Immigration issues have obviously been in the news a ton the last few weeks, as Trump's new "zero tolerance" policies at the border have resulted in thousands of minors being separated from their parents. According to some reports, many of these kids are being housed in make-shift detention facilities that sometimes lack proper air-conditioning or even acceptable sanitation.
The most insane thing I've read so far has been that some of these people are being
force-fed psychotropic drugs disguised as vitamins.
Making matters worse, President Trump
recently suggested that the detentions are in some ways a negotiation tool, particularly against Democrats who he said need to get on board with his preferred immigration policies in order to stop this from happening.
Democrats, on the other hand, are calling all of this stuff "cruel and inhumane", and some people are even making hysterical comparisons to Nazi concentration camps.
This has turned into one of the most polarizing issues imaginable, and yet in spite of the absolutely deafening level of anger and hyperbole coming from every angle, I don't think anybody has stopped to seriously consider how difficult an issue this subject actually is.
"What are you talking about!?", you say, "Separating kids from their parents isn't a difficult issue, it's always wrong!"
And... I get it.
The images we've seen in the press are heartbreaking. Crying children, young people in "cages", sad parents who are being arrested just for trying to get a better job or seek asylum while escaping horrifying conditions in their home countries... It's all awful to watch.
I'm sure for a lot of people the imagery alone is enough to make a lot of people think differently about immigration.
There are some challenges, though.
For one thing, a lot of the imagery we've been seeing in the media is extremely deceptive. One of the first major photographs that tens of thousands of people shared on social media was of a crying child in a cage from Jose Antonio Vargas' Twitter:
Trouble with this is... It's not actually a kid detained under current Immigration and Customs Enforcement policies. To the contrary, it was an image taken during an anti-Trump protest on June 10th. That didn't stop over twenty-five thousand people from sharing it or nearly 40 thousand from liking it.
This is what kicked off a lot of the outrage about this issue. Nobody likes seeing kids in cages, so that became the driving narrative immediately.
The other seriously viral image of a crying child was taken by Getty staff photographer, John Moore:
Time Magazine subsequently used this image as the basis for a new cover, depicting President Trump as the cause of this child's misery, along with the caption "Welcome to America."
The problem with this image is that once again, the truth behind it is not as it first appears.
Firstly, the backstory behind the mother being in America is nearly a poster-case for conservatives who criticize illegal immigration and elected Trump partly on the basis of more tightly controlling the border.
In this case, the mother was not here because she was in grave danger and seeking asylum, or because economic conditions in her home country of Honduras were so dire that she couldn't do anything else. She also didn't apply for asylum in any of the ten US consulate locations throughout Mexico that were available for that purpose. Instead, she left her family and her other children, hiring a coyote to get herself and her daughter across the United States border.
Then she was arrested.
But even given that, the child and mother were never separated during the arrest and subsequent detention.
That's not to say that every story being told about the child detentions is false or that it's not happening. Trump didn't invent immigration restrictions, but his "zero tolerance" policy is new and it's meant a significant increase in border arrests. And with that has come over 2,000 children detained in the last couple months. It would not be surprising in the slightest to find that many of these kids were being housed in substandard conditions as there's just no way to ramp up this kind of activity without expanding into random warehouses and temporary facilities that aren't always going to be amazing.
Watching kids get caught up in all this is the biggest tragedy of the whole affair, and if - like me - you don't approve of immigration restrictions, then it's hard not to see it as a nightmare that's wholly preventable by changing immigration policy.
The tricky part is, if you
do support immigration restrictions, then it's still a tragedy but it's not one of Trump's making... Instead, it's only preventable once the parents of these children quit trying to enter the United States illegally.
That's only part of what makes the issue so complicated, but before I can get into the rest of it, I want to take a second and talk about immigration itself, and why I support opening the borders to other people as much as humanly possible on both philosophical or practical grounds.
The Philosophical Case for Open Borders
I believe (as I've
written here numerous times) that for the concept of "human rights" to mean anything at all, they must inherently be universal.
I normally talk about that in terms of the distinction between negative rights and positive rights privileges, and the way in which rights themselves should be able to be equally applied to everyone simultaneously. For example, if I establish a right to property, this means I'm asserting both an expectation that nobody is allowed to steal from me and also a responsibility to myself not to steal from anyone else. The only thing we're all required to do under this framework is... Nothing. Negative rights are rights against some external action... It's a right to be "free from" coercion.
Thus, the moral concept of, "don't steal from anybody" can be universally applied simultaneously and everyone is made better off as a result.
This is in contrast to claims of rights to some kind of material outcome - ie. the "right" to home-ownership/shelter, clothing, equal incomes, health care, etc. Because material wealth must be produced by others, the only way to equalize it is by taking from some people and giving it to someone else. This framework is impossible to establish universally, and as a result I am loathed to call them "rights", but refer to them instead as special privileges which cannot exist apart from coercion.
Without digressing further into those issues here, something I probably don't talk about enough is the idea of universality in terms of nations and tribes.
For a "human right" to be a "right" at all, it must be universally applicable all the time. And for it to be "human", it must be universal to all humans - no matter where they're born, where they live, what skin color they are, what religion they believe, what language they speak, or anything else.
All this is to say: Immigration restrictions are clear violations of human liberty and all kinds of corollary rights.
On some level, I think we all know this.
Americans would not, and generally do not, tolerate the imprisonment or detention of people who haven't done anything to violate the rights of other citizens. Although it probably happens more today than it should, cops are not legally allowed to arrest someone just for walking from one side of the street to another. Nor can they do this to people who move from one town to another within the same state, or even moving from one state to another state.
I should know, as I've done this many, many times.
Over the course of my own life, I've personally moved to
twenty three different homes inside the United States. Most of the times I've done this in my adult life have had to do with seeking (and finding) better opportunities and higher standards of living
And ya know what? Not one single time have I ever been stopped at the border of a city or a state and detained for any length of time because I wasn't "allowed" to move from one place to another. As an American citizen I get to roam free across 3.8 million square miles of beautiful open countryside.
In fact, the only things that mattered to any of those moves were the voluntary, contractual associations I had with current and future landlords, and now my mortgage holder.
Thankfully, I live in a country where I face a very low probability of being imprisoned unless I've actually harmed someone else, and that's how it should be.
But... That's not how immigration controls or border security works. Instead of applying the right to liberty (and its corollary right of free movement) universally to anyone around the world, the government limits the protection of this right only to its own citizens. This makes liberty not something that we're treating as a universal right, but rather as a right limited only to people who were lucky enough to be born here.
We'll get back to that later, but the point here is that I cannot support this on a fundamental philosophical level.
That said, there's also the practical matter of immigration being tremendously valuable to society.
The Practical Case for Open Borders
It's hard to overstate the benefits of immigration from an economics standpoint.
More people mean more hands and more brains, more production and consumption, more specialized skills and the expansion of our ability to produce wealth and meet everyone's needs as a society. It also means more ideas and perspectives to mix and intermingle, thus creating more innovations and entrepreneurship.
Economist Bryan Caplan was interviewed by The Economist a while back and estimated that a world of open borders would likely be about
$78 Trillion richer than it is today.
This would be a nearly unfathomable increase in global prosperity, and the reasons why are fairly clear, as the article explains:
The potential gains from open borders dwarf those of, say, completely free trade, let alone foreign aid. Yet the idea is everywhere treated as a fantasy. In most countries fewer than 10% of people favour it. In the era of Brexit and Donald Trump, it is a political non-starter. Nonetheless, it is worth asking what might happen if borders were, indeed, open.
To clarify, “open borders” means that people are free to move to find work. It does not mean “no borders” or “the abolition of the nation-state”. On the contrary, the reason why migration is so attractive is that some countries are well-run and others, abysmally so.
Workers in rich countries earn more than those in poor countries partly because they are better educated but mostly because they live in societies that have, over many years, developed institutions that foster prosperity and peace. It is very hard to transfer Canadian institutions to Cambodia, but quite straightforward for a Cambodian family to fly to Canada. The quickest way to eliminate absolute poverty would be to allow people to leave the places where it persists.
The point here is that most of the time, it's the institutions and not the people themselves that disrupt productivity and wealth-creation. I've been working on a documentary about this as it pertains to the institutions in Senegal vs. the rest of the world for the last few months, and what you will see in the film (and can see if you look around the world without it) are a whole lot of people who are very entrepreneurial and driven, but who are being crushed by a massive tax and regulatory burden, low property rights protections, and the immense amount of corruption that comes whenever the state has so much power over people's economic and personal lives.
Ideally, we'd live in a world where all those other terrible countries were "fixed", but the reality is that we could fairly easily improve tens of millions of lives and dramatically expand the productivity and wealth available in the world simply by allowing more people to move to places where the institutions are better.
On a personal note, it took me
two years to be able to hire a photography intern from Spain because our immigration laws are idiotic, and he's already created a tremendous amount of value in the short time he's been in the US. I could have benefited from his services last year, but I didn't.
But of course, this doesn't mean immigration is without problems, as conservatives are quick to point out.
Potential Problems With Immigration
This is where things get complicated, and also where most progressives and libertarians seem to be checking out of the conversation right now. In my current experience, these two groups are spending an immense amount of time denying that any problems could even possibly exist.
See also this ridiculous video from Nancy Pelosi trying to tell a woman whose son was brutally murdered by an illegal immigrant outside of Houston that sanctuary cities only ever contain law-abiding individuals and that these kinds of crimes don't happen in those places.
This is arguably every bit as heartbreaking (if not more, depending on who you ask) as the stories of children being separated from their parents at the border.
This woman has lost her son forever.
Libertarians and progressives need to let these kinds of stories sink in for a little while before they rush to outrage over child detention. This stuff happens, it is devastating, and it's why a lot of people don't really care that preventing illegal immigration is tough on families.
Immigration & Crime
Of course this would be the point at which lots of people would start pointing out that immigrants have lower rates of criminality, lower rates of welfare, and generally tend to be more solid contributors to society than native citizens. Alex Nowrasteh as spent a lot of effort compiling data about this stuff, and back in February the
Cato Institute produced a paper showing the differences in conviction rates for different groups using 2015 data from Texas.
For homicide, we see the following:
And, for sexual assault, we see this:
This is also the point where people like Alex and Bryan Caplan would correctly point out that natives
also break laws and murder people, and in fact they tend to do so at higher rates even than legal immigrants.
I think these rejoinders fall flat for a few reasons:
- These charts clearly depict a situation where illegal immigrants are way more prone to crime than legal immigrants, which confirms a general hypothesis a lot of people have expressed over the years: These two groups of people are different.
Personally, I'd be willing to bet this is always going to be the case.
Those who come here legally self-select into the highest performing categories and this should not come as a surprise because they're specifically the ones willing to work the hardest inside the law to get here, which is quite difficult. They're also selected by the system to be the best candidates for entry in general - people who have attributes that "we want more of" in the United States.
People who come here illegally are almost by definition not going to be the most law-abiding or high skilled people. And since the whole point for conservatives is to crack down on the illegal immigration, their non-strawman point seems to be "Sure, let in the high skilled, low crime, good people from other countries, but keep out the bad ones who can't get past our screening system."
- Excising the United States of all illegal immigrants may not prevent natives from committing similar crimes, but it does theoretically reduce the population of criminals by a significant degree. We can't really deport home-grown criminals (because... to where, and who would take them?) but we can deport people who are here illegally. So perhaps it's possible that the mother in the video above might have lost her son some other way or to some native murderer, but she knows she wouldn't have lost him the way she did if the border had been more tightly controlled and the specific murder hadn't made it in.
- The data behind these numbers is also not nearly as solid as we might imagine. Just thinking through the way the criminal justice system works, US citizens are pretty easy to track and find, what with the lengthy paper trail they tend to leave. As are legal immigrants. Illegal immigrants? Not so much. And there's a shockingly large amount of unsolved crime out there, so it's pretty easy to imagine (or just assume) that a decently large chunk of that unsolved crime is being committed by illegal immigrants who don't get caught or perhaps flee back to their home countries to avoid conviction.
Point being, with a much less porous border, you could argue fairly persuasively for a lot of people - even with Cato's paper claiming the contrary - that you'd prevent a tremendous amount of crime, even though of course you wouldn't be able to stop all of it.
Plus, besides "normal" crimes there's also the question of securing our borders against terrorists which has obviously been an issue before. Three of the 9/11 hijackers were in the United States illegally (I believe having overstayed their Visa allowances).
Again, libertarians might say something along the lines of, "Well, look. Terrorism is a tremendously small problem statistically speaking, and there many terrorists have been living here legally or have even been 'home-grown' such as Timothy McVeigh."
But once again, while this is true, it doesn't stop people from credibly thinking that the tighter our border security is, the fewer
additional terrorists will get in.
And they have a point.
Timothy McVeigh was already here, sure...But per the "low-immigration, pro-immigrant" (read: anti-immigration)
Center for Immigration Studies:
To gain a more complete picture of the threat and of the holes in our immigration system, we must examine acts of terrorism in this country over the last decade. Including the September 11 hijackers, 48 foreign-born militant Islamic terrorists have been charged, or convicted, or have admitted their involvement in terrorism within the United States between 1993 and 2001. In addition to September 11, the plots examined here include the murder of employees outside of CIA headquarters in 1993, the first attack on the World Trade Center in the same year, a plot to bomb the Brooklyn subway system in 1997, plots to bomb New York City landmarks in 1993, and the Millennium plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. Almost all of them have now been linked in some way to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization. To be sure, other terrorist threats exist. However, because the threat it poses dwarfs that of any other terrorist group, foreign or domestic, the emphasis here will be on al Qaeda.
...
Terrorists have even exploited America's humanitarian tradition of welcoming those seeking asylum. At the time they committed their crimes, 16 of the 48 terrorists considered in this analysis were on temporary visas (primarily tourist visas); another 17 were lawful permanent residents or naturalized U.S. citizens; 12 were illegal aliens; and 3 of the 48 had applications for asylum pending.
So, I think the closed-borders argument would go something like this:
Close the holes in US border security and perhaps 31 out of 48 terrorists would not have been able to commit their crimes.
Of course, it's also not just crime and terrorism that people are worried about. They're also worried about social cohesion, economic impacts, political effects and other changes that come from an influx of people who speak different languages and don't understand local culture.
A lot of these things are hard to predict, but the claims I hear most often are that:
- Social cohesion will go down with an influx of immigrants, thus tearing at the fabric of existing communities in America.
- Immigrants will be competing with Americans for jobs, and that this will particularly affect America's working poor who already are most likely to be in a position to be working in low-skill, low-paid occupations.
- Immigrants will come here and bring the terrible institutions from their home countries with them, voting in policies that wrecked their local economies (because they don't properly understand the connection between social institutions/policy and economic outcomes).
The last one often gets stated by conservatives as "they'll vote for Democrats!", but I'd like to steelman this argument a bit and make sure that I'm responding to the most substantial version of this claim.
All three of those problems are legitimate concerns (though, you'd never know it if you look at my Facebook feed).
Let's talk about them for a bit.
Social Cohesion
I've produced tons of videos that touch on this over the last couple years, but trade and immigration are fabulous ways of helping disparate groups of people to get along with each other and improve peace and social cooperation around the world. One of the best contributions writer Thomas Friedman has ever made to the world of ideas is advancing what he ended up calling the
Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Resolution in his book "The Lexus and the Olive Branch".
The basic idea here is that as countries trade with each other and as more people interact with each other via economic exchange, the more they get to know each other, trust each other, and rely on each other for their standards of living.
This is, of course, also commensurate with the point that Leonard Read made in "I, Pencil". Not any one of us could make even something as simple as a pencil by ourselves, but through the power of price signals and profit within the context of trade, we can bring people together with disparate skills and resources from all over the world to produce goods & services for us... And they don't even have to know who we are or care. Each time we do that, though, especially if we can be a part of the cultural exchange, we'll learn to trust and appreciate other people from other parts of the world even more.
Now... This is true. However, it doesn't happen overnight and a lot of studies apparently find that social cohesion (usually defined as generalized trust of one's community) has an inverse relationship to increased racial/ethnic diversity.
Per Oxford University's Migration Observatory:
Most of the empirical literature on this subject finds that the relationship between diversity and trust is negative – the more diverse a community is, the less likely individuals in it are to be trusting. The trend seems to hold especially strong for the US. Costa and Khan (2003) established with the General Social Survey that people in more diverse neighbourhoods trust their neighbours less and are less likely to be politically or communally involved. Alesina and La Ferrara (2000, 2005) found that trust in general and more specifically interpersonal trust is lower in more racially heterogeneous communities in the US. Stolle et al. (2008) comparing US and Canada observed a strong negative effect of diversity on trust; however, they also found that contact may neutralize but not make this relationship positive. Most notably, Putnam (2007) argues that diversity seems to alienate people in general and in his words pushes them towards ‘hunkering down’ i.e. towards segregation and isolation.
This is a genuine challenge to open immigration advocates, and to be honest, I don't have a fabulous rejoinder to it.
I'm confident that over time, people who get to know each other, live near each other, and become economically interdependent
will eventually form a cohesive social group and their social bonds will become much stronger, but while we're waiting for that to happen, the society itself could tear itself apart and wind up becoming even more segregated than ever - which
is something I've observed living in major cities for more than a decade. There are some communities that cross racial and ethnic lines, sure, but there's also a ton of self-segregation.
I also think the internet makes it easier for people to self-segregate and become economically interdependent with a large trading network of people who are all over the world yet share your various pre-existing traits such as skin color, religion, language, culture, etc.
I used to scoff at Robert Putnam's book "Bowling Alone" as simply missing the fact that while people may not be going bowling as a neighborhood anymore, they're playing Halo 3 on headsets with everyone they know instead. I still maintain that criticism, but I've also come to think that a downside of social media in particular is that it allows us to be social without interacting with our actual, physical neighbors.
We get to expand our friend-group, but we can now do it inside a tightly controlled bubble of our own choosing.
Most people seem to use this power to isolate themselves from contrary points of view or from people they don't already believe are part of their tribe - whatever that tribe happens to be. If
anything is going to screw up broad social cohesion in a diverse society, it's that.
Immigration can, therefore, be a very disruptive force in people's communities by reducing trust and creating lines of division that maybe didn't exist before. Lots of it in a short period of time seems likely to put a greater strain on social cohesion than a slow drip. A few families at a time can be effectively assimilated, but hundreds all coming in at once? I'm not so sure.
I don't think libertarians and progressives are wise to dismiss this concern as unimportant, but I have yet to see any serious grappling with the problem from any of the more vocal advocates I know in the last several weeks.
Competition for Jobs
This one's a lot easier to deal with.
Yes, immigrants will compete with native-born Americans for jobs, but all the available evidence suggests that when immigrants come here, they are incredibly entrepreneurial.
About
40% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants. Comparative studies show that first and second generation immigrants create far more businesses and are more financially successful than their native born counterparts within racial and ethnic lines. This becomes pretty apparent when you live in really diverse areas of major cities. The most buzzing and entrepreneurial places are the ones where there's a large concentration of brand new immigrants - and why wouldn't it be when those people are coming here with the very specific goal of improving their lives?
 |
| This crazy immigrant employs 85,000 people! |
As I said above, immigrants do not just represent more mouths to feed, they also represent more
hands, skills, specialties, comparative advantages and ideas. More people means more brains with which to solve more problems more creatively.
Yes, an influx can be disruptive, but the long run economic benefits are quite clear as Bryan Caplan discussed above. So from a policy standpoint, I think the key here is simply to make sure that we are sufficiently promoting a dynamic economy with low barriers to entry, lots of opportunities for education and training, and that we don't use the state to preference one group over another or to subsidize stagnation - which we often do now.
As long as people are able to move about the economy, immigration - even substantial levels of immigration - should not pose a serious economic threat, and at the same time we know it has immense economic benefits.
However... The next one's a bit tougher to answer.
Bringing Bad Social Institutions
This one might be the most challenging problem, although in my experience it's also the one most totally scoffed at and ignored by pro-immigration advocates.
First, let's establish a base premise:
Culture is a product of spontaneous order.
That means that it's not controlled by some omnipresent central committee, rule book, or god, but is rather simply the aggregate product of what everyone living in a given society actually believes and how they behave. In short:
We are our own culture.
Now, let's establish a secondary premise:
Our political system flows from our culture and they are inseparable.
The norms, customs, and beliefs that are held by the majority of people in society will determine what norms, customs, and beliefs are instituted into law. For most of US history, we've benefited from a culture that was broadly pro-freedom. As a result, the US was not originally saddled with a government that had power over speech, religion, or most anything in the economic realm. It did not adopt a system of central planners, and it did inherit many particularly strong protections of critical rights in line with John Locke's "Life, Liberty, and Property" natural rights philosophy.
This has always been the best thing about America, and the only times that America's government has gotten better rather than worse have been the times where the courts or politicians formally recognized that these rights weren't sufficiently protected or weren't being protected to an equal degree among different groups of people.
Most people who were born in America have been immersed in some aspects of these ideas from birth, and they've benefited tremendously from the social outcomes that these ideas about how society and government should function have provided to them.
We have been the most innovative and entrepreneurial nation in the history of the world, primarily because our people have been free to do what they wanted to do without state interference and they have always been able to retain the product of their labor to a degree almost no one else ever had or has since.
Not to go into a soapbox rant about the benefits of property rights, capitalism, free trade, but this stuff has been insanely important and has allowed America to become unfathomably wealthy.
However... Not everyone else in the world has grown up with this kind of culture.
Many people from other parts of the world have grown up in societies where the government has nearly unlimited power over their lives, and where they've been taught from birth that the way to succeed is to work within the corrupt systems they inhabit through graft and bribery. Many people from other parts of the world have grown up in societies where the people who are wealthy are the most ruthless or brutally violent. Many people from other parts of the world have grown up in societies where religious extremism and Dark Ages views about women or homosexuals are the norm. Many people from other parts of the world don't have any way of really even understanding the philosophical underpinnings and values of a place like America.
And again, remember that "culture" is not a static, unchanging thing independent of people. It is only the byproduct of the beliefs and values of all the individuals who live in a particular place.
Speaking as someone who tries to contribute to shaping culture for a living, it's already
extremely difficult to cultivate good values among people who already live here and bringing millions of people into the United States who don't speak English and grew up under
very different types of societies only makes it less likely that a culture filled with people who believe in free speech, freedom of religion, solid property rights, free enterprise, and limited government power is going to continue to exist.
This is a potentially enormous problem that I'm not sure anyone's really got an answer for.
If, for example, an influx of people from socialist nations in South America or Africa come here, or if perhaps a huge number of fundamentalist Muslim refugees from Syria or Iraq show up in the United States, our culture is going to change... And it's absolutely not clear that it's going to change for the better.
This goes beyond just the question of whether or not neighborhoods will be more or less trusting. It goes to what our entire legal and political system could look like in 20-30 years.
And before you say, "Well the people fleeing awful socialist countries or Muslim theocracies
probably don't believe in those systems anymore," I would tell you that this argument is not built on a decent understanding of how people actually think and form philosophical worldviews.
Even people who accept that their home countries have turned to such garbage that they have to leave often have no idea
why, because it actually takes quite a bit of work and study to figure that stuff out. Consider that Egyptians participating in Arab Spring (as seen in the photo above) knew they wanted to rid themselves of Hosni Mubarak, but once Mubarak was forced out of office and the autocracy was overthrown, have Egyptians created a liberal democracy with strong protections of individual liberty and property rights?
No. They have not.
This shouldn't be surprising. The only way to get from the corrupt authoritarianism of Egypt to the democratic traditions of the Western world that protect individual rights to life, liberty, and property, is for enough of the entire society to actually understand and embrace those values to turn it into politics. But people don't think about this stuff that deeply. Even when they know that the system they have isn't working, that doesn't mean they understand how to build a system that would work.
Africa and South America in particular are full of examples of this problem. In the 1960s, all these colonialist power structures got torn down, which many people assumed would be a boon for liberty in Africa, but in their place most nations got socialist dictators!
Likewise, people who have lived in the United States their entire life and benefit from institutions that were put in place decades or centuries ago often have no clue
why their own living standards are so high. This stuff just isn't that obvious to most people, and people can absolutely decide to leave their home country without changing their beliefs about its fundamental values.
I know many people personally for whom this is the case.
A dear friend of mine from France has openly acknowledged to me in conversation numerous times that his birthplace has created a toxic environment for entrepreneurship and business, and he recognizes that he could not have any hope of making a great living doing what he's incredibly good at in France. He moved to the US for opportunity, and he's contributed a ton of value to everyone here ever since, yet he's
still highly sympathetic to most of the heavily restrictive economic policies the French government is best known for.
In spite of knowing about the horrible outcomes in the country he came from, my friend still believes in the very policies that ultimately caused him to leave.
Why?
Because the connection between restrictive policies and poor outcomes just isn't as obvious or intuitive as a lot of libertarian policy wonks like to think it should be, and because when you grow up your whole life in a culture that surrounds you with stories defining the values that are important, you tend to hold onto those values wherever you go. Even if they suck.
Do some people figure it out? Absolutely.
Will everyone, or even most? Don't bet on it.
So where does that leave us?
I'm honestly not sure.
We haven't even covered other difficult topics such as the incentives provided by our welfare system or the strain new immigrants put on government services, which will always be primarily paid for by natives and legal immigrants. Nobel Prize-winning economist and libertarian stalwart Milton Friedman discussed this problem directly in an email to the Polish Minister of the Treasury, Henryk A. Kowalczyk:
Immigration is a particularly difficult subject. There is no doubt that free and open immigration is the right policy in a libertarian state, but in a welfare state it is a different story: the supply of immigrants will become infinite. Your proposal that someone only be able to come for employment is a good one but it would not solve the problem completely. The real hitch is in denying social benefits to the immigrants who are here. That is very hard to do, much harder than you would think as we have found out in California. But nonetheless, we clearly want to move in the direction that you are talking about so this is a question of nitpicking, not of serious objection.
Now, to be clear, Friedman still believed the net-effects of immigration were sufficiently positive to justify these costs. Lots of economists and libertarian political theorists have since taken Friedman to task for not being pro-immigration enough and/or not advocating what they call "keyhole" solutions - that is, policies that would widen the opportunity for more immigration over time - such as a highly porous border that explicitly allows lots of
illegal immigration.
That said, I think a lot of critics who take this approach are deluding themselves that these kinds of approaches are smart or workable.
For one thing, eroding public faith in laws as an intentional policy "solution" does not strike me as a particularly sound long-term strategy if you also care about having a society that gives a shit about its cultural and political institutions. For another, as we've clearly seen from having a fairly porous border already (DHS estimates about 11 million illegal immigrants are currently living in the US), there are tons of people out there who see this kind of solution as a severe affront to the sanctity of their community, to the upholding of authority, and define it as an "invasion" that is tearing at the fabric of our civilization.
And honestly, that's what a lot of this whole blog post is about... Libertarians and progressives who favor open borders can't simply ignore the fact that the majority of the population doesn't agree with them and that a significant minority is actively, vehemently opposed to what they're advocating.
So all I really know at this point is that this subject is actually really goddamn complicated, and social media outrage stories don't really do well with complexity.
It's All More Complicated Than You Think
Even with respect to the idea of children being "put in cages" or separated from their families, the issues aren't nearly as cut and dry as a lot of my friends and people in the media seem to want everyone to believe.
A lot of those kids are unaccompanied to begin with, and they either don't have parents anywhere near the United States, or they have parents or guardians who aren't willing to come get them for fear of being arrested and deported themselves. But besides that, any parent who commits a crime is going to be separated from their kid and it certainly doesn't make any sense to put children in with populations of adults in a prison.
And once we recognize this, we have to acknowledge that if you try to take border security seriously as Trump clearly does, then you're going to be arresting a lot of people and as a result you're going to have to figure out what to do with a lot of those kids when government facilities aren't enough. More border crackdowns are inherently going to turn up kids and if you don't know what you're doing with them, you're going to end up with the problems we have... Even if you think that the overall border crackdowns are a good idea.
It's also not entirely clear what stories to believe regarding treatment.
As we discussed above, a lot of the images in the press and on social media have been shared in error. But it's not just imagery, last night a prominent and consistent anti-Trump (and pro-immigration) voice on my Facebook shared a story about rapes and sexual assaults being committed by guards and border detention facilities.
Predictably, everyone reacted with horror and outrage, often directly at Trump. Problem is...
That report was from 2014.
I find that political outrage tends to turn people into confirmation bias machines, and makes them garbage at fact-checking... Because, really, why bother? If the image or story perfectly fits your pre-existing narrative, fact-checking is only ever going to be a disappointment.
But as I said at the beginning, the cost of failure is that people who aren't as laser-focused on the issues as you are
stop believing you.
Adam Carolla
recently talked about this on his podcast, and I think it warrants a listen. Start at about 9 minutes and 25 seconds into the show.
Final Thoughts
I'm sorry to say that I don't have a good answer to any of this.
I'd love to say that everything was perfectly clear and easy, and that there's some set of words and phrases that I could give you to say how you convince people that immigration is a net benefit to society and that even though,
yes, sometimes an immigrant comes here and commits a heinous crime, that absolutely does not mean that we should restrict all immigration.
I'd like everyone to see other people as individuals and not only as members of identity groups ("foreigner", "American", "immigrant", "Muslim", etc.). If we did this, conservatives would have to acknowledge that the vast majority of immigrants are great, and the progressives and libertarians would have to acknowledge that some of them are not so great.
I'd also like everyone I know personally to accept that there are actually some downsides to immigration and quit acting like the only people who see any negatives in immigration are racist morons who can't get a job.
But most of all, I want everyone to just
listen to each other a hell of a lot better than they are and realize that most of what's happening is an utter failure to communicate.
Conservatives believe that the stability of our society is upset by immigrants. Libertarians believe that restricting immigration is an unacceptable abuse of power over individuals. Progressives believe that preventing immigrants from coming to the US is oppressive and harmful to the poorest people.
All three groups have a point.
As for my own opinion, I'm as strong a supporter of immigration and generally open-borders as I have ever been... Because I see people as the most supremely valuable resource to any society. More immigration means more diversity of perspectives and ideas, more productive hands, and more opportunities to connect with other cultures and improve our own. I also see the downsides as mostly minimal compared to the benefits.
This would all be even more true in a society that was more economically free and had a lower rate of welfare dependency, but we work with the society we have.
As for concerns about immigrants bringing in poor values... Well, friends... Look around. Poor values are already here, and we're going to need to figure out how to reverse that trend immediately but as far as I can tell it has nothing to do with immigration. Most of the worst ideas flooding our kids' brains are coming from our entertainment, news media, and universities, not from the dude running the taco stand on the corner.
If the news that gets reported doesn't bother to tell readers and viewers about angry left-wing lunatics who assault Republican campaign workers, set fire to GOP offices, or shoot Republican congressmen, and if reporters and pundits don't care to spend much time about a series of threatening letters testing positive for ricin poison or threats of and/or the actual attempted murder of Republicans over their political views, then the people who consume news will not know about those kinds of things.
