Guest Workers and The Ultimate Liberal Aim

by Will Wilkinson on December 29, 2007

Thanks to Kerry, there has been a great deal of stimulating cross-blog discussion of the desirability of an expanded American guest worker program compared to other policies. As far as I can tell, a good number of smart, well-intentioned folks see a big guest worker program as a second-best substitute for an increase in permanent migration and the supply of citizenships. (For example, Tim Lee here.) I think this is mistaken. While I also would like to see the United States mint millions of new passports, I think this is an entirely separate issue from the right of individuals to cross borders and enter into productive agreements with other human beings. It may be the case that the current public understanding of migration confuses these logically separate issues. And it may therefore be the case that the status quo, on-the-ground politics of immigration requires some kind of strategic trade-off between a new guest worker program and an upsurge in permanent residents and citizens. I have my doubts, but I really don’t know. The point I want to get across is that if we currently do have to make such a choice politically, we’re probably thinking about this complex of issues sloppily, and ought to do better starting now.

I suspect that some of us are talking past one another because of differences in political aims. My long-term aim regarding migration is the best feasible approximation of a single global labor market–a world in which people are free to travel the world in search of the most valued use for their skills. That this idea should seem shocking to some (most?) of us reveals how deeply-seated are our essentially illiberal nationalistic impulses. But there is nothing new here. Mises had this all nailed down tight in his chapter on “Liberal Foreign Policy” in Liberalism, written eighty years ago. A politics aimed at world peace requires an integrated world of peaceful cooperation. Here is your bracing refresher statement of ideals:

The starting point of liberal thought is the recognition of the value and importance of human cooperation, and the whole policy and program of liberalism is designed to serve the purpose of maintaining the existing state of mutual cooperation among the members of the human race and of extending it still further. The ultimate ideal envisioned by liberalism is the perfect cooperation of all mankind, taking place peacefully and without friction. Liberal thinking always has the whole of humanity in view and not just parts. It does not stop at limited groups; it does not end at the border of the village, of the province, of the nation, or of the continent. Its thinking is cosmopolitan and ecumenical: it takes in all men and the whole world. Liberalism is, in this sense, humanism; and the liberal, a citizen of the world, a cosmopolite.

As I’ve argued before, I think this conception of cosmopolitan liberalism almost got lost in the Cold War, during which cosmopolitan, internationalist ideals were largely ceded to the communists while liberalism rode out the red tide by tying itself defensively to nationalist feelings in those nations with a more or less liberal identity. The Cold War has been over for almost twenty years now. It is time to get back to the project of securing world peace through extending the scope of mutual cooperation. It is time to get back to the cosmopolitan ideals of liberal humanism.

So that’s the backdrop. Against it, questions of the American interest are instrumental, not ultimate. “What’s in it for us?” is such a pressing question because Americans need to see how their interests are compatible with the aim of a free, just, and peaceful world. For a liberal, it is not surprising that they are.

The U.S. has a serious problem regulating movement over the southern border by Mexicans and Central Americans. The main source of the problem is high U.S. labor demand and wage rates. The policy most likely to solve this problem is not a militarized border, which, as Douglas Massey explains, is completely counterproductive.

The net effect of our harsh border policy has been to increase the rate of undocumented population growth in the U.S. By lowering the rate of return migration to Mexico while leaving the rate of in-migration largely unaffected, it has increased net migration from around 180,000 persons per year in the late 1970s and early 1980s to around 368,000 per year over the past decade.

The increase in border enforcement has actually reduced the probability of apprehending undocumented border crossers to a 40-year low by pushing the flows into remote territory where fewer officers are stationed. But it has also tripled the death rate.

It is logically contradictory, and impossible in practical terms, to create a single North American economy that integrates markets for goods, capital, raw materials, services, and information but somehow keeps labor markets separate.

Nor is liberalization of permanent residencies and citizenships the ticket. There are simply too many people who want to work in the U.S., and the political will to hand out that many Green Cards just isn’t there. Even a significant liberalization on the path-to-citizenship front isn’t going to do much to regulate the flow of labor across the southern border. This is a real issue we need to address. Moreover, a large number of the people now crossing the border illegally don’t especially want to become Americans and would like to go home after a while. A large guest-worker program aimed specifically at these workers really is the best bet.

So a guest-worker program would have a real short-term benefit to the U.S. in terms of increased border security, return migration, and labor market efficiency. The medium-term benefit of a large guest worker program aimed at our neighbors to the south is this: Once the program is established and has demonstrated its efficacy, it will be possible to make a persuasive case for further North American labor-market integration, pushing toward a common North American labor market. In the long term, large regional labor markets, such as the EU and a North American market (and a South American market, an African market, an Asian market, etc.) can begin to integrate, moving us toward the ultimate liberal aim of an open world of mutual cooperation.

Thinking of this issue primarily in terms of the distribution of legal permissions to stay for good is a recipe for confusion. We need to build the infrastructure of a well-regulated system in which people are free to come and go in a dynamic global economy where the demand for various forms of human capital comes and goes. Thinking about in terms of Green Cards and passports seems to me to take for granted that if people are going to cross a border to work, they are going to do it just once, and to stay.

  • FrankV
    The American labor market is remarkably dynamic, even during a downturn. Each month, millions of new jobs are created as entrepreneurs start new companies and existing firms hire new workers. Also, millions of jobs also disappear as uncompetitive firms go out of business and existing companies let workers go. The recession has already driven up the rate of unemployment and the number of layoffs, but it hasn't negatively affected payday loans. Even though the number of people that lose their jobs due to massive job cuts, the demand for payday loans and advance lending has actually remained the same – in fact, it has gone up. It isn't really a consolation; the unemployment rate is climbing worldwide, and climbing to levels that are the highest they’ve been since before World War 2. That isn't a problem any amount of payday loans are going to fix.
  • bjk
    Wouldn't the ultimate liberal aim be better served by selling US citizenship rather than through guest workers or immigration? Let's say you auctioned off say citizenship rights equal to 1% of the US each year, so 3 million passports. In turn you got $100000 per passport, which doesn't sound crazy considering all the wealthy people who want to live here. In fact, the cost would probably be much higher. If my math is right, that's $300 billion per year, which buys alot of enchiladas. If you share just 1/3 of that with the displaced immigrants who would have taken those immigration slots, the would-be guest workers or immigrants would be much better off. If libertarians see nations as clubs, why not auction off citizenship like clubs do?
  • I like how "MaryJ" accuses libertarians of living in a fantasy world while in the very same post worrying terribly about the well-documented problem of Raul, Miguel and Julio down by the Home Depot, getting their little militia together like Latin versions of Jim Gilchrist. Um, yeah.
  • MaryJ
    From Mr. Wilkinson's comentary called "Marketplace:

    "Mexico’s GDP per capita is about what Poland’s was in 2004. That was the year Poland became a part of the E.U., and started sending a large flow of newly-legal migrant workers to a much wealthier Britain. This neither increased British unemployment, nor overtaxed social services. (EDITORIAL comment: These are both big fat lies, but whatever.)

    "It’s been a boon to both the British and the Polish economies, and a higher percentage of Polish workers now circulate back home. Romania and Bulgaria are even poorer than Mexico, but they are now set to integrate their labor markets with the rest of the E.U. in seven years."

    The problem is, Mr. Wilkinson, which you so conveniently "forgot" to mention, is that indigenous Britons are leaving their homeland -- where their ancestors have lived for thousands of years -- at the rate of 500K a year, most of them because of the ill effects of massive, inappropriate, and deeply unsettling immigration from a vast plethora of competing non-indigenous, non-compatible cultures. And they are taking their skills and their wealth and their tax base with them. Ultimately this will cause the British economy to collapse, as those replacing the fleeing indigenous population are not as educated, wealthy or law-abiding as the natives. Their number one destination is Australia -- the one Western nation left in the world that has strict immigration policies, and which also offers an approximation of the fleeing Britons' native Anglo-Saxon culture and values.. Your libertarian fantasies are not going to work in a world where First Worlders will simply flee their native lands for ones that are not overwhelmed by immigration anarchy and cultural displacement. If your fantasy world is indeed so much "richer and freer" as you claim, why are all those Brits fleeing the homeland their ancestors have occupied for thousands of years? Closer to home, why are native-born Californians running away from the "richness" of massive immigration at the rate of 300K per year?

    Massive immigration has also resulted, in both Britain and the US, in LESS freedom, not more, with the introduction of a huge police state to control ever-burgeoning crime rates (Britain has the largest per capita number of CCTV cameras in the world, California has draconian "three strikes and you're out" laws), totalitarian "hate speech" and "anti-racism" laws that have virulently suppressed native culture and traditions, and Orwellian mandatory "diversity training" classes that resemble nothing so much as Maoist self-improvement sessions.

    Also I find it rather amusing that a "libertarian" is using the European Union -- a massive, socialistic, bureaucratic state controlled by unelected elites, which is becoming progressively more totalitarian as time goes by -- as a model exemplar for "freedom."
  • MaryJ
    Some questions: In a democracy, how do you keep masses of uncontrolled immigrants from voting themselves massive amounts of welfare, at the expense of the native born taxpayer? (Already happening in many parts of the US where povery stricken illegals are basically allowed to vote, like California.) How do you keep masses of uncontrolled immigrants from forming an army that will kick us all out of our homes and take our property so their own people can enjoy them? This posting has convinced me that the libertarian open borders lunatics are just as crazy as the kumbaya-singing, "can't we all get along" left wing multiculturalist lunatics. Both are utopia-driven crazies living in a fantasy world where human nature can be "remade" -- when the totalitarian experiences of the 20th Century has proven the exact opposite. Moreover, it is not in the least bit "racist" to want to preserve native languages, tradiitons and cultures. With open borders, whoever has the biggest population totals will overwhelm and destroy smaller native cultures. I'm not interested in living in a world in which the only two cultures left standing are Subcontintental and Chinese. What of the English, the Danes, the Dutch, the Tongans,the Mauritians, etc.? Do they have no right to survive as as peoples? Libertarians, like Marxists, both erroneously believe that human beings are nothing but economic units. History has proven both of them massively wrong.
  • Fred S.
    Well, you'd have to specify what "empirical evidence" you're talking about. To my knowledge, no one has suggested that massive low-skill, Latin American immigration is conducive to social cohesion (Prof. Putnam's recent study says precisely the opposite) and the arguments that illegal immigrants committ crime at rates lower than the American average are highly dubious. If cultural continuity has "racial elements", by all means "unpack" it; don't jump immediately to the slur.

    The "racism" charged isn't disliked because it "stings"; it's application is resented because, in modern-day America, it has the same relationship to reasoned debate as the atomic bomb has to conventional warfare. It is an ad hominem attack, which bypasses the merits of the interlocutor's arguments and proclaims to an audience "I have looked into my opponent's soul, perfectly understood his motivations, and have decided that he is beyond the pale of civilised discourse; under no circumstances should anything he says be considered".

    Because this slur tends to be unanswearble, has enormous deterrent effect (no one wants to be labelled a racist) and helps the user to convince himself that he is battling unadulterated evil rather than engaging in reasoned discourse, it takes some discipline and no small amount of good faith not to engage it at any and all opportunities. Both these qualities are in short supply.
  • Will Wilkinson
    Fred, The racism point invariably comes up in part because many immigration opponents remain completely unmoved by empirical evidence regarding things like crime, social cohesion, etc. favorable to higher rates of immigration. And notions like "cultural continuity" when unpacked very often contain racial elements. Immigration foes don't like the charge of racism, because it stings, but in my experience it often does apply, does motivate opposition to immigration, and in those cases, it is not at all a facile to point it out.
  • Fred S.
    Will,

    That's fine. Some libertarians speak as though the right to contract with whomever whenever were some sort of fundamental, inalienable right which ought to trump all other interests.

    The fact is, economic concerns are but one-tenth of the argument against immigration. The failure to grapple with externalities (in terms of crime, population density, social cohesion, cultural continuity, etc.) ensures that libertarians absent themselves from 90% of the debate.

    To the extent that these concerns are addressed by libertarians, they usually adopt Alphie's technique: the mindless and facile slur of "racism".
  • We libertarians continue to argue immigration as if it were merely an issue of free economics. But every Paris riot, every genocide, all revolutions--even mass migrations--are grounded in the psychology of human identity formation, not just economic decisions. Immigration is a far more complex issue than economics, or free markets. Osama bin Laden is a second generation immigrant, to point out an extreme example: highly educated, independently wealthy, enjoys organization. An ideal immigrant...but what makes up his personal identity, other than self-loathing?

    The American people are not going to support porous borders, cosmopolitan liberalism or not, so long as the social sciences are not an integral part of the solution, as well as free economics.
  • Will Wilkinson
    Fred, The right to travel and contract freely may be limited if it conflicts with other rights. If Americans have a right to security against external aggressors, and that right cannot be secured if citizens are selling weapons to the enemy, then the right to do so may be limited.
  • Fred S.
    Just a quick question, Will. Your pro-migration argument seems premised on the notion that people have some sort of absolute (natural) right to freely contract which is unjustifiably impinged upon by the various gov'ts. Would you argue that an American company ought to be permitted, for example, to sell weapons to a foreign nation with which the United States was at war?
  • China has to deal with over 100 million migrant workers and it's still kicking America's arse economically.

    We'd rather be racist than rich, I 'spose.
  • Will Wilkinson
    The common European labor market does exist, and even continues to grow, in case you missed that. Actuality strictly entails possibility, no?
  • There is no indication of the interventionist state being undermined anywhere. Even Mises concedes that until there is, immigration fears are justified.

    Mises appears to have thought getting rid of the interventionist state, along with the creation of a right of secession (see sec.2) were necessary conditions in order to have "universal movement". Libtertarians today assure us they will do those things after the borders are thrown open.
  • Matt Tievsky
    Thank you, Will--a very valuable article that changes how I think about the issue of guest worker programs.
  • Will Wilkinson
    Mises does not think that there is no solution. He thinks that the solution is to undermine "the ideal of the interventionist state", which is why he bothered to write a book that we are still talking about. Do you think his work is pointless?
  • From your Mises link (sec. 8):

    "On the one side stand scores, indeed, hundreds of millions of Europeans and Asiatics who are compelled to work under less favorable conditions of production than they could find in the territories from which they are barred. They demand that the gates of the forbidden paradise be opened to them so that they may increase the productivity of their labor and thereby receive for themselves a higher standard of living. On the other side stand those already fortunate enough to call their own the land with the more favorable conditions of production. They desire, as far as they are workers, and not owners of the means of production, not to give up the higher wages that this position guarantees them. The entire nation, however, is unanimous in fearing inundation by foreigners. The present inhabitants of these favored lands fear that some day they could be reduced to a minority in their own country and that they would then have to suffer all the horrors of national persecution to which, for instance, the Germans are today exposed in Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Poland.

    It cannot be denied that these fears are justified."

    Mises concludes:

    "It is clear that no solution of the problem of immigration is possible if one adheres to the ideal of the interventionist state, which meddles in every field of human activity, or to that of the socialist state."

    The majority of the world favors a meddling, interventionist, socialist state. So why don't you agree with Mises that no solution to the problem of immigration is possible?
  • First, what's the polling data on support for a temporary guest worker program (say, the one that Dubya proposed which was pretty close to Dan Griswold's idea) versus support for upping the number of green cards? Both you and Kerry are saying that a temporary program has more support, and I don't doubt you're right but, you know ... trust, but verify.

    Second, why is radically expanding the number of green cards at odds with the idea of integrating labor markets? Are green-card holders *obligated* to stay in the U.S. if they don't wish to? Does it somehow prevent return migration? If that's the case, why not change those rules instead of adding a guest-worker set of rules on top of it? I guess I don't understand the advantage, in principle, of guest worker programs. But if the advantage is really based on political popularity, I'd like to see the evidence for that.
  • TLB
    0.0001%

    That's the percentage of Americans who wouldn't think Wilkinson is a loon. His childish dream would allow completely unlibertarian foreign governments to send us people in order to gain political power, just as the MexicanGovernment has been able to do.

    Their president recently stated that they're going to be working with U.S. nonprofits to push their agenda inside the U.S. He didn't specify that all of those nonprofits had to be far-left, so maybe Cato could pick up a few coins.
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