That's pretty fair, although I've been even a bit stronger -- that we had open borders (mostly, but not in a way that restricted the quantity of inflow) for a long time in which trans-oceanic travel wasn't particularly hard, and the results weren't tragic at all. My grandparents didn't "wait in line" or "follow the rules" to get here, there was no waiting, and no particularly onerous rules to follow. And they were uneducated and malnourished (under the assumption that no one grows six inches after the age of twenty: 5'8" at immigration, 6'2" when he died) unless he hadn't been eating properly beforehand. So by any standard other than skin color, they were definitely "Those Kinds Of People."
I am unable to close parentheses in any coherent way. I'm probably still Those Kinds Of People.
It would be interesting to get similar research on the U.S. case or at least some account of how it's different from the EU, apart from the Micronesia example. And a 23% increase in Germany's population doesnt sound like a small deal at all.
So you're saying he was the potato-faced spawn of some Irish whore?
3: Is Germany one of the countries that is fretting about its citizens not having enough babies?
A 23% increase in population is a pretty big deal even if you wanted more babies to stop a decline in population.
And a 23% increase in Germany's population doesnt sound like a small deal at all.
Near as I can tell, that's what would happen if, literally, everyone in the world who wanted to move up and did. I don't think that's a realistic assumption.
Furthermore, Germany is an aging nation with below-replacement fertility. They need increased immigrant flows to maintain current living standards, whether they can admit it or not.
I'm debating forwarding this to my German FIL. He's always been a curious blend of liberal and conservative, so I wonder how this will strike him.
||
Hey, I've got the Heebie-Jeebies! Louis Armstrong's version just popped up on the shuffle.
|>
Fascinating nugget from the study linked in that 23% factoid:
[S]cores for countries where non-Arab expats make up more than 50% of the adult population are not reported: United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Qatar.I'm assuming tons of poor immigrant servants plus a substantial population of Unfogged commenters working in academia.
No sizable democratic nation would open its borders if it expected a 23% increase in population in the short term. The first generation of migrants from high-fertility areas tends to carry on that level of fertility and the migrants tend to be people in their child-having years. A influx that resulted in a 23% increase in population would result in something over 50% of the next generation being the children of migrants.
3: Is Germany one of the countries that is fretting about its citizens not having enough babies?
Not sure how much they're fretting--I listened to a public radio podcast about it recently, but it's a real issue. ~81m people now, but that's predicted to sink to between 67-73m by 2060, depending on how tightly they limit immigration.
No sizable democratic nation would open its borders if it expected a 23% increase in population in the short term.
He talks about this at the link - that rarely when we discuss immigration do we distinguish between letting people in immediately, or spacing it out over 20 years.
Furthermore, Germany is an aging nation with below-replacement fertility. They need increased immigrant flows to maintain current living standards, whether they can admit it or not.
They need immigration to maintain current levels of economic growth, not standards of living. For example, Japan is in economic decline because of the drop in the number of working age people, but I haven't seen anything about how that has cut standards of living.
12: But spacing it out of 20 year is not compatible with opening the borders. Spacing that kind of thing out of 20 years is closer to what the U.S. is doing now than it is to open borders.
And of course he makes the point that predictions about the volume of immigration are always too high. That 23% figure is based on everyone in the world who's said that sure, they'd like to move to Germany, actually doing it.
15 crossed with 14, but addressing it. That 23% number is a highest possible, not a this is really immediately likely, prediction.
It would be interesting to get similar research on the U.S. case or at least some account of how it's different from the EU, apart from the Micronesia example.
Clicking through the links, the same survey that gave 23% change for Germany gave net changes of 120%, 53%, 45%, 43%, and 38% for Canada, UK, US, Spain, and France, respectively. Those are big numbers!
Ahimsub, I live in a neighborhood that's been, and continues to be, revitalized by recent immigrants, and it's great! $1 sambusas, $7 giant burritos, tasty cakes and cheap limes -- immigrants are awesome!
What I'd really like to see is some program to encourage revitalizing small towns with new immigrants. We have a little bit of this here, with Mexican immigrants working in meat packing and the like, and Hmong immigrants taking farms, but there could be a lot more. You know, what if we had some of the old Finnish socialist towns up on the Range reoccupied by leftwing Ecuadorians or something? Get the Swedish grandmothers teaching Somali kids how to do rosemåling and stuff.
Also, it would sure make things a lot nicer for everyone if the police didn't treat immigrants like shit all the time. Just sayin'.
I don't know how they are sure that the prediction would be too high. For one thing, the article mentions that predictions were too low when Polish immigration in the U.K. was opened up. For another, the people answering questions about emigrating to Germany mostly know they can't do so right now. You would certainly have some people who said they'd move but didn't move. But I think you'd also have some who would move but aren't even willing to entertain the idea in the current climate.
17: But even if you had, say, 10% of that amount of new immigration, you'd see big changes back in people's home countries when the remittances started coming in.
Eh, Canada's got lots of room and is starting from a lower baseline.
Anyway, a proposal like this wouldn't go anywhere in Congress once the human smuggling lobby started making campaign contributions.
Within reasonable bounds of hospitable climate, how dense would the world be, if the population was evenly distributed? I bet you could use ...some sort of mathematical operation to compute that pretty easily.
I think 17 lends support to my point in 19. Those percentages look to be sorted in terms of how easy it is to get or how many immigrants are currently allowed in.
The meat from giants is too stringy- I prefer dwarf burritos, it's much more tender, like veal.
I always get the burrito fillings put into a bowl. A flour tortilla is just tasteless, nutritionally void calories.
Whereas eating the bowl provides a high amount of fiber and plasticizers?
Now I kinda want to get a rosemåled tattoo.
I had a nice long xenophobic comment all written up but firefox ate it.
I really can't see an open borders policy being anything but an utter disaster for low skill workers. It seems to me that the downwards pressure on wages would be enough to effectively kill any attempt to fix the minimum wage, for example.
It always amazes me that an American's descent from certain once-undesirable populations can be a badge of honor, a cherished, inalienable identity. This is typically most true of educated people, and usually involves taking a much more positive view of the "heritage" than their ancestors did.
It's quite a contrast to "passing," to the age-old practice of hiding your origins, which of course also still goes on.
So the intellectual American can work up a sort of free-floating resentment concerning discrimination never personally experienced, against a ruling elite which is largely imaginary. While baffling to me, the psychological need for this is palpable and the evidence for it widespread.
But if the immigrant workers were all legal, it would be a hell of a lot easier to organize with them.
And they wouldn't be overwhelmingly low-skill. Illegal immigrants are going to cluster in low-skill, poorly regulated, casual labor jobs. Legal immigrants wouldn't. My sense of the research is that the downward pressure on wages you worry about doesn't actually show up in real life.
Come to think, I guess Polish immigration to the UK would be a test case: did wages drop when the borders opened to Poles?
I really can't see an open borders policy being anything but an utter disaster for low skill workers. It seems to me that the downwards pressure on wages would be enough to effectively kill any attempt to fix the minimum wage, for example.
But this is an odd combination of wildly unlikely hypothetical with super grounded realities of Republicans. In the world in which we can't fix the minimum wage, we don't exactly need to worry about opening the borders completely, and the contrapositive too.
29: Is that to me? Because while my grandparents were malnourished and nearly illiterate, they certainly weren't discriminated against: walked right off the boat into nepotistic favoritism.
Also, so many of these debates seem to be predicated on the notion that immigrants come to a rich country, get a low-skill, low-wage, no-local-language-knowledge-required job and just sit there like a bump on a log for the rest of their working lives. That sure isn't what I observe around here. Sure, you've got some guys who are going to be day laborers or dishwashers or whatever for a long time, but you've also got the people who start out cutting friends' hair in their kitchen and in 5 or 10 years they've got their own salon with half a dozen employees. And once you've got enough folx clawing their way up to the middle classes, suddenly you've got law firms and big grocery stores and non-profit organizations and the whole bit springing up to serve that community. And the 2nd gen kids go to pharmacy school or get accounting degrees and now we're talking about people who are unambiguously net contributors to the economy.
I really can't see an open borders policy being anything but an utter disaster for low skill workers.
Did you not read the linked article?
Some of the best new evidence we have on this comes from economists Mette Foged and Giovanni Peri. No one out there has better data or more scientific methods than these researchers. They have studied the wages and employment of every individual worker in Denmark from 1991 to 2008 (yes, everyone) and tracked how they responded to a large influx of refugees from places like Somalia and Afghanistan. Those immigrants caused native unskilled wages and employment to rise.So these guys literally checked in on every low skill worker in Denmark for 18 years of increased immigration, and found that they benefited. But the response is still, "It has to be an utter disaster."
Is this like how people can't believe that raising the minimum wage won't depress employment? We've done it over and over, and it never happens, but everyone is dead certain that it will happen.
Humans are the worst.
A quick google got me some Oxford University page suggesting that there was some downward pressure on wages for low-skill workers as a result of Polish immigration to the UK. Interestingly, that pressure was concentrated on other recent immigrants: new immigrants are better substitutes for older immigrants than for native workers.
And the 2nd gen kids go to pharmacy school or get accounting degrees and now we're talking about people who are unambiguously net contributors to the economy.
And by the third generation we go to law school and start being a net loss again.
35.last: Compared to the alternatives.
But, the research in U.S. has shown that immigration hurt those without at least high school. That's a relatively small portion of the population, so overall wages have improved.
Neoliberalism-saturated supporting link.
Shit, there's like 7 or 8 auto parts retailers within walking distance of my house, all in new buildings (or heavily refurbished old buildings) that have opened up in the last 10 years so, and a big part of the reason is that the neighborhoods around me are full of shade-tree mechanics and immigrants who prefer to do their own car repairs. That's dozens of entry-level jobs, most of them going to native-born workers, not to mention the construction jobs and support services like accountants or whatever, that those businesses support.
Incidentally, Pittsburgh has been trying, with varying intensity, to try to get more international immigrants for almost 20 years, with very little success (other than Nepalese/Bhutanese, of whom we have the nation's largest community). And this despite the fact that, for 100 months running, the MSA has had lower unemployment than the nation at large. Immigrants go where previous immigrants have gone, so it's highly path-dependent.
37: Exactly! 4th generation it's comp lit degrees and a lifetime waiting tables.
38, 39: That link says there's some research showing immigration lowers wages, and other research showing that it raises wages for everyone. Not an unmitigated disaster.
43: Neoliberals are wishy-washy like that.
41: To be fair, we haven't been hugely successful at getting more domestic migrants either.
41: Dr. Oops mentioned that an odd thing about practicing in Pittsburg was the absence of Latinos -- Newark, where she'd been before, Spanish was very useful around the hospital (not that she speaks it, but it would have been helpful if she had). Pittsburgh, patients were overwhelmingly white or black.
33:
It was a general observation. You seem to be aware, in the way you present it, of a certain schtick quality, a sense of ridiculousness. So while you can give vent to a Menckenesque animus against the millions of particularly rural Americans of British Protestant ancestry, I can never be sure you aren't mostly kidding.
39: Frustratingly, the chart in that linked article shows that different measures show different things, with one set of data showing that every native-born group benefits, albeit slightly. But it doesn't seem to explain the different in measures.
Anyway, I'm also unclear whether this is looking at only legal immigrants or legal and illegal. As Natilo has been pointing out, keeping immigrants illegal turns them into the ultimate reserve army of the underemployed - why pay an American minimum wage when there's an undocumented worker who'll do it for half the price? But if everyone is entitled to minimum wage, you can't compete on working below market, you have to compete on effort/ability.
No, no, I'm not prejudiced against WASPs because they discriminated against my family. Nobody much ever discriminated against my family. I'm prejudiced against WASPs because I think they're systematically bad people.
(Still unsure? Because that is the effect I'm going for.)
you have to compete on effort/ability
My own personal goal is to never, ever have to do that.
47: That was strange for me also. I came here after living in North Carolina. Where I was in Durham, it was rare to see somebody white or black doing outdoor labor. I don't know about indoor labor, because I can't see through doors.
It turns out (and I hadn't known this when I posted the original link at the Other Place) that this is Vienna's Integration Week. I should really go to some of these events! Well, aside from going to the thing where I get my Education Pass stamped so I can get a €150 refund on my German class.
Ironically, most of the Chicano day laborers in Durham are named "Jamaal".
that this is Vienna's Integration Week.
Twinsies! I'm grading Cal II!
Newt's math class this year is called Integrated Algebra. I asked him if it's the curriculum that replaced Jim Crow Algebra back in the '60s. He was not amused.
I, unsurprisingly, don't trust any economics research on the effects of immigration on wages; they are highly ideologically motivated and it's an inherently hard effect to isolate. But from a humanitarian perspective one ought to be for freeer immigration from any country that doesn't have a clear and probable path to improvement, as measured by the number of people wanting to leave. I don't think there's another moral choice.
Right. Capital moves freely across borders: labor should be able to do the same.
Actually, I'm opposed to the free movement of capital and think undoing that would be a good idea.
All that suffering capital in the poor countries that our best and strongest from Harvard Business School valiantly liberates and brings to Wall Street to frolic.
Handwringing about low wage workers ignores that they are under pressure from other, more significant factors (like offshoring and automation, and diminishing political and economic leverage). We have, or should have, other tools to help them (and the rest of us) that don't involve leaving millions in miserable conditions.
I don't know what the statistical effects are, but something that is, I think, underrated when people talk about opening the borders to legal immigration is the potential for a reverse flow. Not all people who want to immigrate to more developed countries actually want to live in them, they're just coming for the better opportunities for education and employment. I know a Columbian guy in the country illegally who owns a lovely house he's never seen back in Columbia -- he's going to retire there, and he might have moved back already, but he can't leave the US because he couldn't be sure of getting back in if he needed to work here again. I don't think that kind of story is all that unexpected.
61, 62: I'm with Moby on this one. Free movement of capital and labor will only lead downhill to whatever country is most responsive and pliant to the concerns of capital.
60 is the only argument I find even slightly persuasive for open borders. The economic arguments are built on a Jenga pile of assumptions.
Also I endorse 62.
Within reasonable bounds of hospitable climate, how dense would the world be, if the population was evenly distributed?
This page estimates with 43% of land area habitable, it would come to about 2.3 acres.
other, more significant factors (like offshoring
Right. Worrying solely about the impact of immigration on low wage earners ignores the impact of having to compete with sweatshops in low-wage countries for manufacturing jobs. Once the labor pool in a low-wage country has the opportunity to try their luck here, suddenly it's not going to be so easy to get them to go blind stitching athletic shoes for pennies an hour.
I'm totally on Natilo's side here--especially since I *am* an immigrant here, although of course not the kind they mean when they talk about Those People here, etc.--but the politics of large-scale is depressingly tough.
I mean, I really don't know anything yet about Vienna politics. But the impression I get is that, even though, from my perspective, the city's large-scale immigrant population (almost 1/4th of the city's population wasn't born in Austria, and 38% have foreign-born parents) is a great thing, it's absolutely produced a huge backlash. Current polling has the neo-fascist FPÖ at between 25-30%, and I get the sense that's a pure anti-immigrant vote. And when 30% of the city doesn't have citizenship, and can't vote in the main elections (EU citizens can vote in the neighborhood ones, but not for the city/state parliament), that gives an even bigger opening to reactionary forces.
70 to 67. Capital needs trapped labor to exploit. Where labor has options, the situation changes.
Morally, I agree with 60, but on 31, a practical side effect of our current immigration policy that I pretty much only see discussed by rich tech people who I mostly find obnoxious is that we're moving causing good tech jobs that would have been created in the U.S. to get created elsewhere.
When I was in school (15 years ago), virtually all of the international students I met wanted to get a job in the U.S., but we didn't let a lot of them in. Those people didn't go home and work on farms; they went home and created their own tech companies and the labor pool for those tech companies. Now, a lot of the international students I talk to want to go back home. You can get good jobs, with all the advantages of being back home. It's not all of them, or even a majority, but it's a lot more than it used to be, and the fraction keeps going up.
There aren't many companies that will compete in absolute (not cost of living adjusted) pay overseas, but there are some. Alibaba is currently handing out compensation packages that big U.S. companies (Google, FB, etc.) can't/won't match and they've even been able to lure away some Americans.
I don't have the econometrics skills to figure out if keeping these high-skill workers out increases or decreases the wages of high-skill workers in the U.S., but I don't think anyone is seriously going to argue that people making large multiples of the median U.S. income need their wages protected in the short run, and in the long run our protectionism seems to have the opposite of the desired effect, at least in areas I'm familiar with.
66: The US and Western Europe should ship their elderly to third world countries where the cost of living is cheaper and there is low-cost labor available to help out. I'm not entirely kidding. I hope to retire to some third world country and live out my declining years with lots of domestic help.
I think the moral argument is clear, so there is an obligation to figure out how to make the economics work.
70 to 67. Capital needs trapped labor to exploit. Where labor has options, the situation changes.
I'd like to believe that freer movement of labor would revitalize and internationalize the labor movement worldwide, but I admit I have absolutely no evidence for this.
72: The persistent economic shit holes and geographic disparites within the free United States would like a word.
72, 76: Because labor has things like kids and can't learn new languages, even if labor can move without legal restrictions, I don't think it will ever be able to move fast enough to offset the mobility advantages of capital.
75: And like the minimum wage, the good effects are clear and obvious: increased personal freedom, more opportunity for immigrants. The bad effects, if they exist, are very hard to reliably detect.
Something that I believe as a pretty reliable rule of thumb, is that effects that are almost impossible to detect are not practically important. Same thing with the minimum wage. Is it possible it might have a negative effect on employment rates? It seems logical that it would, and it's really hard to rule out that it might not have some negative effect. But where it doesn't pop right out of the data obviously, while that doesn't mean it's not there at all, I really think it does mean that it's not a big enough effect to worry about much.
74: You're not big on visiting the nursing home, are you?
76-78: All good points, it's not a panacea. But it sure seems as if it would help.
I think the moral argument is clear, so there is an obligation to figure out how to make the economics politics work.
FTFY. My worry is that parties will continue to largely evade the issue, and this will continue to fuel the growth of UKIP/FPÖ/Golden Dawn-style far-right parties, who will rush to fill the void. Left-wing leaders/activists will tend to believe loose immigration is the right thing to do, but lack the courage to actually try to persuade voters of this; right-wing parties will be a mix of indifference, capital-hungry-for-more-labor, and populist/xenophobe influences.
he might have moved back already, but he can't leave the US because he couldn't be sure of getting back in if he needed to work here again.
That's too bad. Countries like Columbia very much need people from their diaspora to come back home and to bring their skills with them.
I go to a lot of meetings down here with people talking about "how can we harness the diaspora to increase growth in our country?" Its got to be more than sending money back, they also need to bring back skills and business contacts. But if people aren't able to go back and forth at will between their home country and the developed world, that doesn't happen.
Let's restrict capital mobility and increase labor mobility! Comity?
The bad effects, if they exist, are very hard to reliably detect.
I don't think the bad effects are hard to detect. It's the offsetting good effects to those who very clearly experienced the bad effects that are hard to detect. For example, you could very clearly see what happened in the meat packing industry when it shifted to immigrant labor. Even a few years later most of the displaced workers were working again and usually in something less unpleasant than meatpacking. But to argue to the former workers that the immigrants didn't take their job means they are going to ignore you. To argue that the economic climate which eventually enabled them to find a job in a better, less bloody, industry depends on allowing immigration, well, that's the hard part.
Jim Crow Algebra
Nobody made a separate but equal joke?
My worry is that parties will continue to largely evade the issue
Hillary Clinton, of all people, was saying some not-evil things on this the other day. The "path to citizenship" stuff that drives the right wing crazy.
18 - ... Hmong immigrants taking farms
Absolutely one of the greatest things about living in the Twin Cities, too. I spend two thirds or so of most springs counting down the days before the farmer's market really gets going.
I'm at least tentatively on the side of unrestricted immigration as well. The ethical case seems pretty strong ("this line on a map that we drew for some mostly spurious reason means that you have to be very, very poor and I get to be very very rich" is hard to justify on moral grounds). Most of the economic arguments seem to depend on taking the effects we see of restricted immigration and assuming that more immigration will increase those effects. "I stay thin by only eating ice cream once a month - think how thin I would be if I ate it three times a week!" isn't a great argument either.
72, 76: Because labor has things like kids and can't learn new languages, even if labor can move without legal restrictions, I don't think it will ever be able to move fast enough to offset the mobility advantages of capital.
I mean, people are real, embodied beings, so they can't move as fast as capital at its fastest (at least until the Singularity), but capital doesn't actually have legs--it can only move as fast as human institutions allow it (or humans carry it). I agree that it's more or less an iron law of capitalism that capital will attempt to overturn all barriers in search of higher returns, but that doesn't mean humans are always and everywhere helpless in their attempts to contain it.
77/etc. - For this to be an argument against what LB was arguing there'd need to be a good reason to think restricting immigration between states would leave things better off than they are now. Otherwise it just goes to show that the world is a vale of tears and nothing will make things perfect or prevent people in power from using power to benefit themselves at the expense of people not in power.
Something that I believe as a pretty reliable rule of thumb, is that effects that are almost impossible to detect are not practically important.
Boy, I don't know. When it's a study of a phenomenon that's impossible to isolate and without any real controls, a finding of no effect is not very convincing.
the world is a vale of tears and nothing will make things perfect or prevent people in power from using power to benefit themselves at the expense of people not in power
New mouseover text, especially if today's UK election goes badly.
I'm not talking about it as an a priori truth, just a rule of thumb: the bigger an effect is, the easier it's going to be to find, regardless of the situational difficulties of isolating it. Being unable to be sure you've found an effect doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but it does seem to be to be pretty likely to give you an upper limit on how significant it could possibly be.
90.last is probably right, but to 90.first, I'd argue that moral case mentioned above is sufficient to keep immigration at the current levels since it's clearly not causing shit to blow up.
I really don't know anything yet about Vienna politics
I'd like to think that Austria has a vibrant "bring back the Habsburgs" movement.
And to increase levels by providing a path to citizenship for those already here. But that's still a long way from open borders.
I think it's telling that when economists want to study the effect of immigration on wages they forget their typical assumption that labor competes in a single market, and assume the effects will show up non-uniformly. If the market for labor is singular, or at least fairly cohesive, the effects of immigration will depress everyone's wages, and, whatever parts of this market the economist is using for comparision, however the economist has partitioned it, no effect will be found.
I'd like to think that Austria has a vibrant "bring back the Habsburgs" movement.
Some of the sarcophagi in the Habsburg crypt we visited did have lots of fresh flowers on them, it's true.
94 - This sounds like the stuff my parents tried to get away with when I was a kid, after realizing that I was keeping track of the reasons they gave me for things and using them against them which resulted in an escalation of moral reasoning until they gave up and just made me do things. The progression was something like "do this because it's fair"; "well the world isn't fair so we have to live with that"; "because the world isn't fair we have to do what we can to make it more fair"; "Ok but I'm your mother so you have to do it". "The world hasn't completely collapsed in an economic catastrophe yet" isn't much of a justification, especially because the "economic catastrophe" involved usually just amounts to exactly what the people currently getting the short end of the stick already live with.
that moral case mentioned above is sufficient to keep immigration at the current levels since it's clearly not causing shit to blow up.
Its not causing our shit to blow up. But other people's shit is blowing up as a result of our policies. So the moral obligation is to push our policies to the point where the blowing up of shit is closer to equilibrium.
The moral argument even goes beyond "eat the rich" due to what we know about the effects inequality has on people's lives (one of the central bits of basic psychology/utilitarian moral theory that gets carefully effaced in economics). Everyone is blind in one eye is better for everyone than a third of people blind in both, once you consider the effect on everyone else of having a third of the population completely blind.
There's a decent case to be made that wages for IT workers have been depressed by immigrants on H1B visas, though that may be washed out by the broader benefit to labor of having a bigger and more competitive IT sector.
In any case, I think a lot of the immigration-related depression of IT wages is a result of the situation in which H1B workers are extremely limited in their ability to find another job if their existing employer is underpaying them. Thus, the restrictions, supposedly put in place to help native workers, have ended up making things worse. They've worked out pretty well for employers, though.
101: That's basically the same case Singer makes for giving away all his wealth not needed for necessities. I don't see that catching on politically either.
95. I don't know Austrian politics much either, but the Czech foreign minister is from Hapsburg nobility. He's a strong positive influence, too bad there aren't more like him.
Were it not for nationalization of collaborators' property under Benes, noble families would have even more influence than they do now.
103.1: I have mixed feeling on that, not that I'm directly in IT. But, aside from what you mention in 103.2, there's also the fact that it's not always easy to tell an intelligent good worker with language issues that will be surmounted very quickly from somebody who is just stupid.
Just popping in to say briefly:
- Eggplant is right that every economist who studies these issues has an axe to grind
- LB is right that the class of workers most affected by new immigration are slightly-less-new immigrants
- In general, there is quite good evidence that more immigration CREATES more consumer demand and thus more economic activity and more jobs overall (aka "People gotta eat, buy clothes, etc")
- However, young black and Latino men without a high school degree are the one group that is pretty much unambiguously worse off because of immigration
Fish got to swim, birds go to fly. I've got to eat food or I die.
Can't stop helping that econ-o-m-i.
104 - Nope, he absolutely argues that you have to take a hard hit rather than a softer one because his really stupid moral theory demands it, so it's the thing I said wasn't really accurate here. And there's a really big difference between 'required individual action' and 'required social policy' too. (Taxes aren't the same as charity, etc.)
Also, Natilo is right that there are dozens of new initiatives that have popped up in the last 2-3 years to try to reverse population loss and economic downturn by recruiting new immigrant residents and entrepreneurs. Most are in Rustbelt cities. Groups like WE G/loba/l Net/work and its members (We/come Day/ton, G/obal Detro/t etc) are the biggest.
These initiatives are a double-edged sword: they are accurately identifying and pursuing a genuine opportunity, but some of the rhetoric and focus is rather disturbingly dismissive of US workers. ("Immigrants are such hard workers" can easily turn into a slam at supposedly "lazy" Americans, and unfortunately is also often racialized.)
Dayton has electric buses that run on overhead wires. That's the best feature of the place.
Best available data on who would move -- worldwide -- if they had the chance. About 138 million say they would come to the US.
But I agree with whoever upthread said that this data is inherently untrustworthy, because people are voicing a preference given the current system. If the US system opened up, you'd see more people saying they wanted to come here -- and if all the borders worldwide opened up, you might see more people wanting to move to a neighboring country *rather* than the US (eg Hondurans wanting to come to Mexico).
electric buses that run on overhead wires
Aren't you afraid that one of the buses will fall off the overhead wire and land on your head?
And while I'm serial posting, Spike is right on all counts on H1Bs.
114: That they provide a reason not to be in Dayton is the best thing.
I've got lots of reasons to not be in Dayton.
that run on overhead wires
One of my sisters lived in IN for several years and I continued to be baffled by the apparent refusal to bury power lines in area of the country plagued by ice storms.
I wonder what it is like to live in that kind of place.
In general, there is quite good evidence that more immigration CREATES more consumer demand and thus more economic activity and more jobs overall (aka "People gotta eat, buy clothes, etc")
More economic activity and more jobs overall doesn't mean more per capita economic activity and higher employment rates. If the net effect is to reduce labor's share of the economy and worsen inequality it will reduce per capita demand.
[I]f all the borders worldwide opened up, you might see more people wanting to move to a neighboring country *rather* than the US (eg Hondurans wanting to come to Mexico).
On that point, an article about Iraqi tourists visiting Iran.
The Iranian shrine city of Mashhad has much to offer visiting Iraqis wanting to escape violence at home - but locals have mixed views about their guests.
...
In January 2015, Mohammad Mehdi Baradaran, deputy of planning and development for the Mashhad mayor's office, announced that 1.5 million foreign tourists visit Mashhad each year, with 23% from Iraq. "Many of the foreign visitors to Iran are pilgrims visiting the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad," Baradaran told SMT News, an Iranian industry and business publication. "All of the other cities in Iran put together can't boast Mashhad's tourism figures."
...
Still, sex isn't all that's on offer in Mashhad. Restaurants in the countryside about 20km outside of town, such as Shandiz and Torqabeh, attract a large Iraqi clientele. Shandiz features some of Iran's most famous kebabs. The shishlik and barg kebabs in particular have a wide reputation that's no secret to Iraqis.
Abd al-Hamid, a teacher from Najaf, Iraq, has brought his wife and two young daughters. "Everyone in Najaf knows about the food in Mashhad," he said in heavily accented Farsi punctuated by laughs. "First Imam Reza, then shishlik - that's the rule."
103: Tim is on an H1B. (green card coming soon!). I think that his employer may have taken him for granted
In a lot of ways, but they were required to pay him "the prevailing wage." That may have been suppressed by the existence if the H1B. He did get a raise once because of that. Promptly eaten up by an increase in the amount we pay for health insurance.
* Pharma may be different from IT.
In IT, a common setup is that the H1B does not work directly for the employe, but for a contracting company specializing in H1Bs, who know just how far "the prevailing wage" can be stretched, and to which the H1B holder is already heavily indebted for the inflated cost of obtaining the H1B and the cost of travel to the United States, and, of course, the cost of "training".
114: Did the Catbus ever fall off the wires? Q.E.D.
The two big holes in this argument are a) the era of both open borders and transoceanic travel predated the modern welfare state and the existence of a welfare state changes the situation in ways which are hopefully obvious, and b) the entire point of relaxing immigration standards is to change the mix of people who immigrate to a country so arguing that it'll be fine because current immigrants are all hardworking and awesome basically the sorites paradox.
Chris Betram at Crooked Timber argues this same thing all the time and gets annoyed when people point out he looks ridiculous.
Discussion of the hardworking awesomeness of current immigrants generally refers to illegal immigrants as well, not our artisinally hand-curated legal immigrants. I'm not sure what the basis is for presuming that immigrants under an open-borders regime would be more degradedly wretched than our current crop.
125 (a): But the modern welfare state is mostly the old folx welfare state. Bringing in younger people to shore it up is just about the only option.
(b) I don't see how any of that follows. First, it's not necessarily true that changing the mix of people who immigrate is either the goal or a likely outcome of opener borders. A big goal, at least for me, would be not immiserating the people who are immigrating any more than is absolutely necessary. And who, precisely, that does not immigrate now, would be immigrating then? 2 year olds? 80 year olds? Heroin addicts? State legislators?
And what Nat says about the welfare state. "Ways which are hopefully obvious" sounds an awful lot like "arguments I don't have empirical evidence to support". What's the basis for thinking immigrants will be a net cost , overall?
I'm not sure what the basis is for presuming that immigrants under an open-borders regime would be more degradedly wretched than our current crop.
One of many interesting things I learned from The Warmth of Other Suns is that African-Americans who moved out of the South during the Great Migration were generally more successful than those already living outside the South. It seems to be pretty broadly true that people who go to the effort of moving in search of a better life are more likely to have the traits that lead to success than people who stay put.
people who go to the effort of moving in search of a better life are more likely to have the traits that lead to success than people who stay put.
Yup. Like, for example, grit.
Just to break it down further:
What forms of "welfare" exist in the US*? SNAP/WIC, TANF, public housing, Medicaid, and elderly programs. If you want to stretch things, unemployment, although you're not eligible unless you've been working, so.
The first three programs are A. tiny, budgetwise, and B. almost meaningless in terms of support. Nobody - and I mean nobody - is moving to the USA in order to collect $150 a month in food stamps. Public housing barely exists any more, and Lord knows that nobody who isn't tied to it by community and has any options at all chooses it. Immigrants are young and healthy, so they don't burden Medicaid, nor elder programs. So what, exactly, is supposed to be the problem?
Is it the fantasy that, with open borders, there will be a surge of elderly people coming in and taking advantage of Social Security? You know, the program you can't get $$ out of unless you've paid in your whole life? Or for that matter, the fantasy that old people will come in any numbers? They didn't during the open borders era: the vast majority of immigrants were young people, for reasons that are too obvious to need spelling out.
It sounds like Chris Bertram keeps saying something, everybody yells at him, yet the yellers have never come up with cogent arguments, just reactionary bullshit.
*I don't know enough to speak to European countries, although my understanding is that the ways in which they're more generous revolve around universal health care, younger/more generous retirement, and education. Maybe housing subsidies?
131: Death, the destroyer of nations? You have a professional reputation to uphold.
Getting into public housing in the US is about as easy and quick as buying a new car in the Soviet Union.
What forms of "welfare" exist in the US*? SNAP/WIC, TANF, public housing, Medicaid, and elderly programs.
Don't forget Obama Phones.
Nobody - and I mean nobody - is moving to the USA in order to collect $150 a month in food stamps.
But a Honduran with a wife and a couple kids would be crazy to not up and come here to live in a relatively safe area and put their kids in American schools while getting $650 a month in food assistance.
You can have open borders and not give access to welfare the moment a migrant gets in the country.
Sure, totally "open" as in "has the resources and education and/or skills to come here and start a life without the safety net." Maybe take a glance at that list of countries in 113.
66: The US and Western Europe should ship their elderly to third world countries where the cost of living is cheaper and there is low-cost labor available to help out.
Already happening. See, for example (which I haven't), "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel". It seems rather better from a transfer-of-funds point of view than shipping the low-cost labour from the third world to the West to help out the elderly in situ.
95: "I'd like to think that Austria has a vibrant 'bring back the Habsburgs" movement.'"
Walburga is a member of the Swedish Parliament, Michaela is a historian in New York, Gabriela was recently the Georgian Ambassador to Germany, Georg is an Ambassador-at-large for Hungary. While the Habsburgs have diversified, current head Karl has been both a game show host and a Member of the European Parliament (not, one notes, simultaneously) in Austria. His investment company previously owned two Bulgarian newspapers. Whether he was using the opportunity to study Simeon II's career is not known to this author.
The words "vibrant" and "Habsburg" are not generally found in close proximity to one another. (With due respect to Gabriela, who is both pleasant and surprisingly down-to-earth.)
I should add that there is definitely a bit of Habsburg nostalgia in the Austrian army. They don't play the Austrian anthem nearly as often as they play the "Gott Erhalte", for example.
126: current illegal immigrants managed to get into the country illegally - maybe they scraped up a bunch of money to pay someone to smuggle them in, maybe they got in themselves, they probably left their family behind, regardless it was more involved than just driving across the border in Mexicali.
As illegal immigrants they are also at the mercy of their employer in a way that legal immigrants are not - "oh, you don't want to work on saturday? it'd be a shame if i discovered the social security number you gave me was fake and you got deported, wouldn't it?"
On the other hand, they're systematically going to be people with really ghastly prospects back home -- they'd have to be to make getting here and suffering from not having legal rights worth it. Wouldn't you figure that people who could come in freely and legally would be likelier to include more decently educated people who weren't desperate?
I do not believe you have a strong argument that legal immigrants under an open borders policy will be systematically less desirable than the legal and illegal immigrants we get now. Would they be demographically different? Probably. But without a good argument that they would be worse, rather than the same or better on the axes we care about, that's not a good argument against changing things.
They don't play the Austrian anthem nearly as often as they play the "Gott Erhalte", for example.
!!!! (One of the many interesting things about "Ring of Steel" is that it shows the extent to which the morons in the Hapsburg army fucked up by treating the non-German ethnicities in the WWI armed forces badly out of political paranoia, thus turning a lot of people who were perfectly Hapsburg-patriotic and willing to settle for semi-autonomous ethnic units ruled by the Emperor into hardcore nationalists).