One Day at ICE: A Dialogue on the Philosophy of Immigration

People seem to have a mental model for the economy as a big plate of food that gets divided between everyone.

I’ve tried arguing that’s only one side: “How’d we make the food? Work. Wouldn’t having more hands help make more food?”

Didn’t even make a dent.

Maybe ditch the Logik for a bit and work on creating viral transports for these memes? Or some other tack?

ziel,

A country is bigger than a house. Requiring that only your family enter a small space entails an understandable, reasonable amount of in-group preference. Requiring that millions who don’t meet an arbitrary criterion be excluded from anywhere within thousands of miles of you, thereby making them much poorer, is entirely unreasonable.

You must admit that the scale makes an important moral difference, or else think that one would be as justified in shooting everyone on the street as one would be in shooting an intruder in one’s own home.

Ziel,

That makes sense if you don’t believe in private property rights.

ziel, is a Californian wanting to enter Arizona like a Haitian trying to enter Caplan’s house? If not, why not? Please, no circular arguments.

ziel,

As I’m reading what you write, you seem to be asserting the same property right to the country as a whole that Bryan has to his living room. Do you really believe that? Read Bryan’s hypothetical carefully. The would-be immigrant has an apartment, rented to him voluntarily by its owner, and a job, given to him voluntarily by his employer. You are asserting the right to veto those transactions for no reason at all, other than the non-reason that he was born on the wrong side of an arbitrary border. I think any reasonable person would be justified in asking for a better reason than that, and I think that any such reason should come with an explanation as to why it doesn’t apply equally to people who were born here.

Ken,

Same response. The entire country is not “[your] domicile”; you have no property rights over it. So, any analogy to property is specious.

I’d also note to both you and ziel that the burden imposed on you by someone moving to your country is far less than the burden imposed by someone moving into your house. Surely you know this, and it is disingenuous for you to pretend otherwise.

As to Bryan’s argument that immigration restrictions are “self-evidently immoral,” I don’t think he’s making that argument at all. Rather, he’s saying that you need some reason for making that restriction, and that place of birth is insufficient reason. Moreover, he’s questioning what sort of reason you can come up with that would not be equally valid for refusing entry to an American citizen temporarily in Haiti.

So, to boil Bryan’s question down to its essence: There are two people in Haiti, both desperate to move to the US, both with jobs waiting for them, and both of whom have arranged to rent a place to live. The first has a piece of paper that says he was born in Miami; the second has a paper that says he was born in Port-au-Prince. What is the justification for letting the first one in and keeping the second one out?

Note that all the stuff about eating dirt and whatnot is just window dressing. The real question is why we should treat these two people differently.

@rapscallion – A country is bigger than a house. Requiring that only your family enter a small space entails an understandable, reasonable amount of in-group preference. Requiring that millions who don’t meet an arbitrary criterion be excluded from anywhere within thousands of miles of you, thereby making them much poorer, is entirely unreasonable.

Who says it’s a small space? The Caplan children are uniquely entitled to their own room (or maybe only two-per room)? How is such luxury “reasonable” under international – or Haitian – standards? And no one is making anyone “poorer” – any more than The Caplan’s insistence on owning their own home* is making homeless people poorer. And so what if a nation is bigger – a mansion is bigger than a 3-bedroom apartment – are mansions therefore illegitimate dwellings?

@Jayson Virissimo – ziel, is a Californian wanting to enter Arizona like a Haitian trying to enter Caplan’s house? If not, why not? Please, no circular arguments.

As Robert points out above, individual states do indeed have residency requirements for exercising certain privileges (just as the Caplan household might have certain rules about entering or occupying each other’s bedrooms).The individual states in the USA have mutually agreed to a compact that allows free movement, but that agreement does not extend to states that are not part of the compact, just as the free-movement within the Caplan home does not imply that the right to enter the home (or even free-movement within) extends to non-family members. And of course you’re whole argument is circular – border restrictions are not legitimate because – well, they’re just not legitimate.

@rpl – As I’m reading what you write, you seem to be asserting the same property right to the country as a whole that Bryan has to his living room. Do you really believe that?

Each nation has the right to control its land – it is not strictly speaking a “property” right, but it is analogous, and it’s recognized throughout the world, everywhere, except in that strange little land called Libertarianville. It is called “sovereignty”. You people (you – you Libertarians, you!) don’t respect this right – just as socialists don’t respect property rights. But most people respect both sovereignty AND property rights.

@Daublin – Ken, I think Bryan’s point was to talk about reasonableness. We’re talking about a policy that, in the case of Haiti, is literally making the difference between whether people are going to get to eat.

If you’re making a special argument for Haiti – that the people there are in especially dire straights and it’s only reasonable that we liberalize immigration restrictions from that stricken country – well that’s a different argument. We allowed a million Irish in for that reason 160 years ago. I personally prefer we didn’t – and instead encouraged birth control and took other steps to alleviate suffering – but I don’t know much about what’s going on there.

* I of course have no idea what the actual domicile of the Caplan family is like – I’m making the assumption they live like a typical middle-class family.

So going by the living room analogy, your reason for not letting Haitians into the US is that they are like a line of smelly homeless people wanting to live on our “collective domicile”.

I think a better house analogy would be this:

Assume you and me live in the same apartment building. I want to have a Hatian friend move in with me. You see this and tell me you dont want my Hatian friend to move in. I tell you to shove it because it’s my apartment. You go to the condo board and bribe and/or threaten them. Now my Hatian friend is only allowed to visit for a week or two, and only if he has a phd. You proceed to tell me that it’s for my own good somehow and that we all have sovereignty over each other in the apartment. You oddly also remind me what happened the last time we lifted restrictions on who could move into the building- we ended up with way too many damn Irish!

a specious analogy

It seems pretty clear that the citizens of a country do indeed have a kind of property interest in and hence property rights to their own country.

I have never seen libertarians provide any actual reasons as to why this is not so. And the answer cannot be something like “I prefer not to think of it that way.”

People have a basic right to go about their peaceable business.

But here you’ve already assumed that the citizens of a country have no property rights to that country. You are not entitled to that assumption. People have no right to go onto other people’s property.

I agree that the leap from housing unit to national borders leaves a few dots untouched. However if there is an agreement that the nation state, which requires regulation of borders, should be subject to a reasonableness test, then I’m a happy camper. My time is short but I’ll try to offer ideas to fill in some dots and address reasonableness.

1. Nation states defend national cultures.
2. Culture is the institution whereby the benefits of learning are passed down to generations. These learnings are often very expensive. Europeans don’t have to fight religious wars anymore, because they remember when they did. Americans don’t have to fight their civil war.
3. Medicine, science, law, etc. all amount to inheritances delivered via culture.
4. National cultures are not all alike. Some are fabulously successful, others dismal failures. I’ve read that the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic is visible from the air because DR side consists of a robust forest while the Haitian side is a deforested wasteland. Forget the US, shall the people of the DR be denied the right to protect whatever cultural elements they enjoy that makes their country so much better a place to live?
5. If you break the nation state you disenherit vast numbers of people from successful cultural legacies. Think about rule of law, which is fundamental to Western democracies and far from universal.
6. The very fact that respect for sovereignty is nearly universal, and paid for in blood and treasure many times over for hundreds of years, is itself a strong argument that the burden of proof lies with its critics.

Ken

Ken,

If the point of immigration restrictions is to defend our national culture, then I’m not sure it’s been clearly established that our national culture is threatened by immigration. In particular, it’s hard to believe that a guest worker program would imperil our culture. Note that allowing people to immigrate doesn’t preclude enforcing our laws, nor ejecting people who refuse to abide by them. Those requirements might imply some restrictions, in order to make enforcing those requirements practical, but it seems pretty clear that current legal immigration levels are way below that what we could support and still maintain law and order.

For what it’s worth, I had heard the same story about Haiti and the Dominican Republic, but looking at the terrain in Google Earth, the difference isn’t so obvious.

Would Bryan be okay with the U.S. simply annexing Haiti and making it a new state or territory, along the lines Puerto Rico? If coming to the U.S. is such a welfare-improving opportunity for Haitians, which it clearly is, what’s wrong with the converse to that, which is to bring the U.S. to Haiti? Furthermore, which is an easier sell to the public: mass Haitian immigration or territorial expansion?

I wonder this too. Why not just have the US conquer the entire third world and administer US policies to them? I mean, what are all these ridiculous countries for if everyone wants to flee them? Better to just turn them into provinces that can be exploited for wealth. Mass immigration is equivalent to having all the costs of empire without any of the benefits.

It seems pretty clear that the citizens of a country do indeed have a kind of property interest in and hence property rights to their own country.

This property right you assert doesn’t look like any other sort of property right in our society. In particular it doesn’t grant exclusive use, can’t be sold or otherwise disposed of, and can’t even be enforced against other citizens (i.e., it affects only foreigners). To turn an old adage on its head, if it neither looks, walks, nor quacks like a duck, it’s kind of silly to call it a duck.

Nobody is disputing that citizens have a right to use the democratic process to make laws, including laws about immigration. However, it is a fallacy to justify those laws by analogy to how you use your personal property because governing a country is different than managing one’s property in many ways, a few of which I have just cited.

But here you’ve already assumed that the citizens of a country have no property rights to that country.

See above. A government’s democratic accountability to its people is so different from a property right as to render any analogy between the two specious.

You are not entitled to that assumption.

But I haven’t assumed anything. I’ve only used the word property in its customary way. You are the one who is trying to use the word in a novel way so as to arrive at a predetermined conclusion.

People have no right to go onto other people’s property.

But if I choose to rent my house to someone, it is my property, and not yours, is it not? That is true irrespective of where the prospective renter happens to have been born, is it not? Your argument only works if you assert some sort of property right over my house, and you have no such right, or so my title search company assures me.

Before you hasten to add that you only seek to ban the immigrant from common areas like roads and sidewalks, let me remind you that immigration law contains no exception for immigrants that remain entirely on private property.

I own shares in Apple, yet I’m not allowed to wander at will over the Apple campus. But I really do have a kind of property right to that campus…

Who says you have any property rights on Apple’s campus? As you have observed, you cannot exercise any of the privileges of ownership over that property, so what exactly does that “property right” mean? In fact, you have no such property right. What you have is ownership of shares of the company’s stock (you do have a property right to those), and those, in turn, grant you a set of rights that is much more limited those granted by a “property” right.

This whole enterprise of justifying immigration restriction based on an analogy to property rights is simply misguided. The authority to impose immigration restrictions must reside in democratic governance, not in property rights. That takes us back to my original point: if you want to propose (or propose to continue) a government policy that infringes on people’s basic right to go about their peaceful business (and we can add to that, to use their property as they see fit), then you owe it to the rest of us to explain why that law is just.

Note, by the way, that there are many such laws on the books, and many of those are good laws. However, they are based on rationales far less arbitrary than “he was born in the wrong place.”

What’s the recipe for a peaceful, prosperous society, such as the U.S.? There might me any number of different elements, but clearly, effective institutions like property rights and the rule of law are key. Given Haitian’s obvious failures in developing such institutions, is it unreasonable to question whether they collectively understand the importance of these institutions? And if it isn’t, is it unreasonable to question whether they would respect our institutions, if they immigrated here in large numbers?

For example, Theo Van Gogh and those French magazine publishers might have a thing or two to say about European Muslim immigrants’ rather inadequate respect for free speech. Obviously, eating dirt is unpleasant, but so is being nearly decapitated with a knife over a film you made.

To build on what rpl said above, the convoluted analogy of immigration restrictions to pseudo-property rights that in turn supersede actual property rights reminds me of the convoluted analogy of “social contracts” to actual contracts, where the hypothetical social contract with tacit consent supersedes actual contracts with explicit consent. Both theories attempt to appeal to common intuitions about property or contract, and then use these same intuitions to contradict the very basis on which these theories rest. A self-defeating argument on many levels.

People have missed the deck-stacking in Bryan’s fable. The fable is based upon

1. the guy has lived in the US
2. the guy has a place to live here
3. the guy has a job here
4. the guy is not a criminal
5. the guy is not asking for charity.

First, why is Bryan even mentioning 1 – 3? If you really support free immigration, and Bryan does, the only practical way for most foreigners to get jobs and places to live here is to move here first without them. Bryan says these things to stack the deck. He’d be happy to have an immigrant come here and look for work and a home, and he’d be unwilling to say they must leave if they have jobs and homes but lose them.

Second, the guy is not a criminal. So Bryan supports requiring criminal background checks for immigrants, and supports denying immigration rights to those who cannot demonstrate a clean history? How would that work in Haiti? Bryan doesn’t really support excluding people unless they can prove they have no criminal history. He’s stacking the deck.

Third, the guy is not asking for charity. That means nothing. He’s legally entitled to many different types of government assistance simply by being here. Bryan may support the idea of a state in which immigrants (and others) are not entitled to any government-required ‘charity’, but we don’t live in that America.

Bryan, do items 1-5 on my list really matter to you? If so, and if each is a necessary part of your argument, do you agree that your case is weakened whenever any of those 5 points does not apply (ie, the guy has no home or job or history here, the guy can’t show whether he has a criminal history or he does have a criminal history, and the guy is legally entitled to substantial government assistance). If not, could you restate the fable using the ‘worst case’ of these 5 items? That would be clarifying.

tom writes:

… the only practical way for most foreigners to get jobs and places to live here is to move here first without them.

All the debate surrounding immigration seems to suggest that even illegal immigrants have little trouble finding work here when the economy is reasonably good, so presumably legal ones would have an even easier time. In a bad economy it might be harder to find work, but in reality immigration seems to slow proportionately when the economy is bad. That’s not surprising because the whole reason people want to come here is to find work. If the jobs aren’t here, they won’t come. Still, if you want to say that you have to get a job within 3 months (or whatever) or leave the country, I don’t have a problem with that. (I can’t speak for Bryan, of course.)

So Bryan supports requiring criminal background checks for immigrants, and supports denying immigration rights to those who cannot demonstrate a clean history?

To the extent that background checks are possible, they’re not a bad idea, but I would think we’d be going off of our own records. Have we identified this guy as a member of a terrorist organization? Has he been thrown out of the country for breaking the law before? And so on. I don’t think it’s necessary to require them to “demonstrate a clean history”. None of my ancestors could have made such a demonstration (the technology didn’t even exist at the time). Could yours? Yet, they were allowed in, and it all worked out ok.

The notion that someone in a desperately poor country will scrape together enough money to travel to the US, spend it all to get here, and then try to steal enough to make up the “investment” before he gets deported is far-fetched. Do you have any evidence to suggest that this is a serious threat? It sounds more like groundless fear of “the other.”

He’s legally entitled to many different types of government assistance simply by being here.

Like what? Certainly we’ll educate his children for free, but considering the possibility that those children will turn around and become productive citizens that seems like it might be a wise investment. I thought we all agreed that education had positive externalities. If he shows up at an emergency room in severe distress he’ll probably get treatment, but that’s not what’s driving our medical costs, and we’d have to accept a lot more immigrants before it came anywhere close. Other than that, I’m not sure what they’re supposed to be getting. Nobody’s talking about handing out welfare checks when they arrive.

Robert writes:

Micha, psuedo-property rights in this country to do super cede individual property rights. It is illegal to discriminate.

Anti-discrimination laws are not based on any theory of property rights. The government’s authority to govern does not derive from a property right over its citizens’ property. You may think that that is a hair-splitting distinction, but it is not. We generally grant much more deference to personal whim when evaluating people’s choices about how to use their property than we do when considering the exercise of government power. That is precisely why some people here have tried to recast immigration law as a property issue instead of a governance issue. If you want to keep people off your property, you don’t have to give a reason. If you want to pass a law to make people do (or not do) something, you have to be persuasive.

In the current political climate where ethnic groups are pitted against each other to obtain power and influence, it is unreasonable to expect that there would not be externalities to completely opening of countries borders.

I can accept the idea that there is some level of immigration so large that it would have negative effects. However, it’s pretty clear that we are nowhere near that point with current immigration, even including illegal immigration. I’m less persuaded that we would actually reach that level if we had open borders, since the job market for immigrant labor would likely saturate well before then. Still, I’d be willing to compromise by setting legal immigration limits at current levels (including the immigration that is currently illegal) and increasing it slowly enough that we have time to observe any problems that arise and back off if necessary. Would that sort of policy be acceptable to you?

Jeff, it is indeed unreasonable to argue on the basis of “collective understanding”, as collectives do not have a single brain with which to understand collectively. Individual Haitians may or may not understand the importance of property rights and the rule of law, but those who do understand may not be able to implement their understanding into policy because of collective action problems.

Micha, I thought it was pretty clear my use of the term “collective understanding” was referring to a relative frequency, not some hypothetical hive mind. There is no need for semantics.

That aside, lets hear more about this collective action problem. Why is it more severe in Haiti than it is in most other nations? Does the severity of it have anything to do with the character, culture, or inborn traits of Haitians themselves? If the answer to this last question is yes, does that imply something about how Haitian communities, if established in the U.S., might also be plagued by collective action problems? If not, why not?

And even if a majority of Haitians do not understand, this is not an argument against keeping out those Haitians who do understand.

I agree with you. My objection is there isn’t any way to reliably tell the latter from the former.

And it is certainly unreasonable to violate property rights and the rule of law in a strange effort to promote or protect property rights and the rule of law.

I think this view is a bit dogmatic and simplistic. As I alluded to earlier, I wager the U.S. could probably do nearly as much good for Haiti if it were to simply annex the country, appoint a governor, and treat it like a colony. Or just like Puerto Rico, if colonialism is too stigmatized for you. In other words, I would like to implement the rule of law in Haiti. Now, doing so may (in fact, it probably will) involve busting a few heads open. You can’t always implement or maintain the rule of law by handing out pamphlets quoting Locke!

So if we accept that you may have to violate some folk’s natural rights in order to successfully implement the rule of law in Haiti, shouldn’t we also accept that we sometimes have to do the same to preserve it, here? And that things like “not allow millions of people from dysfunctional, disordered societies to move here and bring their social pathologies with them” might be one of them?

You can say I’m wrong, and tell me that when Haitians leave Haiti, they all turn into Wayne Brady, and there may be some validity to that (after all, people described the Irish as sub-human in the late 1800’s, but by 1960, there was an Irish Catholic in the Oval Office), but I think the appeal to property rights and the rule of law falls flat.

Rpl,

My point: Bryan should either drop the ‘sweeteners’ from his immigration fable, or say if he thinks they’re relevant.

If immigration to the US was unlimited, then wouldn’t almost every single Haitian come here despite a bad US economy? Please explain how they wouldn’t. Same with every single person in every single war zone who can get transportation here. And it’s comical to say they’d have to go back after 3 months. It would never work practically–it doesn’t work now when we try. And in any case your premise is that people have a right to come here and we don’t really have a right to stop them; is there any fairness is creating such a strange limit on their right?

On criminal history, your real answer has to be that we can’t know the real criminal history of anyone from a third world country because it’s the third world, so we have to assume they are ok. And who are you to decide which crimes would justify revoking someone’s right to come here? What about the man who stole bread because his family was starving? It’s sickening to forbid that man from coming here–he’s exactly who should be getting the benefit of the US. So I don’t think you really expect that we’d ever have a workable open immigration policy subject only to criminal background checks.

On welfare programs, do you really believe that illegal immigrants have no rights to programs? First, anchor babies are a HUGE right. Second, US hospitals must treat people–they cannot turn people away. Third, I think many areas provide housing for illegal immigrants. I expect there’s more. (And does your argument depend on a study showing positive externalities for the US from educating Haitians who come here? Please cite the study, but I don’t believe it.)

I think Bryan is including a bunch of fake sweeteners in his story and that for the sake of honesty he should take them out. He’s naively or dishonestly assuming a libertarian America and a naturally limited type of immigration.

Or Bryan could just go all way and give the guy a dying child, and accuse immigration opponents of wanting to kill the kid.

Nathaniel – you’re just not getting the analogy. You’re rights as property owner of your house is analogous to the rights of the American people as the sovereign entity of the USA. So the sovereign (the American people, through their constitutionally mandated institutions) may indeed invite anyone into the country they wish.

Now your children – or any other occupants of your house – have no such rights. They cannot just invite in anyone they wish – they need your permission first (tacit or explicit, depending on how you run your house). That is what you would be doing if you harbored illegal immigrants – breaking the rules of the house. You personally do not exert sovereign rights over the USA – and have no right to violate the rules on who can enter (or any other rules, for that matter) that have been established by the American people.

So government is the parent and we are all children.

You guys are really having trouble with the “analogy” thing aren’t you? Try an employer/employee relationship. Or better yet, a private club and its members. Though the members have an ownership interest, only the members as a whole can decide who can join and even set rules on who can visit and how they must behave on the grounds.

It’s really not a hard concept – it’s called “sovereignty.” It exists all over the globe, and sovereigns everywhere exert very tight control over who is allowed to live in their country. The USA is unusually liberal in this regard, but even our lax immigration rules is treated in this forum as if it were some bizarre, medieval ritual uniquely practiced by American customs agents.

@ziel:

I’m not sure I’ve ever met “The American People”. I’ve only ever met a bunch of politicians and bureaucrats who claim to speak for the mythical “The American People”. Real individuals have rights. Theoretical constructs such as “The American People” have no rights and especially they do not have the right to violate the rights of individuals.

Individuals are not like children who must bow to the authority of the pater familias-government who has property rights over the entirety of the United States. They are not like employees who may be dismissed at will by an employer. Those analogies are frankly insulting and betray a certain love of fascism which won’t get you very far with anyone here.