In our best interest? In the world’s best interest? Or morally correct?
This book, illustrated by the writer of the comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, is a pretty interesting, well-documented take:
It argues for unrestricted immigration, in case you’re looking for the extreme case of that viewpoint.
Thanks for the recommendation. Just ordered a copy to read their argument.
Do you know what the author says about how to share/distribute limited resources, such as desirable neighborhoods/towns, farmland, food & water, healthcare, etc.? In a world of unrestricted immigration, who or what entity would oversee (or negotiate) the control of such resources across state lines… or would states & nations no longer exist either?
I know, I know, I bet it’s all answered in the book… but just asking for the sake of discussion.
Yes. `````
I posit that the average farmer would run from a war zone to take up farming if land were available [and not all belonging to agribusiness] Sort of like those towns we had in Kansas or wherever offering free farms to small holders.
What happens when the demand for immigration exceeds the available supply (of farmland or any other resource)? Would there be some sort of orderly & fair system to determine who gets the more desirable resources, or is it some sort of first-come-first-serve chaos?
Even in something like the (US) Homestead Acts, it first required the conquest/theft of previous native lands and then redistributed them to a select set of settlers under a mad land grab that led to quite a lot of violence (and also helped create generational landowner wealth decades later).
Like what’s the opposite of “ladder-pulling”, where instead of excluding subsequent generations of immigrants, you keep on welcoming everyone and their extended families and friends until there it’s too crowded for everyone? How would you prevent that?
Wouldn’t it reach some kind of equilibrium? as it get more crowded the desirability of the place as a migration destination diminishes.
IMHO, the United States is underpopulated and could easily absorb millions more. In many areas, this would revive declining cities.
I don’t recall, but I don’t think the author posits that immigrants automatically get some share of resources. They work, add value to the economy, and buy what they can afford where they can afford to, just like the rest of us.
I think I don’t understand your question, I guess.
Not necessarily? Geography alone would play a big role. The temperate zones are generally more livable than the frozen North, for example, and there’s a finite supply of freshwater, arable land, and access to ports & harbors.
And I think open immigration would have to go hand-in-hand with a different way to think about private ownership of land and the means of production, or those existing owners would always seek to maximize their existing value rather than working to help everyone else reach some sort of equilibrium state of maximal efficiency. You’d have to eminent domain them (or outright war with them) to get their lands to begin with.
That didn’t go so well e.g. in the Bundy case, with marginal land that was already publicly owned but nonetheless met with armed resistance by occupying ranchers.
How would that work across the world where so much existing land is already privately owned, or belongs to some government or another, or is a sacred place to some religion or another?
I personally like the idea of an open, equitable world where everyone can live wherever they so chose… I just don’t know how to make that work, pragmatically, when there are 8 billion of us all vying for survival.
Or the newcomers will use whatever means available to them to push out the people who were there previously, rather that’s gentrification, redlining, conquest, settler-colonialism, etc.
I think our primate biology and in-group instincts disfavor this sort of globalized thinking… if our immediate family & friends are threatened, I think most people in most dominant cultures would tend to prioritize their needs over everyone else’s.
On a somewhat more macro note, I hear some progressives argue that immigrants bring in diversity, benefit American culture, boost the U.S. workforce, and that America is and always has been a nation of immigrants. They often say this about both legal and illegal immigrants alike. They often defend illegal immigrants using the exact same rationale that they defend legal ones - “they are bringing in diversity and benefiting the economy and society.” By doing so, they are basically saying that they don’t think there’s any difference between legal and illegal immigration (assuming it is not thugs or cartels etc).
Meanwhile, some conservatives often object to “all these Indian, Chinese, Arab, Mexican, Pakistani, African, Bangladeshi people coming into the United States” - even if they are coming in fully legally on H1B or spousal or F-1 or other types of visas. They are saying in essence that they dislike even legal immigrants coming in - and if the law were amended to make all current illegal immigration suddenly legal, they’d object, too.
It’s like, to some progressives, an illegal immigrant is as good as a legal one, and to some conservatives, a legal one is just as bad as an illegal one.
All three.
Which is why the frozen North is already thinly settled, and to a large extent by people who like it there. Do you think immigration laws are preventing Alaska from becoming depopulated?
Sure, but that’s when immigration (or the birth rate, for that matter) is at a manageably slow trickle. If you suddenly opened all the borders and millions of refugees went wherever they pleased, without necessarily an ability to pay for housing in a completely different market, speak the local languages, find jobs, etc., then you have a massive refugee and homelessness crisis on hand. Not to mention culture clashes.
But it doesn’t have to be “sudden” or complete, I suppose. Maybe like a lottery system that’s open to a million people a year from anywhere so people could gradually migrate over time?
Maybe that’s the dumbed-down faux-news two-party simplification (on either side), but that’s not really the common/popular view, is it?
Personally, I’ve never met anyone who was either completely against any and all form of immigration, OR someone who was completely for wide-open borders. But then again I don’t hang out with Nazis or anyone who advocates for blindly unlimited immigration either.
The more realistic and common arguments I see tend to be things like “build the wall, but still allow legal immigration through a process” or “abolish ICE and give amnesty to those who are already here and allow their families in”.
No, but I do think that immigration laws, combined with gatekeeping by private owners of land and housing, together serve to make places like Los Angeles and San Francisco not even more crowded than they already are. And that’s just in the US. Places like Israel, North Korea, Japan, Iran, Taiwan, etc., would all have their own different but significant concerns about open borders, I think.
I don’t think you can altogether detach ownership and immigration, either, especially as people move from lower-cost-of-living to higher-cost-of-living areas, or from countries with subsidized housing & healthcare to those without. If you don’t do anything to help those immigrants, then they’re fresh of the boat with nothing (relative to what it would actually cost to live in the new place) and will have a very hard time making it. If you do something to help them, then you have to allocate resources for that aid, which will necessarily be finite, so either the rate of immigration will have to match those resources or some immigrants will be left without. That would then quickly backfire and fuel the ultraconservative “immigrants are all crooks or beggars” narrative.
Even something like the E.U. freedom of movement provision (that allows relatively open borders and immigration within the EU) only worked after centuries of cultural and economic warfare and then later peacemaking between their member states, and worker-citizens living among mostly compatible Western cultures and generally developed countries. And even they don’t just allow outsiders (like Americans) to freely immigrate into their zone.
It also took the US many centuries to get to a shared nation with open internal borders, and we have ruthless supply-and-demand capitalism to limit mass migrations from less desirable areas to more desirable ones.
Note that I’m not advocating for either private ownership of land, housing & production OR stricter immigration, just that I think both have to be considered side-by-side to really make sense.
I think it’s a matter for us to put up for a vote: if the electorate wants to let people in according to what we figure is in our best interests, that’s fine; if we want to let people in according to what we figure is in the world’s best interests, that’s fine, too; if we want to let people in according to what we figure is “morally correct,” well, that’s also fine.
Personally, I’m a “what we figure is in our best interests” guy — asking not what our country can do for them, but what they can do for our country — and letting them in if they make a good case, and denying them permission otherwise.
After a century of relatively light immigration, US immigration rates have reached the level they once had for decades in the 19th century (the percentage of immigrants in 2020 was 14.8 percent, while in 1860 through 1900, the percentage was 14%). This is not a wildly high percentage - the percentage of immigrants right now in Germany, Sweden, Ireland, Canada, Switzerland, and many other nations is above 20%.
All three of those criteria lead to the same conclusion, that we should have much more immigration. So given that, what’s the debate?
The real debate is that a lot of these countries have very left-leaning governments and that sing the United States in a relatively short period of time.
Overall, we here in the United States should view immigration as an overwhelmingly positive influence on our nation. America would be poorer economically and socially without the constant influx of immigrants. In the long term, it’s in our best interest to have an immigration policy that’s humane and reconizes their social and economic importance to us.
Assuming ‘We’ means the US:
It’s in the US’s economic interest to increase population through immigration. It’s clear we need the workforce. We should do two primary things:
- Gradually increase the yearly quotas for each country to increase the population of productive people (at all education levels).
- Create a path to citizenship for existing undocumented people so that we can isolate and remove criminal elements.
Any route to open borders should be done incrementally. All plans require an increase in immigration. The question is when to stop or slow down immigration. It’s premature to answer that; we would want to see how things go.
This is pretty insightful, thanks:
I would like to see criminal activity severely discouraged. I believe immigrants coming to another country and then engaging in crime should lose their status, back they go. Why should the country who offered you safe haven have to pay to keep you in prison?
Their family can stay, but you can’t return, they’ll have to come see you.
They bring crimes our police services aren’t really familiar with, and it gets a big foothold before the police services catch up to something unfamiliar.
I’d like to think it would be sufficient deterrent to make enforcing it incredibly rare. But then I’m big on deterrence rather than enforcement. Lord knows it’s much cheaper.
Just a thought.