Commenters push back on immigration

First,

As a property owner, your share of public goods is not yours to dispense as you please, permanently and in perpetuity to their birthright-citizen posterity, to non-citizens.

As a property owner, you pay property taxes and income taxes on the rent that you charge. Your illegal immigrant tenant pays gasoline taxes, sales taxes, and (perhaps) payroll taxes. It is not clear that the immigrant is less morally entitled than anyone else to whatever public goods that immigrant receives.

Second,

If a student illegally admitted himself to Harvard, enrolled in classes, followed all the normal rules, completed assignments, took tests, and paid his tuition like expected, would it be immoral to kick him out? Is it immoral for Harvard to block the student from getting legal admission by rejecting his application?

In fact, you don’t even have to pay tuition to tresspass on classes, and my guess is that if you submit a test it will be graded. But you won’t get the Harvard degree without coming in through the front door via the admissions process. Bryan Caplan uses this example to show that the value of college must be mostly signaling; if it were the education itself that had value, then we would see more people would obtain the education by trespassing.

As for Harvard blocking the student from getting admission, that is because Harvard sees its slots as a scarce resource. In theory, these could be rationed entirely on the basis of price, with slots going to the highest bidders. In practice, Harvard rations these slots through the admissions process. It is free to do so.

Illegal immigrants who occupy housing are using scarce land resources. But those resources are being rationed on the basis of price.

Arguing against allowing illegal immigrants means arguing in favor of some non-price rationing of land resources. Moreover, you are not giving the landlord the right to choose whether and how to ration by non-price criteria. Instead, you are having the government set the criteria.

I am not trying to refute the case for enforcing immigration laws. I am just trying to say that the analogy between kicking out an immigrant and throwing someone off of your personal private property is not really appropriate.

36 thoughts on “Commenters push back on immigration

  1. One of the things I found exceptionally appealing about Harvard was how it didn’t get too worried about a little trespassing. There was a population of people; some of whom had been students, some of whom had never been students, some of whom were currently homeless, who sat in the back of lectures and listened. They didn’t take exams. They didn’t expect grades. How much they learned was sometimes questionable; but they were engaging with the material and in so much as the marginal cost was low, they were welcome.

    • One of these days, an ambitious and smart kid (or parent-kid team, really) is going to try this for real, go for all four years, get A’s in the classes (maybe ask professors to sign letters attesting to the fact?), and, at least in terms of grades, ‘deserve’ a Harvard (or Yale, Princeton, etc.) degree, submit some kind of motion or application for one, and try to make a huge media stink when denied.

      The question is whether that kid will still be able to use that experience to achieve all the other typical Harvard-grad outcomes.

      • As I recall, in order to get a test graded, you had to put your Harvard ID number on it. That would obviously be required for your grades to go into the school data base. But no admission and registration means no ID.

        Unless you could get all the professors of the courses you took to make some sort of official record of what you did, there’s no way you could get a degree or pseudo-degree.

        • You would certainly need the cooperation of all the professors at the very least, and there are a lot of other practical impediments to going about such a stealth-student project. For example, many courses now have some material or projects online, for which one also required an active ID number. Some campuses wouldn’t give a parking permit. Some buildings require access cards, and some labs wouldn’t have any extra work tables, etc. There is also the issue of whether one is actually breaking the law by trespassing, and having to take the risk of it being so lightly enforced that no one will press charges against you.

          Considerations like these tend to undercut Caplan’s argument somewhat.

      • You can audit many courses at many colleges, including Harvard, which will go on your transcript as non credit courses (no grade, no final projects/exams). I’m guessing very few people show up to job interviews with 10+ audited courses from top universities.

  2. The non-price rationing of resources may be a certain set of communal aspirations and ideals that individuals and families are expected to buy into in order to preserve ongoing communal stability.

    And perhaps the government may not be the landlord, but it is the property manager that acts as an agent on behalf of (sometimes) the landlords.

  3. Whether or not these sorts of analogies ‘work’ depends on how one conceives of the government, state, and society, and whether one takes the ideas of social compact / contract seriously.

    Even in an individualistic framework, it’s possible to conceive of a society as something that is like a semi-private club with both assets and rules that are the joint property of the member households, but not of outsiders. If one looks at it this way, whether an individual is trespassing or in a place in accordance with ‘the rules about such matters’ is implicitly included in the example. That is My House:My Rules::Our Country:Our Rules. In the second, collective part of the analogy, other members have a property interest in the way you use your property.

    So, one could say that two brothers own a two-bedroom house, and agree to split the bills according to use. One brother runs into some financial trouble, so he turns his room into a “polyglot boarding house” and sublets to a dozen itinerant laborers. The other brother objects, saying that they don’t each independently own their own rooms. Instead, they own the house jointly, and have tacitly agreed to give each other exclusive possession of the rooms, subject to common rules, which includes the requirement of consensus before anyone invites guests or sublets rooms. If the renting brother refuses to yield, the objecting brother is still within the rights of his own property interests to eject the tenants.

  4. When I used to live in the state of Iowa it was well known that the business classes of the state favored higher immigration of foreigners into the state, including (for example) Mexicans or Tex-Mex Hispanics who would work in meat packing plants. The well paying blue collar meat packing jobs of Cedar Rapids had been restructured into low-skill low-pay jobs in small towns or rural sites, and a lot of towns were shrinking in population, as were school districts.

    More generally, Iowa and West Virginia were the two states that had lost absolute population between 1980 and 1990, and this alarmed the business classes of the state.

    There is a point made by Deirdre McCloskey in her Price Theory textbook ca. 1986. If you can imagine the Green Revolution coming to just own village in India, all the benefits of that economic growth would tend to go to the land-owner in terms of higher land rent, because (think of one village) labor and capital are in elastic supply. It’s when you look at India as a whole, with the Green Revolution in broad swathes of the country, that you can imagine wages going up (either hourly rates or days of paid work per year, or both).

    A weird analytical example, but if you think about low growth areas of the country, it is the owners of fixed capital assets (land, structures, power generating units ) that are hurt by a zero growth economy or zero population growth. The price of Iowa farmland tends to track the global price of corn and soybeans, but the the price of houses, apartments, etc. is influenced by local residents bidding to rent those facilities.

    Iowa was a place where many towns had some houses without occupants, school districts with fewer students in each successive cohort.

    The extreme example of this phenomenon is the anecdotes of places in the Sand Hills of Nebraska where a town will give you a house for free if you will live in it. But they won’t give you a job, alas, and the Sand Hills are pretty remote.

    = – = – = – = – = – =

    There are all sorts of anecdotes, analytical frames, etc. that will give you partial insight into immigration in all its aspects (economic, social, political). All these insights are partial, and a lot of them hold for only some range of the variable in question. Someone whose ancestors have lived in Iowa for 100 years may benefit from enough immigration to keep the local school district a going concern. It doesn’t mean that the average person who has lived in Los Angeles for the last 100 years needs more immigration to keep LA Unified Schools functioning.

    “Restriction of Range” is what Charles Murray called it in _The Bell Curve_. Many of us went to school at some point with a whole bunch of really smart people, and we noticed that the smartest one of us was not the most successful. When we ponder this, we have to remember that the range of IQ for our peers was restricted. Perhaps we were all of about 115 IQ or more in that course. I suspect that “restriction of range” is a hazard in many analyses of immigration.

    Comparing immigration’s impact on small town Midwest conditions does not necessarily yield findings that apply equally as well to Los Angeles or Miami.

    = – = – = – =

    Another big challenge is how to draw lessons from the past. Russian Jews were perceived as unassimilable by many in 1910, but we know that these perceptions were incorrect. Therefore, someone who thinks that Somalis are unassimilable in Minnesota in 2018 is obviously wrong, because we were wrong about Jews from the Pale of Settlement a hundred years ago on the Lower East Side.

    = – = – = – = – =

    A final point worth mentioning is that previous waves of immigrants had limited access to charity, and simultaneously there were campaigns of moral exhortation to promote habits of industriousness and rectitude.

    “How Dagger John saved New York’s Irish” by William J Stern is still worth reading. Online at City Journal, and a few decades old.

    • “Therefore, someone who thinks that Somalis are unassimilable in Minnesota in 2018 is obviously wrong, because we were wrong about Jews from the Pale of Settlement a hundred years ago on the Lower East Side.”

      You’re joking, right?

      All that is proved by America’s experience with Jewish immigrants from the Pale of Settlement and their descendants over the last 100 years is that the people with that genetic background from that particular culture (which no longer exists) were able to assimilate successfully into the America of the early and mid-20th century (another culture that no longer exists). You can’t draw any inference from this history about how some other, vastly different (culturally and genetically) immigrant group will do in the vastly different US of the early 21st century.

      If you’re interested in how the Somali immigrants are working out in Minnesota, there are some interesting posts at Powerline that cast some light on this issue.

  5. Since private property is not the appropriate analogy, then perhaps “the commons” would be a better analogy.

    The tragedy of the commons is a term used in social science to describe a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action.

    We see this occuring in the US as immigrants crowd classrooms and demand services in foreign languages requring expensive translation, drive down wages, and as unscreened immigrants bringing diseases such as the recent upswing in tuberculosis (Walter Williams has been writing about this), and creating the vast tent encampments along public right aways which have become California’s most famous feature.

    Elinor Ostrom’s 8 principles for managing a commons appear to be particularly relevant:

    8 Principles for Managing a Commons

    1. Define clear group boundaries.

    2. Match rules governing use of common goods to local needs and conditions.

    3. Ensure that those affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules.

    4. Make sure the rule-making rights of community members are respected by outside authorities.

    5. Develop a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members’ behavior.

    6. Use graduated sanctions for rule violators.

    7. Provide accessible, low-cost means for dispute resolution.

    8. Build responsibility for governing the common resource in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system.

    Current Federal immigration law violates each of these principles. The greatest cost of tolerating illegal immigration is that it tends to forestall meaningful immigration reform. Under the current irrational and backwards US immigration system, we legally take in over a million immigrants per year with little regard to alternate immigration strategies that could increase economic growth significantly. Points based immigration as adopted in most modern advanced countries could significantly reduce labor shortages and minimize the amount of welfare resources consumed by immigrants. The opportunity cost for allowing this disaster to continue is enormous. Many more immigrants , of the type who would contribute to economic growth, could be accepted into the US with far less negative impact on current citizens if a point based system immigration system along the lines of Australia’s, which incorporates Ostrom’s principles brilliantly, were adopted.

    • Alternately, another useful analogy might be to think of a nation as a kibbutz in which we all take care of one another. In his discussion this week with Ram Abramitzky on The Mystery of the Kibbutz, Russ Roberts discussed the numerous features of a kibbutz that enabled them to survive. Perhaps the most important was that new members are extensively screened and can be rejected. If you are going to assert that immigrants are as equally entitled to the weath of a nation as are its citizens, you might as well ask why outsiders are not morally entitled to join a kibbutz. Property, even when commonly held, must retain the right of exclusion or else the institution of property is gone and we are back to “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

  6. The point about housing brings to mind the strongest negative case for immigration: a well-functioning economy is capable over time of creating jobs and homes for newcomers, and a well-functioning public sector is capable of providing infrastructure and education for them and their families.. However, most of our most productive places no longer have economies that function well for the poor. Restrictive zoning regulations prevent developers from building homes for newcomers. Very high minimum wages prevent entrepreneurs from creating jobs for low-skilled newcomers. Local governments cannot build new roads or transit systems cost-effectively, both because they are in thrall to unions and because they are just not very competent. A variety of tax laws aimed at protecting incumbents (like prop 13) and redistributing money from rich to poor make education systems unable to cope with new students without shortchanging the old.

    None of this, of course, is about immigrants per se rather than other newcomers. It’s just that other newcomers are rich enough to buy their way out of the dysfunction, and can afford to compensate the incumbents for the loss of their privileges. (When a newcomer buys a $4m home in Palo Alto, the higher tax base more than pays for her kids to go to school – it also finds senior services for the elderly who pay 1978-level taxes.)

    I’d rather fix these things than give up and raise a wall against newcomers. But sometimes I feel like there’s no majority for this in California. This is the argument I fear – that we’ve spent 40 years privileging incumbents against newcomers and destroyed the kind of flexible economy that is capable of absorbing low-income immigrants.

    • Well stated.

      Thomas Sowell wrote in his memoir that he had the good luck to leave the South (maybe the Carolinas?) and make it to New York City at a time when the New York City public schools still did a good job educating people like him (by which he means Black Southern migrants of modest means).

      Reading people like Sowell and also Joe Queenan (see his memoir _Closing time_) you can get the impression that certain urban schools experienced some sort of “collapse” of their core educating function in no more than 10 or 15 years. Probably sometime between 1960 and 1970.

      Merely anecdotal, yes.

      = – = – = – =

      Add another rigidity: occupational licensing. Not only are the labor laws taking a toll, but far more jobs and trades are subject to occupational licensing.

      See, for example, Cato Institute, “The tangled mess of occupational licensing.”

  7. “It is not clear that the immigrant is less morally entitled than anyone else to whatever public goods that immigrant receives.”

    The immigrant will not pay in taxes what they receive in benefits. Nor will their children. In perpetuity. Due to genetics.

    Also, they vote for their own benefits, which they always do.

    With native low IQ we have the fact that “they are our people” and the fact that “they are a small enough % of the population we can afford it.” Not so with immigrants in the 21st century.

    “Arguing against allowing illegal immigrants means arguing in favor of some non-price rationing of land resources. ”

    Immigrants impose externality costs on people other than the landlord and the immigrant. Individuals can’t collect this price (if they could the price of immigration would be too high for most low skill third worlders), so they fight against the imposition of the externality.

  8. charles abbott is funny:

    1) “There is a point made by “Deirdre McCloskey in her” Price Theory textbook ca. 1986.”

    https://www.amazon.com/Applied-Theory-Price-Donald-McCloskey/dp/0023794208

    Just remember everyone, all the greengrocers must put their signs up: “Workers of the world, unite!”

    2) “Therefore, someone who thinks that Somalis are unassimilable in Minnesota in 2018 is obviously wrong, because we were wrong about Jews from the Pale of Settlement a hundred years ago on the Lower East Side.”

    Because human beings are like cogs in a machine — there are no differences between any ethnic groups in their biodiversity with respect to mental/psychological characteristics and every single race and ethnicity has the exact same ability to assimilate at exactly the same rate as every other group…right??? I mean pretty soon every single country in Africa will be just like a typical Western European or (free) Northern Asian country…advanced industrial economy, high-tech, low-crime, great public infrastructure, etc. Should we expect this in the next five or ten years “charles”? Or would you like to bet with me that it won’t happen in the next 100?

    • “Because human beings are like cogs in a machine — there are no differences between any ethnic groups in their biodiversity with respect to mental/psychological characteristics and every single race and ethnicity has the exact same ability to assimilate at exactly the same rate as every other group…right???”

      So what? That observation is only useful if you think it makes sense to decide to organize along these lines and vary the rules for individuals based on their ethnic affiliation.

      Within any of those “groups” are idiots and geniuses and a lot of very average people. The distribution might vary based on where you draw the lines and what the circumstances are, and possibly due to culture and even genetics, but does that matter? Any one of us knows families where one sibling is impressive and another is a mess. If even a nuclear family isn’t a reliable trait, how can continental affiliations be? And who gets to decide where the lines are?

      We may as well argue that we should just take people over 6 feet tall. That might even make more sense.

    • McCloskey’s _Applied Theory of Price_ is avaiable as a free PDF at her web site, btw. A lot of the examples are a bit zany, and might work better when presented in lecture personally by the author.

  9. The United States cannot build housing due to property zoning, and cannot build infrastructure due to incompetence.

    So… Open the doors to immigrants?

  10. Kling claims Harvard is free to exclude whomever they want. Why? Existing laws support the rights of both nations and universities to exclude outsiders for any reason, without explanation. Kling is exploring whether nations have a moral right to exclude, I ask that he apply similar consideration to whether universities funded by the government have a moral right to exclude. Caplan’s “trespass education” argument is regarding the value of credentials vs actual knowledge, not on the moral right to exclude. Harvard’s admission slot scarcity is artificial. The present stewards of Harvard don’t want to open more admissions slots as it dilutes the exclusivity of the institution and harms incumbent interests, but if they wanted to, they could easily scale up.

    Kling makes the point that immigration laws inhibit a landlord’s ability to rent to whomever they want. That’s true, but the same can be said about absolutely any law and every law. Landlords can’t rent to incarcerated people, who are incarcerated according to the government’s criteria. Landlords aren’t free to rent to tenants engaged in illegal activity like drug manufacture, prostitution, harboring fugitives, building bombs, generating pollution, producing unpasteurized orange juice, printing counterfeit money, etc. The AnCap follow on argument is that yes, all governments, and all government laws are immoral. I’d ask Kling does he support abolition of all governments and laws which by definition interfere with a landlord’s right to rent out property?

  11. I would say the main point on illegal immigration is it is our citizens that protect (and benefit) from these illegal immigrats.

    Being more Open Borders in SoCal, I like your arguments but I would take it further as I believe 80% of Illegal Immigrants fall into three main buckets: Over-stayed Work & Students Visas, Family/Chained associations and, the highest group, low wage work. So in terms of them of your logic. :

    1) The family ones are more guest of a citizen family and contribute to the household. (Say an Grandmother watching the kids with Mom and Dad at work. There is a fair amount of these examples.)

    2) Over-stayed Visas in which they are productive employees or paying high tuition to our colleges. So these tend to over-stayed.

    3) And the low wage workers whose employers and their customers benefit from the low wages. (And how many homeowners in California, Arizona or Texas are guilty of asking why all the hired help speak Spanish.) Of course the issue here is the naives tend not to work these jobs and the life is extremely hard. (Paid $8/hour picking avocodas and moving around constantly.) But the reality is it overwhelmingly small business that benefits from this labor.)

    And I do wonder if a captialist society can survive without cheap labor and I do believe that is one of the reasons for the Japanese economic slowdown which minimal new business can thrive without a source of cheap labor. (TBH I believe that is behind some of Cowen’s Great Stagnation Theory.)

  12. “(When a newcomer buys a $4m home in Palo Alto, the higher tax base more than pays for her kids to go to school)”

    That’s not given. Immigrants have more children than natives, who can’t afford children because housing is so expensive. Teachers have to get paid much more, which adds to the state’s pension crisis. And of course there needs to be more teachers–not just for the rich immigrants, but also for the poor and the middle class.

    Property taxes in California are low. It’s not at all a given that the newcomers are paying their way, most particularly in education.

    More generally, for all the talk about immigrants coming to a community to “revitalize it”, those communities pay a fortune to educate the kids, both in increased per student education and needing more teachers–which again create more pension obligations.

    And of course, most of the people who think lots of immigration is a great idea want to give all those immigrants charters–private schools at public prices.

    • OK, but the stupendously rich citizens of Palo Alto also pay more and may want an education system too rich for the more pedestrian wealth of tech professionals. Where do you draw the line?

    • I find it unconvincing that wealthy residents with $4 million dollar homes in California aren’t paying their way.

      According to Google, the state of California spends $10,291 per student per year for education. Teacher pensions are part of the cost, but I don’t know if that figure properly includes them. Sure property tax rates are low, but even a low 0.75% property tax rate on a $4 million home is $30k/year. And California has the highest state income taxes too and presumably that is on a high income.

      A more believable argument is possibly that the ratio of tax “whales” to lower income families that consume more in services than they pay in is unfavorable.

      I’d imagine that residents (immigrants or not) with high earning jobs pay in more than they consume and residents with low earning jobs consume more than they pay. That’s complicated somewhat by high paying state funded jobs.

  13. “OK, but the stupendously rich citizens of Palo Alto also pay more and may want an education system too rich for the more pedestrian wealth of tech professionals. Where do you draw the line?”

    I have no idea what you’re saying. The rich citizens of Palo Alto likely send their kids to private schools.

  14. I’m very honored + thankful Kling featured my earlier comment in this post, but I feel that he missed the point. Sure, universities have present legal rights to exclude whomever they want. My question is is this moral? And how does this compare with the moral challenge to the present legal right of enforcing immigration restrictions?

  15. “I am just trying to say that the analogy between kicking out an immigrant and throwing someone off of your personal private property is not really appropriate.”

    Of course it is. In both cases, the person is breaking the law.

    • Sure, but Kling probably regards immigration laws as unjust laws. So while I’m sure he acknowledges some inherent value to the “rule of law” even when we disagree with it, he would want to change the law (immigration restrictionists do not want to increase legal immigration, or at least legal immigration of certain natures).

      At a minimum when you feel a law is unjust you may not actively advocate flouting the law, but you aren’t going to do what it takes to enforce it (which is basically the current state of immigration in the USA, a kind of half assed neglect with periodic amnesty).

      There is just no way around tackling the question of “is immigration good for America.” And you can’t tackle that without asking “are these specific immigrants good for America.”

      • I think Kling’s issue with your approach is that he finds the concept of “good for America” unintelligible. It doesn’t matter if the potential immigration is bad for most American citizens if it is outweighed by the benefit to the immigrants and to the minority of Americans who exploit them (as cheap labor or customers). The notion that political decision-makers should prioritize the wellbeing of citizens as a group (material and cultural) over the ability of undifferentiated humanity to satisfy immediate individual desires through consensual transactions apparently is seen as intolerable “hate.”

        • >The notion that political decision-makers should prioritize the wellbeing of citizens as a group (material and cultural) over the ability of undifferentiated humanity to satisfy immediate individual desires through consensual transactions apparently is seen as intolerable “hate.”

          And this is why they will get more Trump. Or Trump^2 if Trump doesn’t get it done.

          Or Brazil. Time will tell.

          • Looks like we’re getting Brazil. Trump’s been more effective delivering tax cuts than in doing anything on immigration. Don’t see any Trump 2.0 on the horizon.

        • I think … [i]t doesn’t matter [to Kling] if the potential immigration is bad for most American citizens if it is outweighed by the benefit to the immigrants and to the minority of Americans who exploit them (as cheap labor or customers).

          I suspect the minority is pretty big. For example, the nursing homes around here are staffed largely by Haitians–many of whom I’m sure are illegal. The patients, on the other hand, are almost all native born, as are their children.

          • Great. Let’s turn ourselves into a third world country so we can more cheaply attend to the elderly.

          • The point I was trying to make is that the PRESENT benefits of large unskilled immigration go to an awful lot of people, not just a small minority.

            Don’t kid yourself that it’s just limousine liberals getting cheap gardeners.

          • I understood your point. I don’t see how it undercuts mine. By all means, include infirm old people among the beneficiaries of mass unskilled immigration (although without this immigration I am sure they would still be taken care of, albeit the workers would be paid more). Do we really want to turn this country into Brazil to reap this benefit? And much of the cost of importing these people is being experienced right now. I won’t belabor the externalities of their presence.

          • All I was disagreeing about is that the present beneficiaries are “the minority of Americans who exploit them (as cheap labor or customers).”

            1) It is a fairly large minority that benefits directly: old people AND their children, ordinary suburbanites who get cheap yard services, etc.

            2) Indirectly, just about everyone benefits: cheaper prices for meat and produce, lower taxes to pay for those nursing homes and health care facilities (much payment is via Medicare and Medicaid), etc.

            3) A lot of this benefit isn’t really exploitation–unless you stretch the meaning of the word to mean not paying more than you have to.

            Now, there are also costs, in the present and, more important, in the future. There may be big costs that don’t show up in a comparative statics analysis. They be way bigger than the benefits. But if you want to be honest, that has to be the argument, not that the present benefits are small and only accrue to a minority of bad people.

          • I don’t see how we’re in disagreement. I would just point out that the immigrants are not just gardeners, maids & nannies but are replacing native-born workers in blue-collar jobs generally. I am aware of the “benefits” (to those of us already here) of having these immigrants in the country, but I do not think these rather cheesy “benefits” – lower prices for some things, basically – are worth the costs – economic, social and cultural – their presence imposes, in an era of generous social safety nets, collapsing social norms, dysfunctional government institutions, the idolization of “diversity” rather than social integration, and rapidly increasing automation. It is a question of what you find important. If you what you care about it are the cheaper beef prices made possible by the complete replacement of native labor by immigrants in the meatpacking industry, congratulations, have another burger.

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