In my recent posts, I have argued that restrictions on immigration are immoral because they violate the natural human rights to freedom of movement and voluntary exchange. If someone born outside the United States wants to live and work in the United States, and if there are some native Americans who want to employ that immigrant, and others willing to sell him a house or provide rental property where he can live, isn't it wrong for the American government to coercively prohibit these voluntary transactions?
The opponents of immigration will object, however, that it is morally right to prohibit these mutually beneficial transactions between natives and immigrants if they have severely harmful side-effects for other people.
The most common objections to immigration point to four kinds of harmful side-effects: immigrants are seen as harming American workers, American taxpayers, American public safety, and American culture. But I will argue that there is little or no harm in each case; and even if people insist that there is some harm, there are ways to reduce the putative harm that are more moral than restricting immigration. My thinking here has been shaped by the writings of Bryan Caplan (Caplan and Weinersmith 2019; Caplan 2012), Ilya Somin (2020), Hein de Haas (2023), and Ian Goldin (2024), who have surveyed the empirical research on immigration in America and around the world.
I will conclude by arguing that the free migration of people from one society to another satisfies the evolved natural desire for social membership.
HARMING AMERICAN WORKERS?
The most popular argument for restricting immigration is that this protects American workers from poverty because if the supply of labor (particularly, the low-wage and low-skilled labor of immigrants) increases, this will lower the wages of American workers or drive them into unemployment.
Empirical studies have shown, however, that immigration has little or no effect on unemployment or wage levels. Although in the short run, low-skilled wages might fall slightly, over the long run, there is almost no decline in wages. And even moderately educated native workers--high school graduates without college degrees--can show increased wages. Moreover, while there is some correlation between levels of employment and levels of immigration, the correlation is negative. Immigration goes up when unemployment goes down. So, clearly immigrants are not taking away jobs from native workers (Caplan 2012, 7-9; de Haas 2023, 131-144).
The explanation for this, as de Haas says, is that immigrants don't steal jobs, they fill vacancies. "Immigration is primarily a response to labor shortages caused by a dwindling supply of local workers willing and able to do various manual jobs in agriculture, construction, cleaning, domestic work and various other services" (de Haas, 132). This is confirmed by what is happening now with Trump's increased detentions and deportations of immigrants. As immigrants are forced to leave their jobs, their vacancies are not being filled by native American workers. But if it were true that the immigrants stole the jobs of American workers, then we would have expected that now those unemployed Americans would be rushing to fill the new vacancies.
It is simply not true, as politicians often say, that "we don't need foreign workers." Because many native workers would rather not work at all than to take the low-level jobs that immigrants are willing and able to fill.
There have been a few "natural experiments" in testing how a sudden massive surge in immigration can affect wages and employment. The best example of this for the United States is the "Mariel boatlift" of 1980. In April of 1980, Fidel Castro announced that all Cubans wanting to go to the US were free to board boats landing at the port of Mariel, west of Havana. Cuban exiles already in Florida rushed to find boats to carry Cubans from Mariel to Miami. This mass influx of refugees overwhelmed the US Coast Guard. In October of that year, President Carter negotiated an end to this open migration to the US. During this six-month period, as many as 125,000 Cubans crossed the sea to Florida, and most of them settled in the Miami area (de Haas, 132-34).
As a consequence of this, the labor force in Miami increased by about 7 percent, and the low-skilled labor force increased by 20 percent. When labor economists studied the effects of this sudden increase in the labor supply, they found that it had either no effect or very little effect on the wages or unemployment rates of lower-skilled workers.
There have been similar cases elsewhere in the world. After 1989, almost one million Russian Jews emigrated to Israel, which increased the population of Israel by 12 percent in five years. At the same time, 2.8 million people migrated from East to West Germany over a period of fifteen years. Like the Mariel boatlift, these sudden waves of migration had little if any effects on employment and wages.
Actually, immigration can create more jobs and make native workers more productive when the skills of migrants and native workers are complementary, and so they don't compete for the same jobs.
Migrant workers washing dishes, cooking food, waiting tables or delivering food increase the capacity of restaurants to serve more customers, thereby increasing jobs for senior management and income for the owners. This also allows customers to eat out, or have food delivered for affordable prices, thereby freeing up more time to spend on their own work and be more productive. Meanwhile, the sufficient supply of support staff like janitors, cleaners and various office workers enables (migrant and non-migrant) higher-skilled workers to concentrate on the work they're best at instead of doing manual tasks themselves. In this way, all workers can derive mutual benefits from immigration (de Haas, 137).
Immigrants not only fill low-level job shortages, but they also introduce innovative ideas and practice entrepreneurship in ways that promote progress in all fields of human endeavor. After all, immigrants are exceptional people who were often the most talented, resourceful, and ambitious people in the societies where they originated. Immigrants to the US are more likely than native Americans to start their own businesses. They are over-represented among Nobel laureates, National Academy of Science members, patent holders, and Oscar-winning film directors (Goldin, 228-31; de Haas, 138-39).
Nevertheless, there is some evidence, as I've said, that low-skilled native Americans might be a little worse off, at least in the short run, because of immigration. But even if this is true, that doesn't justify restricting immigration because there are better ways to protect low-skilled Americans from immigration. For example, as Caplan (2012, 9) has suggested, we could charge immigrants an admission fee or a surtax, which they could pay off by deductions from their earnings in the US; and then we could use that revenue to compensate low-skilled Americans. Even if this seems unfair to the immigrants, it's not as unfair as denying their entry into the country.
HARMING AMERICAN TAXPAYERS?
Many people fear that immigrants create a burden on taxpayers because immigrants tend to become costly dependents on the welfare, healthcare, and education systems. As Donald Trump has said, "illegal immigrants are lower skilled workers with less education" who "draw much more out from the system than they can ever possibly pay back" (September 1, 2016). On the contrary, illegal immigrants on average probably pay more in taxes than they will ever get back in payments from the government because they don't have a valid social security number! And indeed, it has been found that in general the fiscal benefits of immigrants exceed their costs (de Haas, 145-59).
The reason for this is that recent immigrants tend to be young, employed, healthy, and have no children. and so they are net contributors to public finance. But then as they marry, have children, and become older, they use public services like schools and healthcare. And yet, once their children become adults and enter the labor market, these children become taxpayers.
Most of the people who want to migrate to the US want to get a job and become a taxpaying worker--not to live off welfare. After all, until recently, the US has been the most popular destination for migrants even though the US has the weakest welfare system in the Western world.
But let's say you're not convinced by this argument, and you still believe that immigrants draw more in government benefits than they pay in through taxation. Even so, this does not justify restricting immigration because there are better ways to solve this putative problem. You could freely admit immigrants on the condition that they will never be eligible for welfare benefits, but they will still have to pay taxes. Or you could reduce their benefits. Or you could say no benefits for 10 years. Caplan (2012, 11) has suggested these and other similar ways to solve the problem.
HARMING AMERICAN PUBLIC SAFETY?
"They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." Immigrant gang members "don't want to use guns, because it's too fast, and it's not painful enough. So they'll take a young, beautiful girl, 16, 15, and others, and they slice them and dice them with a knife because they want them to go through excruciating pain before they die. And these are the animals that we've been protecting for so long."
Was Donald Trump accurate in his description of immigrants as blood-thirsty criminals? Even if some are "good people," are most of them violent criminals?
Here the evidence is indisputable: immigrants have much lower crime rates than native Americans, and illegal immigrants have the lowest. De Haas summarizes one typical study:
Using individual data on arrests from the Texas Department of Public Safety between 2012 and 2018, Light and his colleagues compared crime rates between illegal migrants, legal migrants and native-born US citizens. Their findings were remarkable. Illegal immigrants turned out to have the lowest crime rates, legal migrants were somewhere in the middle, while native-born citizens were twice as likely to be arrested for a violent crime compared to undocumented migrants, four times as likely to be arrested for property felony, and 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crime. These results were consistent across a broad range of crimes, including homicide, assault, robbery, sexual assault, burglary, theft and arson--undocumented migrants had consistently lower crime rates than native-born citizens. For all criminal convictions in Texas in 2015, convictions among illegal immigrants were 50 percent below those of native-born Americans (de Haas, 200-201).
Of course, some immigrants will become violent criminals, and they should be deported. But the fact that a few immigrants become criminals does not justify restricting the immigration of people with no record of crime.
HARMING AMERICAN CULTURE?
It has become common for nationalist conservatives like J. D. Vance to say that America needs severe restrictions on immigration because immigration creates too much cultural diversity, which dissolves the social cohesion and homogeneity of American culture: if America had open borders, it would cease to exist as nation because it would have no distinctive social identity.
J D Vance's Speech to the Claremont Institute Accepting Claremont's Statesmanship Award
JD's wife Usha was born in 1986 in California to Lakshmi and Radhakrishna Chilukuri, who are both Telugu Indian immigrants, speaking the Telugu language, who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s from Andhra Pradesh, which is a state on the east coast of southern India. Usha met JD at Yale Law School. They married in 2014 in an interfaith marriage ceremony: Usha is a practicing Hindu, while JD was raised as an Evangelical Christian before converting to Catholicism in 2019. They have three children.
Hmm. Sounds like a heck of a lot of cultural diversity to me. Does JD really believe that by marrying the daughter of Telugu Indian immigrants and creating a multicultural and interfaith family with biracial children that he is helping to dissolve the social cohesion of America?
No, of course not. He doesn't really believe what he said at the Claremont Institute about immigration being a threat to America's cultural identity. Because he knows that Telugu Indian immigrants--like most immigrants to America--have assimilated into American culture.
We need to remember that beginning in the 19th century, many Americans feared that German, Irish, Italian, Polish, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants would threaten the national identity of America by introducing foreign languages, religions, and cultural practices. But all of those groups have shown the same intergenerational pattern of assimilation that we see today in the new Latino, Asian, and Muslim immigrants to America. Initially, the first-generation migrants might be inclined to withdraw into ethnic enclaves separated from the mainstream of American culture. But then the second and third generations show all the signs of socio-cultural integration--mixed marriages, speaking English as their first language, and adopting the social norms of American culture (de Haan, 160-79).
Ultimately, then, native Americans recognize these immigrant Americans and their descendants as full members of American society. "They" become members of "our" society, and so "they" become "us."
MIGRATION AND SOCIAL MEMBERSHIP
I have argued against the claim made by people like Frank Salter and Stephen Sanderson that there is a natural desire for ethnic nationalism that is part of our evolved human nature. But I do recognize that there is a natural desire for membership in a society, which arose in the evolutionary state of nature of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and that this natural desire for social membership can be satisfied in a multiethnic Lockean liberal nation like the United States, which includes immigrants who have chosen to leave their native-born society to become members of American society.
As indicated in some previous posts, I have found support for these conclusions in Mark Moffett's book The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall. Moffett is a field biologist who has wondered whether the capacity of invasive Argentine ants to form massive supercolonies might help to explain the human capacity for living in nations with huge populations of people whose society cannot be based on individual recognition of all the members of the society. An Argentine ant colony is an anonymous society in which membership is marked by the distinctive scent of the colony, which distinguishes us from them, so that individual ants will be accepted into the colony if they carry the colony's scent, but if they carry the scent of a foreign colony, they will be attacked. Similarly, a human society is an anonymous society with markers of social membership that distinguish those who belong to the society from those who are outsiders; but for a human society the markers of membership are not chemical signals but shared symbols (such as the flag, the language, or the history of a society).
Moffett's brief definition of "society" is "an enduring territorial group whose members recognize each other as belonging" (2019, 3). He also provides a longer definition:
"A society is a group extending beyond an immediate family, capable of perpetuating its population for generations, whose members ordinarily perceive one another as belonging together and set apart from other groups (notwithstanding transfers between societies, either mutually agreeable or initially forced) and which regulates access to a space or spaces it ultimately controls, across which its members travel with relative impunity" (Moffett 2019, 13).
Societies so defined include prehistoric hunter-gatherer and horticultural groups, modern nation states, and some groups in other species. Thus, beginning in the evolutionary state of nature, human beings have always lived in societies. And that suggests to me that a natural desire for membership in a society is part of our evolved human nature.
That natural desire for social membership can motivate many human beings to stay in the society where they were born. But it can also motivate some human beings to leave the society of their birth and to seek membership in another society that they believe will give them better opportunities to live a flourishing life. To succeed in doing that, they must show the cultural markers of membership in that new society to persuade the native-born people to recognize that they belong--that "they" have become "us."
Open borders would make that easier for all those people who want to improve their lives through immigration, which will also improve the life of the society that they join.
REFERENCES
Caplan, Bryan. 2012. "Why Should We Restrict Immigration?" Cato Journal 32:5-24.
Caplan, Bryan, and Zach Weinersmith. 2019. Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. New York: First Second.
Goldin, Ian. 2024. The Shortest History of Migration: When, Why, and How Humans Move--From the Prehistoric Peopling of the Planet to Today and Tomorrow's Migrants. New York: The Experiment.
de Haas, Hein. 2023. How Migration Really Works: The Facts About the Most Divisive Issue in Politics. New York: Basic Books.
Moffett, Mark. 2019. The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall. New York: Basic Books.
Somin, Ilya. 2020. Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom. Revised edition. New York: Oxford University Press.
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