The estimable Shika Dalmia, in a WSJ piece in favor of scrapping the current cap on H1-B’s, informs me:

In response, most industrialized countries, facing their own skills crunch, are liberalizing their immigration policies to make themselves more attractive. England recently scrapped its Byzantine work permit program in favor of a Canadian-style point system that will allow entry to some skilled workers even before they get a job. New Zealand has a remarkable program that gives accredited private companies fast-track access to work visas that they can hand to foreign workers along with a job offer. Australia is considering modifying its skilled visa program along similar lines.

Even more radical is the blue card program that the European Union proposed last year to bump up its skilled workforce by 20 million over 20 years. The card will admit not only skilled workers – but their entire families – and give spouses the legal right to work in all 27 EU countries within three months of applying. By contrast, the U.S. Congress recently questioned even a relatively modest suggestion by Bill Gates to raise or scrap the annual H-1B visa cap. Astoundingly, this cap was lowered to 1990 levels four years ago.

I want a blue card! The right to work in 27  other countries? Wow! That would be an immense increase in real freedom. I seriously want to look into this.

My own interest I guess is a clue to how this could work out in the long run, which is that an already stratified system of mobility rights will come to favor the wealthy and skilled even more heavily as jurisdictions compete for the most productive workers. I suspect that an increased volume of global migration among the skilled would do a good deal to acclimate incumbent residents to foreigners, thereby softening the ground for more general liberalization. But I’ll have to think about it. What do y’all think?

It looks like I’ve been unfair to Dean Baker. Thanks to Chris Hayes, I see that he’s generally been quite good on promoting skilled immigration as a means of lower national inequality. For example:

If Leonhardt and the NYT were interested in free trade, we could ask hospitals what barriers prevent them from hiring Mexican doctors who would be happy to work for one-half of the wages of their U.S. counterparts. We could do the same for law firms, universities, and even newspapers. We could standardize education and professional standards so that Mexican kids could grow up and work as doctors in Los Angeles or lawyers in New York, just as easily as kids born in Chicago or Boston. This would lead to huge gains to the U.S. economy and greater equality in the United States instead of greater inequality.

That makes a lot more sense to me, and I’m glad to see it. All apologies, Dean Baker. That said, the post I dug into below is now even more confusing to me.

Of course, I think allowing in foreign skilled professionals in order to bring down national inequality is silly. The reason to do so is that they are people, they should be free to work where they like, and allowing them in makes both them and incumbent residents better off.

Please absorb this extremely important advance in economic methodology and basic intellectual rigor:

Income Per Natural: Measuring Development as if People Mattered More Than Places

by Michael Clemens and Lant Pritchett

It is easy to learn the average income of a resident of El Salvador or Albania. But there is no systematic source of information on the average income of a Salvadoran or Albanian. In this new working paper, research fellow Michael Clemens and non-resident fellow Lant Pritchett create a new statistic: income per natural — the mean annual income of persons born in a given country, regardless of where that person now resides. If income per capita has any interpretation as a welfare measure, exclusive focus on the nationally resident population can lead to substantial errors of the income of the natural population for countries where emigration is an important path to greater welfare. The estimates differ substantially from traditional measures of GDP or GNI per resident, and not just for a handful of tiny countries. Almost 43 million people live in a group of countries whose income per natural collectively is 50 percent higher than GDP per resident. For 1.1 billion people the difference exceeds 10 percent. The authors also show that poverty estimates are different for national residents and naturals; for example, 26 percent of Haitian naturals who are not poor by the two-dollar-a-day standard live in the United States. These estimates are simply descriptive statistics and do not depend on any assumptions about how much of observed income differences across naturals is selection and how much is a pure location effect. Our conservative, if rough, estimate is that three quarters of this difference represents the effect of international migration on income per natural.

The bottom line: migration is one of the most important sources of poverty reduction for a large portion of the developing world. If economic development is defined as rising human well being, then a residence-neutral measure of well-being emphasizes that crossing international borders is not an alternative to economic development, it is economic development.

The whole paper is here.

Note that this isn’t an argument open to some kind of refutation. It’s just a better way of measuring things — a way that makes the way the world works clearer. Seeing this alternative metric in action should help us realize just how much of profound moral importance is obscured by the economic nationalism at the foundations of conventional welfare economics. Soon enough, it simply won’t be an option for honest intellectuals to ignore the perspective Clemens and Pritchett encourage us to adopt. Paul Krugman: hello!

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.

My comments are teeming with racists good people who believe in the racial and cultural superiority of Americans of European descent clearly terrified by the prospect of the breakdown of Anglo-European cultural hegemony in America. The worry seems to be that with a slightly liberalized immigration regime the U.S. will swiftly devolve into some kind of squalid hell.

Like California?

[Click for bigger image.]

Presently, whites are well less than half the Calfornian population. Hispanics make up just more than a third. Asians at 12 percent are nearly double the black population. I’d guess it won’t be long before Hispanics pass whites to become a plurality.

Now, if my fearful commenters aren’t simply making things up in their paranoid dreams, wouldn’t California be a complete disaster already? Of course, we all know that, were it a country, California would be the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world. The median household income in California, $54,385, ranks 11th in the U.S., and would put California right near the top of the world rankings.

No doubt the browning of California has become unpleasant for some white natives. But according to the 2007 United Van Lines internal migration study, California just had another year of decline in out-bound intra-U.S. migration rates, leaving net migration about a wash. And the out-migration that exists is probably more a result of price pressure than white flight, given that California is the most expensive state in the country in which to live. Indeed, the fact that more people don’t leave due to such high costs is an indication of how desirable life in California must be. Arizona, a border state whose population is almost a third Hispanic (and that percentage is swiftly growing), is one of the favorite destinations for internal American migration, and in some recent years has been the favorite. So Arizona, which boasts a median family income right around the national median, is either doing just fine or the many thousands of Americans who move there each year are stupid.

So what gives my xenophobic friends? If the idea is that the U.S. will inevitably slide toward second-world status if the whole place comes to look a lot more like California and Arizona demographically, wouldn’t you expect California and Arizona to be much poorer and much less popular? I mean, given the claims I’m getting from some of you, these places ought to be nightmares. But instead they are … really nice places to live!

Anyway, I can’t say I’m looking forward to the explanation of how it is that, if suddenly cut loose from the Union, an independent California and its half-wit citizens would swiftly vote its way into conditions resembling the slums of Calcutta. But I’m pretty sure it’s coming…

So…, James Poulos had said:

The big problem with Gerson’s ‘moral internationalism’ is not that it has a big heart or a goofy smile. The big problem is that it’s inimical to citizenship. Gerson and his ilk long for the day that Americans don’t get a better shake in life just because they’re Americans.

I was a bit confused by the possibility of a decent person denying the fundamental moral equality of human beings, so I asked in comments:

Just to be clear, you think Americans ought to get a better shake in life just because they’re Americans?

In the comments, James ends up endorsing this view, from J.A.:

Whether you subscribe to the notion that America’s prosperity and stability are undeserved accidents of a less-than-honorable history, or, alternatively, happy results of the Constitution and better than average leadership — or, in fact, if you believe neither or a combination of these — do other peoples, less fortunate in their circumstances, have legitimate moral claims on us for access to them? If you take as a given that America is, comparatively speaking, a really good place to live, work, and raise a family — which I think is obviously a true statement — then the question is not whether Americans should get a better shake in life; they do get a better shake in life by virtue of being citizens in a “really good place to live, work and raise a family.” The question isn’t even one of just deserts. The question is, what moral claims can non-citizens make on American citizens given the fact of American prosperity and stability?

Yes, Americans get a better shake in life than most people in the world in virtue of having had the good sense to get born in the United States, which does have relatively excellent institutions. Yes, those institutions are a main reason so many people come to live and work here. But I cannot make sense of the concluding question. Does J.A. think that the fact Americans are so rich weakens the obligations of Americans to non-citizens? I guess that would be an… interesting thing to think.

There is no need for confusion about the question at hand, which is clear enough: What justifies state-imposed limits on the human rights to movement and free association?

A country is not a big plot of land owned by its citizens. It is a jurisdiction of government within which there are many free people and many pieces of privately-owned property — at least if the government is decent. But suppose one is simple and thinks citizens own countries in much the way a family can own a farm. What then?

First, back up to the question of the justification of a system of private property. The division of the commons into parcels, and the use of government coercion to enforce private claims over these parcels — which include the right to exclude — requires a justification. Dave Schmidtz provides that justification here [doc]. In short, dividing the commons leaves each with more than had it remained open. The right to exclude enables general prosperity.

So, think of the Earth as a big commons, and imagine borders as fences. Can we justify the system of nation-states and its migration controls in the same way? Evidently not. The welfare gains that would come from even a mild decrease in coercive limits on travel and free association are awesomely huge, which of course implies that the status quo system of limits does not leave most people better off than they would be in a feasible alternative system. And this suggests that the global-level system of division and exclusion lacks moral justification.

Citizens may have stronger claims on one another than they have on non-citizens. And they may have stronger claims one another than non-citizens have on them, because they share the burdens and benefits of a set of common institutions. But everyone, no matter who printed their passport, has equal claim to the respect of their basic rights. Citizens are under a strict obligation not to harm or violate the rights of non-citizens. The status quo system, which limits the freedom to travel and cooperation without benefiting most of those whose freedom is limited, amounts to both a substantive and moral harm; it denies some basic conditions for human flourishing and a thereby constitutes a violation of basic rights. What non-citizens have coming to them, is the recognition of their rights, moral respect as persons.

Limiting basic rights to travel and associate may be justified if it is necessary to maintain the integrity and stability of instutitions that tend to make people better off overall. The United States economy and its supporting institutions are hugely beneficial not only to those who live and work within them, but more broadly. I am open to serious, empirically-minded arguments about the location of the point at which additional openness to migration leads to diminishing benefits. But, I’m afraid, one sees very little of this.

Heads up, globalist pigs! Kerry’s interview with Lant Pritchett, now online, is full of great stuff about how to increase liberty and well-being at the same time! Here’s a taste:

Pritchett: [...] Being against migration to the United States is wrong for two reasons. One, I don’t think it gets the scale of the poverty in the United States vs. poverty in the rest of the world right. Second, if you are really concerned about inequality in the United States, there are many things you can do that would be better than blocking other people from coming to our country. I don’t want to say that people who are concerned about inequality in the U.S. aren’t right to be concerned about inequality in the U.S. But I think taking that concern and using it to keep people from coming to the United States is victimizing the world’s true victims in favor of people who happen to live closer to you.

Reason: It seems strange to worry more about inequality within the arbitrary boundaries of a nation-state than about much larger global inequalities.

Pritchett: Exactly. I’ve never understood a view of the world in which the place in which a person was born becomes the key factor in whether you care about them.

Pritchett is nice; he says he doesn’t understand this view of the world. What I’d like to think he means is that it is obviously a sign of a shamefully stunted moral sense to see shared national membership as the key condition for giving a damn.

The conclusion to Kerry’s prelude is great:

What’s keeping so many would-be migrants in place? “Men with guns,” Pritchett says. His message is less a call to arms than a call to lay them down, less a provocation than a vision of a richer, better, freer world.

That’s libertarianism right there.

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.

Kerry’s spate of recent writing on immigration is making me think differently.

First, prior to reading her interview with Laura Agustin, I had not occurred to me to think of a Mexican gardner as an “expat” or that relatively poor people might also be interested in traveling across borders out of curiosity or a sense of adventure. That really is shameful. My inner Kant, my inner Christian, recoils at my failure to see persons as persons as persons, all with reasons worth taking seriously, all very like my own.

Second, Kerry’s latest reply to Megan makes me realize that I have dated a guest worker! She was an au pair from Germany, in the U.S. under a J1 “exchange visitors” visa. She worked for a living, taking care of children. She came because she wanted to see America. A year later, she left, having lived the expat life while helping raise some small girls. Like most transient guest workers, she left America no worse. On the contrary. Now, if you think this case is different because she was (still is!) German, then clearly your problem isn’t really with guest workers, is it?

If you have yet to read Kerry’s Reason cover on guest-worker programs, you’re falling behind. It is simply the best thing anyone has lately done on guest-worker programs, beautifully written and brilliantly reasoned. This part is phenomenal:

As Americans struggle with the implications of immigrants who come to live but not to stay, their single greatest objection to a guest worker plan may have nothing to do with migrant well-being. The gains for immigrants are demonstrably too big and the need too great to lend credibility to those who cast all guest workers as victims. According to the Inter-American Development Bank, migrants send $62.3 billion in remittances to Latin American and the Caribbean last year, keeping 8 to 10 million families above the poverty line. The unexplored opportunities for mutually advantageous cooperation are massive and undeniable. But it seems dirty. “It simply feels exploitative and un-American to allow migrants in without giving them a shot at becoming citizens,” writes Jacob Weisberg in Slate.

The economist Lawrence Summers, a former president of Harvard, has expressed this objection in somewhat loftier terms. In a critique of Harvard’s Pritchett, Summers explains: “Lant’s kind of compassionate libertarianism carries the risk of a morally problematic coarsening that we resist in many other ways.” The problem with guest worker programs, in other words, has nothing to do with the good of guest workers, and everything to do with the moral harm that proximate poverty might cause to their hosts. Allowing workers entry to the United States might be mutually beneficial for employer and employee, all the while producing corrosive cultural externalities. Summers seems to think that guest workers will inure Americans to a system of class stratification and undermine a shared, naive sense of global solidarity.

The moral calculus, then, is to be weighed between the welfare of potential workers and the preservation of an idealized American narrative. Does it reflect better on the American character to lock poor people out than to permit them entry on limited terms? Guest worker programs do clash with deeply held mythologies about our relationship to the global poor. We live in a state of relative political equality nested awkwardly within a deeply unequal world, and it can seem better, kinder, to keep the inequality outside, walling it off and keeping our hands clean. Perhaps American egalitarianism, like a dress too precious to be worn, is a value too dear to expose to the real world. As the essayist Richard Rodriguez, himself the son of Mexican immigrants, has written, “Americans prefer unknowing.”

Do you prefer unknowing? Read it.

At VoxEu Esther Duflo outlines a new study on assimilation of Muslim immigrants in Britain by LSE’s Alan Manning and Sanchari Roy:

Manning and Roy rightly conclude that, on the basis of available evidence, Huntington’s pessimism - that Muslim immigrants will prove “indigestible” to non-Muslim societies, seems unjustified indeed. If anything, the constant reminders of “native” Europeans that there is “us” and “them”, the new, scary, Muslim immigrants and their offspring may do substantially more to create a rift than any religious or cultural feeling these immigrants have brought with them and transferred to their children.

So chill.

Brad Pitt is leading an initiative to build a bunch of houses designed by fancy architecture firms in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. That’s nice. But why not build these houses elsewhere, perhaps a place less likely to flood, a place with jobs?

Responding to critics who question the wisdom of rebuilding at all in an area likely to get hit again, Mr. Pitt said: “My first answer to that is, talk to the people who’ve lived there and have raised their kids there. People are needing to get back in their homes.”

I don’t think this helps Pitt’s case, exactly. People ought to be encouraged to move where the opportunities are, not enticed with designer accommodations to stay in a struggling place prone to disaster. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are and where we’re from can, through some good old-fashioned emotional alchemy, create pride from deprivation. When that’s all you’ve got—or all you can get—that’s a great thing indeed. But our narratives of place and tribe are too often an identity-arresting form of self-indulgence that can consign our kids to second-class lives.  We may fear that we will disintegrate or disappear if we leave the neighborhood, quit the church, forsake our roots, sell out, but we won’t. Those fears are deep, terrifying, and almost completely unfounded. Our allegiance to our stories and our enchanted places do not save us so much as comfort us against the specters of uncertainty and enable us to feel righteous in inaction. People are not needing to get back in their homes.

Writing about Clive Crook’s clear-headed essay on the downsides of homeownership, a, umm…, certain Economist blogger said something that could just as well apply to Pitt’s project.

Subsidising homeownership through huge tax breaks not only reinforces a cultural ethos in which home ownership is considered central to the American Dream, but also reinforces pernicious communitarian myths of the profound romance in seeing nothing and going nowhere.

This is an exceedingly unpopular thought, but it is a necessary one. Often, when we discourage people from leaving, we discourage them from thriving. When a better life is a bus ride away, it is obviously inhuman to slap a tax on tickets. And just how different from that is a subsidy to stay? I’ll be very pleased if the people who are given these houses thrive, but I also won’t be astonished if their lives aren’t transformed by their sleek new designer anchors.

Steve Burton helpfully lays out his version of the exchange between Daniel Larison and me. Isolated posts tackling complex issues are sure to lack the context of a broader set of assumption laid out across many different posts, no one reads every blog post, and anyway many of my posts are dashed off, unclear, and confused, so Steve bears no blame for mischaracterizing my argument:

In other words, maximizing the minimum (i.e., making the least well-off better off) should be our overriding moral goal. So Americans should welcome unlimited immigration from Mexico, Zimbabwe, etc., even if it makes most Americans worse off, because it makes the immigrants from Mexico, Zimbabwe, etc., better off — and Mexicans, Zimbabweans, etc. are less well-off than Americans. So, from a Rawlsian (or Rawlsish) point of view, their interests count for more than ours do.

I think this actually misunderstands the point of the difference principle in Rawls — or at least the way I like to interpret him. It is in everyone’s interest to live in a peaceful society of mutual advantage. A system of institutions requires that everyone living within it have reason to support it, and to comply with the terms of association it lays down, if it is to be well-ordered and stable. If the basic structure of institutions leaves some people much worse off than they could be under a feasible alternative, then they have no reason to accept its terms, or to comply with them. Now, I reject a strict maximin rule. I think it would be ridiculous to expect the wealthiest to make huge sacrifices to make the least well-off only marginally better off. The “strains of commitment” matter, and asking too much of the top can be as unjust and destabilizing as asking too much of the bottom. But, generally, asking if a system leave the least well-off better-off than the alternatives is simply a focused way of asking whether the system benefits everyone, and not only those with the most power to ensure that it benefits them.

In the post Steve references, I’m trying to draw attention to the fact that the basic structure of the global system of border enforcement and legal exclusion from labor market participation badly disadvantages millions and possibly billions. These people have no reason to accept or comply with the terms of the current dispensation, and in fact, many millions do not, crossing borders and working illegally. This non-compliance is a sign of the system’s injustice. Many millions of people are harmed by the status quo, which is why those people, who weigh their interests as heavily as we weigh ours, revolt against it by sneaking across borders and taking jobs that are offered to them. If we reject Thrasymachus, and seek justice and not merely advantage, we will take the harm we cause into account when considering how our domestic policies contribute to the justice of the overall global scheme.

I think our duties of beneficence are quite weak, unlike the utilitarian. We do not have great positive duties to others simply in virtue of their existence. We come to have strong positive duties due to our agreements and our special relationships. I deny that shared citizenship is a special relationship that confers especially strong positive duties. But however strong our duties to compatriots may be, they do not outweigh our negative duty not to harm or to respect basic rights. I may give my children everything, and others’ children nothing. But I may not kill anyone, no matter how much it helps my family. My argument is not so much that the policies of most wealthy countries represent a greedy parochialism, but that they actively harm and violate fundamental rights to physical movement and voluntary association. The essentially cooperative nature of justice is highlighted by the fact that we can ameliorate some of the harmful effects of the present system by implementing reforms policies that would make natives of rich countries better off on average. Though, of course, our strict duty not to actively harm others does not end when it begins to cut into our privilege.

There much more, naturally. For now, I hope that leaves things a little clearer.

Reason’s Kerry Howley (to whom I devote most of my energy for exclusive local attachment) introduced me to Lant Pritchett’s exciting and radical work on immigration, and knows way more about this stuff than I do, being a real journalist who covers this issue. So she’s got the goods on Larison’s ill-supported points about brain drain:

it’s probably not a great thing for a community to lose its most motivated members. But, this, too, is far more complicated than Larison wants to admit. We don’t know nearly as much as he pretends we do about the trade-offs, but we do know that people respond to incentives when they consider whether or not to pursue education. Thus, as the Center for Global Development’s Michael Clemens has shown, claims that the U.S. is stripping Africa of health care workers probably have it backward. Health care workers who immigrate to the United States may never have acquired those skills were immigration not an option. The countries Clemens studied didn’t suffer from a lack of health care workers, generally; they suffered from the fact that they could not employ the workers they educated. There is no incentive to acquire skills you have no hope of using, and the most motivated people in a community might not be motivated at all absent the hope of exit.

And Kerry’s analysis of Daniel’s analogy to domestic ghettos is spot-on:

Applied domestically, the alternate policy would be rather like forcing people to stay in undeveloped inner city ghettos. It would mean telling the children of poor parents that they could never leave the economically backward neighborhood they happened to be born in, even if that neighborhood offered no education or employment opportunities. It would entail prohibiting suburbanites from inviting inner city residents onto their property to perform an economic service.

You didn’t know it before now, but you are anxiously awaiting Kerry’s forthcoming Reason feature story on guest worker programs.

Daniel Larison kindly responds at length. There’s too much to discuss in one post. I’ll start here:

In any case, the two posts in question are expositions of the observation that conservatives do not hold his kind of libertarian assumptions about national identity and borders, because, among other things, they do not and cannot take liberty to be the moral baseline. They make distinctions between citizens and non-citizens, nationals and non-nationals, which they consider to be not simply prudent but actually obligatory and right. Neither do conservatives, or most people for that matter, judge the efficiacy and worthiness of U.S. immigration policy on the basis of whether it aids the populations of ”developing” nations, because we do not think that it is the role of the U.S. government to set its policies to maximise the prosperity of the populatiions of “developing” nations. Having put up a rather eccentric set of standards, Mr. Wilkinson finds that conservatives are not measuring up. That’s all very well, but I don’t know that it tells us very much. That is why I wrote the concluding remarks that I did.

Well, I’m not taking liberty as the moral baseline. My baseline in these posts has been primarily a concern for human well-being. People improve their material condition chiefly through cooperative exchange. Rules that restrict the liberty of people to move to where the economic opportunities are directly negatively affect their prospects. Whether or not you take a condition of liberty as the baseline, the fact is that people do worse in a world where their liberty is denied. Or at least that is my claim. Like everyone else, I make the distinction between citizen and non-citizen, national and non-national. But, like Daniel in his better moments, I also think it is possible to consider our obligations to others as fellow human beings, and not only as countrymen, teammates, or fraternity brothers. The issue between Daniel and me isn’t over the fact that some people are citizens and other people aren’t. The issue has to do with the moral salience or relevance of this fact. Daniel seems to me to want to either deny the possibility of prioritizing our humanity over our more local, exclusive attachments, or to affirm the perversity of doing so. I agree that it is “eccentric” to ask whether the global system of mostly sealed borders hurts people — even when those people don’t go to our church, or live in our town, or hold the same passport as we do, or speak our language, or look much like us. But good people will ask it anyway. If they find that the system does hurt people, good people will not consider this irrelevant to policy.

He berates conservatives for privileging the interests of fellow citizens and countrymen (which he finds “morally abhorrent”), but beyond asserting that this act of privileging is wrong he does not give any persuasive reason why this should be so, except to fall back on his assumption that distinguishing between citizen and non-citizen is arbitrary and wrong.

This is silly. I don’t deny that fellow citizens may have special obligations to one another, so I can’t deny that the distinction between citizen and non-citizen is “wrong,” though it is pretty arbitrary. Yes, I deny that it is generally morally permissible to weigh the interests of citizens more highly than the interests of non-citizens. But with no persuasive reason? Perhaps part of the problem here is a conflict in views about which set of assumptions is the default, and thus who bears the burden of establishing something different. Daniel apparently finds it intuitive or natural that someone born in Minnesota must weigh the interests of someone born on a U.S. Naval base in the Philipines more heavily than the interests of his co-workers who live a mile away across the Canadian border. I don’t find this intuitive at all. I don’t find it that intuitive or natural that I owed a person less regard on Tuesday because they weren’t sworn in as a citizen until Wednesday. The reasons I think privileging the interests of people of my nationality is wrong are basically the reasons I would cite when explaining why privileging the interests of people of the same race or the same sex is wrong. Nationality, like race and sex, is generally a morally irrelevant attribute. If Daniel is unmoved by the assumption that the lives and interests of black, whites, men, women, Ethiopians, Danes, and Americans ought to be weighed equally, unless there is a very special justification for weighing them unequally, then I am not sure what I will be able to say to him.

Yes, United States policy doesn’t govern Ethiopians (those not already in the U.S., at least), so the U.S. needn’t have their interests specifically in mind when crafting its public health policy. But the issue is rather more complicated when the policies in question are policies for assigning nationality or legal residency. It is up to democratic citizens to choose these policies. How heavily ought we (and every other democratic public) weigh the interests of people we might admit within our borders? My position is more heavily. Daniel’s position seems to be “not at all,” if that’s what we want. And he seems to think that’s what we should want.

This is not the first time Daniel Larison has replied to a post of mine with a thought like this:

Mr. Wilkinson has successfully shown once again that he hates boundary maintenance–both of the physical and the metaphorical kind–and that conservatives favour it, which is why he isn’t a conservative.  Very illuminating.

Apparently, Daniel thinks I spend a good deal of time saying nothing more substantive than that I do not agree with things I disagree with. It therefore strikes me as odd that Daniel’s posts in response to my vacuities are so long.

Anyway, I don’t think anyone who has paid attention to what I have been saying thinks I’m indiscriminately against boundaries. I’m against boundaries that do not make people better off. I like systems of private property — which include lots of boundaries — because the ability to exclude on this scale and in this way enables the ability to productively invest and coordinate, leaving most everyone better off over time. One can justify this system of boundaries to the least well-off by showing how it will tend to make them better off than the alternatives. It may not benefit them most, but they will be worse off without something like it. However, national boundaries are not like fences around parcels of property. And unlike local systems of property, the global system of exclusion through citizenships, visas, and borders has manifestly failed to make the world’s least well-off better off. On the contrary, it has trapped billions in miserable poverty. They have reason to affirm the terms of this system … why? If Daniel doesn’t think the suffering of billions counts as an argument against the current global system of exclusion by nationality, then what would? Anyway, it’s just dense to think my argument is a bit of autobiography explaining why I don’t identify as a conservative. My argument is that vast human suffering is caused by the systematic denial of the liberty of movement and association. Maybe I’m wrong about that. But it’s hard to come up with a less trivial claim.

Now, if Daniel does little more than tells us again and again that he is proud to be indifferent to suffering and injustice just as long as it takes place outside the coalitions in which he chooses (for whatever reasons) to embed himself, and that is why he is a conservative, well, that’s still pretty illuminating.

One of the Economist’s Free Exchange bloggers, with whom I mysteriously seldom disagree, last night presciently rebutted Robert Samuelson’s deplorable column today in the Post. Samuelson, like Robert Rector, who the Economist blogger was addressing, advises that we reduce the poverty rate by allowing fewer poor people to cross our borders—which is to say, by promoting poverty. As the Economist blogger put it:

It takes a special kind of brazenness to propose a reduction of the national poverty rate at the expense of ensuring that more people stay poor by denying them opportunity to set foot in the nation.

If Mr Rector cared about actual human poverty, as opposed to some statistic about the number of Americans beneath what he agrees is an arbitrary line, he’d favour an increase in legal immigration and some kind of guest-worker program. If these policies were to inflate American poverty rates, as they surely would, that would be something to be proud of. From a humanitarian perspective, if a wealthy nation’s poverty rate improves, then it isn’t letting enough poor people in.

Rector and Samuelson seem to be in the grip of what I like to call the Augusta National Golf Club model of the nation state. It’s our club, so we can keep women (or poor people, or anyone) out if we like.

People who never encounter them.

Kerry reports at Reason that state and local tough-on-immigration laws come primarily from places next to no one immigrates to.

In a report to be published by the American Immigration Law Foundation (AILF) in September, [San Diego State sociologist Jill] Esbenshade finds that almost 80 percent of the localities where ordinances have been discussed had below the national average of Latino population share in 2000.

I found this contrast especially illuminating:

Meanwhile, Missouri’s newly deputized immigration enforcers have claimed the right to detain even immigrants who would not otherwise be arrested. As Gov. Blunt fills the state’s detention centers, he might ponder the last time the state experienced an “unnatural influx” of migrants. In the first half of the 20^th century, another politically unpopular group—Southern blacks—flooded into Missouri, bringing culture and identity, barbeque and blues. School kids learn to call that the “Great Migration”; politicians refer to today’s “immigration crisis.”

Yesterday’s cultural synthesis is today’s cultural amnesia, I guess. Which reminds me that I keep forgetting to visit Kansas City’s American Jazz Museum.

Mexican birthrates are plummeting, according to GW economist Robert Dunn in The American:

Some politicians fear that we are being “Mexicanized.” In fact the opposite may be underway. NAFTA, our mass media, the more widespread use of English, and the large number of people going back and forth (legally or otherwise) mean that Mexicans are increasingly influenced by our culture, and that implies fewer babies. The United States also has a fertility rate of 2.1, but that is the same as it was in 1990. Mexico is becoming more similar to the United States, which must frustrate their nationalists.

The main point for the United States is that we have only a temporary problem with illegal immigration from Mexico. For another decade or a bit more we must attempt to limit such entry, but then the problem will fade like the smile on the Cheshire Cat. Lou Dobbs, Rep. Tancredo and their nationalistic friends can calm down and relax.

Then we expand NAFTA to include a common labor market and bring in low-wage labor from even poorer countries.

I am unimpressed by Tyler’s reply to Tyrone. I don’t relish the gimmicky nature of Tyrone’s proposals, and my commitment to the rule of law excludes setting forth the intentional disregard for the law as a positive reform. That said, Tyrone is in important ways both a better liberal and a better utilitarian than Tyler, at least in this case. And Tyler’s reply, “Poor Tyrone has no idea of the cultural foundations of democracy,” sounds like a glib piece of reactionary agitprop in the absence of evidence that Tyrone’s proposals would indeed erode the cultural foundations of the institutions that make the U.S. such an attractive target of migration.

I am the last person to deny that “moral infrastructure” is of fundamental importance. But opponents of liberal migration and labor policies too often confuse dynamic cultural change for cultural erosion. I more afraid that fat, tenured Americans will become too risk averse and insurance-minded than that hungry, entrepreneurial new entrants will undermine the very institutions they came to benefit from. Why not think that, on the one hand, our institutions  transform newcomers culturally more than they transform our institutions, while, on the other hand, newcomers keep our institutions vital and growth-minded, rather than moribund and insurance-mided? I wonder if Anthony de Jasay’s reply to a very different argument doesn’t apply here, too:

It so happens that under the hypothesis of an accumulated pool of agreeable externalities, the very processes of production and exchange that are enriched by people helping themselves to the pool, and by so doing depleting it so that less is left for latecomers, must be agreed by the same token to be replenishing the pool by the agreeable externalities they generate. For if past social cooperation has left over externalities that enrich the present, why should we not assume that present social cooperation will likewise enrich the future?–though room may always be left for the second-order question about the present doing enough for the future.

[Update: In the comments Tyler clarifies, "Sometimes Tyler is simply too obscure. I meant the line about cultural foundations to be poking fun at others, namely that a nation can be too stupid to embrace certain bright ideas…and that, sadly, that is part of democracy too." I think I see! So... Then Tyler agrees with the upshot of Tyrone's ideas after all, but just thinks they are too infeasible to take seriously, given democractic stupidity?

 You should of course pre-order Tyler's book and get access to his super-secret blog hideout. I got my hands on a review copy and have read most of it. It's good. Short review forthcoming.]

Like the editors of the New Republic seem to think? The Center for Global Development’s Michael Clemens cooly annihilates the vile comparison.

I take a breath and count to ten. First, and emphatically, we must set the brutal, coercive slave trade completely and irrevocably apart from Chinese and Mexican immigration, which has been almost universally voluntary. Forcing Africans to come to this country and work for nothing was indeed far beyond unsavory and it did reflect, in its time, the worst instincts of this country. A colossal difference lies between this and the braceros’ decision to come here and work for pay. Slaves were indeed “imported” as subhuman commodities. Mexicans and Chinese chose to come. And allowing people to voluntarily pursue their dreams is not something for which we should hang our heads in shame.

Now: What is the alternative to admitting Chinese and Mexicans to do “difficult” work here in a “shadowy” underclass? The alternative was not mass admission of unskilled labor with full citizenship, which would have been politically impossible and continues to be. For most of them, the alternative was not to come at all, and the temporary worker provision of the Immigration Act embodies a sophisticated understanding of this fact. If the US had not admitted Chinese and Mexicans in the past, those people would have remained where they were: doing far more difficult work in a sub-sub-underclass in the places they came from — not just shadowy, but completely invisible to Americans. How do we know it was that bad where they were before? Because despite the enormous hardships of coming here, both groups kept on choosing to come, for many decades. Immigrants, bluntly, are not stupid; they know what makes them better off, and they act on it.

The failure of the Immigration Reform Act means no temporary worker program, so fewer people will have that chance for a better life. The way the editors of the New Republic excoriate that provision of the bill, you’d think the bill’s collapse is a victory in the fight against poverty.

Michael is an incredibly smart guy who really knows what he’s talking about. Please read the rest.

I am glad to see Ross explicitly lay out in his gracious rejoinder what he takes the alternative to the liberal moral baseline to be:

I suppose I prefer to think that constitutionalism and Judeo-Christian ethics are the moral baseline where government action is concerned. That is, I believe that the government of the United States should strive to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,” and do so without trampling on any of the liberties enumerated in the Constitution; at the same time, I would prefer that America’s leaders pursue policies that are broadly consonant with the Judeo-Christian tradition. (No wars of aggression, for instance.) And I’m pretty sure that “unrestricted voluntary cooperation between human beings” isn’t a liberty that the Constitution protects, since the Congress is explicitly granted the power to regulate both interstate and international commerce.

Fair enough, though I don’t think specifically Judeo-Christian ethics are an acceptable baseline in a pluralistic society with tens of millions of citizens who do not accept the authority of that ethical tradition. That said, observing the principle of equal liberty (i.e., “that every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberty to every other man”) with regard to trade in labor is also perfectly consonant with both the Judeo-Christian tradition and the U.S. Constitution. So Ross’s baseline seems to me largely irrelevant to his restrictionism, other than not obviously ruling it out. And, as a moral matter, it does nothing to establish what I see as his nationalism: the preference for the well-being of co-citizens over non-citizens, or the preference for reductions in inequality among citizens over even larger reductions of inequality between citizens and non-citizens.

The ultimate reason to endorse liberal principles is that adherence to them produces conditions under which human beings are most likely to thrive (according to the broadest variety of different conceptions of thriving). Even from a nationalist point of view, it is necessary to justify deviations from the principles that are most likely to improve the welfare of the nation’s citizens. The argument Ross had offered seemed to be based on the idea that, although de facto not-completely-restricted trade in labor with Mexican workers likely produces net benefits for the nation, these benefits come at the expense of some of the least well-off citizens. The unarticulated argument, I take it, is that certain patterns of material holdings are, for one reason or another, in the interest of the nation, and so that it may be morally legitimate to restrict the liberties of all citizens, and reduce the average national material well-being, so that less well-off citizens may be made better off (or not worse off).

Even if we hold fixed nationalist assumptions, this line of thinking is unconvincing. If we’re worried about patterns of material holdings, then we could, alternatively, not further restrict the freedom of citizens to trade in labor with migrant workers, go ahead and realize the economic surplus, and then reallocate some portion of the surplus to achieve the desired pattern of holdings. This produces a gain all around – even if we don’t take the welfare of migrant workers into account — and without restricting the liberty of citizens to cooperate with others to mutual advantage. So it is hard to see how what I called a “Rawlsian nationalist” worried about the national pattern of income and holdings could rationally use this worry as a lever for restrictions on the inflow of foreign workers.

I appreciate Ross’s meditation on the relationship between Christianity and immigration policy (I think Christianity, which sees all souls as having equal value under the eyes of God, is pretty flatly incompatible with all but the most tepid nationalisms, but nobody’s going to take my heathen word for it) which I think identifies one of the chief issue of contention between us.

There are all sorts of variables that the government of a Christian society should weigh when deciding how many migrants to admit, chief among them the effect of migration on civil peace and political stability, both of which are taken somewhat for granted in contemporary America but which have historically been rather fragile things. How to weigh these variables is a point on which intelligent people, Christian and otherwise, can disagree. 

I would say we are a society containing a large majority of Christians, not a Christian society, but I agree that “civil peace and political stability” are at the heart of the issue. Statist liberals often worry about the destabilizing effects of income inequality. Statist conservatives often worry about the destabilizing effects of cultural change. Ross evidently worries about both, which puts him at odds with cosmopolitan dynamism on two separate fronts. In this sense, I think Ross’s concerns about eroding American national identity and nation-level economic inequality are of a piece. But I think the actual evidence of destabilization, either from national economic inequality or from immigrant-led social change, is very scant. I, for one, think we are in a period of both rapidly evolving American cultural identity and increasing social, political, and economic stability. Ross is right that this is an argument worth having, and I think we’re starting to have it, which is good. Let the data soar!

But, I’ve got to insist, the arguments over (a) whether the existence of political boundaries and co-citizenship is a conversation-stopper when it comes to matters of justice, and (b) over the amount of moral consideration to give to the well-being of non-citizens when it comes to assessing the costs and benefits of trade, are also worth having (i.e., worth not avoiding.)

Reihan has also written a long, meaty rejoinder (and who doesn’t take pleasure in Reihan’s long, meaty rejoinder?). I’ll get to that a bit later when I get a chance.       

George Borjas writes:

We always tend to think of the U.S. as a “nation of immigrants.” About 12% of the U.S. population today is foreign-born. It is eye-opening to put this number in perspective. Just look at some of the data collected by the U.N.:

Ireland, 14.1% foreign-born
Sweden, 12.4%
United Kingdom, 9.1%
Greece, 8.8%
Spain, 11.1%
Austria, 15.1%
France, 10.7%
Germany, 12.3%
Netherlands, 10.1%
Switzerland, 22.9%

That’s percentage of the population foreign-born. The U.S. is even more of a laggard in inflows of foreign nationals as a percentage of population. Here is a graph from the OECD factbook:

Inflow of Foreign Nationals as a Percentage of Total Population among OECD Countries, 2004

[Click for full graph]

I’ve been poring over national quality of life statistics for the past two years now, and I can tell you for sure that Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada are much better places to live for the average person, in terms of QoL indicators, than the countries at the bottom the list. Part of it is that immigrants know what they’re doing: they go where the opportunity is. Part of it is that high immigrant in-flows are a vital part of a thriving economy and society.

Grinding his Christian universalism under his nationalist heel, Ross Douthat breezily sets forth a multiply fallacious argument on the premise that there is no intellectual or moral difference between confiscatory redistribution and voluntary exchange when citizens of other countries are involved:

A slightly better way of putting what Matt is driving at, I think, is this: Large-scale immigration from Mexico to the United States is a form of de facto humanitarianism, and since Americans are generally leery of humanitarian spending (primarily because we overestimate the size of our existing foreign aid budget), liberal humanitarians have a vested interest in preserving the existing immigration system. It’s a rare issue where business interests line up on the side of raising the living standards of Third World peasants, and why mess with a good thing? Better, as Matt suggests, to go after the global elite in other arenas – like tax policy, say – where the business class’s preferred policies don’t have humanitarian externalities.

To which one might respond that there’s something slightly perverse about pursuing humanitarian ends through policies that lower the incomes of your poorest citizens and raise the incomes of your richest citizens. If I proposed a new AIDS-in-Africa initiative and advocated funding it through a regressive tax that included a tax credit for families making over $75,000, I doubt that many liberals would line up behind the proposal.

I’ll muster some charity and assume that Ross is simply confused here. But he really is badly confused.

It’s a rather profound error to characterize voluntary trade between American employers and Mexicans workers as equivalent to ”humanitarian spending,” as if money tax revenue had been withdrawn from the Treasury and sent to Mexicans. There is indeed a pecuniary externality of Mexican workers in the American labor market – downward price pressure from competition — and this can indeed have an effect on the pattern of American incomes. But it is a pretty basic and embarrassing mistake to confuse (1) coercive state confiscation and reallocation of income with (2) changing patterns of income from voluntary exchange.

Perhaps Ross really does think that the U.S. government has taken money from the pockets of the producers of Oceans 13 by refusing to ban Pirates of the Carribean, but I think he’s smarter than that. Government tax policy requires justification. Distribution of tax revenue require justification. Exercising our rights doesn’t.

That Ross is liable see the issue in this weird, mistaken way does indicate that he thinks some sort of nationalism is the legitimate moral baseline. The liberal (in the broad sense) presumption of freedom, on the other hand, has it that unrestricted voluntary cooperation between human beings is the moral baseline. Deviations from this require special justification. Given the liberal baseline, labor market restrictions (that’s what we’re talking about here – whether to further restrict American labor markets), besides standing as a violation of the rights of both Americans and Mexicans to freely associate and trade with one another, amount to a transfer of income from Mexican workers and American consumers to some low-skilled American workers. In addition to the basic violation of liberty, this is a monstrously regressive transfer, harming Mexican workers much more than it helps low-skilled American workers.

But Ross seems to understand the situation in a way that, as far as I can tell, completely discounts the welfare gain to Mexicans, and conceives of the effects of millions of people exercising their human rights as requiring some kind of special justification. This makes sense only relative to a nationalist worldview where ”humanitarian spending” is something benighted “liberal humanitarians” want to do and the actual welfare effects of this “spending” on foreigners is simply irrelevant to the moral calculus; all that matters is the effect of the policy on persons with valid U.S. passports. If the policy turns out to (on average) reduce the incomes of low-skilled U.S. workers and raise the incomes of  higher-skilled U.S. workers, then it’s evidently “perverse.” So if we have to placate uppity U.S. humanitarian liberals by throwing money at poor people somewhere, surely this isn’t the way we want to do it.

But what about Mexican workers and their families? Who cares! Wrong passport! What about the lost liberty of Americans to trade with Mexican workers on the labor market? Well, I guess we decide what liberties Americans have based on some undermotivated nation-level idea of just distribution. Why? Who knows!? (And who cares if it keeps Mexicans out?!) I don’t think Ross denies the fact that Mexican immigration on average makes Americans better off. So a merely utilitarian nationalism would have us accept even more immigrants. You could try to dress Ross’s view up as Rawlsian nationalism, demanding that a policy improve the lot of the least well-off Americans. But I think Ross’s argument really amounts to populist nationalism, appealing to populist class sentiments to help achieve a goal he wants anyway: a less Mexican America.  

Well, I understand that a certain kind of nationalism may well be the default baseline for a broad swathe of American public opinion, but that makes it no less repugnant from the perspective of both human liberty and human welfare. Democrats and then Republicans in the American South long succeeded in winning elections by drumming up racist majorities. (Integrating blacks fully into the labor market no doubt put downward pressure on low-skilled white wages, and I don’t doubt successful politicians brought this up.) But I don’t think this speaks well of our democracy.

This whole issue really turns on what we take to be the relevant moral baseline. I would very much like to see Ross defend what I see as his form of nationalism. From where I sit, there’s something more than “slightly perverse” about denying our human rights to freely cooperate and locking very poor people out of our labor markets so that relatively wealthy people whose grandparents got here first don’t have to take a paycut.