In a conversation with Tyler Cowen, Romer says,
I think we should talk about a trilemma for migration, which is three things, and we can only have two out of the three. You think of the liberal democracies — what would we like as a response for large numbers of people who need to go someplace? If it was some political jurisdictions, one of the things we want is local democratic accountability for the officials in the government. The second would be equal treatment under the law. And the third is, in this jurisdiction, the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, potentially numbers that are bigger than the existing population.
Picture one of these places when there’s a million people there, but you’d like it to be able to accept another 9 million. All three of those things are things that most people would support, and you can’t have all three. So, the two we pick in most existing jurisdictions — we just don’t allow large-scale migration, and you can see some logic to that.
His preferred solution is to suspend local democracy for a while, until the immigrants are absorbed. I think of this as adding Syrian refugees to Germany but, instead of letting the Syrian refugees vote in a different set of rules, letting the EU run things there.
It’s a very unfamiliar approach, and it has features that are unattractive. But the thing to realize is, we just don’t have an answer at all if we’re facing this kind of very large-scale crisis of migration.
That’s exactly what happened to the native inhabitants of the New world. How’d it work our for them?
I wonder why immigration has been sacralized in Western academic circles.
Meanwhile, the US builds net about one million housing units a year (in a good year). Scott Sumner says the US is so bad at building infrastructure it should not even try.
So where to put immigrants?
Property zoning is pervasive, restrictive of new construction. New infrastructure also runs into property rights, as well as corruption (legal or otherwise).
US housing stock is aging, nearly on a year-for-year basis, as is our infrastructure.
Bring on immigrants into aging and crowded housing and infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the US builds net about one million housing units a year (in a good year).
Which is limited by demand and, especially, regulation, not by inherent construction capacity. The U.S. could build far more in places where development is easily permitted and, especially, if you could use the immigrant labor for drywall and shingles.
Scott Sumner says the US is so bad at building infrastructure it should not even try.
His argument is not against infrastructure generally, but against building more mass-transit in heavily-built, heavily-regulated environments. The U.S. is terrible at building subways in New York City and light-rail in Los Angeles, but very good at building highways and roads in Houston.
But there remains a legitimate question — is there enough demand to provide jobs for large numbers of immigrants in places where regulations are also loose enough to make it possible to build new housing for them?
“is there enough demand to provide jobs for large numbers of immigrants in places where regulations are also loose enough to make it possible to build new housing for them?”
Those new people will both produce and consume, and prices and wages will adjust eventually, but it’s not at all clear what the new equilibrium would look like, and any serious analysis has to seriously consider the possibility it could be worse than the baseline scenario absent mass migration.
But consider purely domestic migration. The US is still “urbanizing” and the big winner city metro areas are still pulling in people from the hinterlands on net, especially talented, ambitious people looking for lucrative work opportunities. Even though many of these people are born, raised, and educated in very cheap places where it is very easy to build, there are still not “enough” of the right kind of opportunities there to keep them “down on the farm flyover country.” As an anecdote, I count myself as an example, and at least half of the folks where I work too.
1. Romer is talking about migration-based “ruin voting” with this one.
Warren Meyer said the same thing at Coyote Blog: “When You Come Here, Please Don’t Vote for the Same Sh*t That Ruined the Place You Are Leaving”. That one was regarding Californian “refugees” fleeing a California made increasingly unlivable and inhospitable for business by the bad laws there (that is, they are “refugees” in part by their own hand), then migrating to Arizona, then, failing to have learned anything or to have connected cause and effect, changing the local political equilibrium by voting for Californian style politicians and policies.
Arizonans who like Arizona the way it is perfectly legitimate interests in keeping it that way and would thus be completely within reason to want to quarantine themselves off from that process. Alas, legally they have no choice but to accept all three legs of the trilemma stool with regards to California.
Romer talks about restoring democracy when the “migration process is over”, but is it realistic to think it would ever be “over” with an open door so long as the local standard of living is higher than anywhere else in the world? And why wouldn’t the threat of ruin voting still be present? Only in the magical case when all new migrants and their descendants have a near-identical voting profile and distribution as the pre-migration locals would that be the case, and all the empirical evidence points toward this never being the case. The alternative is to just ditch the “democratic accountability” and don’t let people vote at all on those institutional matters that wise expert technocrats identify as being the reason the place has become so attractive. This has its own set of problems, and also, the logical implication being that not only do the migrants not get to vote, but the locals also no longer get to vote, in the name of equal status.
At any rate, we already live under that system for an increasing number of items the judges pretend the Constituion puts outside the scope of the democratic process. It has its own failure modes, to be sure.
2. Romer says
Well, in the US right now, we have tens of millions of adults with long-term presence in the country at any moment who are not eligible to vote – maybe around a fifth of the registered voter population. Big deal? No, not a big deal. This has been the case for a long time, and so what? What norm evolution is he talking about? Could it be different when it’s 80% instead of 20%. Maybe, but maybe not. That’s the kind of thing that requires strong examples of circumstances in which large portions of the population were under no other legal disability than lacking the franchise.
3. Finally, it’s worth pointing out that getting hung up on democracy, and the legal system of laws and government policies and so forth seems a very wrong and overly-narrow way at looking at “local social change” overall, though perhaps the bad local minimum you get when a discussion is “optimized subject to constraints” in “discourse in the shadow of the guillotine.”
There are plenty of other legitimate interests and things to worry about that come from a sudden influx of a very large number of very different people, that have little to do with laws, policies, and voting – things that people disliked going back to ancient (indeed, prehistoric) times well before the widespread adoption of democracy as a mechanism of governance.
That’s what makes the trilemma a false framing, because just ditching universal adult franchise doesn’t in fact address the full nature of these problems in anything approaching the same way that restricting migration does. This is the actual “logic” behind the policy he mentions when he says, “we just don’t allow large-scale migration, and you can see some logic to that.”
Good point Handle. I highly doubt that “poor governance” is high on the list of problems of mass migration, in the opinion of many. In this way Romer is being disingenuous.
Yes. Frequently, I suspect, migrants don’t know why they are moving. That is, they know they’re moving for a better job where they’ll be able to afford a nicer house in a better neighborhood with a shorter commute, etc, but they don’t understand why those things are more readily available where they’re going than where they came from. So, of course, many California ‘economic refugees’ moving to Arizona and elsewhere come and vote for the policies they preferred in California. They never made the connection between the policies and the opportunities before their move, so why would they afterwards?
Handle,
Your thinking/writing reminds me of another commenter going on other sites by the handle of Sean. Like Sean, I tend to find your comments as, and often more, illuminating the original post they address.
Thanks.
I don’t know Sean. Where does he leave his comments?
Bleeding Heart Libertarians
I dunno, Handle, if tossing out 250 years of political and cultural norms is all it takes to get us the benefits of a few percentage points of additional GDP growth, I’d say that looks like a pretty swell deal.
People are very sensitive to creative destruction and disruption, and they want protection and preservation. This goes 10 times more for their cultural and social context than it does for the commercial and economic context. But the difference is that in the market context, the evolutionary competitive selection mechanism tends to set up better incentives and improve things over time by keeping everyone on their toes and letting failures fail.
That doesn’t apply to cultural change, where elimination of less competitive or adaptive versions involves quite ugly processes we eschew. Cultures embed functional protocols, traditions, and institutions and are thus like highly valuable intangible or organizational capital. One sees this in small organizations or whole nations. They are therefore not arbitrary or equivalent and one is justified in having strong preferences and not being indifferent. They are also asymmetrically vulnerable, so fragile, and prone to entropic deterioration without active efforts at maintenance and perpetuation. So cultural disruption is experienced as just destruction without the creativity, that is, without the mitigating and compensating factor of innovative improvements.
When did it become the case that the US is a culture resistant to change or experimentation? I thought that was supposed to be one of the defining features of the US as opposed to the “old world”. The great experiment in self-government. The frontier, jazz, radio, electricity, cars, movies, television, the freedom of the open road, rock n’ roll, etc.
“His preferred solution is to suspend local democracy for a while, until the immigrants are absorbed. I think of this as adding Syrian refugees to Germany but, instead of letting the Syrian refugees vote in a different set of rules, letting the EU run things there.”
This has been tried in the US. In Arizone vs. United Staes, the high priests at the Supreme Court read the pigeon entrails and decided that the states could not inforce immigration laws. Taking a cue from this utterly arbitrary and politicized decision, other judicial priests around the country have decided that they personally are should decide for the people what is right and good on all things immigration and have imposed judicial tyranny.
Ironically, in still democratic Germany, which has an actual federal system in both name and practice, the German states retain significant powers. Under Germany’s decentralised legal and administrative framework, the federal states enforce immigration laws and are responsible for immigration detention. National laws are intended to provide only a general framework for immigration detention. The national German Residence Act provides the grounds for detention, rules on the length of detention, and basic procedural safeguards. However it contains few provisions dealing with conditions of detention, instead allowing the federal states the power to adopt such laws, since they are in charge of illegal immigrant detention. The Federal police enforce immigration law around the national borders.
But even with 1 out of 5 people in Germany being foreigners and one in 1 in 4 babies there being born to foreign mothers, you don’t see the kind of chaos and horror that you see in the US. The national government allocates immigrants evenly to states using a quota system. But then the states distribute the immigrants internally within their states. The states also bear a significant share of the cost for accomodating and integrating immigrants. Germany requires 8 years of residence with a clean criminal record, German language skills, renunciation of prior citizenship, and self-support before granting citizenship to outside immigrants.
Based upon the German example, one could reasonably conclude that Romer has it completely backwards. Rather than suspending local democracy, immigration policy will most likely succeed through decentralization and increased empowerment of local jurisdictions.
Moreover the German example demonstrates that Romer’s notion of a trilemna is false.
Suspend the democracy here or there where the mass migration starts?
We are one globe, why not figure out the causes of sudden mass migration. In some cases the solution is at the source, as Romer knows. You are stuck, go there and fix it or stay here and adapt.
But sudden mass migrations seem odd, we are not birds. Am I wrong? Do we have some innate desire for sudden mass migration?
What Handle wrote.
And as some others are also addressing, the big problem with Romer’s trilemma is that his third goal, mass immigration, is not like the others. Romer’s analysis is tendentious but illuminating. Romer says:
He’s lying. Mass immigration (nine to one, he says!) is not a thing “most people would support.” We know he’s lying about people’s sentiments because he says (correctly) that local democratic accountability prevents mass immigration. That would not be so if most people favored it.
Legal equality and democratic accountability are universal benefits to the members of societies which enjoy (or seek) them. Mass immigration is something else, a special benefit to the migrants and a few citizens, but a bane to the rest. Logically we can resolve Romer’s trilemma in a heartbeat by choosing the universally-valuable two out of three goals, leaving the special interest of mass immigration in the wastebasket.
Given the apparently endless enthusiasm for mass migration on the part of many economists, I suggest we give it an earnest try in some polity and see what happens. Maybe we can find an economically developed, democratic nation in the Middle East and have it open its borders to all migrants and let everyone in. Then we wait ten years and see what effect it has! If positive, great we now know. If it’s an orgy of violence and destruction…. well, maybe we hold off.
But let’s try it in Israel first before we do it on the entire Western World. I’m confident the open-borders crowd would love this as a proof of concept. Right?
I agree we should actually encourage someplace to actually try it. I am 95% sure that it will be an unmitigated disaster, but if anyplace is crazy enough to try it, I support their freedom to do so, and I will gladly keep an open mind. Imagine what we could learn, good, bad, and lessons going forward.
The problem in a nut shell is that institutions matter, a lot! And institutions are built up not opon a base of quarks and leptons, but an invisible set of cultural mores, habits, values, shared goals, religious beliefs and Schelling points. Every society is a cumulative development of its formal institutions and informal beliefs and values. Exporting an institution like democracy to a radically different informal culture leads to something completely different than thing we think of as democracy (consider democracy in clan-based, cousin marriage societies). Similarly, importing a significant share of the population (multiples of the base pop) will change the culture and this how the existing institutions work.
Open borders is a suicidal idea for liberal democracy. That most libertarians can’t see this, is as sad of a commentary on the intellectual foundations of current libertarianism. Instead of importing massive numbers of non liberals, we should put our efforts into exporting liberal values and/or creating new institutional export colonies (such as Romer’s charter cities).
I believe there is a trilemma here, but I do not think it is quite the one that Romer puts forward. I would suggest this framing.
The USA has very expensive labor (for various reasons). We therefore must adopt one of the following:
1: Free trade, or at least much freer trade, low tariffs and all.
2: Much more open immigration of low wage workers.
3: Expensive goods, and possibly services.
Another way of putting it is that so long as wages are high for natives here, we either need to import goods made abroad by inexpensive labor, import inexpensive labor and make the goods here, or accept a very large increase in the cost of goods. Each has their own pros and cons, but reality seems to dictate that one must be chosen.
I personally don’t like #3 at all, as it hurts the deserving poor the most while doing very little to get the undeserving poor to support themselves. There are probably a lot of changes we could do to increase the number of domestic workers and lower wages, but I don’t think there are many changes that are politically feasible at the moment. The resulting comparative economic poverty from an across the board increase in prices will definitely be a step back, and I suspect a much greater one than people anticipate.
As to #1 or #2, I am somewhat indifferent. On the one hand, I think that having a larger population is generally a good thing, and that a Bryan Caplan-esque model of denying immigrants voting rights and means tested benefits would work out pretty well for Americans and be acceptable to immigrants. On the other hand, I can imagine a world where Bryan Caplan is put in charge of immigration and nationalization policy, but I am pretty sure it is not this one, so I think there is perhaps some value to keeping immigration low and simply trading with foreigners. I am not entirely comfortable with the ethical implications of barring freedom of association, but it might be true that the overall liberty side outweighs the direct liberty side there.
What worries me most is that the current trend seems to be away from both trade and immigration, which leads back to comparative poverty. Not good. I don’t see that there is much political motivation to get people back into the labor force either.
As said: “Open borders is a suicidal idea for liberal democracy” … unless all other countries are liberal democracies.
Even then, when Slovakia joined the EU, and thousands of poor Roma (Gypsies) went to France, the French sent them back, “not allowing” the mass migration.
Pushing countries to be democracies, like what the US tried to do in S. Vietnam, and later Afghanistan & Iraq, doesn’t work if the countries aren’t culturally ready to make choices. Probably supporting a Free Market capitalist oriented dictator, until capitalism gets established with some corruption below an unknown threshold, is the best foreign policy we can realistically do. But it’s not good enough to be inspiring.
Letting Cambodia and Rwanda have internal genocides, letting rich Venezuela turn into shithole socialist Venezuela, that hasn’t been so great either, but at least the US has cleaner hands.
The development focus in all poor countries needs to be on jobs, local jobs, local private, sustainable, non-tax supported jobs. Poor countries, like Haiti and Guatemala, perhaps should be encouraged more strongly (both carrots and less-aid sticks) to try Romer’s ideas for charter cities.
The USA should be pushing Puerto Rico to try it, too. Maybe first. Maybe with a small percent of the hurricane rebuilding money.
The current framing of “how will we absorb millions of immigrants” signals an abandonment of foreign policy. The Western democracies have yielded to the academic neo-Marxist critics of capitalism, and thus no longer promote capitalism, economic development, or democracy in poorer nations. The current US policy of punitive tariffs is only going to increase migration pressure. Our utter indifference to the Marxist destruction of Venezuela is appalling.