TLDR: Immigration is hugely beneficial, both to the migrant and to the host country. Open borders could double the productive ability of the world, and while there are small costs, that benefit is obviously worth it.
Prerequisites: None
I’m a citizen of the USA, and have the privilege of voting in both local and national elections. As should be clear from these essays, I care about a lot of things, but when it comes to national elections I’m approximately a two-issue voter. First and foremost I vote for presidential and congressional candidates who increase geopolitical stability. This mostly means reducing the risk of nuclear war, strengthening international treaties, and supporting the peaceful transfer of power, but also includes pandemic risk reduction (hello, Gain-of-Function research!), and would include regulations on AGI research if there were any serious agendas on the table.
But when two candidates seem indistinguishably good when it comes to global stability, my vote goes towards whoever is more pro-immigration. Many issues in US politics seem fraught and difficult, but I’m quite convinced that letting people move around the world and especially do work in rich countries like the US is one of the best opportunities for making the world a better place. The immigration we currently allow is good, and I basically think that the amount of good that we’d get by allowing more of it just keeps going up and up, even to the limit of “open borders.”
I quote “open borders” because I think there are three distinct and important concepts that naturally go together on this topic, and most discussions of immigration aren’t careful to be sufficiently precise. This leads to misunderstandings and bad policy, and I want to do better.
A country is a place, often with a well-defined border and a government. Migration is the movement of people from one country to another. From the perspective of their origin they’re emigrants and from the perspective of their destination they’re immigrants. This essay will be focused on whether it’s a good idea for people to allow immigration into their country. Not to be confused with…
A nation is a set of people, often also associated with a government. Naturalization is the process by which a person joins a nation (and becomes a citizen), and renunciation of citizenship is the opposite. There is a policy question that parallels that of immigration around how many people to naturalize, which I will mostly ignore in this essay.
Open borders are borders that are uncontrolled and often unsurveilled by a government. People are free to cross an open border without obstruction or harassment. Uncontrolled borders can, in some circumstances, be a security hazard and even in times of peace can result in inability to regulate the trafficking of illegal substances or objects such as weapons. I think these concerns are usually overblown, but I don’t really care about them very much. For the purposes of this essay I only really care about how free people are to migrate, not how many officers are watching the border.
So, let’s get into it.
Why Immigration is Good
The short answer is: free trade is a win-win.
Nobody (or at least nobody I take seriously) is opposed to people generally being able to set boundaries and exclude certain other people or groups of people from their spaces. Anti-discrimination laws and freedom-to-roam laws aside, if a stranger wants to come into your home, private workplace, etc. you should have the right to say no, and exclude them. If a group of people wants to form a gated community or club that’s not open to the public, I think that’s similarly fine, albeit perhaps snooty.
But immigration is not a question of whether people have the right to exclude others from their spaces, it’s a question of whether Alice gets to decide who Bob has on his property. A farmer on the southern border of the USA might want to hire Mexican day-laborers to help, but immigration restrictions say that even if the farmer consents and the laborers consent, crossing the border to do that work is illegal.
To state the obvious: being able to hire immigrants is clearly beneficial to farms and other companies. Immigrants often are willing to do comparably-good work at lower wages, which in turn makes businesses that hire immigrants more profitable and ultimately allows them to sell their goods at lower prices than their competitors.
Lower prices for food and other goods is in turn a benefit to consumers. A world with immigrants willing and able to do jobs for less is one with lower prices and greater general purchasing power for people in the host country.
And of course the immigrants, who otherwise might have been stuck in low-productivity activities like subsistence farming, almost always benefit enormously from being able to come and work. For instance, the median income in Haiti is about $0.71/hr. Even working for minimum wage digging ditches in Louisiana would reflect more than a 10x increase in earnings!
In terms of raw economic activity, the only group that might be somewhat disadvantaged by letting immigrants come and do work are laborers in the host country that face increased competition from immigrants. In other words, perhaps letting immigrants into America is bad for the working poor who already lived in the country, who then face having their wages drop and their jobs taken by foreigners.
There are many responses to this concern. Let’s go through them, one by one.
Not all immigrants are unskilled. Letting doctors from Ireland into the country increases competition within the field of medicine, but doesn’t really increase competition to dig ditches in Louisiana. Similarly, letting roboticists from Japan into the country doesn’t (significantly) increase competition with doctors. But regardless of skill-level, immigrants do naturally increase production/purchasing power, including for the poor. More doctors and roboticists and unskilled laborers mean that medicine, cars, food, etc. becomes cheaper, which is a big win for poor Americans.
Natives still have a natural advantage, even with lots of immigrants: culture. While a Haitian immigrant can probably replace an American digging ditches, it’s much harder to replace someone waiting tables at a restaurant, because unless it happens to be a Haitian restaurant (and maybe even then), customers will probably prefer talking to an American with good English and a familiar culture.
A counterpoint here is that even though unskilled Americans could continue to work in various sectors without facing direct competition, immigrants displacing unskilled Americans in other sectors would cause more competition between Americans for the jobs that only Americans are suitable for.
Immigrants create jobs, including jobs for the poor. As a simple example, perhaps immigration is the difference between a restaurant doing well or going out of business. In the world where the restaurant does well, it can hire waiters and managers that would otherwise be unemployed. In addition to starting small-businesses (which immigrants are famously likely to do), immigrants come with demands for food, housing, entertainment, et cetera, and these needs create opportunity.
Another important response is to acknowledge that this concern is somewhat valid. Protectionism is a thing for a reason: while it hurts people in general, it can serve to benefit special interests. Unskilled laborers are a special interest, and it might be a net bad for them to let in unskilled immigrants. (Similarly, letting in skilled immigrants might be a net bad to laborers in the specific economic sectors they compete with.)
A counterpoint here is that whenever we’re tempted to hurt the average person (a.k.a. “the economy”) through restricting trade so that we can help a special-interest group (e.g. teenagers), there’s almost certainly a Pareto-improvement to be made in freeing up trade and redistributing wealth instead. As a toy example, rather than paying an American $10/hr to do manual labor, we could have the employer pay a Haitian $2/hr and give the American $7/hr as Basic Income. This results in more money for the employer, more money for the Haitian, and very likely a better life for the American laborer, who still gets a bunch of money (especially given that their purchasing power per dollar may be higher, thanks to other immigrants) and doesn’t have to spend all day working in the hot sun. Everyone is better off!
But my favorite response to the anti-competitive argument against immigration is that it assumes a weirdly arbitrary allegiance to people just because of where they were born. People from Mexico and people from New Mexico might both be interested in job openings in Texas. Allowing people to move to Texas increases competition for those jobs, which could be bad for the Texans who want those jobs. Should we ban people from New Mexico from moving to Texas, just like we ban people from Mexico? If reducing job competition is so important, why not?
Essentially all economists agree: high-skilled immigration is very beneficial to the host country, as well as the immigrants. Immigrants are disproportionately likely to be entrepreneurs and innovators, creating jobs and wealth. And while unskilled immigrants are less obviously good, they very likely improve the lives of the average inhabitant of the host country.
Some of the best writing I know of on the topic comes from Bryan Caplan, who co-wrote Open Borders, a very accessible comic book on the topic. (Strongly recommended for readers who want a more in-depth take on this topic.)
In it, Caplan draws attention to the work of Michael Clemens that estimates that the world is about half as productive as it would be if people were free to migrate. Or in other words, we could double the world’s output if we allowed unlimited immigration.
That’s such a huge number that it’s hard to even begin to make comparisons. Doubling the world’s productive capacity would be like rapidly undergoing the shift in production that occurred between 1900 and 1930! It’s the productive equivalent to giving everyone in the world $10k a year without any inflation. Much of this would be going to the world’s poorest, but much of it would also be going to those in rich countries. A win-win for nearly everyone!
If you’re not a fan of comic books or right-wing thinkers, but want another good perspective, I recommend Kimberly Clausing’s book Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital.
Inequality and Crime
Despite the huge potential economic gains, basically no country on Earth (even the poor ones!) allows unlimited immigration. Many borders are open, such as between states in the USA or between countries in the EU, but this is different from the country accepting 2 million refugees from the other side of the world overnight.
This isn’t out of a concern for protecting the special interest of teenagers or high-school drop-outs either. In democracies it’s typically a result of the median voter being concerned about immigration and wanting to protect the country from outsiders. A lot of this is xenophobia (or simply racism), but occasionally there are some more nuanced objections.
One objection to immigration is that allowing poor people into a rich country would increase inequality. This is a bit perverse, since even though inequality within countries would go up with immigration, total inequality would go down. Insofar as we’re tracking the same set of people either way, immigration is an pro-equality move.
But perhaps someone has read a study that shows that people’s happiness is more a product of how much they earn relative to their neighbors, rather than how much they can buy per se. I’m somewhat skeptical of these results, but even assuming they’re true it makes no sense to reject poor immigrants on those grounds. Presumably the citizens of the host country would receive a boost to subjective well-being as a result of seeing how much better their lives are than the poor immigrants a block away.
A more sensible worry about inequality, perhaps, is that it might be a driver behind property crimes. If we let poor immigrants into a wealthy country, perhaps they’ll break into people’s homes and steal their stuff.
The data doesn’t really bear this out as a concern.
Housing and Carbon
Ok, but where will people live? If immigration is unlimited, won’t millions of people move to already-overflowing cities like New York and San Francisco? Skilled or unskilled, such people need shelter, and the increased competition for housing could drive up the rents!
This is true, as far as it goes. Increased mobility would mean even more demand for housing in the most productive places in the world. Likewise, increased mobility and productive capacity would almost certainly increase carbon emissions in the short-term. With the extra money, more people would be able to afford cars and meat, which come with increased congestion, pollution, and other negative externalities. These are the costs of having more people doing useful things, whether they’re immigrants or native children that have grown up.
But the solution to these problems can’t be to repress the economy and keep people mired in poverty. With productive power we can simply… solve the problems directly! Any other strategy leads inexorably to voluntary human extinction.
Enough houses can be built, as long as cities allow it. Immigrant labor can help build them cheaply.
Climate change can be tackled through technology and collective action. Keeping much of the world too poor to buy solar panels and electric cars isn’t helping anyone.
Social Services and Taxation
“It is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promised a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.”
— Milton Friedman
In my essay on funding basic income I concluded something similar to Milton Friedman, above. The world is currently too large and too poor for it to be realistic to adopt a policy of universal welfare. If we gave basic income, education, healthcare, unemployment, disability, and social security to everyone in the world who wanted it, at the same level as we currently provide for American citizens, it wouldn’t be long before the American taxbase was overwhelmed by the burden of helping people across the globe. Even if the entire western world joined in, the cost would likely be too great.
I’m tempted to believe that if we also simultaneously opened all borders and allowed people to work wherever they wanted, the welfare problem could be solved using the huge increase to productive capacity that would come from migration. But this is probably wishful thinking; a 2x multiplier for how much money there is to go around is good, but not nearly sufficient to make it worth it for the western world.
But we shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Just because it doesn’t make sense to hand out large social security checks to arbitrary Chinese retirees doesn’t mean that immigration is a bad idea on the whole. In particular, most western nations (the USA included) mostly gives out welfare to the elderly and to children (mostly in the form of free education). In this current system, bringing working-age people into the country would naturally pay for itself, as the increased tax revenue would (if things are well-designed, at least) pay for those immigrants’ welfare checks down-the-line.
It probably also still makes sense to allow children to immigrate, as well. In theory they could attend American schools, get a good education, and then fly back to their home-country without paying a cent in American taxes, but this seems like it’d be statistically rare. Far more likely, I think, immigrant children raised in America would want to stay in the land of prosperity, and do skilled labor, paying back the cost of their educations and more.
Perhaps if immigration was solely unskilled adults, and we thus neglect the increase in entrepreneurship and innovation that follow immigrants, the low wages earned by immigrants wouldn’t be enough to fully compensate for their later burden on taxpayers. So it might make sense to limit unskilled immigration to be around 15% of total immigration (and have skilled immigration be unlimited).
In a world where welfare comes in the form of basic income, without restrictions on age or means, what might we do? Well, even if we assume that taxes on immigrant wages can’t justify the level of welfare, it seems like there’s an obvious solution: restrict welfare benefits to citizens, and disentangle citizenship from immigration.
There’s absolutely no reason to deny a migrant entrance to a country on the grounds of welfare cost. If welfare cost to that migrant is prohibitive, simply be very clear that immigrants aren’t citizens and aren’t entitled to social support like citizens are. This might seem unfair, but it’s far more fair than our current system of simply denying would-be-immigrants, which cuts them off not only from welfare but from the opportunity to work at much higher wages! By allowing non-citizen immigrants to work alongside citizens, where citizens get access to welfare and the immigrants do not, we’d enrich the world’s poor and make the welfare state easier to pay for using the increased taxes.
Culture and Brain Drain
Okay, hopefully by now you’re convinced that immigration is a good idea economically. But one of the most difficult-to-analyze arguments against immigration is one that’s held by many intellectual heavyweights: the west is prosperous because of a culture and a specific set of ideas (liberalism, capitalism, democracy, etc.); immigrants dilute this culture and too many immigrants can break it.
As a thought-experiment, imagine that we deleted the USA and sent the entire population to be spread around India, China, and Southeast Asia. Would these places suddenly look like the USA? Would there be high-quality universities, mega-corporations, and fair elections? Or would they still, ultimately be corrupt, communistic, impoverished nations? It’s hard to know! But it seems plausible to me that enough people from one culture can effectively drown-out another culture, at least when it comes to things like public policy.
This argument means that restricting voting to citizens (like we currently do) is probably wise, but cultural changes aren’t limited to voting. Perhaps if America becomes A Nation of Immigrants, the culture will be ruined.
Again, these ideas are less amenable to economic and statistical analysis. But what data there is, indicates that there’s not much to fear. Even in a world of open borders, all of Asia would hardly hop on a boat to North America. And in the past, waves of immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Germany, China, and the USSR have been widely good for Americans (at least if we ask other colonists, and not the real native Americans) and for American culture.
One of the easiest forms of cultural assimilation to measure is language, and there’s no reason to think that English is going anywhere. Immigrants are speaking and learning English at record-high levels, probably thanks to pervasive access to English media on the internet, along with network effects as it becomes the global trade language.
As for culture more broadly, there’s actually a bit of a twist, when we dig into the data: immigration makes the origin and destination countries become similar, but mostly by changing the country that the migrant left, rather than the host country (relevant TED talk). This makes sense, upon careful consideration. Migrants often leave family behind, and in this highly-connected age, stay in contact with their families. Migrants often admire the country that they go to, for one reason or another, and look to change their life to be more like the lives of host-citizens, even if that change is just to become more productive and fit in. Good ideas from their new home are then shared with their family in their old home, propagating culture.
In other words, letting immigrants into western countries is one of the best ways of spreading (good) western ideas to the rest of the world. In turn, I suspect this bridges cultural divides and reduces the risk of wars and terrorism.
I think this also serves as a good rebuttal to worries about brain drain: the prospect that we’re somehow hurting the countries of would-be-immigrants by allowing them to move. Immigrants send remittances, both in the literal sense of giving money to their families back home, and in the form of exporting culture and institutions from their host country that can help their homeland thrive.
Utopian Immigration
I believe Utopia is a land of freedom. In Utopia people can work where they want, move where they want, and live where they want. There are exceptions, of course, but freedom is the general rule.
The only restrictions on travel and work in Utopia come from local governments, such as cities or island governments, where the inhabitants of those countries specifically prioritize having a “pure” society. These countries are widely considered to be xenophobic and backwards by most other people, but hey, freedom and liberalism means tolerating bigots, as long as they’re not actively hurting anyone.
Some local governments have benefits or welfare programs that are restricted to citizens. Non-citizens are usually welcome to come into the country, with an understanding that they won’t be allowed to vote or draw on the social services until they naturalize.
Free travel and free trade makes Utopia richer than our world, as well as more interconnected. Dominant cultural memes spread across the world like wildfire, sometimes to the lament of those trying to preserve the old ways. As a result, Utopia is more culturally homogenous and more effort is put into deliberately cultivating, celebrating, and protecting cultural heritage. This price is worth paying, however, for the increased wealth, peace, and opportunity.