I was up late last night for the results of the EU elections. In the UK, the UK Independence Party came first with 27.5% of the vote (Labour second with 25.5% and Conservatives third with 24%). In France, the Front National came first with 25%.
Both UKIP and the FN want to withdraw from the EU and reduce immigration (they differ in other respects). Since the UK is not part of the Euro, and is not likely to adopt the Euro in the near future, it is unlikely that the ECB's monetary policy had any big effect on the UK results. Neither party is fully "respectable" in the eyes of the establishment, but UKIP is more respectable than the FN.
When I first teach international trade theory, this is what I do:
I teach Comparative Advantage as an explanation of why individuals trade with each other. I then draw a circle, representing the world. I then draw lots of little dots in the circle, representing individuals. I then draw little arrows between some of the dots at random, representing gains from trade between two individuals. I then draw a horizontal line across the circle, representing the border between Canada and the US. Some of the arrows cross the horizontal line, and some of them do not. We call the former arrows "international trade". I then say it doesn't make any difference whether an arrow does or does not cross the horizontal line. Except that two different currencies will be involved if an arrow crosses the horizontal line. And governments may impose extra taxes and other restrictions on arrows that cross the line.
I don't teach the economics of migration, but if I did I might use a similar diagram, except the little arrows would now represent individuals' gaining from moving from one location to another. Some little arrows would cross the horizontal line, and some of them would not. Would it matter whether they did or did not cross the horizontal line?
Chris Dillow sends me to a good post by Ben Cobley on what the immigration debate misses.
Suppose you lived in a house with your family. That house is your home. Now suppose a stranger moves in, and shares the house with you. Even if that stranger paid his fair share of all the household expenses, would you always be indifferent to a stranger moving in? And if you did object, how would you feel if the rest of your family said that your objections were not respectable?
Are countries homes?
How would we do the economics of migration if we modelled countries as homes?
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Suppose there exists a town where the men (and maybe some of the women) have “very long beards”. The towns people take pride in how long the beards of its men are and even the little sign placed on the road into town says “Home of the longest beards in the world!”. The town is renown through out the universe for having the most beard per capita. Partly because this has been the situation for a long time, the average length of the inhabitants’ beard enters the “natives” utility function, even for those with short or no beard.
As it happens this town also does pretty well economically, with high wages. And oh yeah, it has no welfare state. But because the economic conditions are pretty good, one day outsiders start moving into the town, working there, renting houses, paying taxes and going to the local schools. These outsiders actually come from very very very poor towns, and by moving into the Beard Town their material condition improves a lot (and just for sake of argument, the material conditions in the outsiders’ original towns also improves or at least doesn’t get worse – no bad brain drain)
The thing about these outsiders though is that they just don’t care at all about beard length. They themselves usually shave every day. They don’t really think it important that the town has most beard per capita and that it is renown for it in the world.
As a result, the average beard length in the town starts decreasing. The utility of the natives declines. Soon, the town may not have the longest per capita beard in the world. It may not be renown for this reason at all.
You’re the social planner. Do you restrict immigration?
Jacques,
Fair enough, and I’m not unaware of that sentiment, although as a point of fact many Muslim woman do choose to wear the hijab (or other head coverings) of their own free will. But I never suggested that all Muslims would be put out by that ban, but certainly many are. More to the point, the ones who are likely to be most put out are also likely to be the ones the least well-integrated with the broader French society (i.e., they’re more likely to be disadvantated residents of a Parisian suburb rather than university professors or staff at a French university).
(It’s a digression, but my own view is that banning Muslim woman from wearing hijabs because their husbands/fathers/brothers make them wear it is uncomfortably close to the old argument against allowing woman to vote because it gives their husbands/fathers will make them vote the way they want. If we can’t trust Muslim woman enough to choose their own clothing, should we let them vote? More to the point, since, even if that’s true, since the husbands/fathers/brothers will still force Muslim woman to wear the hibjab, all the ban does is condemn them to the private sphere and further isolate them (and ultimately their children) from the broader society).
Please, everyone, read Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. All of these issues are dealt with and explained carefully. There are very few reasons to use coercive force on anyone and we should be careful when we resort to it.
As a second point, people here are really complaining about pecuniary externalities, which aren’t real externalities because they operate through the price mechanism. If I want to trade with someone, and he is more competitive than you, that does not entitle you to use force to prevent the trade. The trade retains Pareto efficiency – the central planner would not prevent the trade either.
I think the point is that there may be non-pecuniary externalities.
“I think the point is that there may be non-pecuniary externalities.”
Really? How? The immigrant comes to Canada to trade. People in Canada accept the trade. Both parties are made better off. Now, there are some people who don’t like the trade, but they are not DIRECTLY harmed. They don’t like the trade first and foremost because it affects the price of their own labour. (It also interferes with voter rent seeking and redistribution as there are now more voices.) The second part, that they don’t like the immigrant’s customs or culture, that does not give the right to use force. If you don’t like someone – for whatever reason – fine, don’t trade with him. But that does not give you the right to use force on people or prevent trading among more open minded people.
We must remember that the state is the only institution that can legitimately use violence to accomplish an end. Granting the state monopoly power on violence is a necessary condition for a peaceful society, but we must be cautious how we use it. The welfare state ignores the gravity of that power, and as a consequence we become desensitized to pointing guns at people – it just an everyday way to get things done. Potential immigrants become just one more group to point guns at, and few give it a second thought.
We’re putting the directly economic questions aside. That’s how I understand the sentence “Even if that stranger paid his fair share of all the household expenses” in Nick’s comment. The discussion is about the fact that some people object to immigration because it alters the cultural make up of their “houses” (or “neighborhoods”), which then becomes a question of what kind of individual preferences are worthy of considering from a social point of view (unless you’re going to deny the existence of non-pecuniary externalities altogether).
I do agree with the point you’re making, but it’s a point that belongs in a different discussion.
notsneaky:
The question reduces to when do we get to use force or the threat of force to change people’s behaviour? If an immigrant wants to move into a community, someone has to agree to sell a house to him (or build one for him). If everyone unanimously agrees not to sell a house to him, he won’t move into the community. But if at least one person is willing to sell, how do we stop this trade from happening and why? Does the collective, through some decision making process (democracy, dictatorship, whatever,…) get to use the threat of physical violence to “protect” some notion of cultural purity? By what principle? We know see how easy it is in the welfare state to run roughshod over this issue. We are so used to using state power to do things, we forget that immigration restrictions are about point guns at both potential immigrants and Canadians alike. We are individuals in individual families making individual Pareto improving choices. Any other starting point requires a heavy dose of threats and/or violence to accomplish anything.
You’re cornering me into playing devil’s advocate here because I very much agree that certain preferences – notions of cultural purity – should not be respected. That was my point about changing the analogy from “house” to “neighborhood”. But if I were to play devil’s advocate I’d ask about letting someone move into an apartment building that likes to play loud music. The wrong kind of loud music. The person who sells them the apartment lives at the other end of the apartment building and is relatively unbothered by it.
But more generally, I do agree – quite strongly – that both utilitarian and liberterian calculus favors open borders. The first because the gains to the poorer individuals are so great, the latter because of the basic issue of freedom which you emphasize. The question is whether a “traditionalist” calculus should also be considered and whether it’s a strong enough consideration to outweight the other two (I say “only a little bit” and “no!”, but some of the other posters appear to be saying that the failure to properly address this third type of viewpoint is why the far right parties won in Europe)
Also this: “We are individuals in individual families making individual Pareto improving choices. ” – is not quite correct, even if we’re only talking pecuniary externalities. If two people make a mutually beneficial trade which makes a third person worse of, that may be Kaldor-Hicks, and both the ex-ante and ex-post situations may be Pareto optimal, but absent transfers, the trade is not Pareto improving (that’s actually why Kaldor-Hicks was invented)
I appreciate the devil’s advocate role 😉
“…,into an apartment building that likes to play loud music.” This I would quantify as a true externality. It’s a form of pollution. Kaldor-Hicks is a different issue here where the aggregate is better off and a Pareto efficient outcome is possible by compensation. This gets close to using Coase’s theorem to decide how to handle these externalities. Pecuniary externalities don’t count (unless other incomplete markets effects become an overwhelming issue, and even then I am loathed to use anything but the most transparent and minimalist form of regulation).
In this case, the lack of cultural purity becomes the externality (or the pollution) but the solution is simple and should be solved at the individual level. I find nothing wrong in principle with a gated community that restricts who can buy a home and what they can do with their property (e.g. a culturally pure neighbourhood) – provided that people enter these contracts voluntarily. But, the state itself should not be some gated community where everyone is forced into gated community contracts.
Suppose initially it’s just me with my labor and some capital owner there with an output producing machine. Putting our L and K together we produce one unit of output which we split 1/2,1/2 (both our outside options are 0). There’s also a potential migrant out there who is busy earning 0.
The migrant comes over and now with two labors and the machine we produce 3/2 units of output. But because of increased competition in the labor market (pecuniary externality) now I get only 3/8, the migrant gets 3/8 and the capital owner gets 3/4.
Absent transfers, both situations are Pareto optimal (moving from status quo to migration makes me worse off, moving from migration to status quo makes the migrant worse off). Based on the Pareto criteria you can neither say that “pecuniary externalities don’t count” nor that they count.
Anyway. I disagree that the solution to this case of cultural externalities is “simple”. It’s anything but, as the political situation illustrates. And also, “the state” is not separate from the community. Under ideal conditions “the state” is a way of implementing community preferences. If you have no problem in principle with a gated community then in principle you can’t really have a problem with the state deciding that a particular country as a whole will be a gated community. You could argue that a particular state fails to adequately implement the community’s preferences, but that’s not “in principle” (the existing community could well prefer not to let immigrants in).
notsneaky: “We’re putting the directly economic questions aside. That’s how I understand the sentence “Even if that stranger paid his fair share of all the household expenses” in Nick’s comment.”
You understand my meaning correctly.
Avon: an example of a “pecuniary externality” would be where immigration increases house prices. Pecuniary externalities are not strictly externalities, in the normal sense, because they do not cause an inefficient allocation of resources, but simply redistribute wealth (in this case to sellers of houses from buyers of houses). [Ah, reading your next comment I see you already know this.]
An example of a true externality would be something like notsneaky’s example of playing loud music, which others don’t like, where the person who plays that music takes no account of the preferences of those who hear it.
(I once (politely) objected to the volume of the music played by another guest at a Cuban hotel, who told me that I was in Cuba now and this is what Cubans did.)
notsneaky: “If you have no problem in principle with a gated community then in principle you can’t really have a problem with the state deciding that a particular country as a whole will be a gated community.”
That leads me to the following thought: Mundell changed the question from “fixed vs flexible exchange rates?” to “what is the optimal currency area?”
Similarly, we might change the question from “open vs closed borders?” to “what is the optimal size of homes?”
“The first because the gains to the poorer individuals are so great, the latter because of the basic issue of freedom which you emphasize.”
Which poorer individuals are you referring to? Setting aside questions of welfare benefits, poor immigrants may have gains (why else would they immigrate), but poor natives may lose (as a result of increased competition for jobs from poor immigrants). It’s no coincidence that, historically at least, anti-immigration movements have generally been working-class movements (the US nativists and late 19th century labour movement, the FN in France), while support for immigration has been strongest amongst businesses. At the end of the day, the only difference between migration and outsourcing is the factor of production that moves.
There’s no denying that there are gains from immigration, but how you weigh the gains and losses (and the welfare of the winners and losers) matters. If you don’t care about the well-being of “foreigners” the fact that open immigration improves their welfare isn’t likely to be meaningful. Similarly, if you want to preference the well-being of the working class over “greedy corporations” (to use the favourite construct of the modern left), the fact that the shareholders (or customers) of the latter may benefit from immigration isn’t going to offset the lower wages to their workers.
notsneaky: “If you have no problem in principle with a gated community then in principle you can’t really have a problem with the state deciding that a particular country as a whole will be a gated community”
No, you miss the point. Read Capitalism and Freedom. This is an essential issue in freedom. The state enforces contracts that people voluntarily enter, but it does not force people into contracts. I very much have a problem with the state saying no immigrants, but I have no problem with a gated community that restricts membership. The gated community is unanimous in their decision, but the state is not. The state has to arrive at it’s decision with less (usually much less) than unanimity – usually through democracy or some type of vote.
People mix up what freedom means, and Friedman carefully lays out the implications of freedom in his book. Freedom is about unanimous consent and this is why free markets are desired over state imposed solutions – trade occurs only if both parties unanimously agree that the trade is beneficial. State solutions are conformist – everyone gets the same solution, whether you like it or not, and the solution is imposed by coercive force. This is why Friedman points out that solution in Brown v. Board of Education on segregation is entirely suboptimal. The problem of course is that the state says segregation or no segregation with public money and no school choice, and then we ask the courts for a solution. But if you used school vouchers and privatized public education, then we could let the tastes of the community decide how schools should be constituted. Some might be segregated and others not. Whatever happens, every family would be unanimous in their school choice. Without privatizing schools and using vouchers, Brown v. Board of Education is the correct way to go, but this is really a ruling about how much the state can discriminate when using force. It’s unfortunate that we use force at all, when choice solves the problem. To be clear, I do not support segregationist views. I support people’s freedom to choose. If I want to sell my house or rent a property to a poor Mexican family, that should be my business, not the state’s, unless I voluntarily bought the property with the proviso that I would not do so.
Avon: I think we could imagine a gated community, into which people voluntarily enter, which makes (some) decisions by something less than unanimity. If the gated community decides whether or not to build a pool, or hire lifeguards, it might be by majority vote, for example. People might prefer gated communities like that, over ones that required all changes be unanimous (because of “holdup costs”, for example). Now suppose that gated community also gave automatic membership to those that were born there, as children of existing members, but others had to apply for membership. It starts to look a bit like a state.
No, Nick, it is not like a state. I still have choice not to live in this gated community. There are alternatives. Friedman is very specific on these points.
Bob Smith: “…offset the lower wages to their workers.”
This is a pecuniary effect and we should ignore it. It is occurring through the price mechanism – there is no loss of Pareto efficiency. If you care about this logic, you would stop all innovation because some people might lose their job.
Avon: Suppose the whole country/world was filled with gated communities/countries. ‘I still have choice not to live in this gated community/country. There are alternatives.’ I can apply to enter some other gated community/country, and leave my current gated community/country, if I can persuade some other gated community/country to let me in.
Last night I watched the PBS show, “Frontline”, about half of which was about the conflict in the Ukraine. It was apparent that for many people there, country and home were not synonymous. While watching the show I thought about how Pan-Slavism was a major factor in causing WWI. “Ein Volk, Ein Reich” was a justification for German aggression leading to WWII.
In much of the world today nation states are the remnants of colonial empires. Colonial powers had little interest in preserving ethnic boundaries. As a result we have Iraq but no Kurdistan, Rhodesia but no Shonaland. Indeed, it was often to the advantage of the colonial powers to play different ethnicities against each other, as with the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda.
Avon: “If you care about this logic, you would stop all innovation because some people might lose their job.”
That’s an exageration. Even on the reasoning I set out, people would support some innovation, depending on the identities of the winner and losers.
More to the point, it matters because we don’t live in libertarian paradise governed by markets. We live in a liberal democracy where the distribution of gains and loses matter to policy outcomes (too many loser from a given policy and they vote against it).
Avon: “No, Nick, it is not like a state. I still have choice not to live in this gated community. There are alternatives.”
If you live in a gated community, you have a choice not to live in it. There are alternatives. If you live outside a gated community you don’t have a choice to live in it if they don’t want you.
If you’re a citizen of a country, you have a choice not to live in it. There are alternatives. If you’re not a citizen of a country, you don’t have a choice to become one if they don’t want you.
Tell me again how a gated community is different than a country?
notsneaky: “‘I don’t want a black person moving into my neighborhood’ is a illegitimate view, even if the majority of individuals in a neighborhood feel that way.”
However, “I don’t want a poor person moving into my neighborhood” is still legitimate in the US. Which shows to go you that at this point in time the US is more classist than racist. OC, discrimination against poor people is a way to discriminate against blacks. Something that our Supreme Court pretends not to believe.
@Bob Smith @10:05 – the thing is that the poorest individuals in rich countries are a lot richer than the average individuals in poor countries. The US (absolute) poverty threshold is set at about world average income. Minimum wages in US are two times the average wage in Mexico (not sure if that’s true anymore actually). And Mexico is a rich country! The monetary gains from migration are enormous and that’s not even letting diminishing marginal utility of wealth to kick in. See that paper about “Trillion Dollars on the Sidewalk” in JEP mentioned above.
If you’re an honest-to-goodness utilitarian then you go with the “equal capacity for happiness” assumption and in your social welfare function everyone gets the same weight, foreign or native. Now, I guess you could modify that to be some sort of nativist-utilitarian where foreigners get a lower weight than natives but for gains from migration not to be huge you’d have to consider foreigners a very very small fraction of a native “person”. So small in fact that it really ends up ethically indefensible, even allowing for some “nativism”.
Of course that’s me considering what kind of social welfare function we should use. Political economy and how people out there actually feel and vote are a different matter.
@Avon
“This is a pecuniary effect and we should ignore it. It is occurring through the price mechanism – there is no loss of Pareto efficiency”
Again, this is incorrect. What does it mean for there to be “no loss of Pareto efficiency”? The situations before and after are simply non-comparable in Pareto terms, since each one involves loosers. So it makes just as much sense to say that closing borders involves “no loss of Pareto efficiency”.
And, related, why should pecuniary effects be ignored? From an individual’s perspective does it matter if I loose 50% of my income due to shifts in labor supply and demand (pecuniary externalities) or because I have to suffer presence of pollution which I value at 50% of my income? By saying that the former should be ignored but not the latter you are making an implicit value judgement (people in the labor market “deserve” the income they get, but a person doesn’t “deserve” to be polluted upon). But you cannot make that value judgement based on the Pareto criteria. It’s a whole big set, it doesn’t help much in evaluating most real world policy proposals, and it is defined independently of any institutional set up (almost) like markets (more precisely it is defined with respect to some kind of a “transfer technology”, with markets being one such technology)
@Min, Pan-Slavism was probably a minor cause of WWI. There was the Russia-Serbia connection but that’s about it. And Pan-Slavism was always mostly a Russian idea, generally regarded with a lot of suspicion by the other Slavs who saw it as a cover/excuse for Russian dominance… except those who lived far away enough from Russia, like the Serbs. Ukrainians were pro-German/pro-Austrian. Poles fought for and against all sides to get independence. Czechs and Slovaks fought for Austria-Hungary, albeit somewhat reluctantly.
Anyway, off topic and that’s my third comment in ten minutes.
Min: “It was apparent that for many people there, country and home were not synonymous.”
I remember reading Margaret MacMillan’s “Paris 1919” where something similar came up. The concept of “national self-determination” proved to be tricky to implement. Did people feel they belonged to a religion, a language group, a country, or what? Borders and groups are very fuzzy things, even today.
“the thing is that the poorest individuals in rich countries are a lot richer than the average individuals in poor countries.”
In nominal dollar terms, yes, although the gap gets narrowed in real terms ($40K a year goes a lot farther in India than in Brampton).
“If you’re an honest-to-goodness utilitarian then you go with the “equal capacity for happiness” assumption and in your social welfare function everyone gets the same weight, foreign or native. Now, I guess you could modify that to be some sort of nativist-utilitarian where foreigners get a lower weight than natives but for gains from migration not to be huge you’d have to consider foreigners a very very small fraction of a native “person”. So small in fact that it really ends up ethically indefensible, even allowing for some “nativism”.
If I were an honest-to-goodness untilitarian, I wouldn’t be a human being. Human beings are “nativist-utilitarians”, that’s why we care more about our family then people in our community, more about people in our community than in neighbouring communities, more about people in neighbouring communities than in other countries. If we weren’t, our foreign aid budget would dwarf, by many orders of magnitude our domestic social welfare spending. The reverse is universally true.
“In nominal dollar terms, yes,…”
The adjustment for price levels and cost of living is nowhere near enough to erase or even put big dent in the size of the huge economic gains from migration. These are huge in both nominal and real terms, although, yes, due to Balassa-Samuelson effects the former is “larger”.
“If I were an honest-to-goodness untilitarian, I wouldn’t be a human being.”
We’re discussing how policy should be formulated and what justifies it. I mean, sure, if there’s a policy proposal out there that says “everyone in the world needs to give notsneaky and his family a dollar” I’d support it, essentially for reasons you mention. But I wouldn’t pretend – at least not to myself in private – that this policy has some kind of moral justification behind it or that it improves social welfare.
This is the question “what kind of preferences should be respected” when formulating policy that I keep mentioning.
And like I said, the “weight” that would have to be assigned to non-natives to justify closing border is so minuscule that even if one allows for some nativism, it’s still ethically indefensible. Something like weighting at about 1/20th a native.
“This is the question “what kind of preferences should be respected” when formulating policy that I keep mentioning.”
Well, two points. First, having a discussion about what preferences shoud be respected is the anti-thesis of a utilitarian discussion. One you start deciding that some preferences are legitimate and illigimate, you’re engaging a variant of the weighted utiitarian exercises (with certain preferences given a weighting of zero). On that logic, Apartheid South Africa could be characterized as an ideal utilitarian society if one accepts the proposition that the preferences of Black South Africans should be treated as being illigitimate.
Second, if we’re discussing the formulation of policy and ethics, surely we have to take into account people’s actual real world preferences and ethical world view. As I mentioned, people regularly give virtually zero-weight to the well-being of non-residents. Again, I give ano bvious example, our health care system will spend vast sums of money one “nice-to-have” treatments for Canadian citizens, but won’t spend a nickel on life-saving vacines or nutrients for African children. Even if include the limited health-related foreign aid, Canadian health policy gives virtually no weight to the welfare of 6-odd billion people outside of Canada, and significant weight to the ~30-odd million Canadian citizens and permanent residents. Forget a 1/20th weight to non-resident welfare, we’re talking a weighting of non-resident utility that is infintesimally small.
I could give countless other examples. No country provides meaningful education or welfare (beyond meager foreign aid) to non-residents. If someone kills a few thousand Americans (Pearl Harbour, 9/11) Americans will move heavan and earth an will move wage war accross the planet to bring them to justice (and, not to pick on the US, other countries in the same situation wil do the same thing, if they have the ability). If someone kills a million Rwandans (or Syrians, or Cambodians, or Jews, or Koreans, or Chinese) no one does anything. All of that is driven by a preference for the well-being of “us” over the well-being of “them”. We may recognize the suffering of “outsiders” as wrong and bad, but we don’t see our preference for the well-being of insiders as unethical, those preferences are just human.
Given that, why would we expect Canadians to give radically different weight to the well-being of non-residents for immigration purposes than we do for health, welfare, education, war etc.?
If we’re going to have a discussion of what policies should be formulated, we have to take into account peoples real world preferences. Sure, you can have a fun time wondering what policies we would adopt behind the Rawlsian veil (personally I think Rawls bought his results with his assumed utility function), but that’s not particularly relevant to a policy discussion in a democratic society.
notsneaky: because of the basic issue of freedom which you emphasize Mass migration of Muslims into a society (or even developing world Christians) might not be good for the freedom of queer citizens. Polities make rules, migrants become voters and vote. It makes a difference.
Jacques René Giguère & Bob Smith: The new veiling movement is about middle class Muslim women signalling their commitment to religious norms when away from their immediate neighbourhood and men responsible for them while engaged in work and study. It is all about the implications of highly patriarchal Muslim norms.
http://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/forschung/veranstaltungen/rse/Past_Programs/Winter_2010_11/RSE-Carvalho.pdf?1353071422
Avon Barksdale & Bob Smith: In Without Consent or Contract Robert Fogel documents the significantly adverse effects of mass migration on locally born citizens. The nativist movement expressed rational antipathy to mass migration. The new Republican Party brilliantly finessed that into antipathy to “the Slave Power”. Migration can create serious crowding effects, for example. The costs of migration are not evenly distributed, nor are the benefits.
Avon Barksdale: Americans have more commonality than you might realise. Nick is correct, there is a “thicker” concept of country that has to be dealt with. Looking at dysfunctional polities (of which there are many) provides a salutary corrective.
Bob Smith: we have to take into account peoples real world preferences. Quite. The Rawlsian analysis is both not applicable and instructive. The game is about the rules as much as anything else, where rules are openly up for grabs and preferences about rules are not the same as preferences within individual transactions.
Nick: part of the “thicker” concept of country is that it is not just a mass of one-off transactions. Not even the concept of repeated transactions allows trade analysis to be “deep” enough. The rules powerfully affect not only which transactions take place, but their content and effects.
Access to resources for existing residents can be reduced by migration–this is what happened in C19th US, for example. The dysfunctional EU labour markets also share some of such features. Another way in which the “it is just about gains from trade” analysis does not work.
Since polities need to be able to claim the loyalty of citizens (not being able to do so is not a survival trait in a polity) and as political entrepreneurs exist (see EU elections) telling large numbers of citizens that their preferences on entry to their country have no standing, no matter how important it is to them, is not conducive to political or social stability.
Increased communication costs and dispersal in preferences also affect what public policies become more or less viable. The “Scandinavian model” in public policy fairly clearly rests on high levels of communication and shared preferences. The more migration reduces such flows of communication and disperses the range of preferences, the less viable the Scandinavian model becomes. As that becomes clearer, the costs of migration may well lead to rational antipathy to said migration.
Of course, pandering to anti-immigration feeling can have other political entrepreneurial uses. It may be a lot easier than, for example, dealing with dysfunctional labour markets. Even when said dysfunctions have a great deal to do with how dysfunctional the banlieu are, for example. Regulations tend to defend social incumbents (see dysfunctional labour markets): but well organised/politically focused incumbents rather than just any incumbents.
We must remember that the state is the only institution that can legitimately use violence to accomplish an end. Granting the state monopoly power on violence is a necessary condition for a peaceful society, but we must be cautious how we use it. The welfare state ignores the gravity of that power, and as a consequence we become desensitized to pointing guns at people – it just an everyday way to get things done. Potential immigrants become just one more group to point guns at, and few give it a second thought.
Ahoy, huge non-sequitur fallacy off the port bow! And a straw man to boot!
Compulsory taxation is as old as the hills. In fact “welfare spending” as a state activity is also centuries old. See the Poor Law of England for an excellent example. What changed in the 20th Century was the degree, not the principle. In a liberal democracy it is entirely legitimate for the community to set a new priority by majority consent. In fact, since the welfare state has not led to vastly increased levels of imprisonment, violence or non-compliance with required taxes the obvious conclusion is that the majority has consented to the welfare state and continues to give its consent to the welfare state’s continued existence. So there is obvious link between the welfare state, taxation and state-sponsored violence. Nice attempt to turn a non-sequitur into a straw man though.
Moreover, the greater deterrent is not imprisonment but the economic losses of tax penalties. Tax evasion is an economic crime, after all.
You can’t fault Milton Friedman too much for his over-reliance on straw men; Hayek was the king of No True Scotsman arguments after all.
“Avon Barksdale & Bob Smith: In Without Consent or Contract Robert Fogel documents the significantly adverse effects of mass migration on locally born citizens. The nativist movement expressed rational antipathy to mass migration. The new Republican Party brilliantly finessed that into antipathy to “the Slave Power”. Migration can create serious crowding effects, for example. The costs of migration are not evenly distributed, nor are the benefits.”
Agreed. Indeed, along the same lines, it’s interesting to note that the current kurfluffle over temporary foerign workers in Canada largely started as a result of a challenge by two BC unions of the federal government’s decision to grant temporary foreign worker permits to HD Mining. Plus ca change…
Lorenzo from Oz:.The new veiling movement is about middle class Muslim women signalling their commitment to religious norms when away from their immediate neighbourhood and men responsible for them while engaged in work and study.”
“At home”, the mothers and grand-mothers of my family aren’t veiled. The men, prosperous bankers and traders for generations, are aghast and terrified at what they see as barbarous customs of the lowest orders of peasants.
Though it applies to the wife of one of my colleague, who, after immigrating here, decided she would no longer work outside and stay veiled. To his absolute dismay and that of her family…
The only question is whether you believe in liberty or not. It’s about principles. If you feel that guns are the best way to organize society, that’s a normative position My principles involve minimal use of guns in society. And no, the welfare state and guns are not a non-sequitur when it comes to immigration. The open door policy in the US before WWI could only exist in the absence of a welfare state. The labour groups who opposed immigration in the US at that time had few victories and little effect on immigration – the state was just too small. I love how today’s left forgets that the nascent labour movement in the antebellum US vociferous defended slavery and latter supported Copperheads for exactly the same reasons that they oppose immigration today – the possibility of labour competition.
Disruptions from immigration are no different than technology disruptions. Both change the costs of inputs. If you are against immigration because it might lower wage rates (pecuniary effects), you must also be against machinery or automation that can also lower the wage rate. Once you decide to use guns as an organizing principle, you point guns at nearly everything – it’s much more expedient than persuasion.
Gay marriage and the unacceptability to being against homosexual adoption of children, as pushed by the EU-elite, helped galvanize many anti-EU votes.
Is marriage about man-women committed pairs having and raising children? or something else?
Note that the European Court has declared that “registered partnerships” must be granted all rights of marriage.
A Slovak Roma couple in Britain recently lost custody of their two children, who will be given up for adoption to a homosexual couple. Many folks are quite, and no longer so quietly, upset at these issues.
The increasingly clear anti-religious, anti-Christian, anti-Catholic bias of elites and elites in culture is helping to create an ever larger anti-elite backlash. More elections are likely to follow this trend.
Avon Barksdale: The only question is whether you believe in liberty or not. It’s about principles. Actually, the debate is about how to conceptualise human interactions and what countries are. And yes, you can “win” a debate by simply ignoring or denying those parts of the social world which are awkward for one’s own case. But that is not going to be remotely persuasive to folk who are not up for that.
I do not find any sort of anarchism persuasive, for example, as (1) state societies have achieved so much more than non-state societies and (2) a lack of a state just creates a market niche for entries to the “state” market. That, after all, is what protection rackets are: competitors to the state in extraction-via-coercion.
Tom: The real problem is the mode of politics in the EU, not specific issues. Queer emancipation is mostly just a re-run of Jewish emancipation (which also upset lots of folk, was against God, tradition, they preyed on children, spread disease …). Since the EU is based on the idea that the great problem of European history is nationalism and nationalism is a popular sentiment, then the great problem is popular sentiments and so you get the “we know better” elitism that the EU operates under–the democratic deficit as feature, not bug.
To my mind, the great problem of European history is unaccountable/irresponsible power, and the EU is not exactly free of that little wrinkle.
Just to be absolutely clear, I mean that it was claimed that it was against God, tradition, and they preyed on children, spread disease …
Avon,
It’s a bit odd to suggest that the labour movement’s and other’s opposition to the US open door policy was ineffective, given that the US subsequently ended that policy and closed it’s doors.
And there is a material difference between technological change and immigration policy. It’s difficult to put the latter back in the bottle, whereas laws can be changed with the flick of a pen (as the actual experience of immigration in the us and Canada shows).