Conservative Immigration “Overlords”

Posted on by
Reply

Bryan Caplan argues that conservatives believe the state is an all-powerful “overlord” channeling the will of the voters – but only when they talk about immigration. Chapman University Prof. John Eastman’s* WSJ Letter to the Editor gives a perfect example. Breeze past the body of his argument (he claims the 14th amendment does not grant birthright citizenship) to the conclusion:

The Citizenship Clause actually codifies the Lockean view of government articulated in the Declaration of Independence, namely, that legitimate government is grounded in the consent of the governed. That philosophical principle rejects the old feudal notion that anyone born on the King’s soil is forever the subject of the King. Mutual consent is what makes citizens, not the illegal actions of those who try to demand it unilaterally.

Eastman is referring to Locke’s “social contract”. A social contract is nearly the opposite of a contract. Contracts require that participants actually agree to bind themselves. The social contract, on the other hand, is binding whether or not you explicitly agree to it. A private party cannot force you into an actual contract by threat of violence – this would be duress. But if you do not wish to enter into the social contract, you must, supposedly, flee.

Locke’s discussion of tacit and explicit consent leads everyone astray. It should not be taken seriously. Few people, citizen or immigrant, ever truly consent to an unconstrained leviathan. Participating in democracy is not consent, any more than a contract you were forced to enter against your will would be consensual, if you got to vote on some of its terms with 300 million other people afterward. Even the Pledge of Allegiance fails under traditional contract doctrine – there is no consideration (exchange) – unless it is loyalty in exchange for “liberty and justice for all”.

Locke does not believe that the fictional social contract creates an omnipotent government. In order for the social contract to have a hint of legitimacy, it needs to represent at least what people would have agreed to willfully and without duress. Locke believes that people have a natural right to hold and use property free from the interference of others. Locke supposes that people would contract away (only) their individual right to protect their other rights, and only for the purpose of allowing the state to do so more efficiently. He explicitly and repeatedly insists that government acts illegitimately if it intentionally violates property rights.

Any state that intentionally prohibits “landlords, grocers, and employers” (as Bryan Caplan puts it) from doing business with immigrants is violating their property rights. Immigration restrictions violate the moral conception of the social contract. The social contract that allows immigration restrictions is the one where citizens give up their rights. Not Locke’s social contract, but the Leviathan of Hobbes.

* I assume John Eastman is a conservative because he takes the conservative line on immigration. Don’t dwell on the circularity.

Political Incentives of the Republican Party

Posted on by
Reply

Matthew Yglesias disagrees with Paul Krugman that conservative and progressive political philosophies are irreconcilable:

The strange thing is that so much of this furious opposition to activist government appears to be make-believe. The American Enterprise Institute did a poll of self-identified conservatives and found that “only 3 percent of respondents favored reforming Social Security and Medicare.” The 2010 elections put a lot of new conservative governors in office, and I’m guessing that exactly zero of them will abolish mandatory minimum parking requirements in their states. Nor do I expect to see Rep Frank Lewis slash farm subsidies.It’s a bit puzzling. The gap is really not just between conservatives and non-conservatives, but between conservatives’ self-image and the reality of their program. Paul Ryan, for example, can’t quite seem to decide if he wants to slow the growth of Medicare while maintaining a credible safety net for elderly Americans (in which case his “roadmap” proposal is the starting point of a discussion) or if he’s an Ayn Rand devotée who’s trying to liberate America from enslavement at the hands of the welfare state. Indeed, he doesn’t really even seem to see that these are different ideas!

I don’t find it as puzzling as Yglesias does.  The political process has a specific set of incentives that will shape the career of all successful politicians.  In general, Politicians try to win voters and campaign funds by appealing to concrete, discernible interest groups: agriculture, the banks, the middle class, the elderly, unions, doctors.  Voters pursue their interests much more effectively by protecting their own particular entitlement than trying to simultaneously repeal all the other entitlements.  There is a political prisoner’s dilemma; the equilibrium of political incentives will always be very far from Republican small-government rhetoric.

Conservative politicians succeed both by pandering to interest groups for votes (the elderly, for example, in the last election) and by wooing ideological conservative voters with small government-platitudes.  In other words, they succeed by pursuing incompatible principles.  Democrat voters, on the other hand, usually like rhetoric about extending additional government support to (certain) interest groups (e.g. the sick, the poor, the uninsured, teachers, doctors).  The only hard choices that Democratic politicians have to make is how hard to push for their priorities – and which come first.  A “small-government” politician needs to be a hypocrite to succeed.

More on the Fallacy of Inevitability

Posted on by
Reply

For the fallacy see here.

An American friend once told me that he wanted the United States to maximize its citizens’ utility. I asked, why just its citizens? Is there some moral reason to prefer Americans to foreigners?*  No, he said, but obviously Americans would never vote to maximize global utility. Fine, I said, but why don’t you want to?  Should we harvest African babies if it could increase American total utility?  No, he admitted, we should probably adopt some formula that maximized the sum of American utility and some fraction of non-American utility – perhaps 1/2).

That struck me as odd for two reasons.  My friend was implying that foreigners counted for a fraction of the moral worth of Americans – which he did not believe.  And he was adopting a utility scale that a purely rational electorate would reject nearly as inevitably as it would reject a “global utility” formula.  He had adopted it as a hybrid between what he probably preferred – equal weighting of utility – and what he considered inevitable – national maximizing.  Given that he was capable of embracing an impossible principle, why didn’t he embrace the one he actually believed?

I should probably apologize for ambushing my friend at an irrelevant tangent in our conversation.

Sometimes the fallacy is blindingly obvious.  If you ask someone for their opinion on abortion, they will give it to you.  Suppose they are pro-life.  If you tell them that they should change their opinion, because the Supreme Court has decided the issue, they will shrug.  What does the Supreme Court’s opinion have to do with theirs?

I suspect that many people who consistently commit the fallacy of inevitability have delusions of politics: they want to be President someday.  They are not eager to embrace obvious moral principles that are contrary to the interests of voters (like equal moral worth for foreigners).  So they pretend to support things that are inevitable.  This is one way that political incentives weed honest people out of politics.

* Nothing in this post should be construed to suggest I advocate maximizing global utility.

Libertarians on Giffords Shooting

Posted on by
Reply

A scan of my blogroll and Facebook feed suggests that most libertarians tend to agree with conservatives that the Giffords shooting does not have implications for the supposedly high pitch of contemporary partisan politics. See here, here, and here, for examples.

Why is this? One simple explanation is that most libertarians are more sympathetic to the Republican party in general, and the Tea Party in particular. I suspect that most American libertarians come from the right. It is certainly true in my case.

So it could just be partisan bias. A more sympathetic explanation is that libertarians are all strong individualists. Individualists tend to want to compartmentalize moral blame. They want to blame only the person who actually commits a bad act. To do more would question the self-responsibility of that bad actor and impinge on the autonomy of other actors. If you loan your roommate a copy of The Road to Serfdom and he bludgeons his congressman to death with it, neither you nor Hayek is responsible. Even if he got the idea from reading the book.  This is how I tend to see things.

Progressives are more sympathetic to the notion of shared responsibility – which they sometimes refer to (in confusion, I think) as “personal responsibility”.  Viewed with at least a grain of determinism, it is not in fact true that humans have complete willful control over their own actions.  Human actors are influenced by their environment, including the actions of other humans.  If you give your friend alcohol and then he has an accident while driving home drunk from your house, perhaps you share some culpability?  But it is hard to engineer a solution to collective responsibility, even if it is real.

Conservatives tend to share the individualistic outlook but I’m not sure how consistent they are. If a Muslim person committed a terrorist attack in the name of Islam, many conservatives would blame “Muslims” or at least “Islam”.  Would libertarians? Progressives would be less willing to assign collective responsibility to Islam.  Perhaps because they are used to thinking of government, not religion, as the relevant collective.  Or maybe because they are not a part of this particular collective?  Or perhaps they have a complicating commitment to cultural sensitivity.

Secession! Sudan Edition

Posted on by
Reply

Apparently, voters in southern Sudan are expected to vote to secede from that country.

All things being equal, I am a fan of secession.  More countries means more choices of regulatory regime for the world’s citizens.  When dissatisfied citizens have more alternatives to their native country, their native country has less leverage over them.  This means that countries have to compete to deliver the sort of regulatory regime that people actually want.  Conversely, large federal governments like the United States or the European Union act as collusive agreements that prevent regulatory competition between their constituent states.

Some people object that it is difficult and expensive to leave your home country.  I agree!  If there were no migration costs, then one more country wouldn’t make much difference.  But because there are migration costs, having smaller countries reduces those costs, and allows more competition on the margin.  It costs less to leave a smaller country, if only because of the mileage.  I imagine that tiny countries like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Monaco face a lot of regulatory competition, relative to behemoths like the United States.

Unfortunately, secession is often associated with civil war and ethnic violence.  Sudan has had both, and there is fear of more.  The benefits of regulatory competition have to be weighed against the costs of achieving it.  I advocate peaceful, not violent, secession.  But when secession has arrived, we should acknowledge its benefits.

Two Fallacies

Posted on by
2

The Self-Centered Fallacy. The Fallacy of Inevitability.

Can you think of better names for these fallacies? Do they already have names?

People commit the self-centered fallacy when they believe some rule only because they think it would be useful for everyone else to believe that rule.  It is self centered because it implies a megalomaniac faith that your beliefs really have an important effect on everyone else’s beliefs.  Examples of the self-centered fallacy (these are examples, not statements of belief):

  • I believe it is bad to pick flowers in the park, because it would be bad if everyone else thought they could pick the flowers in the park.
  • I believe it is important to vote, because everyone else should believe it is important to vote.
  • I believe that it is immoral to violate the law, because it is important for everyone else to believe it is immoral to break the law.
  • I believe that people should give to charity, because it would be good if everyone believed they should give to charity.
  • I believe that the Constitution is a binding document, because I want everyone else to believe that it is a binding document.

People commit the fallacy of inevitability when they believe something is good because it is inevitable.  This often manifests as an endorsement of the status quo.  Mickey Kaus recently confessed:

I don’t favor policies that would hurt unskilled American workers even if they would help unskilled Latin American illegal immigrants…. I’m happy to acknowledge a commitment to moral nationalism. [Others have] a plausible but extreme and eccentric libertarian position that we have no moral obligation to help fellow nationals before we help everyone else on the planet, because [they view] borders as a “global system of socio-economic apartheid.” Well, OK. Let’s vote!

I’ve insisted, on the contrary that:

It may be inevitable for democratic processes to discount utilitarian gains to poor foreigners.  But there is no reason for any individual utilitarian thinker to adopt the utilitarian constraints of their nation’s politics.  Neither should a natural rights thinker accept the practical constraints of his political system as a moral constraint on natural rights.  Justice is justice, whether or not it is procedurally obtainable.

When people insist that a law is good because it exists “everywhere”, or that the state is good because there is no alternative to it, they are committing the fallacy of inevitability.

I think these fallacies are pretty important to common sense morality.  Here is a just-so evolutionary story to explain the psychological strength of these fallacies:

In the evolutionary environment, we lived in small bands with few people.  A small minority of those few people had more authority than the rest.  It would be dangerous for the rest of the people to challenge the often inevitable power of the few people with more authority.  It would be useful for them to accept the moral claims of these few people.  Because people did in fact accept their moral claims, it was useful for the few people with authority to believe that their own moral beliefs affected the beliefs of everyone else.

We no longer live in that environment.

Update: Here is a list of some fallacies.  The self-centered fallacy is similar to the “Appeal to the Consequences of a Belief”.  I don’t see anything like the fallacy of inevitability.

Kaus on Immigration

Posted on by
Reply

A week ago Newsweek blogger Mickey Kaus argued that we should reduce income inequality by prohibiting poor people from immigrating.  Will Wilkinson made the appropriate analogy:

Did you know that nation-level income inequality would drop if the government herded all the poor people onto boats and dropped them off on a distant island?

Kaus responded to criticism:

I’m happy to acknowledge a commitment to moral nationalism. Wilkinson has a plausible but extreme and eccentric libertarian position that we have no moral obligation to help fellow nationals before we help everyone else on the planet, because he views borders as a “global system of socio-economic apartheid.” Well, OK. Let’s vote!

This is a bizarre way to put it.  Kaus is not proposing active “help for fellow nationals” – he is proposing coercion and prohibition against desperately poor people in order to manipulate the distribution of domestic wages.  Kaus needs to believe both that “we” (who?) should help Americans first and that we should “help” some Americans by depriving immigrants of their freedom to live or work here.  Is it legitimate to help (some) Americans by sending soldiers to prohibit poor immigrants from peacefully doing business with consenting American adults?  By sending police to hunt them down and drag them away their homes here if they do?

Kaus says he doesn’t really care about incomes, he cares about “social equality”:

I’m interested in income inequality because at the extremes it can undermine social equality, our sense that we are the equal of our fellows. Social equality is not an economic concept.

…

[Isn't it better] to live in a series of political subdivisions within which a rule of equal respect conditions all social relations?

Kaus wants rigid arbitrary geographical restrictions on all human beings in order to engineer emotions of “social equality” (I doubt the term has any meaning).  Even Kaus’s goal strikes me as a creepy attempt at thought control, but most people don’t share my moral intuitions about this sort of thing.  The means to his goal are worse.  It would be too depressing to dig up pre-Civil Rights arguments defending racial segregation as a way to ensure “social equality” or “social relations”, but I claim that the injustice is parallel.

Kaus wants to know whether it is “better” to live in a rich society with income inequality, or a poor one without it. Obviously most immigrants seem to prefer wealth, and Kaus hasn’t moved to Africa yet.  But why does Kaus think that there needs to be one answer to this question?  Discard the notion that the United States is the only “society” worth thinking about, and you realize that people can make their own decisions about what sort of place they want to live in.  A society can be as small as your neighborhood, maybe as large as a city. There is no need to “zone” foreigners out of a third of North America.

Immigration Series

Posted on by
Reply

Since my series on immigration is now finished, I thought it might be useful reposting a linking index for the series.  Enjoy!

* The Moral Obviousness of Open Immigration

* The Rule of Law

* National Security

* The Utilitarian Argument

* The Prudential Argument

* The Externalities of Immigration

* Fairness

* The Bad Analogy

* The Psychology of Nativism

* Ideological Cancer

* Systemic Forces

* Credit Where it is Due

* Conclusion: What Should be done?

* Addendum: What About Citizenship?

Addendum: What About Citizenship?

Posted on by
2

When I showed a rough draft of this series to a few people, they were confused.  They wanted to know why, if I cared so much about rights, I didn’t insist that immigrants get political rights – i.e. citizenship and the vote.  The reason is that political rights are not part of my conception of objective moral rights.

One may believe that fundamental justice is either a specific set of principles or a specific procedural system.  You cannot, I think, reasonably believe both.  I subscribe to a certain set of beliefs about freedom and personal autonomy.  I believe laws are legitimate if they respect these things.  They are illegitimate if they do not, whether or not they are democratically enacted.  The holocaust is not legitimate if people vote for it.

If you believe that legitimacy comes solely from democracy, then you are a democratic fundamentalist.  If people can legitimately vote for whatever laws they want, then they can legitimately vote for the holocaust.  If you believe that there is a limit to what people can vote for, then there is a principle of legitimacy that is stronger than democracy.  I believe that principle is freedom.

The ability to vote is neither necessary nor sufficient for freedom.  Denying citizenship does not itself infringe on freedom.  Because I believe that legitimacy comes from respecting freedom, freedom-respecting laws would be legitimate even if not everyone were able to vote for them.

Historically, some classical liberals have gone so far as to recommend restriction of the franchise.  See, for example, Bastiat.  I think Hayek or Milton Friedman may also have questioned the wisdom of allowing those who pay no taxes to vote for redistribution, but I can’t find the quote.

I don’t necessarily agree with Bastiat that it is useful to restrict the franchise.  I tentatively agree with the Churchillian view that democracy is the “least bad” form of government.  But it does not follow from my moral argument for immigration that immigrants must have citizenship.  It would be an unnecessarily controversial argument to make, as I suspect every conservative worries (and every progressive hopes) that a legion of potential Democratic voters is camped outside of the country’s borders.

Conclusion: What should be done?

Posted on by
Reply

Ideally, immigration reform would start with nativists getting down on their knees and begging for forgiveness.  But it always exceeds a bigot’s imagination that he is one, so I would settle for legal reform alone.

Congress should open America’s borders, grant residency status to all foreigners who apply for it, and grant amnesty (residency) to immigrants who live here illegally now.  If Congress wishes, it can attempt to screen immigrants for those that it reasonably suspects intend to harm Americans.  This is probably beyond the capacity of the United States government, but the attempt may be politically inevitable.

A less good alternative to open borders, still better than the status quo, would be for Congress to pass a guest worker program that granted temporary resident status to any foreign worker able to find employment.  This would allow in all foreigners capable of supporting themselves – those who would not be a burden to the welfare state.  Congress could also increase the quotas for permanent resident and worker visas instead of eliminating them altogether.

A less good alternative to amnesty, would be to establish a “pathway to citizenship” that would provide permanent residence status to all illegal immigrants who first voluntarily paid a small fine and temporarily left the country.  This is a worse alternative to amnesty because it pointlessly harasses immigrants – a bit like offering freedom to runaway slaves provided that they first briefly returned to their plantations.  But it is better than the status quo.  Immigrants could of course continue to live illegally in the United States, if they preferred.

What do we not need to do?

We do not need to extend welfare benefits – social security, welfare, public education, or public health care – to immigrants.  If immigrants do not have a right to these things outside of our borders, then they need not have a right to them inside of it.  It is a marginal improvement to grant immigrants permission to live in our country without welfare benefits.   Obviously, illegal immigrants prefer living here without benefits, even illegally, to living in their native countries with them.  We do not need to extend the right to vote to immigrants, though I am not convinced that we should not.  If immigrants prefer disenfranchised membership in our own society to enfranchised life in the country of their birth, then we should let them have it.

Ultimately, the goal must be to make legal immigration easy, not hard.  We should do this not merely because it increases American productivity, not merely because it will allow millions of foreigners to raise themselves out of poverty, but because it is right: it is their right.

Credit Where it is Due

Posted on by
Reply

My defense of open immigration is mostly an attack against conservatives.  But conservatives are not uniformly opposed to a more humane, just, and open immigration policy.  An obvious example is the most recent conservative president – George W. Bush.  I dislike George W. Bush immensely, partly for his initiative in expanding the welfare state.  But I believe that he sincerely wanted to improve immigration laws by creating a guest worker program and a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants (i.e. some sort of amnesty).  John McCain, hate him or hate him, also worked hard to keep the failed 2006-7 immigration reform push alive.  Ronald Reagan famously signed a bill granting amnesty to illegal immigrants.

I suspect that the conservative elite is ahead of its base on immigration.  Maybe elites value economic thinking more and support labor mobility. Maybe the elites have broader horizons – they are more cosmopolitan and have more contact with foreigners, so they are less able to ignore their humanity.  Maybe conservative politicians are just worried about the future of the conservative party, given a shrinking Caucasian share of the electorate.

Their secret convictions notwithstanding, conservative politicians have failed to make progress in the last few decades.  Politicians are professionals at giving voters what they want – so the blame ultimately falls on the conservative base that the politicians are afraid to challenge.  Until the conservative base learns to see immigrants as equal human beings, the conservative party will continue its pointless war against­­­ foreigners.