There’s a thread in GQ about about finding ways to immigrate to another country. In many cases, people are unable to take jobs that they could have gotten but for their inability to obtain the correct visa.
What would change in the world if suddenly everyone who wanted to move to another country could legally do so?
Ground rules (feel free to change these slightly for purposes of examples, but these rules define the basic thoughts surrounding the idea)
People would still have to finance or arrange their own travel. The fact that a subsistence farmer in Uganda has the right to move immediately to NYC doesn’t mean that he is entitled to a free plane ticket, but he could certainly pack up his things, walk overland to the sea, and build a boat and try to sail it and if he makes it, his lack of “papers” won’t matter - he could walk right up the Jersey Shore and walk across to NYC.
Citizenship and voting rights would not necessarily be automatic (but also consider a scenario where you do get citizenship/voting rights after X years in the country).
People currently serving criminal sentences don’t get to emigrate without a parole officer/etc.'s permission, as is currently common in terms of internal country migration (e.g. someone on parole in Pennsylvania today who wants to move to Texas needs to get permission from the applicable corrections officials). Be reasonable with this one - assume that governments won’t try some underhanded practice of convicting massive numbers of people of brand new “crimes” solely in order to put them on probation to prevent them from emigrating. Once the person has completed their sentence (jail term and any probation and parole), they can pack up and move to Fiji or wherever the hell they want.
What sort of changes in the world would you expect to see? What kinds of economic changes are likely? Would there be cultural upheavals as millions upon millions of Chinese descend on small farming communities in Kansas and Rome becomes a city of a thousand languages and practical communication breaks down as the Russian next door can’t understand the Congolese family across the street and neither understands the Japanese guy who lives at 564 and planeloads and planeloads of Americans who refuse to speak any language but English are showing up each day? Would most people end up multilingual? Would large numbers of languages die out?
My hypothesis is that there would be an initial chaotic period potentially lasting several years. There would be issues ala The Grapes of Wrath where you had too many refugees competing for a large but insufficient number of California jobs. Eventually some sort of equilibrium would be established as people figure out where they really ought to go and you would get a world where people were free to follow economic opportunities with much less red tape, and you would have lower unemployment and more global inequality as “poor countries” now become only as poor as the common person wants them to be.
The US has been tightening its immigration requirements for decades. Yes, it used to be that anyone could buy a ticket to NYC in, say, 1795 and not expect to need to have immigration paperwork, but it hasn’t been that way for a long time. Sure, there are lots of illegal immigrants, but what would happen if the thousands or millions of “undocumented” Mexican day-laborers suddenly became 100% legal immigrants or maybe even citizens overnight? Would they continue to work “under the table” fixing roofs and picking crops or would they try to settle into a more mainstream American lifestyle now that they don’t have to hide and worry that USCIS is going to bust them?
They would no longer be a de facto slave class? Not really seeing the downside here. Perhaps they would also pick up the responsibilities of citizenship, such as fully participating in our tax structure.
That may have been Aizle’s point. Not that the United States currently has open immigration but that the modern United States is the product of historically open immigration.
One of the things you’d have to figure out a way to deal with is the provision of government services and benefits and how to fund them. For example, in the US, emergency rooms have to treat anyone with a life-threatening condition (if certain conditions are in place). How would you pay for a sudden influx of people with life-threatening conditions? How would you build the facilities to treat them? And there’s a whole lot of other services as well to consider. If a million people suddenly move into Los Angeles, do we have to ramp up fire and police services? What about water and sewage services? There might be a way to deal with this (user fees or consumption and excise taxes, maybe), but I haven’t really thought about it before. Maybe some other enterprising Doper has some ideas.
Down here, we get colonias. A chunk of land never zoned, but cut up and sold as residential often without important things like drainage or sewage disposal in the deal.
Dirt or caleche roads, no streetlights or even signs for responders to read.
No state income tax here, but I suspect sales tax is tearing a lot more from colonial residents percentage wise than other residents.
I’m guessing you’d ramp them up the same way we do it now. What difference does it make if a million people move to Los Angeles from Mexico or Minnesota? If a million new people move to the city, it increases the tax base and that provides you with the funds to increase public services for the larger population.
From a tax standpoint, immigrants are actually the best people to have move to your city. Immigrants tend to be young adults in their prime working and tax paying years. They’re generally putting more money into the system then they’re taking out of it.
We’d all be out of work. Immigration laws are the means by which people like you and me retain our jobs. I’m pretty sure that if anyone at all could migrate to Australia and start working here some dude from Asia would do my job for far less than I get paid.
I don’t know about existing colonias, but if we’re talking about spontaneous, unzoned shack and tent cities, count yourself lucky if first wave folks dig holes and put up outhouses. Septic tanks take money and coordination with the neighbors.
Not true- they’d be protected by the same minimum wage laws. The influx of immigrants would cause the industries to support them to grow, generating jobs. And the tax revenue they would provide would allow local governments to hire people for necessary infrastructure.
A lot of criticisms of illegal immigrants would vanish if they suddenly became legal. They’d pay taxes, serve in jury duty, and take care of old people.
Economically, it would be similar to implementing free trade. In general, better for everyone. But protectionism (which is all immigration restrictions/quotas are) is there for a reason – it benefits some people. These people will be worse off having to compete with cheaper and/or higher quality labor from all over the world.
But with comparative advantage and all that – in general we will all be better off. That’s not even mentioning the justice and morality arguments. Free adults should be able to move where they want to live.
I’d be absolutely in favour of this if it were restricted to developed liberal democracies (so Canada, Australia/NZ, most of Europe, Southern Cone, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and Israel).
I’m going to assume his good intentions and argue he adopted this position because he feels it’s important that immigrants believe in the type of government we have in the United States. The fact that he excluded entire ethnic groups was probably an unfortunate coincidence.
