In mid-October 2023, I wrote a draft of a blog post that I didn’t end up posting. I’m running it below, word for word as I wrote it in October. In October, I ran it by a friend who is very pro-immigration and, even though he largely agreed with it, he thought my proposal wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of being accepted. The barriers to people immigrating from anywhere, he argued correctly, are just too high. So the idea of letting people in from Gaza didn’t seem worth bothering to push.
He persuaded me. I shouldn’t have been persuaded. Because look at what just has happened. The Biden administration is starting to talk about letting people in from Gaza. Here’s a post from Dave DeCamp from antiwar.com, titled, “White House Considers Taking in Palestinian Refugees from Gaza.”
And here’s a quote from his short post:
The Biden administration is considering taking in certain Palestinian refugees and giving them a permanent safe haven in the US, CBS News reported on Tuesday.
The report said that officials across several government agencies are examining options to resettle Palestinians who have immediate family members who are American citizens or permanent residents. They are also considering making the option available for Palestinians with any relatives who are Americans.
The number of Palestinians eligible for permanent resettlement in the US is expected to be relatively small, but the report said it would mark the first time the US refugee program accepts Palestinians in large numbers.
I should not have accepted the idea that proposals that seem unlikely today will be unlikely 6 or 7 months from now.
Here’s my post from October. I’ve kept the same title.
Or, at least, let some of them in.
Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis have been competing recently for the title of who most wants to keep people from Gaza out of the United States. I can’t compete, because I want to allow many of the people from Gaza in to the United States. And even in the likely case that I can’t convince many people, I want to allow many people to leave Gaza. They are not allowed do so now.
Many critics of Israeli government policy have claimed that Israel has made Gaza into an “open-air prison.” But a simple look at a map tells you that that can’t be true. The Israeli government can’t do it alone. What has made Gaza into an open-air prison is the fact that Israel’s government won’t let many Gazans enter Israel and that Egypt’s government won’t let many Gazans enter Egypt. There’s not complete closure for people entering Israel, or, at least, there wasn’t before the horrendous Hamas murders on October 7. Similarly, there hasn’t been, until recently, complete closure into Egypt. But in both cases, it was a trickle.
Of course, there’s one other possible way to exit Gaza: by boat. But Israel’s Navy forcibly prevents people from leaving Gaza by boat.
Let’s imagine that the U.S. government or some other government decides to let in some people from Gaza and that the various governments persuade Israel’s government to let them go. How would a government choose whom to let in?
It should be obvious that it’s a really bad idea to let in members of Hamas or even non-members who strongly support the Hamas agenda of wiping out Jews. And vetting them is not easy. What kinds of records would a government require? When I immigrated to the United States in 1977, I had to get a statement from the RCMP that I had no criminal record in Canada. That was relatively easy to do. Can the U.S. government trust a police force in Gaza to the same extent it could trust the RCMP? Probably not.
In short, I don’t have a good way to suggest for vetting potential immigrants from Gaza. But that doesn’t mean that no one does. In particular, I would want to know what Alex Nowrasteh and David Bier, two immigration analysts and proponents at the Cato Institute, think.
One thing that helps the vetting problem is self-selection. Many people would rather stay in Gaza than leave because they still believe that they can take over Israel and run the Jews into the sea. Fortunately, that’s highly unlikely, but try telling them that.
Better yet, don’t try telling them that. Leave them and choose from the ones who want to come.
Let’s say that the vetting problem is solved. We’re unlikely to get, say one million people from Gaza. It’s more likely to be hundreds of thousands. If it were, say, 200,000, that’s approximately 10 percent of the number of residents. That may not sound like a lot. But one conclusion I came to when I was an economist with President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers is that if you solve 10 percent of a problem, and do so with almost no new government spending, you’ve done a lot.
And the way to have almost no government spending, beyond the amount spent on vetting, is to let them work. People coming from Gaza, like immigrants from other low-income countries, would immediately multiply their productivity, as Bryan Caplan has shown in Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. So there would be no need for government to house or feed them.
You might wonder why, then, governments in various cities are breaking their budgets to house and feed immigrants who come in through our southern border. It’s for one main reason: for the first 180 days they’re here, they can’t legally work.
What about the fear that even those who don’t support Hamas will be anti-semitic? This is a reasonable fear. But before Ariel Sharon forcibly removed thousands of Jews from Gaza, those Jews got along reasonably well with many of their Arab neighbors. What changed is that now the only contact most residents of Gaza have ever had with Israelis (the median age of a resident of Gaza is about 19) is with Israeli soldiers or Israeli police. That’s bound to affect, in a negative way, their overall impression of Jews. The late Carlos Ball, whose father was once the Venezuelan ambassador to the United States, told me that his father had said, “Never judge a country by its government bureaucracy.” The implication was that the people of any country are almost always nicer than the bureaucrats. If I had had to judge Americans by the way the bureaucrats at the Immigration and Naturalization Service treated me, I wouldn’t have wanted to come. Similarly, many Gazans who come here might well be anti-semitic. But most of them would be too busy making a living and enjoying the incredible wealth that they would be creating. Trade creates peace. It also reduces racism.
READER COMMENTS
Richard W Fulmer
May 1 2024 at 9:57am
Doesn’t the current rash of, often Palestinian-led, campus demonstrations punctuated by physical assaults on Jewish students move this from a fear to a certainty?
David Henderson
May 1 2024 at 11:38am
You write:
It certainly raises the probability. But most of the demonstrations I know of are led by Jewish Voices for Peace. I bet that there are few Gazans in the mix.
Craig
May 1 2024 at 10:51am
“Similarly, many Gazans who come here might well be anti-semitic. ”
What about anti-American? If I were Gazan, I’d hate our guts. There’s a billion people in India, nurses come from South Africa and there’s a failed state in Haiti. Let Gaza be somebody else’s problem. When weapons exploding somewhere have shrapnel that say ‘Made in USA’ on them, take notice that there’s a consequence to that.
Anders
May 1 2024 at 12:56pm
Anti-semitic does not capture it, although it can be truly vile: arriving in Jordan with a German colleague, the taxi driver, upon learning his origin, said great, we hate Jews too (for anyone who knows how hypersensitive Germans are about that part of its past, you can imagine his reaction).
But during Ottoman times, they lived perhaps separately, but side by side.
It is not at all some kind of scripturally driven hatred of other Abrahamic religions I think. It is simply intense hatred, and unfortunately often understandable, hatred of an Israel coopted by a coterie of irredentist and religious extremists that stymie even perfectly feasible and rational steps or rapprochement (as Gaza is coopted by the extreme factions of Hamas).
Its a Jewish state, true (not sure what that means, as almost all Israelis I know are atheists; and it is not race either – so what is it?) – but that is not the point. And I am sad that the West fails to take any responsibility for creating this mess by imposing the notion of Nation States, arbitrarily dividing up the region, and blithely issuing the Balfour declaration for reasons of short term convenience. And taking sides (beyond of course condemning terrorism and humanitarian disaster) and reducing such a mess to anti-semitism is not going to take as anywhere closes to tiny steps towards finding a solution.
Peter
May 2 2024 at 7:16am
It’s a bloodline but I digress, just wanted to say your German comment is really just an elite thing. I lived in Germany for the better part of a decade among the working class and rarely did I stumble across a hypersensitivity about WW2 in the corner East nor among the Turks, non-conscript enlisted soldiers, truck drivers, nor street sweepers. In fact it was generally the opposite ranging from indifferent (Germans of Turkish decent) to a feeling of wronged by history or even pride in their WW2 history (especially among the soldiers). PC Germans are a vocal minority and a bane of their country, the same as PC everywhere.
Richard W Fulmer
May 1 2024 at 12:13pm
Biden seems determined to get Trump elected in November. (On the other hand, Trump seems equally determined to return the favor.)
Mactoul
May 1 2024 at 8:39pm
You shouldn’t worry about Anti-semitism. Rather worry about anti-Americanism. These are people who cheered on 9/11, Saddam Hussein (and got expelled from Kuwait) and chant Death to America five times a day.
Is America so short of immigrants that it should seek them from the most radicalized population in the world?
Peter
May 2 2024 at 7:28am
“It should be obvious that it’s a really bad idea to let in members of Hamas or even non-members who strongly support the Hamas agenda of wiping out Jews”.
That isn’t obvious, wiping out Jews isn’t an American problem and we have a long history of allowing “terrorists” and their supporters in from the IRA to the White Russians to the UGK to dozens of other groups. As an American, what do I care if you are a member of ETA.
You make a immigration criminal point but non-US terrorism isn’t really a crime per say, at least the sort we care about and likewise we shouldn’t even really care about criminal records period as the devil is in the details around due process in those nations, etc. For example, Canada is notorious for not letting in Americans with criminals records whose very crimes aren’t illegal in Canada or, even they were, wouldn’t have been prosecuted or the sentence enough to bar them but because they just care about “conviction in a kangaroo court” over substance, they deny people who would make excellent immigrants. There is no reason to deny criminal immigrants really in any nation, they are just an easy group to red meat discriminate against.
Mactoul
May 3 2024 at 12:18am
Including the American Jews?
Mark Z
May 2 2024 at 11:02pm
In general, I suspect ideological vetting is often fairly pointless, especially in the long run, and especially for a small volume of immigrants. For one thing it’s easy to enough fake having the ‘right views’ to pass an ideological litmus test. It’s sometimes surprising how openly racist, homophobic, fanatically religious, or otherwise ‘eccentric’ the views are of so many immigrants from other parts of the world (and were among our ancestors who came here, those of us descended from immigrants). I think it’s rarely discussed since those most concerned about racism tend to also be the ones most sympathetic to immigrants (and most immigrants themselves tend to be ethnic minorities). But assimilation – at least in the US – is rapid; their children are far like native-born Americans than like their parents in their views. It’s perhaps contrary to modern sensibilities to say, but I think being law-abiding is much more important than having moral views in vetting immigrants. Letting a politically and morally enlightened habitual shoplifter immigrate may cause more harm to American citizens than letting a law abiding bigot immigrate.
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