A neighbor here among the Millionaires against Trump posted the following on Facebook:
I AM A FIRST GENERATION IMMIGRANT. FROM A SHITHOLE. Yes, Taiwan in the early 70s was not nearly as much of a shithole as, say, Haiti is today. And, yes, Haiti is a shithole, by any objective measure.
Compared to the United States in the early 70s, Taiwan was a substandard place to raise your children. The US was then — and is today — the best nation on the planet to where one can immigrate and build a better life, for yourself and your children.
I have ALWAYS been in favor of a (virtually) open border policy. One thing we can do for Haiti is to permit as many Haitians as possible to immigrate to America. And from Africa. And Vietnam and Indonesia and Turkmenistan. And, hey, from Norway too.
As an avowed “Never-Trumper” since day one, I am horrified by our President’s personal behavior, his loose affiliation with objective truth, and his unbelievable egotism.
[link to “Of Course Most Immigrants Come from Shithole Countries. So What?” (Reason)]
It try to be as agreeable as possible on Facebook, so I responded:
By the 1970s, Taiwan had only 8,000 years of world-leading education and culture to draw from (see the National Palace Museum for example).
(Alluding to the fact that Taiwan in 1949 became home to millions of people from the mainland’s most elite families.)
In response to his idea of open borders, I made my standard offer:
If you would like to host a Haitian family in your house for the next few years, I will be happy to pay for the JetBlue tickets from Port-au-Prince and the Boston Coach ride from Logan!
He responded with
Oh, please. If Haitians – or Norwegians – want to buy my house, I’d be happy to take their money.
He clarified that he expected immigrants to “find a job”. I asked why this was a reasonable expectation given that an immigrant under his proposed scheme might be a wheelchair-bound 80-year-old. Or the immigrant might simply prefer to live in public housing, subscribe to Medicaid, shop with an EBT, and talk on an Obamaphone. (Here in Massachusetts, one need not be a legal immigrant in order to be entitled to taxpayer-funded housing.)
His response was essentially that immigration of randomly-selected or even adversely selected (e.g., disabled senior citizens) was guaranteed to make existing Americans wealthier via GDP growth. I got him to clarify that he expected both the aggregate GDP and the per-capita GDP to grow. He focused in on one point from the Reason article: immigrants “use welfare at lower rates than their made-in-the-U.S.A. analogues”. He provided support for this with a link to “Poor Immigrants Use Public Benefits at a Lower Rate than Poor Native-Born Citizens” (Cato Institute). It turns out that immigrants are slightly less likely to receive at least one form of welfare, perhaps due to bureaucratic obstacles. It turns out the wording of the title has to be read carefully. The study is limited to poor immigrants. The Cato folks say “a greater percent of immigrants are low-income and, all else remaining equal, more eligible for benefits. Non-citizens are almost twice as likely to have low incomes compared with natives.”
I asked how it was possible for a society to be richer on average by bringing in people who are, on average, lower income than those already present. The answer turned out to be that, in the long run (yet to be measured), the grandchildren of today’s immigrants are guaranteed to be much more successful than the grandchildren of native-born Americans.
What about providing infrastructure for a country of, say, 1 billion people? How would that work given our current inability to build mass transit or highways economically?
Infrastructure follows demand, and is also heavily determined by population density. This country was built by-and because- of growing immigrant populations, and infrastructure followed. The *difficulty* in building infrastructure is entirely, wholly, and utterly, a result of BS political rules, in deference to, among other things, union featherbedding, environmental NIMBYism, etc.
[i.e., once we have more immigrants the political rules and unions will no longer inflate public construction projects]
One big question is why any immigrants are available to the U.S. If immigration is an economic panacea, why don’t other countries bid higher than we do? Norway is wealthier per capita than the U.S. Why aren’t they able to out-compete us to capture valuable immigrants, e.g., by paying Haitians to come live in Norway? (And, in fact, why do the Norwegians instead invest their time and money in deporting immigrants?)
His summary:
The world gets wealthier with more people — even as you divide wealth among more people.
The original poster remained confident in his theories, so I decided to see how much explanatory value they had.
You’ve proven that random immigration will make us richer per capita. But can you explain how emigration would make us poor? Suppose the US found a nice exoplanet and developed an exclusive technology for getting there. Only Americans can go and half of households decide to depart the solar system. It turns out to be a perfectly random sample. So now we are left with the same infrastructure, natural resources, real estate, but half as many people. Do individual incomes rise or fall?
His response:
Just think about it, logically. If the current population of the US generates $X trillion in GDP, and if the population drops to ZERO, then GDP would necessarily drop to $0, right? Now draw a graph between the two points.
The line may not, and almost certainly would not, be straight, but it’s hard to see how there would be a bump in the graph line such that productivity would be substantially higher if our population is randomly decreased by Y%.
I pressed
So the supply of labor decreases (because half the population has gone to the exoplanet) and the value of labor also decreases? (Note that wages rose in Europe after the Black Death reduced the supply of labor. See the Economist.
It turns out that he essentially rejects the principle of diminishing marginal product of labor (Wikipedia).
Sorry for the length of the post, but I think it is interesting for showing how Americans are able to think about immigration. At least some Americans seem to disregard the idea that natural resources are a source of national wealth and therefore, since all GDP comes from human effort, the U.S. could be just as wealthy (or wealthier!), per capita, if all 7.6 billion people on the planet lived here. It is kind of the opposite of Barack Obama’s “You didn’t build that.” We mark the value of the land, water, minerals, etc. that we stole from the Indians to $0. We mark the value of already-built infrastructure, such as the Interstates, the New York City subway system, etc. to $0. We mark the value of existing business assets, such as car factories, to $0.
Related:
- “As Labor Pool Shrinks, Prison Time Is Less of a Hiring Hurdle” (nytimes, Jan 13), suggesting that a smaller labor force is better for existing workers (someone didn’t clear this story with the rest of the editorial staff?)
- “What most frequently meets our view (and occasions complaint) is our teeming population. Our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us…. In very deed, pestilence, and famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy for nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race.” (Tertullian, nearly 2000 years ago in Carthage, quoted in Wikipedia)
- Modern Malthusianism
You can’t talk to Americans about natural resources. They are incapable of thinking rationally on the subject. Six year olds can grasp the issues, but adult Americans cannot. If you ever mention that we are clearly running out of coal and oil and natural gas and this is obviously going to be a huge problem within ten years, they will start babbling nonsensically about electric cars.
I take exception to Greenspun’s claims about Norway.
The Norwegian equivalent USCIS against the will of the majority of the population intentionally accepts invalid refuge status applications.
Why are the applications invalid? Because in the great majority of cases, the illegal aliens arrive via other safe countries, and UNHCR limits the responsibility of accepting refugees to the first safe country the purported refugee arrives at. Since I have never heard about boats full of refugees arriving at Norwegian shores, it must be unusual, thus the great majority of asylum applicants are arriving from safe countries, either by airplanes or across land borders from safe countries.
In summary, Norway spends more efforts importing ineligible fraudulent asylum seekers than it spends removing some of the criminals among them.
“B. Safe Country of Asylum
11. According to this use of the concept, asylum-seekers/refugees may be returned to countries where they have, or could have, sought asylum and where their safety would not be jeopardized, whether in that country or through return there from to the country of origin.”
http://www.unhcr.org/excom/scip/3ae68ccec/background-note-safe-country-concept-refugee-status.html
https://www.ssb.no/en/befolkning/artikler-og-publikasjoner/refugees-in-norway
The assumption that AMERICANS will be offended and outraged because The Donald allegedly used the term SHITHOLE COUNTRIES to describe 3rd world places is laughable. Most Americans will be happy with that state if it was true.
(1) There is a difference between developed countries and 3rd world countries.
(2) 3rd world countries — impoverished places without sanitation, healthcare, education, freedom, law, security and/or stability — are SHIT HOLES.
(3) Favoring immigration from SHITHOLE COUNTRIES over developed nations sharing our standards on… well… everything, is BAD for our country.
(4) It is bad for our health, our security, our economy, our values and our freedoms.
Voters did not reject Trump in 2016 because he was brash, rude and oblivious every sensitivity other than AMERICAN interests. They VOTED for Trump specifically because of that. The voted for Trump specifically because they hated political correctness and catering to every marginalized country and deviancy while ignoring main stream America. And, this includes voters who are 1st generation naturalized citizens like myself.
The only people who do not understand that are ardent leftists and insane Liberals. Sadly, that is basically the entire news media, all of Hollywood and most of academia. These individuals live in their own fantasy world, listen only to their own drivel and think they are the mainstream. Insanity begets insanity!
U.S. immigration policy is a complex issue which involve balancing many competing trade-offs. Both of the parties in the quoted discussion make some good points, but both parties also make some fallacious arguments. Trading zingers like this is all good fun, but nobody should confuse it with useful discussion about the subject.
“The US was then — and is today — the best nation on the planet to where one can immigrate and build a better life, for yourself and your children.”
A joke right? ever heard of Norway? Unlimited oil wealth, strong democracy, free healthcare. Beat that.
> U.S. immigration policy is a complex issue which involve balancing many competing trade-offs.
I don’t think it’s really very complicated. The Democrat party wants voters, the rentier class wants cheap labor and more consumers, and the vast majority of the citizenry wants restrictive immigration.
“the vast majority of the citizenry wants restrictive immigration”
Sure, if 35% constitutes a “vast majority”
http://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx
@Federico
From my comment above, it is clear that Norway does not have a strong democracy.
Norway used to be a high trust society, due to immigration from shithole countries, the anti social behavior of such countries is effectively imported.
If you think Norway is a land of milk and honey with unlimited oil wealth, you will soon come to a rude awakening. The welfare costs of a Somali polygamist family (husband, one wife, two ex wifes, all three keep producing offspring) can easily exceed the projected pension payments of dozens of Norwegians that actually paid into the system.
Here is an entertaining story about two foreigners robbing the 10 year old son of another foreigner of his cellphone, and two Norwegians taking care of them.
The aftermath was that the criminals are still in the country, and one of the saviors had to pay the robber who lost some teeth.
https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/takker-dem-som-banket-opp-soennens-ranere/a/10136298/
http://www.tv2.no/a/5284386
You can probably read from google translate, but the quick summary is as follows:
October 2013, two foreigners, one identified as Algerian, arrested for robbing 10 year old.
February 2014, one sentenced to time served, free, the other sentenced to time served plus one more month, but out on parole.
This Chinese guy is very very stupid!
Try this to explain:
Think of the GDP as a pie. Think of your share of the GDP as a slice of the pie.
Immigration increases the size of the pie. Your slice however, gets smaller.
This holds true for poor people more than for rich people.
This is how a proper democracy acts:
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/swiss-town-denies-passport-to-dutch-vegan-because-she-is-annoying-125316437.html
“This Chinese guy is very very stupid!”
Hey, China is a big country, its population average IQ being higher than say in Russia notwithstanding.
Besides, immigration is one of those religious beliefs that are not amenable to reason.
I have a college educated relative, in economics no less, who is a rabid progressive. He is all for open borders because there won’t be anyone willing to wash his car (literal complaint) if immigration was curtailed plus he feels good about the whole concept.
While vacationing together on one of the Caribbean islands, he sneered at a local waiter who dared to express his dissatisfaction with influx of cheap immigrant labor. He just could not stand in the waiter’s shoes because according to his dogma “everyone” must benefit from globalization.
No need to argue which is the correct hypothesis on the economics of immigration when the Congressional Research Service has 65 year of actual data on the subject. This chart of that data succinctly shows you can either have rising wages or immigration, but not both (correlation not always causation, blah blah).
This whole debate about immigration and “shithole” countries is so misdirected.
You FB friends support for immigrant and for believing if we have more of them it will make the whole world better “The world gets wealthier with more people — even as you divide wealth among more people.” is so naive.
You fix the immigration issue and lift up a “shithole” country by letting that country fix its own issues — be it through civil war or political reform of the citizens.
We pump money into those countries and all it does is ends up in the hands of the corrupts. Heck, we even pump money into countries that revolt against our troupes [1], or want to nuke us [2], [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mogadishu_(1993)
[2] https://www.voanews.com/a/united-states-humanitarian-aid-goes-to-north-korea/3692811.html
[3] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R40095.pdf
Philip, you are deplorable
Phil I think you are an adorable deplorable!
@Viking, you (and the two guys that intervened) seem not to understand how criminal justice works — they are in fact lucky they are in Norway, in the US they would have been put away for a substantial amount of time in the most violent prison system of the western world. Stomping people in the ground hard enough to get teeth off is illegal in any jurisdiction.
Unless a severe attack of stupidity is pervading the nation (it might, angel schools and all), the pension fund or Norway is not what people put away, it is in the millions of barrels of oil. If your argument is that Norwegians live above their means irrespective of natural resources (and their projected value in the future) you are welcome to do so, but I’d need some facts before I accept that.
Perhaps Taiwan would be willing to accept Haitian and other migrants in the stead of America? It doesn’t seem impossible.
https://sentinel.tw/taiwan-syria-refugees/
“Think of the GDP as a pie. Think of your share of the GDP as a slice of the pie.”
It should also be noted that even useless migrants cause economic activity, GDP if you will, in a welfare state. For example, apart from direct payments, new housing stock may be constructed to house the incoming, new personnel hired to manage them, etc.
This phenomenon can be presented as ‘growth’ by some, but might turn out to be disappointing in the somewhat longer run.
“Stomping people in the ground hard enough to get teeth off is illegal in any jurisdiction.”
The article indicates the 17-y/o guy kicked the 18-y/o robber in the face, not stomped. But whatever, I can’t say I feel it was unjust. Both the 18-y/o and 24-y/o should have been deported too.
The robbers were of Algerian origin if memory serves. Islam considers robbery to be haram, though it should be noted that perhaps robbing the infidels is okay.
“[As for] the thief, the male and the female, amputate their hands in recompense for what they earned [i.e. committed] as a deterrent [punishment] from Allah. And Allah is Exalted in Might and Wise.” [Quran 5:38]
“The hand (of the thief) should be cut off for (the theft of) a quarter of a Dinar or more.” [Al-Bukhari]
Well, a smartphone is worth more than that. Should we be lenient?
“Do you intercede concerning one of the Hadd set by Allah? Those who came before you were destroyed because if a rich man among them stole, they would let him off, but if a lowly person stole, they would carry out the punishment on him. By Allah, if Faatimah Bint (daughter of) Muhammad were to steal, I would cut off her hand.” [Al-Bukhari]
No.
https://www.islamweb.net/en/article/136791/the-ruling-of-theft-in-islam
The GDP/capita argument is wrong due to a fallacy of composition. Suppose a new worker comes to the US from Mexico and his annual income doubles, say, from $2k to $4k. He is better off. He provides lawn services that make a few existing Americans – the ones that hire him – better off, but not by very much as the difference between mowing their own lawn and hiring the new guy who just showed up isn’t huge. So let’s say ten Americans are better off by $1 each, meaning Americans are $10 better off in all.
Calculating GDP/capita of “Americans” might suggest his low salary drags us down, but that is a dishonest way to look at the data; you have to pick which set of people you are comparing and use the SAME set for the comparison to be valid. In this case, your choices are: (a) exclude the new guy from BOTH averages, or (b) include the new guy in BOTH averages.
The total benefit to “Americans-other-than-the-new-guy” is: $10.
The total benefit to “Americans-including-the-new-guy” is: $1010.
Either way we’re better off, but we’re MORE better off if you include the benefit to the new immigrant. Which is a typical result when looking at the benefits of importing cheap labor.
[As an entirely separate point: Economists have known since Ricardo and Smith that we benefit the most from trading with partners who have *different* skills and desires than our own. There’s less “comparative advantage” when trading with people who are just like us. Thus it’s at least theoretically possible we might do better trading more with countries like Haiti than countries like Norway.]
@Tom, I have kicked plenty of people in the face, but as these acts were judiciously dosed, no teeth were removed. Self defence is a legal definition, not a physical one — it requires to stop as soon as people do not pose a threat anymore, and requires the ability to articulate the full set of actions one might have taken. YMMV.
@Viking — denying citizenship to a vegan (annoying or not), seems only reasonable. Who can abide them?
@Federico
“@Viking — denying citizenship to a vegan (annoying or not), seems only reasonable. Who can abide them?”
The vegan part is just humorous. The point is that the community members are stakeholders, and get a say, that is what makes it a real democracy. Likewise, citizenship in Switzerland is not afforded those that don’t care enough to learn the language. Note that for practical purposes, this annoying Dutch vegan has all rights of citizenship except for voting and the desirable Swiss passport.
Regarding the barbaric prison’s and long sentences in USA for those that rob a child, what do you think is appropriate for the two perpetrators?
“@Tom, I have kicked plenty of people in the face, but as these acts were judiciously dosed, no teeth were removed.”
Presumably in the context of practicing a martial art of some sort?
[As an entirely separate point: Economists have known since Ricardo and Smith that we benefit the most from trading with partners who have *different* skills and desires than our own. There’s less “comparative advantage” when trading with people who are just like us. Thus it’s at least theoretically possible we might do better trading more with countries like Haiti than countries like Norway.]
The example by Ricardo suggests that our nation concentrate on the skill that gives us comparative advantage, even if the other nation is superior in every skill, including our best skill. However, one may also ask to what extent Ricardo is relevant in the current global regime.
“The GDP/capita argument is wrong due to a fallacy of composition.”
The proposed approach, however, still seems wrong since it does not consider follow-on effects, ‘what is seen and not seen’. For example, does the foreign worker displace a native worker? etc.
If immigration from a poorer country always makes the host country poorer, then I guess the answer to my question (unanswered in the “Adverse Possession” thread) is “Yes, the U.S. would be better off if we deported (over) three quarters of our farm workers.” Color me skeptical. The Econ 101 concept of comparative advantage (which the “what happens if the entire earth’s population moves here” straw man conveniently sets to zero) suggests it is quite possible that under some circumstances both host and source countries could benefit from migration.
It’s too bad Trump doesn’t seem to have any good advisors, or they could have told him to suggest that we favor immigration from countries rich in human capital as measured by the U.N.’s “Human Development Index”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
Created by a guy in Pakistan, so you know it’s not racist.
One thing I do not accept: Is it really good for Haiti for us to siphon off the top %1 of their population, even if the remittances do really help economically?
My family lived in Taiwan for a year, back in 1978-1979. It was definitely a poor country at that time, although still far ahead of China. The East Asian tigers made very rapid progress in a single generation.
On the question of unlimited immigration, though, I agree with Paul Krugman and Joseph Heath: you can’t have generous social-insurance programs and unlimited immigration at the same time. (Heath describes Canada as being coconut-like: hard on the outside, soft on the inside.)
There’s a bipartisan deal on the table in the Senate. We’ll see what happens next:
superMike: Are you sure that index would be prudent to use? One big element is life expectancy and state and federal governments are already running out of money because of higher-than-expected spending on public employee pensions, Social Security, and Medicare. If the goal is to make current Americans better off via immigration of people who will grow the economy at a rate faster than population growth, why not look instead at PISA test results? Try to recruit immigrants from countries whose PISA scores are higher than those of the U.S. That gives us quite a few countries from which to choose! See http://www.bbc.com/news/education-38212070
Tom: Including follow-on effects the immigrant is still a net benefit – at least on the current margin, though one could imagine degenerate cases where they wouldn’t be. (Your contrary intuition is sometimes called the “lump of labor fallacy”.)
A new immigrant moving here does add to the *supply* of labor but also adds to the *demand* for labor. The amount of labor in a country at a particular time isn’t fixed – if it were, we’d have had massive unemployment when technology took over the farming industry – but just for the sake of argument let’s pretend that it was. Given that premise, when workers go work in a field you’d have to say they “use up one job” but then when they spend their paycheck to buy a burrito or clothing or pay rent you’d also have to say they’re “creating jobs”. On the margin, there’s ever-so-slightly more need to hire people to produce goods and services because there’s an extra guy *consuming* goods and services, and all those fractional parts-of-a-job approximately add up to the job they “take”, leaving the economy in about the same place it was before.
As a sanity check on our intuitions, it’s helpful to apply them to new babies. When an American family has a new kid, do we bemoan that the kid will be “taking jobs” from the economy? Of course not – we expect the kid to produce more value than they consume. But a new immigrant is even BETTER than a new kid – the immigrant can start being productive RIGHT AWAY without having to pay for their schooling or treat their childhood diseases until they can start contributing. The immigrant starts out at a net value of zero while the kid starts out 18 years in the negative.
> it is quite possible that under some circumstances both
> host and source countries could benefit from migration.
Like in “What happens when blondes move from Oregon to California?”
Remember
1. Be rich enough (or attempt to become rich enough) to live in a gated community
2. Publically posture in favor of open borders
That’s the ticket the success!
Was was Milton Friedman’s stance again on open borders and a welfare state?
Prefer immigrants to having native children you say? Intriguing.
>Prefer immigrants to having native children you say? Intriguing.
The context was GDP/capita. A newborn infant adds one to the “capita” term but adds nothing to the “GDP” term, so by definition (using phillg’s methods above) the math suggests that GDP/capita gets WORSE when a baby is born.
Right?
If you then think through what’s WRONG with the argument “babies lower our per-capita GDP so we need to stop letting people have babies!” you should find that the same logic you used to defend “babies” also defends “working-age immigrants”. That’s all I’m saying. 🙂
Glen: “a new immigrant is even BETTER than a new kid – the immigrant can start being productive RIGHT AWAY without having to pay for their schooling”
Under chain migration rules, isn’t the parent of an immigrant citizen automatically entitled to become an immigrant via a Green Card? Can you then assume that the immigrant will “start being productive right away”? What if the parent-immigrant is 65, 75, or 85 years old?
[Maybe your definition of “being productive” is living in means-tested public housing, subscribing to Medicaid, shopping via EBT, etc.?]
“Under chain migration rules, isn’t the parent of an immigrant citizen automatically entitled to become an immigrant via a Green Card?”
I don’t know how the rules work, but even if some fraction of immigrants bring “non-productive” relatives to the U.S., almost every native born American already has the corresponding “non-productive” relative already here.
>Was was Milton Friedman’s stance again on open borders and a welfare state?
He supported open borders but thought it was incompatible with a welfare state. Accordingly he thought illegal immigration was a good thing that should not be stopped or interfered with since illegal immigrants aren’t eligible for welfare.