From a book review by Alberto Mingardi:
Controlling (“governing”) immigration means imposing restrictions upon natives too. They will be less “at ease” in their hiring people or buying things from strangers whose legal status they would not otherwise be interested in knowing. It also means a further increase in red tape and in requiring documents from people, exacerbating an unfortunate trend in contemporary nation states. Kukathas points to a simple and yet often forgotten fact: immigration control means controlling more those who are not immigrants. It means, for example, checking on factories to make sure every worker is documented; to make sure that families are not employing a maid who does not have a regular permit to stay in that country
We live in an age where Fear Of Others’ Liberty is on the march.
Extremely weak argument.
I need the same or similar paperwork to vote or board a plane or rent a car or stay in a hotel.
Yes, I’m “less at ease” to engage in these activities with the documentation requirements, but not significantly so. I like do them all frequently, which just demonstrates, prima facie, that they aren’t that onerous.
The immigration documentation requirements are a small price to pay to keep the welfare leeches out of the country. Cost savings > loss of ease. And, it’s not even close.
Full disclosure: I fear the liberty of others to have unlimited access to my wallet.
This fact isn’t forgotten, it’s applied inconsistently and ignored when it’s inconvenient. Economists like to pretend that borders are somehow special. At lower levels we spend an outsized amount of class time talking about the pernicious effects of protectionism, but rarely acknowledge that the same forces that make a tariff bad make any domestic tax just as bad too.
At best, one might say something ridiculous like “well, at least domestically, everyone is voting and therefore has a say in the nature of the imposition”. That’s true, but it’s always struck me as a self-defeating point of contention because it’s acknowledging that markets require a somewhat consistent set of rules. Trade can’t be said to be free if it’s coerced.
And while libertarians will get mad and write about how immigration control requires domestic control, the simple and yet often forgotten fact is that immigration, just like free trade, is oftenjust used to arbitrage against domestic rules anyway.
Lets be real here, the government is already “checking on factories to make sure every worker is documented”. As a libertarian, I might prefer not to fill out an I-9 and W-4 form, but that certainly has the overwhelming support of the public. It’s a reasonable ground rule for the economy.
When companies bring in a truckload of illegal immigrants, they’re evading that rule. And that’s bad. Sure, in my ideal world, there would be no W-4s and free trade. But ultimately, our rights come into being by mutual assent and recognition. That’s what a polity does. Giving some members of the polity license to break the rules and giving employment advantage to non-members of the polity undermines all of that. And in doing so, it can no longer be free trade, because we don’t even have the same rights.
Illegal immigrants don’t have to have tax documentation (I-9 and W4/W2) filled out by their employers? That seems unlikely to me, unless they are being paid entirely under the table. In that case, however, the business can’t include their pay as a cost, meaning they will pay more in taxes on the other side. That only seems like it would make sense if the cost of hiring and illegal plus the tax rate on the cost savings and risk of discovery is less than the price of hiring a legal workers plus additional taxes and costs. Which might be the case, but I don’t know. I would expect it is only less when the cost of hiring legal workers is very high compared to the cost of illegals, due to legal workers having outside options like “don’t work.”
“Buying things”? When has any country ever criminalized buying goods from someone who, unknown to the buyer, is illegally present in the country?
Universities are built on exclusive membership. They have the freedom to grant or deny membership to anyone without explanation. Most people are denied admission to pursue their studies, career, and social life at the location and facility and university of their choice.
A moral philosopher could debate which freedom takes precedence: does the university have freedom to exclude? Do individuals have freedom to be entitled full membership at their campus and facility of choice? A philosopher can ask the same question of nation states: Does a nation state have the freedom to exclude and reserve membership for an exclusive group? Or do humans have the freedom to be entitled full membership at their nation of choice?
Kling chooses the rhetoric, “fear of other’s liberty”. Would he use this rhetorical device to describe those who fear the freedom of a nation state to exercise exclusive membership? Or would he use this rhetorical device to describe those who fear letting individuals decide which university they want membership in?
This is a cultural question, not an economic one.
When a culture gets rich, we forget all the things that made us rich. We start to believe strange things, such as we can cure all evils in the world, or that we need to atone for our own evils of decades or centuries ago, like having unrestricted immigration. We dress this up in economic clothes, like it is a good thing, and perhaps it is, for a year or two or a decade or two. We invent “melting pot” and other hokum, then change the rules so that the melting pot analogy no longer applies.
If you don’t have borders you don’t have a country. If you don’t have a country, your economic ideas are irrelevant. See Mark Steyn.
I don’t know about the rest of your post, but the first sentence, that reasonable arguments against immigration are culturally based not economic, makes sense.
I don’t know exactly how you get around the culture problem, although in some cases I would argue that the culture of immigrants is a lot better than the native culture in many respects. Many Americans just don’t seem to want, or expect to need to have, actual jobs, for instance.
Yeah man, love them open borders. When I am knocking over a liquor store in El Paso it would be be so much easier to lose the heat if I could just pop over the border without having to slow down. Now that is the kind of freedom I am talking about. Of course open borders for the heat would be messed up. Pretty sure my pork farmer brother-in-law would not be too keen on the Saudi religious police kicking down his door for selling pork. On the other hand, it might be cool to be able to hide our nukes in Canada to make it harder for the Russians to find. And if the Canadians don’t like it we will just move in and out vote them. How long does Hayek say we have to wait to vote when we walk across a border? 30 minutes? A year? No problem. We need somewhere to resettle the rest of the Afghan population anyway if we don’t want them fighting over who gets which city or state. (And talking about fighting, wouldn’t open borders just be the best thing ever for Israel?) But on the other hand think about the tons of great government jobs created providing social services when the rest of the population of Haiti arrives unless of course Bryan Caplan is correct and no immigrant to the US ever has or ever will cost taxpayers a penny. It’s just inconceivable. But why worry about taxes anyway when we are going to just print more money. Inflation will erase any relevance of the minimum wage and all the little people can starve in tiny little apartments packed together in Pruitt-Igoe splendor, or, knock over liquor stores or enjoy a nice tenured sinecure at a tax-exempt university, but heh, get in line, I’ve got dibs. Oh, and anybody who is nationalist rather than a cosmopolite and identifies with a distinct non-non-white community and would seek to preserve that culture is a heinous white supreme cost racist, so open borders wins the wokeness war too.
I am not sure open borders would ever work, and of course the primary reason to call for open borders is to call for cheap labor.
But if open borders could ever work, first you have to eliminate all property zoning and allow robust housing construction, and also figure out a way to build endless amounts of infrastructure.
Are you willing for that house across the street to be converted into a 20-story condo with retail on the ground floor? And for a highway to plow through your back yard?
1) I live in Zoning Utopia. The highest concentration of families on the Acella Corridor. I would die for that, and if local town politics are any indication others would too.
2) Housing price increases, nearly 20% in the last year, have come in every single area. Zoning can’t be the cause. It has to be loose money.
That sounds awful. I prefer smaller communities with low density living.
Just another NIMBY commenter? These simple steps are all a part of the libertarian utopia…just wait, things are going to be completely awesome. I can feel it.
If there is demand for high density real estate, and a relatively small number of incumbent residents want to stop them, the latter seems unreasonable. I side with the former, which is the YIMBY position. And yes, even in my own neighborhood.
The similar argument with national immigration is that large numbers of people want to pursue life, liberty, and happiness in the US, and it’s unreasonable for a small number of existing residents to have voting rights to keep them out. I sincerely agree with that argument. I disagree with the rest.
The “cheap labor” bit is a petty jab. As is Kling’s remark on Fear of Other’s Liberty. Every liberty is an inverse of another liberty. The high ground route is to make an honest argument about why one liberty should take precedence over its inverse. The less noble ground is to just insult the other side as fearful.
“The high ground route is to make an honest argument about why one liberty should take precedence over its inverse.”
You could make the reverse argument, and say that mild constraints on one liberty enable preservation of many others in a rare refuge habitat but which are quickly going extinct on a global basis.
With immigration, the usual arguments are of the Spherical Cow variety, which would be fine if we lived in ideological outer space instead of actual reality.
In reality, the more immigration, the more FOOL, and, soon enough, the less liberty in general. Go to any Libertarian event and take a look around.
My 7yo daughter’s Harry Potter costume just showed up today. Hermione or something like that…I got no clue on this stuff. I’m just responsible for hitting the buy button. As long as she stays nerdy and intellectually curious, then I don’t really care.
You still going for the ANTIFA COVID-19 look this Halloween?
Since I want to inspire fear, I’m going as “Others Liberty”
@handle
No, please no. Dressing up as a low iq Haitian, even if for the sake of others’ liberty, is just yet another example of cultural appropriation.
Please just go the ANTIFA route instead.
Individual liberty is a good, but it is not the highest good, rather it is just one among many. Rights and liberties cannot be expanded without imposing corresponding duties and costs on others.
Let’s consider some of these costs.
When a talented and skilled illegal immigrant comes to America, he is depriving his own society, his own people, of his talent and skills. Imagine if America had 1% of its population leaving its shores every year, representing some of the most motivated, skilled, and intelligent people. It wouldn’t be long before America would fall into dysfunction because the capable and driven people who make society move are no longer around.
When people migrate to rich countries, their impact on the environment changes to reflect modern western consumption habits. Areas with large amounts of continual immigration can see rapid growth in numbers, which can drive up housing/land prices, increase sprawl/congestion, etc.
When large numbers of immigrants come into an area, they can effectively colonize it and change it, with culture and in some cases even language reflecting the immigrants rather than the host nation. Imagine if 1,000,000 Europeans emigrated into Japan every year for a century. Depending on birth rates, the Japanese could quite possibly become a minority in their own country, with the culture reflecting the large European migrant population rather than native Japanese.
Even with moderate restrictions on immigration, the effect of decades of immigration has been to give control of the federal government and many state governments over to people who appear to despise people who look like me. We might have had countervailing pressure against anti-white wokeism if the right had greater political power (though maybe not, Republicans are usually awful when in power), but despite the outrageousness of the left, they hold political control and are likely to do so often in the future due to demographic realities. On top of this, America has become an increasingly low trust society as it has become more multicultural.
I haven’t yet ever worried that I was buying something from someone here illegally (in fact, if you count Mexican restaurants I’m almost certain that I’ve done so multiple times without even the slightest amount of fear), but I do have to worry about what I say out loud in public.
Yes, some employers may be less “at ease” hiring certain people, but why should I care? My employer is clearly uneasy with hiring American citizens who look like me, and feels the need to actively encourage me and other managers to avoid hiring and promoting such people if possible.
If you would like to limit the dollar value of “eviction moratoriums,” which you have steadfastly opposed, then please be consistent by opposing immigration and reproduction at the lower end of the SES to minimize such costs. Those low SES folks are the ones that cannot pay for their rent or healthcare or food or much of anything else.
I guess you don’t like the landlord to bear the full burden of these moratoriums. But, are ok when that burden is distributed more broadly among the general taxpayer?
The acronym for this would be FOOD, meaning Fear Of Others’ Dependency.
People in comments talk about housing costs and heating costs. They talk about healthcare and homelessness and building enough new highways to ease the traffic on the commute to some low-wage work in the city.
The original post, on the other hand, is about hiring people without having to ask if they’re citizens. The divide is pretty stark. The two sides are talking past each other.
My employer requires a blood draw to prove that I am drug free. Is there anything more invasive or inconvenient than that? Yet, our host is complaining about presenting the appropriate ID, which is quite simple actually, to also get into the door.
Yes, we are definitely talking past each other.
–“The original post, on the other hand, is about hiring people without having to ask if they’re citizens. The divide is pretty stark. The two sides are talking past each other.”–
Why is the burden government places on employers to be sure they are hiring only Americans so intolerable compared to the large list of other government requirements of employers?
Add on:
I understand libertarian and free market arguments for open borders, and an end to sovereign nations. Maybe we should have a global central bank, a global government.
But in the real world, globalism is just class warfare on the employees of developed nations. The US military has become a global guard service for multinationals.
“Trade Wars are Class Wars” by Michael Pettit is a good read.