Krugman on Immigration and Inequality
Because I want to be certain not to argue against a strawman in my inequality paper, I’m arguing against Paul Krugman, for the most part. So I’ve been reading The Conscience of a Liberal for the third time. This is not pleasant work. Reading a John Bates Clark Medal winner shouldn’t feel this much like reading Ann Coulter. But it does. Liberal Fascism is a more intellectually evenhanded book, which says more about Krugman than it does about Liberal Fascism, I’m afraid.
But I digress before I even start. When Krugman talks about immigration, he has two points to make. One is that Republicans can’t win by being racists forever, because that’s sure to backfire once the Latin American population becomes large enough. The other point is that lots of low-skilled immigration makes it hard to politically mobilize the working class, since so few immigrants can vote. In Krugman’s view, if the working class contains many members without the franchise, it is itself disenfranchised. So it is that Krugman pretty nearly celebrates one of the most shameful chapters in 20th century American politics: the progressive (read: “racist”) imposition of strict immigration controls to keep shifty Asians and dirty Italian anarchists off our shores.
Krugman says that “a more fully enfranchised population” was an “unintended consequence” of the Immigration Act, but the effect that Krugman celebrates was not at all unintended by Samuel Gompers and the AFL, perhaps the most powerful driving force behind the law. And it is an effect Krugman thinks we should consider intending: “The disenfranchisement effect is, however, something liberals need to think hard about when confronting questions about immigration reform,” he delicately puts it.
What Krugman never says about immigration is that it is the most powerful engine of economic mobility and equalization there is. This make it obvious that Paul Krugman is not especially concerned with poor people or with economic equality. He is evidently not even especially concerned with poor people in the United States if they can’t vote. He seems to think it is at least worth considering keeping some of those people out of the country — keeping them poorer — if that would help achieve the redistributive politics he prizes. What kind of egalitarian is that?
Imagine a choice between two policies. Policy A would leave the level of redistribution just as it is, but would allow a much larger volume of immigration. Policy B would leave immigration as it is, but would increase the level of redistribution from rich to poor citizens. Which policy should a humanitarian favor? There can be no doubt: policy A. Which policy should an egalitarian favor? Well, Policy A will increase nation-level inequality by increasing the proportion of the population near the bottom of the income distribution. But why is this of any moral significance? If we take the set of people in the U.S. at time 2, and follow them all back in time to t1, when everyone is in whatever country he or she was in then, and see whether inequality has increased or decreased among this group of people, we will see that it has decreased a great deal, and that almost all of this decrease will have come from the poor becoming richer in real terms, and not from the rich losing income to taxes. If it were necessary to limit redistribution in order to make a greater volume of immigration politically feasible, then egalitarians and humanitarians ought to be for it.
Paul Krugman wouldn’t be for it, which is not surprising, since he appears to be neither a thoroughgoing egalitarian nor a thoroughgoing humanitarian. He is a nationalist social democrat, largely indifferent to larger concerns about equality and welfare. At this late globalizing date, “20th century Western European nationalist social democracy in yet another country!” strikes me as both a useless and unmoving conception of America’s ideal future.
March 30th, 2008 15:10
Scratch a universalist humanitarian and you’ll ultimately find a rather milquetoast conservative.
Here’s why.
The welfare state must be defended, and by extension the political borders and nation-state conventions it is concretely based on. There’s a tension here between the liberal disdain for national borders and their commitment to upholding the redistributist and regulatory status quo.
March 30th, 2008 15:49
Well said, Will.
I’d love to see you interview PK on “Free Will”…hahaha. That would be fun. Having read PK’s book, I came away with a similar disdain.
But what you say is a nice summary of the premise advanced by Dan Klein and Harika Barlett in this paper.
Too bad your excellent analysis of PK (as well as that of Klein and Barlett) is not as easy to grasp for most people. It is indeed a very telling way and to expose PK for what he is.
March 30th, 2008 15:58
“Liberal Fascism is a more intellectually evenhanded book, which says more about Krugman than it does about Liberal Fascism, I’m afraid.”
Now that’s just stupid. Starting your argument that way is like starting a critique of Bush with “Bush is a Nazi” or writing a book called “Liberal Fascism” and expecting people to take it seriously.
Now, I’ve only read Krugman’s book once but you seem to take quite a bit of liberty with his immigration intentions. My estimation is Krugman has little problem with a nice inflow of immigration so long as it doesn’t create a political backlash that drives the working class into the hands of the nativists mostly trolling about the Republican party or worse yet turn the Democrats into a Nativist party as well. It’s a pragmatic calculation, something Libertarians, for all their nice traits, are quite awful at.
So yes, you could open up the borders and see a nice short term increase in Earthen income equalization followed by an isolationist backlash and a turn toward conservative economic policy and ending up with a hefty overall decrease in opportunity and equalization. So perhaps you should imagine Policy A beyond the short term which changes the outcome considerably. But as I said, Libertarians have never been good at translating theory into practice. In my estimation, that’s why they’ll always be big players in the political abstract of policy theory and cocktail discussions but on the margins when it comes to accomplishing anything practical. This post seems to be a perfect illustration.
I can see the Libertarian attraction to this argument but ask yourself if we can really greatly increase immigration and not expect a backlash. Don’t we already bring in the most immigrants of any nation? The calculus is much more complicated than how you present it.
March 30th, 2008 16:32
KJ,
Allowing Muslims into the country, to proselytize and accumulate wealth and likely political power could also very well drive the plebs into the hands of the Republicans. Should Muslims, then, be descriminated against?
One may as well say that Democrats being Democrats drives non-Democrats into the hands of Republicans. Thus Democrats should be…Republicans.
March 30th, 2008 17:58
“Liberal Fascism is a more intellectually evenhanded book, which says more about Krugman than it does about Liberal Fascism, I’m afraid.”
Now that feels like reading Ann Coulter! Maybe Krugman made a hash out of the argument, but Goldberg’s entire thesis is inherently, transparently frivolous.
March 30th, 2008 18:20
[...] I confess I have not read through Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal to the part Will is lambasting, so I can only go off of what I know of Krugman from his other writings, this bit still strikes me [...]
March 30th, 2008 19:30
Well, uh, to the extent that authoritarian elitists and police-backed technocratic paternalists essentially don’t trust people to run their own damn lives, I’d say Goldberg’s thesis isn’t INHERENTLY frivoulous.
The problem with Goldberg is that he has no credibility writing a book like that, supporter of Bush - a right wing social engineer - that he is.
March 30th, 2008 21:20
Perhaps Cato would care to join up with the immigration supporter quoted at my name’s link. I’m sure they have much in common.
(Note that her comments were warmly received and that “economists” frequently forget to include all the costs of immigration, including giving people like her more power.)
March 31st, 2008 11:42
I (perhaps wrongly) took part of Krugman’s point to be that policy A would increase political inequality at the global level: people who previously could vote now can’t.* To the extent that such political inequality is something that than an egalitarian might care about, it’s conceivable that they could think that policy A is worse than policy B, all things considered.
Now, I don’t personally buy this: individual choices to migrate seem to indicate pretty clearly which way they see the tradeoff between income and political rights; and I see little reason to second-guess them. But it seems possible at least, for an egalitarian to think this way.
*Yes, this depends on where the immigrants come from, but I think it’s defensible as an empirical generalisation.
April 8th, 2008 02:27
[...] Will Wilkinson, in discussing Paul Krugman’s recent book, writes: In Krugman’s view, if the working class contains many members without the franchise, it is [...]