dec 23 JDN 2458476

This is a Christmas post, but not like most of my other Christmas posts. It’s not going to be an upbeat post about the effects of holidays on the economy, or the psychology of gift-giving, or the game theory that underlies the whole concept of a “holiday”.

No, today is about an urgent moral crisis. This post isn’t about Christmas as a weird but delightful syncretic solstice celebration. This post is about the so-called “spirit of Christmas”, a spirit of compassion and generosity that our country is clearly not living up to.

At the time of writing, the story had just come out: Jakelin Maquin, a 7-year-old girl from Guatemala died in the custody of US border agents.

Even if it’s true that the Border Patrol did everything they could to help her once they found out she was dying (and the reports coming out suggest that this is in fact the case), this death was still entirely preventable.

The first question we should ask is very basic: Why are there little girls in custody of border agents?
The next question is even more fundamental than that: Why are there border agents?

There are now 15,000 children being held by US Border Patrol. There should not be even one. The very concept of imprisoning children for crossing the border, under any circumstances, is a human rights violation. And yes, this is new, and it is specific to Donald Trump: Bush and Obama never separated children from their families this way. And while two-thirds of Americans oppose this policy, a majority of Republicans support it—this child’s blood is on their hands too.

Yet despite the gulf between the two major parties, the majority of Americans do support the idea of restricting immigration in general. And what I want to know is: Why? What gives us that right?

Let’s be absolutely clear about what “restricting immigration” means. It means that when someone decides they want to come to our country, either to escape oppression, work toward a better life, or simply to live with their family who came here before, men with guns come and lock them up.

We don’t politely ask them to leave. We don’t even fine them or tax them for entering. We lock them in detention camps, or force them to return to the country they came from which may be ruled by a dictator or a drug cartel.

Honestly, even the level of border security US citizens are subjected to is appalling: We’ve somehow come to think of it as normal that whenever you get on an airplane, you are first run through a body scanner, while all your belongings are inspected and scanned, and if you are found carrying any contraband—or if you even say the wrong thing—you can be summarily detained. This is literally Orwellian. “Papers, please” is the refrain of a tyrannical regime, not a liberal democracy.

If we truly believe in the spirit of compassion and generosity, we must let these people in. We don’t even have to do anything; we just need to stop violently resisting them. Stop pointing guns at them, stop locking them away. How is “Stop pointing guns at children” controversial?

I could write an entire post about the benefits for Americans of more open immigration. But honestly, we shouldn’t even care. It doesn’t matter whether immigration creates jobs, or destroys jobs, or decreases crime, or increases crime. We should not be locking up children in camps.

If we really believe in the spirit of compassion and generosity, the only thing we should care about is whether immigration is good for the immigrants. And it obviously is, or they wouldn’t be willing to go to such lengths to accomplish it. But I don’t think most people realize just how large the benefits of immigration are.

I’m going to focus on Guatemala, because that’s where Jakelin Maqin was from.

Guatemala’s life expectancy at birth is 73 years. The life expectancy for recent Hispanic immigrants to the US is 82 years. Crossing that border can give you nine years of life.

And what about income? GDP per capita PPP in the US is almost $60,000 per year. In Guatemala? Just over $8,000. Of course, that’s not accounting for the fact that Guatemalans are less educated; but even the exact same worker emigrating from there to here can greatly increase their income. The minimum wage in Guatemala is 90 GTQ per day, which is about $11.64. For a typical 8-hour workday, the US minimum wage of $7.25 per hour comes to $58 per day. That same exact worker can quintuple their income just by getting a job on the other side of the border.

Almost 60 percent of Guatemalans live in poverty. Over 20% live below the UN extreme poverty line. A full 11% of Guatemala’s GDP is remittances: Money that immigrants pay to help their families back home. A further 7% is exports to the US. This means that almost a fifth of Guatemala’s economy is dependent on the United States.

For comparison, less than 0.5% of Americans live in extreme poverty. (The UN recently claimed almost 6%; the Trump administration has claimed only 0.1% which is even more dubious. Both methodologies are deeply flawed; in particular, the UN report looks at income, not consumption—and consumption is what matters.) The overall poverty rate in the US is about 12%.

These figures are still appallingly high for a country as rich as the US; our extreme poverty rate should be strictly zero, a policy decision which could be implemented immediately and permanently in the form of a basic income of $700 per person per year, at a total expenditure of only $224 billion per year—about a third of the military budget. The net cost would in fact be far smaller than that, because we’d immediately turn around and spend that money. In fact, had this been done at the trough of the Great Recession, it would almost certainly have saved the government money.

Making our overall poverty rate strictly zero would be more challenging, but not obviously infeasible; since the poverty line is about $12,000 per person per year, it would take a basic income of that much to eliminate poverty, which would cost about $3.8 trillion per year. This is a huge expenditure, comparable as a proportion of GDP to the First World War (though still less than the Second). On the other hand, it would end poverty in America immediately and forever.

But even as things currently stand, the contrast between Guatemala and the US could hardly be starker: Immigrants are moving from a country with 60% poverty and 20% extreme poverty to one with 12% poverty and 0.5% extreme poverty.

Guatemala is a particularly extreme example; things are not as bad in Mexico or Cuba, for example. But the general pattern is a very consistent one: Immigrants come to the United States because things are very bad where they come from and their chances of living a better life here are much higher.

The best way to help these people, at Christmas and all year round, literally couldn’t be easier:

Let them in.

What really works against bigotry

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics, personal, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 30 JDN 2458392

With Donald Trump in office, I think we all need to be thinking carefully about what got us to this point, how we have apparently failed in our response to bigotry. It’s good to see that Kavanaugh’s nomination vote has been delayed pending investigations, but we can’t hope to rely on individual criminal accusations to derail every potentially catastrophic candidate. The damage that someone like Kavanaugh would do to the rights of women, racial minorities, and LGBT people is too severe to risk. We need to attack this problem at its roots: Why are there so many bigoted leaders, and so many bigoted voters willing to vote for them?

The problem is hardly limited to the United States; we are witnessing a global crisis of far-right ideology, as even the UN has publicly recognized.

I think the left made a very dangerous wrong turn with the notion of “call-out culture”. There is now empirical data to support me on this. Publicly calling people racist doesn’t make them less racist—in fact, it usually makes them more racist. Angrily denouncing people doesn’t change their minds—it just makes you feel righteous. Our own accusatory, divisive rhetoric is part of the problem: By accusing anyone who even slightly deviates from our party line (say, by opposing abortion in some circumstances, as 75% of Americans do?) of being a fascist, we slowly but surely push more people toward actual fascism.

Call-out culture encourages a black-and-white view of the world, where there are “good guys” (us) and “bad guys” (them), and our only job is to fight as hard as possible against the “bad guys”. It frees us from the pain of nuance, complexity, and self-reflection—at only the cost of giving up any hope of actually understanding the real causes or solving the problem. Bigotry is not something that “other” people have, which you, fine upstanding individual, could never suffer from. We are all Judy Hopps.

This is not to say we should do nothing—indeed, that would be just as bad if not worse. The rise of neofascism has been possible largely because so many people did nothing. Knowing that there is bigotry in all of us shouldn’t stop us from recognizing that some people are far worse than others, or paralyze us against constructively improving ourselves and our society. See the shades of gray without succumbing to the Fallacy of Gray.

The most effective interventions at reducing bigotry are done in early childhood; obviously, it’s far too late for that when it comes to people like Trump and Kavanaugh.

But there are interventions that can work at reducing bigotry among adults. We need to first understand where the bigotry comes from—and it doesn’t always come from the same source. We need to be willing to look carefully—yes, even sympathetically—at people with bigoted views so that we can understand them.

There are deep, innate systems in the human brain that make bigotry come naturally to us. Even people on the left who devote their lives to combating discrimination against women, racial minorities and LGBT people can still harbor bigoted attitudes toward other groups—such as rural people or Republicans. If you think that all Republicans are necessarily racist, that’s not a serious understanding of what motivates Republicans—that’s just bigotry on your part. Trump is racist. Pence is racist. One could argue that voting for them constitutes, in itself, a racist act. But that does not mean that every single Republican voter is fundamentally and irredeemably racist.

It’s also important to have conversations face-to-face. I must admit that I am personally terrible at this; despite training myself extensively in etiquette and public speaking to the point where most people perceive me as charismatic, even charming, deep down I am still a strong introvert. I dislike talking in person, and dread talking over the phone. I would much prefer to communicate entirely in written electronic communication—but the data is quite clear on this: Face-to-face conversations work better at changing people’s minds. It may be awkward and uncomfortable, but by being there in person, you limit their ability to ignore you or dismiss you; you aren’t a tweet from the void, but an actual person, sitting there in front of them.

Speak with friends and family members. This, I know, can be especially awkward and painful. In the last few years I have lost connections with friends who were once quite close to me as a result of difficult political conversations. But we must speak up, for silence becomes complicity. And speaking up really can work.

Don’t expect people to change their entire worldview overnight. Focus on small, concrete policy ideas. Don’t ask them to change who they are; ask them to change what they believe. Ask them to justify and explain their beliefs—and really listen to them when they do. Be open to the possibility that you, too might be wrong about something.

If they say “We should deport all illegal immigrants!”, point out that whenever we try this, a lot of fields go unharvested for lack of workers, and ask them why they are so concerned about illegal immigrants. If they say “Illegal immigrants come here and commit crimes!” point them to the statistical data showing that illegal immigrants actually commit fewer crimes on average than native-born citizens (probably because they are more afraid of what happens if they get caught).

If they are concerned about Muslim immigrants influencing our culture in harmful ways, first, acknowledge that there are legitimate concerns about Islamic cultural values (particularly toward women and LGBT people)—but then point out that over 90% of Muslim-Americans are proud to be American, and that welcoming people is much more effective at getting them to assimilate into our culture than keeping them out and treating them as outsiders.

If they are concerned about “White people getting outnumbered”, first point out that White people are still over 70% of the US population, and in most rural areas there are only a tiny fraction of non-White people. Point out that Census projections showing the US will be majority non-White by 2045 are based on naively extrapolating current trends, and we really have no idea what the world will look like almost 30 years from now. Next, ask them why they worry about being “outnumbered”; get them to consider that perhaps racial demographics don’t have to be a matter of zero-sum conflict.

After you’ve done this, you will feel frustrated and exhausted, and the relationship between you and the person you’re trying to convince will be strained. You will probably feel like you have accomplished absolutely nothing to change their mind—but you are wrong. Even if they don’t acknowledge any change in their beliefs, the mere fact that you sat down and asked them to justify what they believe, and presented calm, reasonable, cogent arguments against those beliefs will have an effect. It will be a small effect, difficult for you to observe in that moment. But it will still be an effect.

Think about the last time you changed your mind about something important. (I hope you can remember such a time; none of us were born being right about everything!) Did it happen all at once? Was there just one, single knock-down argument that convinced you? Probably not. (On some mathematical and scientific questions I’ve had that experience: Oh, wow, yeah, that proof totally demolishes what I believed. Well, I guess I was wrong. But most beliefs aren’t susceptible to such direct proof.) More likely, you were presented with arguments from a variety of sources over a long span of time, gradually chipping away at what you thought you knew. In the moment, you might not even have admitted that you thought any differently—even to yourself. But as the months or years went by, you believed something quite different at the end than you had at the beginning.

Your goal should be to catalyze that process in other people. Don’t take someone who is currently a frothing neo-Nazi and expect them to start marching with Black Lives Matter. Take someone who is currently a little bit uncomfortable about immigration, and calm their fears. Don’t take someone who thinks all poor people are subhuman filth and try to get them to support a basic income. Take someone who is worried about food stamps adding to our national debt, and show them how it is a small portion of our budget. Don’t take someone who thinks global warming was made up by the Chinese and try to get them to support a ban on fossil fuels. Take someone who is worried about gas prices going up as a result of carbon taxes and show them that carbon offsets would add only about $100 per person per year while saving millions of lives.

And if you’re ever on the other side, and someone has just changed your mind, even a little bit—say so. Thank them for opening your eyes. I think a big part of why we don’t spend more time trying to honestly persuade people is that so few people acknowledge us when we do.

The inherent atrocity of “border security”

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Jun 24 JDN 2458294

By now you are probably aware of the fact that a new “zero tolerance” border security policy under the Trump administration has resulted in 2,000 children being forcibly separated from their parents by US government agents. If you weren’t, here are a variety of different sources all telling the same basic story of large-scale state violence and terror.

Make no mistake: This is an atrocity. The United Nations has explicitly condemned this human rights violation—to which Trump responded by making an unprecedented threat of withdrawing unilaterally from the UN Human Rights Council.

#ThisIsNotNormal, and Trump was everything we feared—everything we warned—he would be: Corrupt, incompetent, cruel, and authoritarian.

Yet Trump’s border policy differs mainly in degree, not kind, from existing US border policy. There is much more continuity here than most of us would like to admit.

The Trump administration has dramatically increased “interior removals”, the most obviously cruel acts, where ICE agents break into the houses of people living in the US and take them away. Don’t let the cold language fool you; this is literally people with guns breaking into your home and kidnapping members of your family. This is characteristic of totalitarian governments, not liberal democracies.

And yet, the Obama administration actually holds the record for most deportations (though only because they included “at-border deportations” which other administrations did not). A major policy change by George W. Bush started this whole process of detaining people at the border instead of releasing them and requiring them to return for later court dates.

I could keep going back; US border enforcement has gotten more and more aggressive as time goes on. US border security staffing has quintupled since just 1990. There was a time when the United States was a land of opportunity that welcomed “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses”; but that time is long past.

And this, in itself, is a human rights violation. Indeed, I am convinced that border security itself is inherently a human rights violation, always and everywhere; future generations will not praise us for being more restrained than Trump’s abject and intentional cruelty, but condemn us for acting under the same basic moral framework that justified it.

There is an imaginary line in the sand just a hundred miles south of where I sit now. On one side of the line, a typical family makes $66,000 per year. On the other side, a typical family makes only $20,000. On one side of the line, life expectancy is 81 years; on the other, 77. This means that over their lifetime, someone on this side of the line can expect to make over one million dollars more than they would if they had lived on the other side. Step across this line, get a million dollars; it sounds ridiculous, but it’s an empirical fact.

This would be bizarre enough by itself; but now consider that on that line there are fences, guard towers, and soldiers who will keep you from crossing it. If you have appropriate papers, you can cross; but if you don’t, they will arrest and detain you, potentially for months. This is not how we treat you if you are carrying contraband or have a criminal record. This is how we treat you if you don’t have a passport.

How can we possibly reconcile this with the principles of liberal democracy? Philosophers have tried, to be sure. Yet they invariably rely upon some notion that the people who want to cross our border are coming from another country where they were already granted basic human rights and democratic representation—which is almost never the case. People who come here from the UK or the Netherlands or generally have the proper visas. Even people who come here from China usually have visas—though China is by no means a liberal democracy. It’s people who come here from Haiti and Nicaragua who don’t—and these are some of the most corrupt and impoverished nations in the world.

As I said in an earlier post, I was not offended that Trump characterized countries like Haiti and Syria as “shitholes”. By any objective standard, that is accurate; these countries are terrible, terrible places to live. No, what offends me is that he thinks this gives us a right to turn these people away, as though the horrible conditions of their country somehow “rub off” on them and make them less worthy as human beings. On the contrary, we have a word for people who come from “shithole” countries seeking help, and that word is “refugee”.

Under international law, “refugee” has a very specific legal meaning, under which most immigrants do not qualify. But in a broader moral sense, almost every immigrant is a refugee. People don’t uproot themselves and travel thousands of miles on a whim. They are coming here because conditions in their home country are so bad that they simply cannot tolerate them anymore, and they come to us desperately seeking our help. They aren’t asking for handouts of free money—illegal immigrants are a net gain for our fiscal system, paying more in taxes than they receive in benefits. They are looking for jobs, and willing to accept much lower wages than the workers already here—because those wages are still dramatically higher than what they had where they came from.

Of course, that does potentially mean they are competing with local low-wage workers, doesn’t it? Yes—but not as much as you might think. There is only a very weak relationship between higher immigration and lower wages (some studies find none at all!), even at the largest plausible estimates, the gain in welfare for the immigrants is dramatically higher than the loss in welfare for the low-wage workers who are already here. It’s not even a question of valuing them equally; as long as you value an immigrant at least one tenth as much as a native-born citizen, the equation comes out favoring more immigration.

This is for two reasons: One, most native-born workers already are unwilling to do the jobs that most immigrants do, such as picking fruit and laying masonry; and two, increased spending by immigrants boosts the local economy enough to compensate for any job losses.

 

But even aside from the economic impacts, what is the moral case for border security?

I have heard many people argue that “It’s our home, we should be able to decide who lives here.” First of all, there are some major differences between letting someone live in your home and letting someone come into your country. I’m not saying we should allow immigrants to force themselves into people’s homes, only that we shouldn’t arrest them when they try cross the border.

But even if I were to accept the analogy, if someone were fleeing oppression by an authoritarian government and asked to live in my home, I would let them. I would help hide them from the government if they were trying to escape persecution. I would even be willing to house people simply trying to escape poverty, as long as it were part of a well-organized program designed to ensure that everyone actually gets helped and the burden on homeowners and renters was not too great. I wouldn’t simply let homeless people come live here, because that creates all sorts of coordination problems (I can only fit so many, and how do I prioritize which ones?); but I’d absolutely participate in a program that coordinates placement of homeless families in apartments provided by volunteers. (In fact, maybe I should try to petition for such a program, as Southern California has a huge homelessness rate due to our ridiculous housing prices.)

Many people seem to fear that immigrants will bring crime, but actually they reduce crime rates. It’s really kind of astonishing how much less crime immigrants commit than locals. My hypothesis is that immigrants are a self-selected sample; the kind of person willing to move thousands of miles isn’t the kind of person who commits a lot of crimes.
I understand wanting to keep out terrorists and drug smugglers, but there are already plenty of terrorists and drug smugglers here in the US; if we are unwilling to set up border security between California and Nevada, I don’t see why we should be setting it up between California and Baja California. But okay, fine, we can keep the customs agents who inspect your belongings when you cross the border. If someone doesn’t have proper documentation, we can even detain and interrogate them—for a few hours, not a few months. The goal should be to detect dangerous criminals and nothing else. Once we are confident that you have not committed any felonies, we should let you through—frankly, we should give you a green card. We should only be willing to detain someone at the border for the same reasons we would be willing to detain a citizen who already lives here—that is, probable cause for an actual crime. (And no, you don’t get to count “illegal border crossing” as a crime, because that’s begging the question. By the same logic I could justify detaining people for jaywalking.)

A lot of people argue that restricting immigration is necessary to “preserve local culture”; but I’m not even sure that this is a goal sufficiently important to justify arresting and detaining people, and in any case, that’s really not how culture works. Culture is not advanced by purism and stagnation, but by openness and cross-pollination. From anime to pizza, many of our most valued cultural traditions would not exist without interaction across cultural boundaries. Introducing more Spanish speakers into the US may make us start saying no problemo and vamonos, but it’s not going to destroy liberal democracy. If you value culture, you should value interactions across different societies.

Most importantly, think about what you are trying to justify. Even if we stop doing Trump’s most extreme acts of cruelty, we are still talking about using military force to stop people from crossing an imaginary line. ICE basically treats people the same way the SS did. “Papers, please” isn’t something we associate with free societies—it’s characteristic of totalitarianism. We are so accustomed to border security (or so ignorant of its details) that we don’t see it for the atrocity it so obviously is.

National borders function something very much like feudal privilege. We have our “birthright”, which grants us all sorts of benefits and special privileges—literally tripling our incomes and extending our lives. We did nothing to earn this privilege. If anything, we show ourselves to be less deserving (e.g. by committing more crimes). And we use the government to defend our privilege by force.

Are people born on the other side of the line less human? Are they less morally worthy? On what grounds do we point guns at them and lock them away for the “crime” of wanting to live here?

What Trump is doing right now is horrific. But it is not that much more horrific than what we were already doing. My hope is that this will finally open our eyes to the horrors that we had been participating in all along.