Not unless you have an amazing insight / highly effective novel argument to inject into the political debate on the issue. It is an altruistic goal, but pushing for political changes that have near zero chance of actually coming to pass or have overton window shifts in the desired direction fails hard at the “Effective” part. Dont get me wrong, political action can certainly be a very effective way to do good in the world, but this particular issue is so far out of reach of the overton window it kind of isn’t part of the building anymore.
The best argument I’ve ever been able to come up with is that we should underbid the people smuggling industry—Grant anyone who can post a 3000 dollar bond and a return ticket a temporary right of residence and employment as long as their money lasts, and I’ve never been able to sell anyone on it that weren’t already opposed to controls on immigration.
I have also seen people much, much better at politics than me try to persuade people of the immorality of immigration restrictions. I have never seen it work. Anecdote, data, I know, but if this was a good attack angle, I should be able to think of examples of it not just abysmally failing.
If I could figure out a way to make seasteading actually profitable (iron fertilization fishing industry? ) doing that under an appropriate flag of convenience and recruiting labor out of the various hellholes people need to leave seems workable, because it doesn’t require persuasion. However, it also requires what would effectively be company towns to be run to first world standards of living…
pushing for political changes that have near zero chance of actually coming to pass
It’s not an either-or thing. There are a lot of intermediate states and pushing in the direction of open immigration can be effective even if you don’t expect to get to the abolisment of national borders in the near future. EU exists.
And if we could get our politicians to stop fucking up for a couple of years, expanding the union further would be the most viable angle of attack I can think of. But that requires the european economy to be doing much better than it currently is to be viable, so step one would be to deprogram our political class of their love affair with austerity…
EU expansion doesn’t rely on a successful European economy. Croatia’s accession to the EU took place entirely post-GFC.
The real reason the EU won’t expand significantly is because there’s nowhere for it to expand to. Norway, Switzerland and Iceland don’t want to join. Turkey and the Ukraine aren’t wanted. Some of the remaining Balkan countries will join eventually, but they total only 18 million people, and none are great accession candidates; it’s now recognised that Bulgaria was probably a mistake, and there’s no wish to repeat that. I’d say there’s more chance that the UK leaves the EU than it undertakes a significant expansion in the next, say, 20 years.
And if we could get our politicians to stop fucking up for a couple of years
Ah, well, I wouldn’t advise you to hold your breath… X-)
But that requires the european economy to be doing much better
The most pressing problem at the moment for that expansion east is that Mr.Putin doesn’t seem to like it. And if you are thinking about expanding south, the voters don’t seem to like that.
The voters are reasoning beings—if we could get the economy created by the last expansion round to work well, they would have more of an appetite for further rounds. Nothing much is viable as long as we are collectively shooting ourselves in one foot, reloading and switching to the other, however. It hurts my head that our political class doesnt seem to be updating on evidence at all. Austerity makes things worse. Try something else. ANYTHING ELSE, Wage hikes in Germany. A monster project to build a low-pressure intercity subway between every city in europe with more than 100000 inhabitants. I’m not picky, as long as it’s less idiotic than “If we remove money from the economy it’s sure to grow!”
Are they now? They persistently elect those politicians who make you despair. And I’m not sure at all that the anti-immigrant moods can be assuaged by throwing money at the voters.
Austerity makes things worse.
There is no austerity in Western Europe (with the possible exception of Greece). Take a look at the government budgets—did they significantly contract? Take a look at the ECB balance sheet and the current interest rates as well.
ANYTHING ELSE
Sure. How about you deregulate the economy and let capitalism do what it does best?
From a Keynesian point of view the impression is more important than the reality. There may not be austerity, but people think there is, and they’re saving rather than consuming as a result, and that slows the economy.
They don’t always. Even if they do, investment doesn’t help if it doesn’t have anywhere to go. Right now the economy is not investment-limited, it’s demand-limited (as you can tell by e.g. low returns on investment).
a) there’s a persistent market distortion because investment profits are undertaxed
b) savers are often not terribly price-sensitive; a lot of people will “save as much as they can” at any interest rate. Also interest can’t go below nominal zero (many bank accounts are very close to this).
That too, but conventionally long-term interest rates are 10-years and up. In the US the term structure usually goes out to 30 years, in other countries sometimes more.
I went to a talk which presented the horrifying fact that immigrants are several times more likely to develop psychosis (varying from 2x to 10x dependant upon group, IIRC), and they theorised that some people have trouble empathising with people of other races, and this literally drives them insane. (Their other theory was that the cause is stimulant psychosis, but there wasn’t evidence to support this as the primary cause)
I’d rather this wasn’t the case. I quite like some level of controlled immigration, especially if they bring curry. But I worry that driving people insane is a fairly severe negative externality.
Schizophrenia occurs in national populations with an annual prevalence of 1.4 to 4.6 per 1000 and incidence rates of 16–42 per 100 000 (Jablensky, 2000). Although the incidence rates vary between countries by a factor of less than 3, wider ranges of variation are found among population subgroups within single countries. In the UK, for example, incidence rate ratios of 4 or above have been estimated both for the lowest social class in the indigenous White population and for Black immigrant groups. These data provide the most compelling evidence yet to hand for the role of socio-economic factors in aetiology.
I think the amount of additional schizophrenia is low enough that this isn’t a major issue for immigration.
Did this study consider the difference between white and non-white immigrants to mostly white Western countries?
Did this study consider the difference between white and non-white immigrants to non-white countries?
Did this study consider the difference between immigrants who (try to) assimilate to local communities, and those who prefer to stay within national communities?
Did this study consider the difference between white and non-white immigrants to mostly white Western countries?
Yes, the effect was very pronounced in Africans, possibly due to the use of the traditional African stimulant khat. But white people do drugs too, so this seems very dubious.
Did this study consider the difference between white and non-white immigrants to non-white countries?
&
Did this study consider the difference between immigrants who (try to) assimilate to local communities, and those who prefer to stay within national communities?
For context on the size of the potential benefit, an additional 1% migration rate would increase world GDP by about 1% (i.e. about one trillion dollars). The main question is the rate of migration if barriers are partially lowered, with estimates varying between 1% and 30%. Completely open migration could double world output. Based on Table 2 of Clemens (2011)
an additional 1% migration rate would increase world GDP by about 1% (i.e. about one trillion dollars)
I am having strong doubts about this number. The paper cited is long on handwaving and seems to be entirely too fond of expressions like “should make economists’ jaws hit their desks” and “there appear to be trillion-dollar bills on the
sidewalk”. In particular, there is the pervasive assumption that people are fungible so transferring a person from a $5,000 GDP/capita economy to a $50,000 GDP/capita economy immediately nets you $45,000 in additional GDP. I don’t think this is true.
In particular, there is the pervasive assumption that people are fungible so transferring a person from a $5,000 GDP/capita economy to a $50,000 GDP/capita economy immediately nets you $45,000 in additional GDP. I don’t think this is true.
This is ridiculous. If this were possible, wouldn’t the industries just relocate to the third world? (obviously, yes, some industries are inherently local, but not all industries that can move have moved)
Not all of it, but a lot of it. My point is that its economy grew as a result.
Industries are moving out of China to cheaper places like Africa and the Philippines. But the real-world economy is not completely frictionless; it takes time for these effects to occur.
But the real-world economy is not completely frictionless; it takes time for these effects to occur.
Indeed, it takes time, and for a third world person to reach the productivity of a first world person could take maybe 15 years of first-world education at a bare minimum? So people are not perfectly fungible.
I very much doubt your number. Third world people who go to first world universities do fine, so that’s 3 years, not 15. And for many jobs—even a very intellectual one like mine—I’m skeptical how much difference a degree really makes.
If immigrants didn’t have the skills that were needed to be productive, companies wouldn’t want to hire them. Instead we see companies chafing at the H-1B limits and crying out for more immigration.
I very much doubt your number. Third world people who go to first world universities do fine, so that’s 3 years, not 15. And for many jobs—even a very intellectual one like mine—I’m skeptical how much difference a degree really makes.
But these people are not the average third world people, they are presumably the ones fortunate enough to get a decent education in a country where many people don’t.
If immigrants didn’t have the skills that were needed to be productive, companies wouldn’t want to hire them. Instead we see companies chafing at the H-1B limits and crying out for more immigration.
I’m certainly not arguing some crazy position like ‘all immigrants are stupid.’ I’m also guessing that these immigrants that companies desperately want to hire are mostly not from third world countries.
Productivity will equalize and then growth will slow. When I’m pessimistic I fear every national economy will look like Japan’s as soon as we catch up.
That’s not a joke—industrial automation is proceeding at a rapid clip and the range of jobs for which you want dumb but cheap human labour continues to contract.
The paper cited is handwavy and conversational because it isn’t making original claims. It’s providing a survey for non-specialists. The table I mentioned is a summary of six other papers.
Some of the studies assume workers in poorer countries are permanently 1/3rd or 1/5th as productive as native workers, so the estimate is based on something more like a person transferred from a $5,000 GDP/capita economy to a $50,000 GDP/capita economy is able to produce $10-15K in value.
It looks to me as providing evidence for a particular point of view it wishes to promote. I am not sure of its… evenhandedness.
I think that social and economic effects of immigration are a complex subject and going about trillions lying on the sidewalk isn’t particularly helpful.
Some of the studies assume workers in poorer countries are permanently 1/3rd or 1/5th as productive as native workers
Are they advocating for abolition of the minimum wage? Can one survive on 1/5th the average salery? Will the combination of inequality and race cause civil unrest?
Sure, a randomly chosen person in a $5,000 GDP/capita economy is unlikely to make $50,000 no matter where you move them, but no-one is proposing to move people at random.
Do you happen to know of a scatter graph for immigration rate vs GDP? It might shed a little light on the matter, though fertility would be a cofounder.
I fail to see the connection between more immigration and improved utility. Notably most of the arguments in this regard tend to assume that people are completely fungible and that third-worlders will magically acquire the characteristics of the average first-wolder the moment they cross the boarder.
I don’t think that’s a necessary implication for wanting to open up immigration. All that’s needed is that new immigrants should do significantly better than they did in their home country, and do some good in the country they’ve moved to.
All that’s needed is that new immigrants should do significantly better than they did in their home country, do some good in the country they’ve moved to.
Notice that your two assumptions nearly contradict each other. After all if the average citizen of the old country was as capable of doing good as the average citizen of the destination, the old country wouldn’t be the kind of place one needs to leave to do significantly better.
Consider the common case of a Latin American man who leaves to become a construction worker in the US.
He’s a basically sensible person who’s willing to work hard, but due to corruption, lack of infrastructure, and probably prejudice in Latin America, he’s extremely poor.
He risks his life to go to America, where he’s still subject to corruption (employers can get away with cheating him of his wages, and there may be payments for his work into Social Security that he will almost certainly never be able to collect) and prejudice, but he’s still better off because he’s hooked into much better infrastructure, probably less corruption, and possibly less prejudice.
corruption, lack of infrastructure, and probably prejudice in Latin America
Why are these problems so much worse in Latin America? Probably a lot of it has to do with the character of the people there. Thus when he’s in the country he’s likely to do things that incrementally increase the problems he left Latin America to get away from.
If you get irritated by malicious comments like “U.S. people are self-centered, greedy, manipulative, meddlesome, trigger-happy devourers of the world’s resources, entitled policemen of the world’s affairs, and deluded by their overinflated self-importance”, then that should give you a hint of how your odious generalization about Latin Americans is likely to be received.
Many Western societies have seen pretty dramatic productivity-enhancing institutional changes in the last few hundred years that aren’t explicable in terms of changes in genetic makeup. In light of this, your view seems to rely on believing that most currently remaining institutional variation is genetic, whereas this wasn’t the case ~300 years ago. Do you think this is the case?
Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea seem to make a pretty strong case for a huge independent effect of institutions.
Many Western societies have seen pretty dramatic productivity-enhancing institutional changes in the last few hundred years that aren’t explicable in terms of changes in genetic makeup.
Who said anything about genetics?
Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea seem to make a pretty strong case for a huge independent effect of institutions.
Korea is. China (I assume this is what you mean by Hong Kong and Singapore) is evidence against.
Oops, shouldn’t have assumed you’re talking about genetics :)
Still, if you’re talking about character in a causally neutral sense, it seems that you need to posit character traits that hardly change within a person’s lifetime. Here I admit that the evidence for rapid institutional effects is weaker than the evidence for institutional effects in general.
(Re: Hong Kong, Singapore, no, I do mean those cities specifically. Their economic outcomes differ strikingly from culturally and genetically similar neighbors because of their unique histories.
You’re leaving out that he left Latin America to get away from those problems, and also that a lot of immigrants want to become real Americans (or whichever country they’re moving to).
All that’s needed is that new immigrants should do significantly better than they did in their home country, do some good in the country they’ve moved to.
Notice that your two assumptions nearly contradict each other. After all if the average citizen of the old country was as capable of doing good as the average citizen of the destination, the old country wouldn’t be the kind of place one needs to leave to do significantly better.
That argument seems to me non-responsive, fallacious, or at least inadequately fleshed out, in three different ways.
Immigrants needn’t be representative of their country of origin, in which case arguments about the average citizen in that country of origin aren’t automatically relevant.
The “average citizen of the old country” needn’t be “as capable of doing good as the average citizen of the destination” for NancyLebovitz’s point to go through; they just need to generate a net gain (however one operationalizes “a net gain”) at the margin.
Something like a fallacy of composition: a priori, “the average citizen of the old country [being] as capable of doing good as the average citizen of the destination” doesn’t automatically imply that “the old country [isn’t] the kind of place one needs to leave to do significantly better”. Given, say, increasing returns to scale & specialization, it’s quite possible that denizens of a tiny country would be outperformed by those of a bigger country, but would nonetheless be quite capable of matching their new neighbours if they moved to that bigger country.
That argument seems to me non-responsive, fallacious, or at least inadequately fleshed out, in three different ways.
Yes, it was a Baysian not a mathematical argument.
Immigrants needn’t be representative of their country of origin, in which case arguments about the average citizen in that country of origin aren’t automatically relevant.
They are unless you have reason to believe the immigrants are above average.
Given, say, increasing returns to scale
Comparing per-capita GDP with populations suggests we have decreasing returns to scale.
One way to see the problem with Nancy’s argument is to consider the following question: If most people from country X want to move to country Y then wouldn’t it be easier for country Y to simply annex country X? You save on relocation costs and the people are now in country Y.
unless you have reason to believe the immigrants are above average.
You do. (For a particular sense of “above average” that’s appropriate here.) The people who choose to leave country A to seek their fortune in country B are going to be (on average) atypical in a bunch of ways.
They will tend to be more optimistic about their prospects in country B and maybe less optimistic about their prospects in country A. It’s not immediately clear what we should expect this to say about them overall, but let’s “change basis” as follows: they will tend to have a higher opinion of how much better they’d do in B than in A, and this seems like it should correlate with actual prospects in B if it’s a healthier country than A.
They will tend to be more proactive, more go-getting. This seems like it should also correlate with productive work.
They will tend to be actually able to get themselves from country A to country B without starving, getting arrested by overzealous police in country A or B or in between, failing to get past border controls, etc. This all seems like it would correlated with effectiveness in getting stuff done. (Both directly, and because their ability to do this will be affected by the resources they have in country A, which for multiple reasons will correlate with their ability to get things done.)
There will probably be differences in their relationships with other people in country A, but I’m not sure which direction the overall effect goes. (Maybe they have looser ties, and that correlates with being less good with people, and that correlates with doing badly; maybe they have good friends and family making them feel well supported and confident, and that correlates with doing well.)
Having got from A to B, they are then going to be strongly motivated to make the trouble and expense worth while, which probably means that whatever their underlying competence they will work harder and more resourcefully in country B than they would have in country A.
So there are lots of reasons to expect people who have emigrated from dysfunctional country A to more-functional country B to be more effective workers in country B than the population average in country A.
(Note: I don’t think this is by any means the dominant reason to agree with Nancy and disagree with Azathoth on this point.)
Something like that was formerly more true. Now I suspect part of the problem is that improvements in transportation have made it “too easy” to immigrate.
Yes, it was a Baysian not a mathematical argument.
I don’t quite understand—Bayes is maths.
They are unless you have reason to believe the immigrants are above average.
One could require immigrants to have demonstrable skills. However, if the immigrants are above average then this causes a brain drain for the home country.
If most people from country X want to move to country Y then wouldn’t it be easier for country Y to simply annex country X? You save on relocation costs and the people are now in country Y.
This would also stop smaller first world countries like the Japan or the UK becoming overcrowded. OTOH its also completely infeasible in the foreseeable future because people wouldn’t agree to it.
The scatterplot shown here appears to show a strong positive correlation between population and GDP per capita.
[EDITED to add: no, I’m an idiot and misread the plot, which shows a clear correlation between population and total GDP and suggests rather little between population and per capita GDP. Sorry about that. The Gapminder link posted by satt also suggests very little correlation between population and per capita GDP. So the context for my (unchanged) argument below is not “Increasing returns to scale are just one factor; here are a bunch more” but “Increased returns to scale are probably negligible; here are a bunch of things that aren’t”.]
In any case, “increasing returns to scale” were just one example (and I think not the best) of how someone might be more productive on moving from (smaller, poorer, more corrupt, less developed) country A to (larger, richer, less corrupt, more developed) country B. Here, let me list some other specific things that might make someone more productive if they move from (say) Somalia to (say) France.
Better food and healthcare. Our migrant will likely be healthier in country B, and people do more and better work when healthier.
Easier learning. Our migrant may arrive in country B with few really valuable skills, but will find more opportunities than in country A to learn new things.
Better infrastructure. Perhaps our migrant is working on making things; country B has better roads, railways, airports, etc., for shipping the products around for sale. Perhaps s/he is (after taking advantage of those educational opportunities) working on computer software; country B has reliable electricity, internet that doesn’t suck, places to buy computer hardware, etc.
Richer customers. Perhaps our migrant is making food or cleaning houses. People in country B will pay a lot more for this, because they are richer and their time is worth more to them. So, at least as measured in GDP, the same work is more productive-in-dollars in country B than in country A. (Is this a real gain rather than an artefact of imperfect quantification? Maybe. If people in country B are richer and their time is worth more because they are actually doing more valuable things then any given saving in their time is helping the world more.)
Less corruption. Many poor dysfunctional countries have a lot of corruption. This imposes a sort of friction on otherwise-productive activities—one has to spend time and/or money bribing and sweet-talking corrupt officials, and it could have been used for something else. In country B this happens much less.
And what caused these differences between these two countries? (Hint: it’s not magical corruption ray located in Mogadishu.) And how will these traits change as more people move from Somalia to France?
It could be any number of things. Including the one I take it you’re looking for, namely some genetic inferiority on the part of the people in country A. But even if that were the entire cause it could still easily be the case that when someone moves from A to B their productivity (especially if expressed in monetary terms) increases dramatically.
I’m actually not quite sure what point you’re arguing now. A few comments back, though, your claim was that Nancy was (nearly) contradicting herself by expecting immigrants to (1) be productive in their new country even though (2) their old country is the kind of place where it’s really hard to be productive, on the grounds that for #2 to be true the people in the old country must be unproductive people.
It seems to me that for this argument to work you’d need counters to the following points (which have been made and which you haven’t, as it seems to me, given any good counterargument to so far):
There are lots of other ways in which the old country could make productivity harder than the new—e.g., the ones I mention above.
Let me reiterate that these apply even if the old country’s productivity is entirely a matter of permanent, unfixable genetic deficiencies in its people. Suppose the people of country A are substantially stupider and lazier than those of country B; this will lead to all kinds of structural problems in country A; but in country B it may well be that even someone substantially stupider and lazier than the average can still be productive. (Indeed I’m pretty sure many such people are.)
If the differences between A and B do indeed all arise in this way (which, incidentally, I think there are good reasons to think is far from the truth) then yes, if the scale of migration from A to B is large enough then it could make things worse rather than better overall. Given that the empirical evidence I’m aware of strongly suggests that migration to successful countries tends to make them better off, I think the onus is on you if you want to make the case that this actually happens at any credible level of migration.
The people who move from country A to country B may be atypical of the people of country A, in ways that make them more likely overall to be productive in country B.
Your only response to this has been a handwavy dismissal, to the effect that that might have been true once but now immigration is too easy so it isn’t any more. How about some evidence?
It could be any number of things. Including the one I take it you’re looking for, namely some genetic inferiority on the part of the people in country A.
Not necessarily, my argument goes through even if it’s memetic.
The people who move from country A to country B may be atypical of the people of country A, in ways that make them more likely overall to be productive in country B.
Your only response to this has been a handwavy dismissal, to the effect that that might have been true once but now immigration is too easy so it isn’t any more. How about some evidence?
How about some yourself. Note simply saying that something may happen is not a reason to ignore the prior that it won’t. I responded to your only argument about the prior. Also, look at the way the immigrants are in fact behaving, I believe it involves lots of riots and creating neighborhoods that the police are afraid to go into.
The cost of annexing can be very high. War is hard on people, and we don’t have methods of smoothly and sensibly rearranging national borders.
Also, at that point, country Y has inherited all of country X’s problems.
As far as I can tell, you don’t get everyone (or a very large proportion) of people wanting to leave a country unless there’s a lot of violence or a natural disaster. If the problem is poverty, people would rather have some members of their families emigrate to work, and send money back.
I think “annexing country X” might show some problems with utilitarian thinking—a tendency to abstract away important amounts of detail and the costs of getting from point A to point B. This doesn’t mean utilitarian thinking is always wrong, but these are problems to watch out for.
That was a special case since there the difference was (originally) entirely due to the Soviet occupation. And even then it wasn’t particularly effective, i.e., today the former GDR is doing much worse then the former FRG and (I think) comparably to the neighboring former Soviet satellites that weren’t annexed.
Yes, it was a Baysian not a mathematical argument.
That is a bit better, but even as a Bayesian argument it quietly rests on empirical priors which I find odd (as we’re about to see).
They are unless you have reason to believe the immigrants are above average.
In fact I do. gjm has listed a priori reasons to expect this. More empirically, I already know that epidemiologists talk about a “healthy immigrant effect”, which suggests that immigrants are selected (or indeed self-select) to be healthier & wealthier than the average for their home country. I’ve also seen people bringing up the selectedness of immigrants in arguments about race & IQ, to rebut observations that Third World immigrants tend to do better in their new homes than the estimated mean IQs of their home countries would suggest.
Comparing per-capita GDP with populations suggests we have decreasing returns to scale.
It does, but it is a very weak suggestion. The correlation is not that great to start with, and doesn’t account for other factors, like international differences in the working-age proportion of the population. Economists have tried to take a more systematic approach based on more involved regressions and/or fitting production functions, but the results here seem mixed, varying across industries and the level of aggregation.
(My own prior that increasing returns to scale occur in manufacturing — the class of industries, AFAIK, most important to a country’s development — seems broadly consistent with the available evidence. I may as well add that my point 3 invokes “increasing returns to scale & specialization” simply as an example, and the basic conclusion that there’s “[s]omething like a fallacy of composition” going on stands even if returns to scale are everywhere decreasing.)
One way to see the problem with Nancy’s argument is to consider the following question: If most people from country X want to move to country Y then wouldn’t it be easier for country Y to simply annex country X? You save on relocation costs and the people are now in country Y.
I fail to see the connection between more immigration and improved utility.
If I didn’t think I’d have higher utility in a different country than in mine, I wouldn’t want to move to that country in the first place. Granted, my moving there could affect other people’s utility, but it’s not obvious a priori what the sign of the net effect would be. EDIT: Most of the obvious externalities are pecuniary, so their effects on total utility cancel out when considering both sides of each transaction (assuming they have equal marginal utility for money).
Would supporting open immigration count as part of effective altruism?
Not unless you have an amazing insight / highly effective novel argument to inject into the political debate on the issue. It is an altruistic goal, but pushing for political changes that have near zero chance of actually coming to pass or have overton window shifts in the desired direction fails hard at the “Effective” part. Dont get me wrong, political action can certainly be a very effective way to do good in the world, but this particular issue is so far out of reach of the overton window it kind of isn’t part of the building anymore.
The best argument I’ve ever been able to come up with is that we should underbid the people smuggling industry—Grant anyone who can post a 3000 dollar bond and a return ticket a temporary right of residence and employment as long as their money lasts, and I’ve never been able to sell anyone on it that weren’t already opposed to controls on immigration.
I have also seen people much, much better at politics than me try to persuade people of the immorality of immigration restrictions. I have never seen it work. Anecdote, data, I know, but if this was a good attack angle, I should be able to think of examples of it not just abysmally failing.
If I could figure out a way to make seasteading actually profitable (iron fertilization fishing industry? ) doing that under an appropriate flag of convenience and recruiting labor out of the various hellholes people need to leave seems workable, because it doesn’t require persuasion. However, it also requires what would effectively be company towns to be run to first world standards of living…
It’s not an either-or thing. There are a lot of intermediate states and pushing in the direction of open immigration can be effective even if you don’t expect to get to the abolisment of national borders in the near future. EU exists.
And if we could get our politicians to stop fucking up for a couple of years, expanding the union further would be the most viable angle of attack I can think of. But that requires the european economy to be doing much better than it currently is to be viable, so step one would be to deprogram our political class of their love affair with austerity…
EU expansion doesn’t rely on a successful European economy. Croatia’s accession to the EU took place entirely post-GFC.
The real reason the EU won’t expand significantly is because there’s nowhere for it to expand to. Norway, Switzerland and Iceland don’t want to join. Turkey and the Ukraine aren’t wanted. Some of the remaining Balkan countries will join eventually, but they total only 18 million people, and none are great accession candidates; it’s now recognised that Bulgaria was probably a mistake, and there’s no wish to repeat that. I’d say there’s more chance that the UK leaves the EU than it undertakes a significant expansion in the next, say, 20 years.
Ah, well, I wouldn’t advise you to hold your breath… X-)
The most pressing problem at the moment for that expansion east is that Mr.Putin doesn’t seem to like it. And if you are thinking about expanding south, the voters don’t seem to like that.
The voters are reasoning beings—if we could get the economy created by the last expansion round to work well, they would have more of an appetite for further rounds. Nothing much is viable as long as we are collectively shooting ourselves in one foot, reloading and switching to the other, however. It hurts my head that our political class doesnt seem to be updating on evidence at all. Austerity makes things worse. Try something else. ANYTHING ELSE, Wage hikes in Germany. A monster project to build a low-pressure intercity subway between every city in europe with more than 100000 inhabitants. I’m not picky, as long as it’s less idiotic than “If we remove money from the economy it’s sure to grow!”
Are they now? They persistently elect those politicians who make you despair. And I’m not sure at all that the anti-immigrant moods can be assuaged by throwing money at the voters.
There is no austerity in Western Europe (with the possible exception of Greece). Take a look at the government budgets—did they significantly contract? Take a look at the ECB balance sheet and the current interest rates as well.
Sure. How about you deregulate the economy and let capitalism do what it does best?
From a Keynesian point of view the impression is more important than the reality. There may not be austerity, but people think there is, and they’re saving rather than consuming as a result, and that slows the economy.
Why? If savings come out the other end as investment.
They don’t always. Even if they do, investment doesn’t help if it doesn’t have anywhere to go. Right now the economy is not investment-limited, it’s demand-limited (as you can tell by e.g. low returns on investment).
Why doesn’t the market for capital equalize the discrepancy between supply and demand by adjusting the price (the interest rate)?
a) there’s a persistent market distortion because investment profits are undertaxed
b) savers are often not terribly price-sensitive; a lot of people will “save as much as they can” at any interest rate. Also interest can’t go below nominal zero (many bank accounts are very close to this).
What do you mean? Corporate tax rates, at least in the US, are higher than personal tax rates.
Sure it can.
It does for long-term interest rates. Short-term interest rates are effectively determined by the government.
“And in the long run we’re all dead”? : )
That too, but conventionally long-term interest rates are 10-years and up. In the US the term structure usually goes out to 30 years, in other countries sometimes more.
Heh. That’s an interesting question. Some people certainly believe so.
It’s something that GiveWell’s looked into over the last year or two, and so has Carl Shulman on Reflective Disequilibrium as part of his effective altruism research notes.
“Effective” assumes that you believe you make an impact. Depending on how you plan to support it, effectiveness might vary greatly.
I went to a talk which presented the horrifying fact that immigrants are several times more likely to develop psychosis (varying from 2x to 10x dependant upon group, IIRC), and they theorised that some people have trouble empathising with people of other races, and this literally drives them insane. (Their other theory was that the cause is stimulant psychosis, but there wasn’t evidence to support this as the primary cause)
I’d rather this wasn’t the case. I quite like some level of controlled immigration, especially if they bring curry. But I worry that driving people insane is a fairly severe negative externality.
Here’s a study.
I think the amount of additional schizophrenia is low enough that this isn’t a major issue for immigration.
Guessing that link’s meant to go somewhere else...
Thanks. I’ve found a better link than the one I intended, so I’ve updated the comment text.
Did this study consider the difference between white and non-white immigrants to mostly white Western countries?
Did this study consider the difference between white and non-white immigrants to non-white countries?
Did this study consider the difference between immigrants who (try to) assimilate to local communities, and those who prefer to stay within national communities?
Yes, the effect was very pronounced in Africans, possibly due to the use of the traditional African stimulant khat. But white people do drugs too, so this seems very dubious.
&
No, although maybe other studies did.
For context on the size of the potential benefit, an additional 1% migration rate would increase world GDP by about 1% (i.e. about one trillion dollars). The main question is the rate of migration if barriers are partially lowered, with estimates varying between 1% and 30%. Completely open migration could double world output. Based on Table 2 of Clemens (2011)
I am having strong doubts about this number. The paper cited is long on handwaving and seems to be entirely too fond of expressions like “should make economists’ jaws hit their desks” and “there appear to be trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk”. In particular, there is the pervasive assumption that people are fungible so transferring a person from a $5,000 GDP/capita economy to a $50,000 GDP/capita economy immediately nets you $45,000 in additional GDP. I don’t think this is true.
This is ridiculous. If this were possible, wouldn’t the industries just relocate to the third world? (obviously, yes, some industries are inherently local, but not all industries that can move have moved)
Um....
:-D
Yes, I know about China, but (a) not all industry that could move has (b) China isn’t really a third world country.
Not any more it isn’t, now that all the industry moved there.
All the industry moved there? And so why hasn’t it now moved to the remaining third-world countries?
Not all of it, but a lot of it. My point is that its economy grew as a result.
Industries are moving out of China to cheaper places like Africa and the Philippines. But the real-world economy is not completely frictionless; it takes time for these effects to occur.
Indeed, it takes time, and for a third world person to reach the productivity of a first world person could take maybe 15 years of first-world education at a bare minimum? So people are not perfectly fungible.
I very much doubt your number. Third world people who go to first world universities do fine, so that’s 3 years, not 15. And for many jobs—even a very intellectual one like mine—I’m skeptical how much difference a degree really makes.
If immigrants didn’t have the skills that were needed to be productive, companies wouldn’t want to hire them. Instead we see companies chafing at the H-1B limits and crying out for more immigration.
But these people are not the average third world people, they are presumably the ones fortunate enough to get a decent education in a country where many people don’t.
I’m certainly not arguing some crazy position like ‘all immigrants are stupid.’ I’m also guessing that these immigrants that companies desperately want to hire are mostly not from third world countries.
Any thoughts about what will happen when there are no longer really cheap places to move to?
Productivity will equalize and then growth will slow. When I’m pessimistic I fear every national economy will look like Japan’s as soon as we catch up.
The robots will take over.
That’s not a joke—industrial automation is proceeding at a rapid clip and the range of jobs for which you want dumb but cheap human labour continues to contract.
Also, the industries that can move and would benefit already did, so the rest are in particular need of people from developed nations.
The paper cited is handwavy and conversational because it isn’t making original claims. It’s providing a survey for non-specialists. The table I mentioned is a summary of six other papers.
Some of the studies assume workers in poorer countries are permanently 1/3rd or 1/5th as productive as native workers, so the estimate is based on something more like a person transferred from a $5,000 GDP/capita economy to a $50,000 GDP/capita economy is able to produce $10-15K in value.
It looks to me as providing evidence for a particular point of view it wishes to promote. I am not sure of its… evenhandedness.
I think that social and economic effects of immigration are a complex subject and going about trillions lying on the sidewalk isn’t particularly helpful.
Are they advocating for abolition of the minimum wage? Can one survive on 1/5th the average salery? Will the combination of inequality and race cause civil unrest?
Sure, a randomly chosen person in a $5,000 GDP/capita economy is unlikely to make $50,000 no matter where you move them, but no-one is proposing to move people at random.
Do you happen to know of a scatter graph for immigration rate vs GDP? It might shed a little light on the matter, though fertility would be a cofounder.
I fail to see the connection between more immigration and improved utility. Notably most of the arguments in this regard tend to assume that people are completely fungible and that third-worlders will magically acquire the characteristics of the average first-wolder the moment they cross the boarder.
I don’t think that’s a necessary implication for wanting to open up immigration. All that’s needed is that new immigrants should do significantly better than they did in their home country, and do some good in the country they’ve moved to.
Notice that your two assumptions nearly contradict each other. After all if the average citizen of the old country was as capable of doing good as the average citizen of the destination, the old country wouldn’t be the kind of place one needs to leave to do significantly better.
Consider the common case of a Latin American man who leaves to become a construction worker in the US.
He’s a basically sensible person who’s willing to work hard, but due to corruption, lack of infrastructure, and probably prejudice in Latin America, he’s extremely poor.
He risks his life to go to America, where he’s still subject to corruption (employers can get away with cheating him of his wages, and there may be payments for his work into Social Security that he will almost certainly never be able to collect) and prejudice, but he’s still better off because he’s hooked into much better infrastructure, probably less corruption, and possibly less prejudice.
Why are these problems so much worse in Latin America? Probably a lot of it has to do with the character of the people there. Thus when he’s in the country he’s likely to do things that incrementally increase the problems he left Latin America to get away from.
If you get irritated by malicious comments like “U.S. people are self-centered, greedy, manipulative, meddlesome, trigger-happy devourers of the world’s resources, entitled policemen of the world’s affairs, and deluded by their overinflated self-importance”, then that should give you a hint of how your odious generalization about Latin Americans is likely to be received.
Many Western societies have seen pretty dramatic productivity-enhancing institutional changes in the last few hundred years that aren’t explicable in terms of changes in genetic makeup. In light of this, your view seems to rely on believing that most currently remaining institutional variation is genetic, whereas this wasn’t the case ~300 years ago. Do you think this is the case?
Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea seem to make a pretty strong case for a huge independent effect of institutions.
Who said anything about genetics?
Korea is. China (I assume this is what you mean by Hong Kong and Singapore) is evidence against.
Oops, shouldn’t have assumed you’re talking about genetics :)
Still, if you’re talking about character in a causally neutral sense, it seems that you need to posit character traits that hardly change within a person’s lifetime. Here I admit that the evidence for rapid institutional effects is weaker than the evidence for institutional effects in general.
(Re: Hong Kong, Singapore, no, I do mean those cities specifically. Their economic outcomes differ strikingly from culturally and genetically similar neighbors because of their unique histories.
You seem to assume that everybody in Latin America has the same character, in which case how comes certain people emigrate and other don’t?
You’re leaving out that he left Latin America to get away from those problems, and also that a lot of immigrants want to become real Americans (or whichever country they’re moving to).
But do they understand what caused them.
I’d be more comfortable with an immigration policy that explicitly screened for something like this.
That argument seems to me non-responsive, fallacious, or at least inadequately fleshed out, in three different ways.
Immigrants needn’t be representative of their country of origin, in which case arguments about the average citizen in that country of origin aren’t automatically relevant.
The “average citizen of the old country” needn’t be “as capable of doing good as the average citizen of the destination” for NancyLebovitz’s point to go through; they just need to generate a net gain (however one operationalizes “a net gain”) at the margin.
Something like a fallacy of composition: a priori, “the average citizen of the old country [being] as capable of doing good as the average citizen of the destination” doesn’t automatically imply that “the old country [isn’t] the kind of place one needs to leave to do significantly better”. Given, say, increasing returns to scale & specialization, it’s quite possible that denizens of a tiny country would be outperformed by those of a bigger country, but would nonetheless be quite capable of matching their new neighbours if they moved to that bigger country.
Yes, it was a Baysian not a mathematical argument.
They are unless you have reason to believe the immigrants are above average.
Comparing per-capita GDP with populations suggests we have decreasing returns to scale.
One way to see the problem with Nancy’s argument is to consider the following question: If most people from country X want to move to country Y then wouldn’t it be easier for country Y to simply annex country X? You save on relocation costs and the people are now in country Y.
You do. (For a particular sense of “above average” that’s appropriate here.) The people who choose to leave country A to seek their fortune in country B are going to be (on average) atypical in a bunch of ways.
They will tend to be more optimistic about their prospects in country B and maybe less optimistic about their prospects in country A. It’s not immediately clear what we should expect this to say about them overall, but let’s “change basis” as follows: they will tend to have a higher opinion of how much better they’d do in B than in A, and this seems like it should correlate with actual prospects in B if it’s a healthier country than A.
They will tend to be more proactive, more go-getting. This seems like it should also correlate with productive work.
They will tend to be actually able to get themselves from country A to country B without starving, getting arrested by overzealous police in country A or B or in between, failing to get past border controls, etc. This all seems like it would correlated with effectiveness in getting stuff done. (Both directly, and because their ability to do this will be affected by the resources they have in country A, which for multiple reasons will correlate with their ability to get things done.)
There will probably be differences in their relationships with other people in country A, but I’m not sure which direction the overall effect goes. (Maybe they have looser ties, and that correlates with being less good with people, and that correlates with doing badly; maybe they have good friends and family making them feel well supported and confident, and that correlates with doing well.)
Having got from A to B, they are then going to be strongly motivated to make the trouble and expense worth while, which probably means that whatever their underlying competence they will work harder and more resourcefully in country B than they would have in country A.
So there are lots of reasons to expect people who have emigrated from dysfunctional country A to more-functional country B to be more effective workers in country B than the population average in country A.
(Note: I don’t think this is by any means the dominant reason to agree with Nancy and disagree with Azathoth on this point.)
Something like that was formerly more true. Now I suspect part of the problem is that improvements in transportation have made it “too easy” to immigrate.
I suspect you mean “formerly.”
Thanks, fixed.
Ahem
I don’t quite understand—Bayes is maths.
One could require immigrants to have demonstrable skills. However, if the immigrants are above average then this causes a brain drain for the home country.
This would also stop smaller first world countries like the Japan or the UK becoming overcrowded. OTOH its also completely infeasible in the foreseeable future because people wouldn’t agree to it.
The scatterplot shown here appears to show a strong positive correlation between population and GDP per capita.
[EDITED to add: no, I’m an idiot and misread the plot, which shows a clear correlation between population and total GDP and suggests rather little between population and per capita GDP. Sorry about that. The Gapminder link posted by satt also suggests very little correlation between population and per capita GDP. So the context for my (unchanged) argument below is not “Increasing returns to scale are just one factor; here are a bunch more” but “Increased returns to scale are probably negligible; here are a bunch of things that aren’t”.]
In any case, “increasing returns to scale” were just one example (and I think not the best) of how someone might be more productive on moving from (smaller, poorer, more corrupt, less developed) country A to (larger, richer, less corrupt, more developed) country B. Here, let me list some other specific things that might make someone more productive if they move from (say) Somalia to (say) France.
Better food and healthcare. Our migrant will likely be healthier in country B, and people do more and better work when healthier.
Easier learning. Our migrant may arrive in country B with few really valuable skills, but will find more opportunities than in country A to learn new things.
Better infrastructure. Perhaps our migrant is working on making things; country B has better roads, railways, airports, etc., for shipping the products around for sale. Perhaps s/he is (after taking advantage of those educational opportunities) working on computer software; country B has reliable electricity, internet that doesn’t suck, places to buy computer hardware, etc.
Richer customers. Perhaps our migrant is making food or cleaning houses. People in country B will pay a lot more for this, because they are richer and their time is worth more to them. So, at least as measured in GDP, the same work is more productive-in-dollars in country B than in country A. (Is this a real gain rather than an artefact of imperfect quantification? Maybe. If people in country B are richer and their time is worth more because they are actually doing more valuable things then any given saving in their time is helping the world more.)
Less corruption. Many poor dysfunctional countries have a lot of corruption. This imposes a sort of friction on otherwise-productive activities—one has to spend time and/or money bribing and sweet-talking corrupt officials, and it could have been used for something else. In country B this happens much less.
And what caused these differences between these two countries? (Hint: it’s not magical corruption ray located in Mogadishu.) And how will these traits change as more people move from Somalia to France?
It could be any number of things. Including the one I take it you’re looking for, namely some genetic inferiority on the part of the people in country A. But even if that were the entire cause it could still easily be the case that when someone moves from A to B their productivity (especially if expressed in monetary terms) increases dramatically.
I’m actually not quite sure what point you’re arguing now. A few comments back, though, your claim was that Nancy was (nearly) contradicting herself by expecting immigrants to (1) be productive in their new country even though (2) their old country is the kind of place where it’s really hard to be productive, on the grounds that for #2 to be true the people in the old country must be unproductive people.
It seems to me that for this argument to work you’d need counters to the following points (which have been made and which you haven’t, as it seems to me, given any good counterargument to so far):
There are lots of other ways in which the old country could make productivity harder than the new—e.g., the ones I mention above.
Let me reiterate that these apply even if the old country’s productivity is entirely a matter of permanent, unfixable genetic deficiencies in its people. Suppose the people of country A are substantially stupider and lazier than those of country B; this will lead to all kinds of structural problems in country A; but in country B it may well be that even someone substantially stupider and lazier than the average can still be productive. (Indeed I’m pretty sure many such people are.)
If the differences between A and B do indeed all arise in this way (which, incidentally, I think there are good reasons to think is far from the truth) then yes, if the scale of migration from A to B is large enough then it could make things worse rather than better overall. Given that the empirical evidence I’m aware of strongly suggests that migration to successful countries tends to make them better off, I think the onus is on you if you want to make the case that this actually happens at any credible level of migration.
The people who move from country A to country B may be atypical of the people of country A, in ways that make them more likely overall to be productive in country B.
Your only response to this has been a handwavy dismissal, to the effect that that might have been true once but now immigration is too easy so it isn’t any more. How about some evidence?
Not necessarily, my argument goes through even if it’s memetic.
How about some yourself. Note simply saying that something may happen is not a reason to ignore the prior that it won’t. I responded to your only argument about the prior. Also, look at the way the immigrants are in fact behaving, I believe it involves lots of riots and creating neighborhoods that the police are afraid to go into.
The cost of annexing can be very high. War is hard on people, and we don’t have methods of smoothly and sensibly rearranging national borders.
Also, at that point, country Y has inherited all of country X’s problems.
As far as I can tell, you don’t get everyone (or a very large proportion) of people wanting to leave a country unless there’s a lot of violence or a natural disaster. If the problem is poverty, people would rather have some members of their families emigrate to work, and send money back.
I think “annexing country X” might show some problems with utilitarian thinking—a tendency to abstract away important amounts of detail and the costs of getting from point A to point B. This doesn’t mean utilitarian thinking is always wrong, but these are problems to watch out for.
That’s my point. Having many people from country X emigrate to country Y causes country X to acquire country Y’s problems.
Immigration doesn’t lead to importing country X’s government.
True, but it may very well lead to importing the reason country X has the government it does.
That’s exactly what the FRG did with the GDR.
That was a special case since there the difference was (originally) entirely due to the Soviet occupation. And even then it wasn’t particularly effective, i.e., today the former GDR is doing much worse then the former FRG and (I think) comparably to the neighboring former Soviet satellites that weren’t annexed.
That is a bit better, but even as a Bayesian argument it quietly rests on empirical priors which I find odd (as we’re about to see).
In fact I do. gjm has listed a priori reasons to expect this. More empirically, I already know that epidemiologists talk about a “healthy immigrant effect”, which suggests that immigrants are selected (or indeed self-select) to be healthier & wealthier than the average for their home country. I’ve also seen people bringing up the selectedness of immigrants in arguments about race & IQ, to rebut observations that Third World immigrants tend to do better in their new homes than the estimated mean IQs of their home countries would suggest.
It does, but it is a very weak suggestion. The correlation is not that great to start with, and doesn’t account for other factors, like international differences in the working-age proportion of the population. Economists have tried to take a more systematic approach based on more involved regressions and/or fitting production functions, but the results here seem mixed, varying across industries and the level of aggregation.
(My own prior that increasing returns to scale occur in manufacturing — the class of industries, AFAIK, most important to a country’s development — seems broadly consistent with the available evidence. I may as well add that my point 3 invokes “increasing returns to scale & specialization” simply as an example, and the basic conclusion that there’s “[s]omething like a fallacy of composition” going on stands even if returns to scale are everywhere decreasing.)
I have little to add to what NancyLebovitz & skeptical_lurker have already said.
If I didn’t think I’d have higher utility in a different country than in mine, I wouldn’t want to move to that country in the first place. Granted, my moving there could affect other people’s utility, but it’s not obvious a priori what the sign of the net effect would be. EDIT: Most of the obvious externalities are pecuniary, so their effects on total utility cancel out when considering both sides of each transaction (assuming they have equal marginal utility for money).