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
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