Economists aren't exactly noted for their expertise in Cultural Studies (I think that's what I'm doing here), but I'm going to give it a go.
The fact that the Arthurian legend still resonates 1,500 years later tells us something about people, their hopes and fears. According to legend, Arthur was the British resistance leader who fought the invaders. His side eventually lost, which is why I am writing this post in English and not Cornish. And the Arthurian legend all begins with Vortigern's failed immigration policy. Vortigern invited some Saxons to settle in Brtain, and they invited other Saxons to join them. Which is why England exists. (It's ironic that the Arthurian legend is so popular among the descendants of his enemies.)
When economists disagree with public opinion, I normally agree with the economists. But we ought to think twice when this happens. Maybe, just maybe, public opinion is based not on ignorance but on something that our models leave out. When it comes to immigration policy, I think it is correct to say that elite opinion (which includes economists) in rich countries that are attractive to immigrants is generally more favourable to immigration than is public opinion. The elite finds public opinion a bit embarrassing, and tries to ignore it. They remind me of parents trying to get their kids to eat broccoli: "It's good for you, and you will like it once you get used to it".
The basic economics of immigration are quite simple. If we assume constant returns to scale, with output a function of labour and capital, and realise that increased labour creates increased capital (either immediately through capital inflows or slowly through immigrants' saving), everything expands in proportion. Both supply and demand for labour expand, leaving real wages, per capita income, and the unemployment rate, all unchanged.
If the central bank fails to increase the money supply and aggregate demand in line with increased aggregate supply of goods, it is true that immigration will cause a recession and increased unemployment. But then a stupid central bank will likely be equally stupid with or without immigration.
If we add land to the model it changes the results a bit, because land can't increase in proportion to population. So house prices (strictly the prices of building land) will rise. This hurts those natives who rent, but is a benefit to natives in aggregate, who get increased demand for the houses they own. Nobody forces them to sell or rent at higher prices.
If we add national debt to the model the natives benefit from immigration, because immigrants pay part of the burden.
There may be pros from non-rival goods (spreading the costs), and cons from common property resources (crowding).
There are lots of other potential pros and cons of immigration for the natives, depending on various details like whether the immigrants will be richer or poorer than the natives, and redistributive taxation, but that's the big picture in the standard model.
There may be economies of scale, but it is not obvious to me whether countries with larger populations are richer or poorer per capita than countries with smaller populations (though Malthusian and Tiebout effects would give reverse causation and make it difficult to interpret any correlation). And large cities can presumably capture the advantages of economies of scale in all but the smallest countries.
So immigration probably doesn't matter much for natives; but for immigrants it can sometimes matter a lot.
But if you explained that standard model to Arthur, I don't think it would change his mind about Vortigern's immigration policy.
And if you accused Arthur of being irrationally prejudiced or fearful of "The Other", I'm not sure how he would respond. Probably reach for Excalibur.
Maybe the standard model leaves something out? Starting with Arthur wanting to continue to live in Britain, and not England. People's preferences can be a bit conservative like that. Foreign holidays are OK for a bit of novelty, but it's nice to come home afterwards. Most people don't want to be forced to live in a "foreign" country.
What else might it leave out?
A sensible immigration policy would be careful to avoid the Vortigern mistake.
[Update: I am talking here mostly about legend, rather than what actually happened in post-Roman Britain. But I strongly recommend Razib Khan's "Celts to Anglo-Saxons" on the latter.]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Are you saying that parents should stop trying to make their kids eat broccoli? Horror of horrors!
I think the institutional ceteris paribus (which most economic models assume) is being violated here. A couple of recent studies here in Sweden indicate that trust goes down in areas that have seen a large influx of immigrants. That is to say people become less inclined to believe that everyone they interact with will behave honestly.
I think you’re equivocating a bit. Equivocating between “immigrants” and “invaders”. Both are foreigners. But the first want to come and work, the second want to come and take your land. Big difference. So even if you don’t care about culture, you’ll oppose the second and not the first.
And isn’t this whole “culture” thing just a polite way of saying that the public which opposes immigration is xenophobic (or even racist)? Which may make for a good descriptive analysis but if you’re going to turn that into a normative statement, then you have to make the argument that society in general should respect these kinds of preferences. Which is the tough part.
As far as Vortigern and the Saxons goes you have to be careful taking the chronicler’s word as truth. The most likely scenario of what really happened is that Vortigern promised the Saxons a bunch of stuff if they helped him against the Picts, they did, he didn’t pay up (welched?) so they started plundering.
“So immigration probably doesn’t matter much for natives”
One thing that a fairly macro approach to immigration fails to account of is that immigration has different effects on different labour markets, and has different effects on new entrants as compared to established workers. Foreign trained lawyers find it almost impossible to practice law in Canada, hence immigration has almost zero effect on the supply of lawyers, and quite likely increases the demand for lawyers, so one would not be surprised to see lawyers enthusiastically supporting high levels of immigration. If we think, instead, of relatively unpleasant jobs requiring minimal language skills or Canadian training, e.g. working in a meat processing plant, the ability of firms to employ temporary or permanent migrant workers basically removes upwards pressure on wages.
Also being able to deport anyone who shows up late for work removes the need to pay efficiency wages.
So for people on the margins of the labour market – unskilled workers who would otherwise see their wages bid up, as well as the less-than-perfect potential employees who would otherwise get hired – immigration policy can matter a great deal.
This is, however, not your point. Your point is that Rules and Institutions matter, and these rules and institutions are based on a set of social norms, unwritten rules of behaviour and conduct. If just one or two people behaving differently enter a group, the social norms, unwritten rules can still persist. But if a certain number of people start deviating from the unwritten rules, breaking the social norms, it is not clear that the existing social institutions can persist.
I tend to agree with you on this. But I think it’s important to differentiate between two different things:
First, resistance to change – the “I don’t like foreigners who smell of garlic/curry/butter/whatever” phenomenon. Societies change. Even societies that are isolated from any outside contact evolve over time – just watch a 1940s movie and marvel at how much accents have changed in 75 years. That’s an inevitable part of aging – the old become strangers in their own country. But I don’t have any right to impose my prejudice against new fangled things like, say, ear buds on other people.
Second, real threats to social institutions. Think, e.g., of a rule “don’t litter” or “pick up after your dog”. As long as everyone follows that rule, parks will be clean and pleasant places. But as soon as just one person doesn’t follow that rule, we end up with garbage or other nasty things in the park, and once the park is bespoiled, no one else will bother to follow the rule, because it doesn’t matter any more.
So the question is – which of the two scenarios here are we really talking about? And the truth is, I suspect, a mix of both, which is why immigration policy is complicated.
My personal view is that some amount of immigration is good, but I have some serious problems with the idea of temporary foreign workers, and also it’s not obvious to me that the current level of immigration to Canada is the right one.
Frances, I think that the argument that immigration affects “people on the margins of the labour market” is essentially a partial equilibrium thinking (and Nick, you were criticizing that in the post on robots). It’s also a static effect. Once capital accumulates, wages come back to where they were, same pressure. And that’s basically what most studies of effects of immigration on unskilled worker’s find, a small short run effect (around 3% decrease in wages) and a zero or even positive effect in the “long run” (a few years).
And even those estimates tend to be based on the assumption that within a particular skill category natives and immigrant workers are perfect substitutes, which is quite unlikely.
Overall the purely economic argument is very very much pro Open Borders.
Hugo: Yep, I think the institutional ceteris paribus (institutions are just ignored) is the big one.
notsneaky: If immigration is seen as an elite project, public opinion might see immigrants as invaders. Perceptions might be very fluid, depending on perceived legitimacy. And if immigrants change the rules and institutions, it might be hard to distinguish buying and taking (land and other goods). Terra nullis?
“The most likely scenario of what really happened is that Vortigern promised the Saxons a bunch of stuff if they helped him against the Picts, they did, he didn’t pay up (welched?) so they started plundering.”
Could be. Whose court of law could have decided that claim?
Lovely (un-PC) use of “welched” in this context. Welsh/welch has 3 meanings: 1. Saxon word for foreigner/Briton, hence 2. modern word person from Wales, and 3. un-PC (and archaic) slang for not paying what you owe. (Were you punning on all three meanings?)
Frances: yes, I suffer from the Macro vice. Lots more is going on when we look at distributional questions.
The Vortigern argument is about ethnogenesis, the process by which ethnic groups come into being by the common consent of their members. The language question is here a bit tricky, but not terribly applicable to the bilingual context of Early Medieval western Europe.
There are two prongs to the argument. The first is ideological, letting that word do some heavy lifting, while the the second is economic. (In a broad sense, as I could equally well write agronomic.).
I.
i) Romanitas is, at its core, all about ethnogenesis. To be Roman is to participate in the Roman way of life. Period. At the beginning, Romulus and Remus populate their new city with a motley band of outlaws, escaped slaves and cattle rustlers. (And with the Rape of the Sabine Women, but let’s not go there. Oops, too late…) They are Romanised by accepting Romanitas.
ii) This ideology facilitates the largescale incorporation of “barbarian armies” into Roman-controlled spaces in western Europe: Franks, Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Burgundians –various argument may now be had about Arabs, Vandals, Lombards and Isaurians.
iii) Since we don’t know crap about what happened in sub-Roman Britain, and it is debatable that our sources do, we can look at the story of an invited Saxon settlement as either something that happened (extrapolating a bit from Gildas, who claims that the Saxon settlement happened, but was then reversed), something that it is polemically important to claim is happening (Gallic Chronicles); or something later writers (Bede, Anglo-Saxon Chronicles) want to have happened.
Intermission: I have put so much emphasis on the ideological context of stories about the Saxon emigration/invasion/assisted immmigration because I have serious doubts about the logistics of a largescale movement of population under early Medieval populations. The Occam’s Razor argument is that we hear about this migration because it is a good story, and not because it happened, because it didn’t. But I could be wrong!
II.
The division within Britain between English and British (P-Celtic) speaking regions maps onto the 60″ isohyet which divides the eastern and western parts of the British Isles into a higher-rainfall, more hilly west, and a flatter, less wet east. The high rainfall zone is more suitable to transhumant stockraising, the drier east to mixed in-and-outfield farming. This is a claim about the boundaries of ancient dialects, so it is probably telling here that the 60″ isohyet also maps still-existing differences in the distributions of mitochondrial DNA. Further, this differentiation of a western and eastern British population group predates the Migration Period. As far as we know, it is primordial.
We can argue that this statistically observable difference in population groups represents the persistence of difference established in the Paleolithic. It strikes me as much more reasonable to assume that someone from Belfast is more likely to marry someone from Liverpool, because she is handy to go a-milking in the summer pastures, while a Hollander is more likely to marry a Whitbyite, because he knows what trouble sheep can get into down in the saltmarsh. Carry this trend down through six thousand years, and you get the genetic distribution that appears in the maps.
Now a conclusion: It doesn’t matter where they come from! Over time, ethnogenesis depends on the job skills you learn. (Okay, a bit of a jump, but also a way of making a programmatic statement, which is that high immigration will be readily smoothed over by a high pressure economy.)
notsneaky: ” Once capital accumulates, wages come back to where they were, same pressure. And that’s basically what most studies of effects of immigration on unskilled worker’s find, a small short run effect (around 3% decrease in wages) and a zero or even positive effect in the “long run” (a few years).”
Yes, I know the research. But I don’t find a lot of it tremendously convincing. Immigrants tend to go where there are jobs. If we see good things economically happening in places where there are immigrants we don’t know whether it’s because immigrants go where there are jobs, or jobs go where there are immigrants. Now there are various attempts to get around this problem by looking at exogenous immigration events – waves of Cuban emigration, Hurricane Katrina, for example. Those studies are more interesting, but their limited scope makes it difficult to generalize from those studies to the 1%-of-population-per-year level of immigration Canada has had for a long time.
If what you’re saying is true, i.e. “Once capital accumulates, wages come back to where they were, same pressure” it is hard to explain decades and decades of owners-of-capital pushing for the ability to import low-wage labour from e.g. China (if you ever have a chance, and you haven’t already, visit the canning factory in Steveston (Richmond), BC – fascinating in terms of the long long long history of temporary migrant workers in this country), and decades and decades of worker resistance to same. The only explanation we can come up with is “people are stupid” which – as an economist – is an explanation I avoid whenever possible.
Erik Lund – fascinating!
Frances, yes, it’s true there’s the obvious endogeneity in many of those studies, but even the ones which try to control for that come to roughly the same conclusions. And just intuitively a 1% immigration rate is very unlikely to have much of an impact no matter how you slice it.
As far as why capital owners support immigration there’s two reasons. One, there is still the short run gain to them from increase in labor. Two, if immigrant labor and native labor are substitutes (maybe imperfect) and both kinds of labor are complements to capital then there is also a long run gain to capital (at least assuming a constant saving rate).
I don’t think “people are stupid” is the explanation. “People are xenophobic” very well might be.
Nick, yes, that was on purpose and I guess un-PC. Anyway, just because the public perceives immigrants as “invaders” does not mean they are. Unlike with Vortigern and the Saxons, we do have a court system which would settle any claims.
I also see no evidence that immigration changes institutions at least not over any reasonable horizon. Culture, maybe. And even there the historical norm – with very very few exceptions – has been that it’s the immigrants who assimilate (sometimes faster, sometimes slower) into the native culture rather than vice versa (of course that’s not true with conquest but the point is exactly that that’s a different kettle of fish)
Finally, given that immigrants usually have less political power relative to natives – whether due to lack of citizenship or information or cultural capital – it’s more likely that any expropriation (of land, wages, whatever) that happens is going to involve existing natives taking from newly arrived migrants, rather than vice versa. And again, it seems like that has been the historical case.
One also sees this in the attraction many economists have in gdp over gdp per capita under the presumption larger markets, increased specialization, faster growth, even though this should be true per capita as well and is a better measure. Far too much of this ends in absurdities of all or none, while most do see the advantage of some at the same time seeing the disadvantage of unrestrained. This demonstrates the weakness of an argument that can’t admit any negatives for fear of losing the argument, absolutism reigns.
Erik: fascinating. But if Saxon immigration was a steady trickle over centuries, why did the Brittonic language get replaced by English (except in Wales and Cornwall)? Same with place names. A steady trickle of immigrants will presumably speak the language (and practice the religion) of the people already there.
notsneaky: it’s presumably going to depend on the speed of immigration (some sort of non-linear function), and whether or not all the immigrants come from the same place and settle in the same places, and whether their children intermarry with the natives or bring wives and husbands from back home.
Lord: short run macroeconomists (like me) normally focus on GDP, because population doesn’t change much at business cycle frequencies. But long run growth theorists should pay more attention to GDP per capita.
Frances,
Regarding capitalists lobbying for immigration, this issue is a bit subtle, but the short answer is that they are not lobbying for more immigration, they are lobbying to 1) outsource jobs and 2) for guest-worker programs.
There are obvious reasons why an employer would prefer to hire a guest-worker who cannot leave the employer for a competitor, or who does not know their rights. But there is a big difference between something like an H1-B program (for which employers are actively lobbying) and an overall increase in immigration (for which employers are not actively lobbying).
Looking back historically we see the same thing, employers wanted the right to be able to bring in their own foreigners to displace domestic labor, with the proviso that if the foreigners caused trouble or tried to find higher wage employment elsewhere, they could be sent back home. The solution is to give more rights to immigrants and ban guest-worker style programs, not to curb immigration per se.
rsj – agree with you on the guest worker programs, not sure I agree with you here: “The solution is …. not to curb immigration per se.”
That statement is unlikely to be universally true. Some countries have much higher rates of immigration than others. Given the wide range of currently existing immigration policies, it is implausible that all countries are currently at the optimal level of immigration.
Some countries are probably too restrictive with respect to immigration. Some countries are probably too lax. But to say that no country should curb immigration – well, I guess that’s the Libertarian Party of Canada’s position. Which makes sense. Because an open borders policy is basically incompatible with large scale income redistribution. The quid pro quo of having, say, a child tax benefit program that raises all families with children out of poverty is some restriction on the ability of families with children to move to Canada and collect said benefits.
notsneaky: “And just intuitively a 1% immigration rate is very unlikely to have much of an impact no matter how you slice it.”
The relevant comparison is not to the population but to the number of new labour market entrants. At any one point in time say 1 or 2 or 3% of the currently existing Canadian population is entering the labour market. Now not all immigrants enter the labour market- some are too young, some are too old, some are not interested. But even so, the number of new immigrants relative to the number of new labour market entrants who are either native-born or established immigrants is still high enough to matter quite a bit.
We abhor states that point guns at people to keep them. I hope one day we will equally abhor states that point guns at people to keep them out.
The two branches of Celtic languages are both quite different from English. I studied Irish a little, and it’s completely different from both English and French. English has tons of words originating from the Normans and the Saxon etc … but not so much from the Celtic languages that existed England at the time. I wonder if the differences in structure of the Celtic languages (and culture) created too much friction for them to be assimilated like almost everything else English come in contact with? Anyway, there are no doubt people who actually know something about this with better theories.
The experience of the US in the 19th century would suggest that it would take truly staggering numbers of immigrants to overwhelm the institutions of a modern democracy. DId it change their culture? I suppose it did, but I doubt anyone views it as a bad thing today. Though I suppose it was terrible for some to be forced to live next to a Jewish or an Irish family.
Avon: “We abhor states that point guns at people to keep them. I hope one day we will equally abhor states that point guns at people to keep them out.”
Would you also abhor states that point guns at their own people forcing them to emigrate to live in a foreign country?
What’s the difference? (“Physical geography” is not a good answer.)
Patrick: “Anyway, there are no doubt people who actually know something about this with better theories.”
Razib Khan had a lovely long post on this, about a year back, exploring both the linguistic and genetic evidence, informed by his knowledge of similar events elsewhere in the world, to try to figure out what was happening in post-Roman Britain. But (as usual) I can’t find it.
“DId it change their culture? I suppose it did, but I doubt anyone views it as a bad thing today.”
If people are small-c conservative, nobody will view past changes as a bad thing, because going back in time would also be a change.
If you put people temporarily behind the Veil of Ignorance, so they can’t remember which country they live in, and ask them “would you like to be re-allocated to another country/culture at random?” I think most people would say “no”.
Aha! I found Razib Khan’s post on “Celts to Anglo-Saxons”. Half of it goes over my head, of course. God only knows how that guy does it. The New York Times made a terrible mistake when they fired him on the same day they hired him, because some nasty SJW objected.
Or people that point guns to force their way in.
The ideal is where everyone has the option and no one feels the need, but if we are only going to solve half a problem, let it be the the latter. That is much better than everyone having the option but no one having the desire because everywhere is equally bad.
Nick,
What are you taking about? No, the state should not force people to emigrate.
Here’s how Alex Tabarrok puts it:
“No defensible moral framework regards foreigners as less deserving of rights than people born in the right place at the right time.
Not every place in the world is equally well-suited to mass economic activity. Nature’s bounty is divided unevenly. Variations in wealth and income created by these differences are magnified by governments that suppress entrepreneurship and promote religious intolerance, gender discrimination, or other bigotry. Closed borders compound these injustices, cementing inequality into place and sentencing their victims to a life of penury.
The overwhelming majority of would-be immigrants want little more than to make a better life for themselves and their families by moving to economic opportunity and participating in peaceful, voluntary trade. But lawmakers and heads of state quash these dreams with state-sanctioned violence—forced repatriation, involuntary detention, or worse—often while paying lip service to “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
The grandest moral revolutions in history — the abolition of slavery, the securing of religious freedom, the recognition of the rights of women—yielded a world in which virtually everyone was better off. They also demonstrated that the fears that had perpetuated these injustices were unfounded. Similarly, a planet unscarred by iron curtains is not only a world of greater equality and justice. It is a world unafraid of itself.”
Avon: the more foreign people enter my country, the more my country becomes a foreign country. I emigrate without moving a foot. The foreign country comes to me.
“Not every place in the world is equally well-suited to mass economic activity. Nature’s bounty is divided unevenly.”
Yes, physical geography matters. But social institutions matter more. Very few people want to migrate to Finland because of the weather and lakes. And social institutions are part of the people, not part of the physical geography. If all the people change, the social institutions will change too, even if the land stays the same.
Do you have the right to share a home with someone? Or does he/she have to give his/her consent? All trade is by mutual consent. Why should migration not also be by mutual consent?
The quid pro quo of having, say, a child tax benefit program that raises all families with children out of poverty is some restriction on the ability of families with children to move to Canada and collect said benefits
This whole discussion is a bit futile unless all involved agree on the relevant set of people to optimise for. What you’re saying is that, to the extent that the two are mutually exclusive (which I doubt , btw), the right of Canadian families to collect such benefits to escape relative poverty ranks morally higher than the right of the immigrant famliy to escape whatever it is that’s causing it to emigrate. Can economics do that?
If anything, it would have to answer the question whether total world welfare rises faster if people are allowed to move from poor / war torn / whatever regions to relatively more prosperous regions or whether on the contrary, in the short or long term, overall welfare it rises faster if each subset of humans has to to figure things out for themselves (that’s keeping it georgraphy neutral, just to please Nick).
That statement is unlikely to be universally true. Some countries have much higher rates of immigration than others. Given the wide range of currently existing immigration policies, it is implausible that all countries are currently at the optimal level of immigration.
Might it also be that what’s optimal for all countries individually is not attainable in aggregate? After all, net world migration is 0.
Nick,
Trade is by mutual consent. I want to trade with a Mexican who only has low skilled labour to trade. To make the trade, he needs to move to Canada. The state prevents the trade from happening. Canada is not at home, it’s an means to an end, that is all. There is no moral or economic ground on which you improve the situation by preventing that trade.
Let’s be honest about your objections. Immigration reduces the ability of the state to redistribute. But prosperity and economic growth do not spring forth from redistribution. The descendants of poor Sicilian immigrants who live in NYC have smartphones in their pockets not because because the US was a great a redistributionalist state.
Avon
Immigration reduces the ability of the state to redistribute.
That’s only true if you assume that immigrants are net receivers of transfers. Of course you can achieve that by design, if you make sure immigrants get the worst jobs if any and thus qualify for redistribtution. But that’s the result of a xenophobic setup, not of any inherent vice or virtue of the average immigrant.
Why not look at immigration like a high birth rate?
Nick, if I kick you out of your house and make you move to another neighborhood, that’s different than me allowing someone to move in next door, no?
Every single part of the argument about culture here applies equally well to things like residential (and other forms of) segregation. And arguably at one point desegregation was seen as an “elite project”.
Suppose I like oranges but I really hate it if other people get to eat oranges. Should a benevolent social planner incorporate this preferences of mine into the social welfare function and restrict the consumption of oranges (at the margin) by others to increase “social welfare”? Suppose I really hate it when people wear sweatshirts, just purely for aesthetic reasons. That’s a real negative externality right there. Should there be a Pigouvian tax on sweatshirts just because I feel that way? Not all externalities are created equal and for some society just needs to say “tough noogies”. Maybe that’s elitist. But it’s also right.
I challenge open borders people to move where others want to leave and work to make life better there. That is a respectable moral position.
Avon: “To make the trade, he needs to move to Canada.”
Or you need to move to Mexico. Now ask yourself, if Mexico had Open Borders, but Canada did not, and if the climate of mexico were exactly the same as Canada, would that resolve the issue? I think not. Because you (very probably) don’t want to move to Mexico. But why not 9if the climate wee the same)? It’s because social and economic institutions are different.
“Canada is not at home, it’s an means to an end, that is all.”
Well, a lot of Canadians will disagree with you on the ‘Canada is not a home’ bit. And if Canada is a means to and end, what is that means, and what is that end? I would say it’s a club of people who have joined together for mutual defence, and to provide other club goods. And it is not obvious to me that club goods should be abolished, and converted into public goods, by preventing excludability. It’s like saying the initial price of membership must be $0. And as you know, price controls like that tend to have undesirable consequences. Would the existing members of a club invest in the club if later entrants can free ride?
“Let’s be honest about your objections. Immigration reduces the ability of the state to redistribute.”
Phew! I thought you were going to accuse me of something else. OK, I confess, I’m a rabid lefty.
Khan is an interesting case. My take on the stuff the so-called SJW’s got upset about is “so what?”. Ideals about human rights, equality of individuals before the law, etc aren’t predicated on, and thus not threatened by, any particular statistical distribution of attributes in a given population with some arbitrarily selected genetic traits. That’s their power. They make us all better off, and nobody worse off.
You know, we don’t actually have to ask Arthur. All we have to do is visit the nearest Indian Reservation and ask the first person we meet. They probably wouldn’t be too keen on immigration.
As Frances says it all depends on the Rules and Institutions. If the immigrants accept our rules and institutions (and they probably would because our rules and institutions are a big reason why they want to be here in the first place) then immigration is going to work just fine. If not well…
Personally I am all for open borders. This is partly because I’ve learned to love ethnic foods and I am comfortable interacting with people from around the world, etc. But it is also because I believe have a firm belief (delusional or otherwise) that my property rights to my house and pension savings, and my professional qualifications, etc. would all be respected and honoured.
But a short drive away there lives a community of people whose rules and institutions weren’t respected by the immigrants (including me), and who have really, really suffered as a result. A humbling thought.
Patrick: that’s roughly my take on it too. Razib did a couple of posts on whether race is a social construct, to which he answered yes and no. (And the pure social construct theory is just looking sillier and sillier with every genome sequencing. Especially with neanderthals and denisovans and all that.) But for a lot of questions, so what!
Brad: yep. I was trying to think who would be the Native American equivalent to Arthur? But being a Brit (of mixed saxon-celtic ancestry, probably) I decided it was safer to stick with Arthur.
Pontiac or Tecumseh? It’d probably be harder to find a Native American Vortigern. And I think it needs reiterating: immigration is not invasion, no more than trade is theft. This is a false equivocation.
Paris
Paris – not so much the bloodshed – tragic though that is. (After all there are over 3,000 motor vehicle related deaths in France and that will not have the impact of this attack.)
It is more what Paris reveals about the different value structures of the French vs assailant’s communities. The French people may well welcome strangers, but what they don’t want to do is to have their value structure imposed on their community.
Some simple correlations on big countries apparently failing to grow faster than small countries
On your land point, you present immigration as a gain (since the value of the land rises). But in a country – like Canada or NZ – where natural resources (fertile land,minerals) contribute materially to wealth there is a depletion effect to consider (natural resources – the value of which probably swamps net national public debt- spread over a larger number of people. My favourite comparison is Norway vs the UK: the UK had about a third of the north sea oil and gas, and Norway two thirds, but with 5m people that resource took Norway to the top of the oecd income per capita tables, and made much much less difference in the UK with 60m or so.
You can consider allowing immigration a charitable contribution of public goods and open borders an attempt to persuade others to join in, but if they decline I doubt calling them racist xenophobes will persuade them.
Nick – please don’t go there. Don’t have to look far to find places where a few young men choose to embrace violence and kill people – don’t need immigrants for that to happen.
What Frances said.
Well at least you’re being honest now Nick. I now know how you think – wasn’t far off what I thought.
So why would people not choose to contribute? Because they have their own interests and responsibilities. Because they want to preserve and protect what they have. Because they don’t feel safe, secure, or wealthy enough to do so. Rather than address them, these and even the choice not to contribute are denied, by those who deem themselves superior.
Countries are first and foremost mutual defence associations. It is easier to offer mutual defence if you defend a border around an area of land within which members of the association live. All agreements are hard to enforce, and mutual defence agreements are hard to enforce. They need all the help they can get, from a sense of sharing a common community. If elite opinion does not recognise these facts, and the consequences become too hard to ignore, the elite will eventually be changed.
I would say it’s a club of people who have joined together for mutual defence, and to provide other club goods. … Would the existing members of a club invest in the club if later entrants can free ride.
What about new entrants who happen to be born into the club? In which way are they different form other entrants? You’re desperately trying to construct a moral imperative from what seems to me a fairly accurate description of the nation state as a club. It’s a complete non sequitur. Just because club members of most clubs like the club rules as they are does not mean the club rules are just or moral or in any other way right. You need a separate moral theory to do that. And starting from the axiom that all people are equal, I don’t see how you can possibly treat people who happen to be born into one jurisdiction differently from those born into others. So yes, nations are like clubs, and politics is mostly a national affair. And no, there is no world government alternative on the horizon. But that still makes a moral story not.
All trade is by mutual consent. Why should migration not also be by mutual consent?
If migration really worked like free trade, people would be free to buy land through consensual bilateral trades wherever they liked and live there. The category foreigner in such a scenario is just another name for a possible trade partner who happens to speak another language. And what national borders do, is they prevent such trades (in the name of national defense).
Oliver: people care for their children, and children are born into their parents’ community. We want our club rules to say that our children are automatically members. Because we want to extend our mutual defence to each others’ children.
Are club rules moral? Well, it depends on the club, and its constitution. I don’t have any special insights into that question. Political philosopher have been debating it for centuries.
If a non-member wants to join a club, and the club wants that non-member to join the club, then his joining the club is by mutual consent.
French lives matter. We need to go there. Though it’s not yet obvious to me where exactly “there” is.
Played us like a violin. Queue the over reaction and the next, and worse cycle of blowback.
I was just watching an old BBC documentary from the ’60s about WWI. It’s a amazing how a criminal outrage can turn tensions over irrelevant bits of land into a conflagration.
Nick:
trying to find a way of making sense of your comment last night. The point of this post is that rules and institutions matter. There we are in agreement. The relevant question is, therefore, “how can a society achieve and maintain desirable social institutions.”
Immigration has the potential to change social institutions. But that does not necessarily imply that the resulting social institutions will be less desirable for society as a whole – though some undoubtedly will win, and some lose, as a result. Furthermore, social institutions change even in the absence of immigration. They’re like languages – they inevitably drift, even in completely isolated populations.
Moreover, as others have argued earlier, enforcement of a zero immigration rule would be costly and/or impossible and/or undesirable and would furthermore create unnecessary hardship.
Terrorism is multi-faceted, so it would probably be overly strong to say it has absolutely nothing to do with immigration. But if I was looking for ways to combat terrorism, I’d go to the root causes – which are more likely to be <a= https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRHqs8SffDo>over-population and inflation and starvation and the crazy politicians than migration per se.
Now I’m going for a walk in the forest to clear my head – there being my favourite place. (Text if you’re free, Nick).
“All agreements are hard to enforce, and mutual defence agreements are hard to enforce.” What are you talking about? The US is an immigrant rich society and finds it pretty easy to spend 3.5+% of GDP on defence creating the most powerful military force ever seen on this planet by far.
Look Nick, this immigration debate is not about who can come to this country – that’s just about getting a tourist visa. This argument is all about who is allowed to work here, and, later, who is allowed to become a citizen. Governments have massive programs in place to stop people from working. That is immigration law.
If you believe in free trade of goods, and free investment, then you must believe that the free movement of people has the same benefits. This blog goes on and on about inequality in the narrow sense about inequality in rich countries like Canada. Most of this planet lives on less than $2 per day. Allowing people to vote on a country’s institutions with their feet is the surest way to increase world GDP and deliver a crushing blow to abject poverty.
Yes, Nick, French lives matter; so do the lives of the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. It’s not mutually exclusive.