One pragmatic argument against stringent immigration enforcement is that it is likely to fail and backfire for the same reasons the War on Some Drugs has failed and backfired. It fits the template in several ways:
1. The law you're trying to enforce is a malum prohibitum, not a malum in se. You can argue there are indirect bad effects from uncontrolled immigration, and you can argue the same about drugs. But in both cases, the mere act of violating the law is not a harm to others in itself, and the majority of lawbreakers are no threat to anyone.
2. Employing unauthorized immigrants, like selling drugs, is a transaction with willing buyer and willing seller, no direct victims (see (1)), and high economic incentive to conceal. That inherently makes it hard to crack down on, and increases the probability that crackdowns will lead not just to cruelty but to capriciousness and corruption.
3. More generally, it is hard to enforce a law against something that lends itself to both tremendous ingenuity in smuggling tactics and tremendous profits from successful smuggling.
All of these considerations also argue against gun bans; and I have had some success arguing this way against gun-banning with people who do not believe that there is a moral right to gun ownership for self-defense or that the Second Amendment protects an individual right.
Reducing illegal immigration by 10% or more is partial success - and over 50% would be definite tho still incomplete success.
Trump's tough enforcement policies seemed to be starting to work, even without getting the Wall built. Israel's Wall was quite successful at reducing terrorist suicide bombing. The US border is far longer and more expensive to build any wall -- but it's obvious that making it tougher to illegally get into the USA will reduce the numbers coming.
Increasingly Hispanics and Blacks are understanding that part of the quite low wage growth for menial jobs is because of the supply of illegals willing to work quite hard for quite low wages. As consumers, they like the lower prices; as competing producers, they resent the increased competition from immigrants and, especially for those who came legally, resent the illegal rivals.
2) It is not "fundamentally impossible" to stop this. East Asia does it. Singapore won its War on Drugs (and its war on illegal immigration). But that may be the exception that proves the rule.
3) Modernity owes itself to a feedback loop that rewarded eugenics in Europe (especially NW Europe). Immigration may well undermine that, which is an existential risk. It may be that embryo selection can solve this, but I'd rather we just trust the thing that worked for a few more generation before betting civilization itself on that premise.
To be clearer, that's absolutely what I am trying to do here, to set aside the human rights arguments and focus on material consequences. I am 90% confident that in the alternate world where we'd stopped both drug prohibition and the deportation of nonviolent immigrants in 1980, US per capita GDP and total GDP would both be significantly higher and the violent crime rate significantly lower, for all the reasons laid out in e.g. Caplan and Weinersmith's _Open Borders_. And I think that while the median voter of 2022 does *not* believe in the moral right of consenting adults to put what they like into their own bodies, they *do* believe drug prohibition has been a practical failure -- which is why I am making the practical parallels.
Redacted handles it below, but there are really two possibilities.
1) Voters are dumb and you are right.
2) You are dumb and voters are right.
I'm well aware of all of Caplan's arguments, and I never found them persuasive. Drugs I think is a messy muddle (and not as important as the people who obsess with it think it is), but I consider Open Borders probably the most destructive single policy anyone in the world could advocate (and all the ideas you think are worse are more likely in an Open Borders world).
Ultimately, either you think immigrants can be slotted in without changing the nature of the host country for the worse, or you do. If you don't, its trillions of dollars lying around. If you do, then the destruction of first world institutions will destroy trillions in value. Caplan has never made a convincing case to me that the former is the case. The voter believe that the latter is the case (even if they don't articulate it as well). I think the voter is right.
-- I did look at the polling and in fact support for increased immigration is at an unusually high level, and support for decreased immigration at an unusually low level, according to Gallup: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx
We've got a ways to go to get a majority in favor of increased immigration, but the trend is steady and favorable, and there's way too much support already for it just to be a matter of insulated elites.
-- I call fallacy of false dichotomy: there's a huge spectrum between the prohibition regimes we have now and total non-regulation. A 90% more tolerant drug regime could still disallow selling fentanyl openly on the street. And as Caplan points out, the same holds for immigration in that for all the problems immigration opponents are worried about, there are far less restrictive keyhole solutions that would address them.
-- I'm familiar with Shellenberger's arguments, and in fact I am a longtime resident of San Francisco so I have some personal interest in evaluating them. Two things:
(a) If it were as bad here as he says, I wouldn't live here. It's just not. We have a real homelessness problem that includes a lot of drug addicts among the homeless population, but Shellenberger is deliberately and greatly exaggerating the severity of the situation to stoke outrage and sell books.
(b) If you do cross-state and cross-city comparisons of relevant variables (homelessness rates, housing costs, drug addiction rates, poverty rates etc), it becomes clear that at the root we have a housing problem, not a drug problem. We don't build nearly enough housing, largely because the housing regime is far too regulated and not libertarian enough, and this is a far more important reason for the problems on our streets than the availability of drugs.
If you poll people on Martha's Vineyard if they want more immigration they would say yes, but like fifty people or whatever show up and they call in the national guard.
Like COVID policy or plenty of other things, there is a big difference between what people tell a pollster and what they do in the voting booth. De Santis just became the first Republican to win an outright majority of Hispanics while engaging in the largest public rebuke of immigration this cycle.
"A 90% more tolerant drug regime could still disallow selling fentanyl openly on the street. "
I can get pot whenever I want at ease and doctors literally wrote prescriptions for our last drug epidemic. Just how much looser do you think things can get?
Look, people are in jail because they are violent criminals. Most people on drug charges are violent criminals, even when it's absent from their record as part of the plea bargain. Most people involved in the drug trade are looking for any excuse to play in a violent tournament, they would just as easily kill each other over dice or whores or who dissed who at a party.
The sooner you stop blaming the drug war for every facet of dysfunction in society the sooner you can start coming up with more realistic solutions.
"there are far less restrictive keyhole solutions that would address them"
There is a 0% chance of keyhole solutions working and you would not like what it would take to make them work.
"it becomes clear that at the root we have a housing problem, not a drug problem."
Housing can not get cheap enough for drug addicted street shitters to be able to live in it.
Anyway, have you considered that your inability to control this behavior is one of the big reasons WHY people protect their zoning so zealously? We've decided that the only way to avoid public disorder is to buy property so expensive that undesirables can't live near it.
The most pro YIMBY policy would be to absolutely and ruthlessly crack down on social dysfunction. Once people believe they can live in cheap housing without having to live near underclass dysfunction the housing will get built.
Here we have common ground. I'm 100% in favor of more federalism and agree that most Californians are not sufficiently willing to let other US jurisdictions have very different policies from the ones we favor. Immigration is an unfortunate exception-- as long as we have internal open borders between states, we'll be arguing over the right policy for the national border-- but we should strive to have as few such exceptions as feasible.
1) The electorate would not agree to higher legal immigration amounts (they would also change the nature of immigration, like source country).
Therefore, illegal immigration is “necessary” if you want higher immigration.
The thing to question there is if it’s really “necessary”.
2) While it’s true that higher immigration has some domestic winners on some timescale, I think the main driver of tolerating illegal immigration is the main driver of tolerating crime in general. Nobody wants to do “cruel” things to poor brown people. But the only way to prevent at activity is for the likelihood and magnitude of punishment to exceed the perceived gains of the crime. If moving to America really is worth millions to immigrants, only drastic punishments are going to dissuade.
100.4? That essentially means an unintelligent person is as likely to graduate college as the intelligent. I don't think so. Seems illogical for many reasons. What is the explanation?
The Conor Fitzgerald post makes me think of the book I have almost finished, Joyce Benenson's Warriors and Worriers (Oxford, 2014).
Her thesis is that during the many millennia of human evolution, human bands without effective warriors either were pushed into resource poor areas or were conquered, the latter often meaning males taken as slaves and women as mates. So the male genes that survived were those that predisposed the males to be good warriors. Women, on the other hand, were the main determinant of the survival of their children. So they had to worry about their own health, and get along with the other people in the band while still pursuing their (and their children's) interests.
So men are predisposed to explicit aggression, risk taking, etc. Women, on the other hand, are predisposed to hidden competition and to be especially concerned about safely and health.
One reason women do so well in modern schools is that they are female-friendly. One could look at it the other way and say, poetically, that schools are a "hostile environment" for males. As a former high school teacher, I was struck by this from pages 178-9, "Unlike boys, girls almost never boast, command each other, tell jokes at one another's expense, try to top another's stories, call each other names, or in any way show off." All of those are things that a teacher today would warn a student are "not appropriate" in school.
In 1970 it was not uncommon to post student grades on the classroom wall. A teacher who did that today would immediately be called into the principal's office. Perhaps that is symbolic, one reason 57% of college students then were male and 42% are today.
Re: Immigration policy. I have a question about economics, and an observation about political psychology.
Can open international trade largely make up for closed borders, as a policy to foster domestic economic growth and reasonably broad domestic prosperity?
If so, then might a policy mix of (a) low levels of immigration (with diligent, effective border enforcement) and (b) more open trade be a pragmatic way to balance law and order, demographic conservatism, and economic growth?
Or would more open trade durably harm a substantial fraction of domestic workers? As far as I can tell, economists seem to find that any adverse effects on employment in the past generation have been caused more by automation (technology shock) than by trade shock.
Casual observation suggests that most people who want to reduce immigration want to reduce imports, too; and most people who want more immigration want also more open trade.
It seems that the policy pair, 'Closed Borders + Open Trade,' is counter-intuitive in American folk political psychology.
One pragmatic argument against stringent immigration enforcement is that it is likely to fail and backfire for the same reasons the War on Some Drugs has failed and backfired. It fits the template in several ways:
1. The law you're trying to enforce is a malum prohibitum, not a malum in se. You can argue there are indirect bad effects from uncontrolled immigration, and you can argue the same about drugs. But in both cases, the mere act of violating the law is not a harm to others in itself, and the majority of lawbreakers are no threat to anyone.
2. Employing unauthorized immigrants, like selling drugs, is a transaction with willing buyer and willing seller, no direct victims (see (1)), and high economic incentive to conceal. That inherently makes it hard to crack down on, and increases the probability that crackdowns will lead not just to cruelty but to capriciousness and corruption.
3. More generally, it is hard to enforce a law against something that lends itself to both tremendous ingenuity in smuggling tactics and tremendous profits from successful smuggling.
All of these considerations also argue against gun bans; and I have had some success arguing this way against gun-banning with people who do not believe that there is a moral right to gun ownership for self-defense or that the Second Amendment protects an individual right.
Reducing illegal immigration by 10% or more is partial success - and over 50% would be definite tho still incomplete success.
Trump's tough enforcement policies seemed to be starting to work, even without getting the Wall built. Israel's Wall was quite successful at reducing terrorist suicide bombing. The US border is far longer and more expensive to build any wall -- but it's obvious that making it tougher to illegally get into the USA will reduce the numbers coming.
Increasingly Hispanics and Blacks are understanding that part of the quite low wage growth for menial jobs is because of the supply of illegals willing to work quite hard for quite low wages. As consumers, they like the lower prices; as competing producers, they resent the increased competition from immigrants and, especially for those who came legally, resent the illegal rivals.
1) All of the is true.
2) It is not "fundamentally impossible" to stop this. East Asia does it. Singapore won its War on Drugs (and its war on illegal immigration). But that may be the exception that proves the rule.
3) Modernity owes itself to a feedback loop that rewarded eugenics in Europe (especially NW Europe). Immigration may well undermine that, which is an existential risk. It may be that embryo selection can solve this, but I'd rather we just trust the thing that worked for a few more generation before betting civilization itself on that premise.
To be clearer, that's absolutely what I am trying to do here, to set aside the human rights arguments and focus on material consequences. I am 90% confident that in the alternate world where we'd stopped both drug prohibition and the deportation of nonviolent immigrants in 1980, US per capita GDP and total GDP would both be significantly higher and the violent crime rate significantly lower, for all the reasons laid out in e.g. Caplan and Weinersmith's _Open Borders_. And I think that while the median voter of 2022 does *not* believe in the moral right of consenting adults to put what they like into their own bodies, they *do* believe drug prohibition has been a practical failure -- which is why I am making the practical parallels.
Redacted handles it below, but there are really two possibilities.
1) Voters are dumb and you are right.
2) You are dumb and voters are right.
I'm well aware of all of Caplan's arguments, and I never found them persuasive. Drugs I think is a messy muddle (and not as important as the people who obsess with it think it is), but I consider Open Borders probably the most destructive single policy anyone in the world could advocate (and all the ideas you think are worse are more likely in an Open Borders world).
Ultimately, either you think immigrants can be slotted in without changing the nature of the host country for the worse, or you do. If you don't, its trillions of dollars lying around. If you do, then the destruction of first world institutions will destroy trillions in value. Caplan has never made a convincing case to me that the former is the case. The voter believe that the latter is the case (even if they don't articulate it as well). I think the voter is right.
Taking the points one by one:
-- I did look at the polling and in fact support for increased immigration is at an unusually high level, and support for decreased immigration at an unusually low level, according to Gallup: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx
We've got a ways to go to get a majority in favor of increased immigration, but the trend is steady and favorable, and there's way too much support already for it just to be a matter of insulated elites.
-- I call fallacy of false dichotomy: there's a huge spectrum between the prohibition regimes we have now and total non-regulation. A 90% more tolerant drug regime could still disallow selling fentanyl openly on the street. And as Caplan points out, the same holds for immigration in that for all the problems immigration opponents are worried about, there are far less restrictive keyhole solutions that would address them.
-- I'm familiar with Shellenberger's arguments, and in fact I am a longtime resident of San Francisco so I have some personal interest in evaluating them. Two things:
(a) If it were as bad here as he says, I wouldn't live here. It's just not. We have a real homelessness problem that includes a lot of drug addicts among the homeless population, but Shellenberger is deliberately and greatly exaggerating the severity of the situation to stoke outrage and sell books.
(b) If you do cross-state and cross-city comparisons of relevant variables (homelessness rates, housing costs, drug addiction rates, poverty rates etc), it becomes clear that at the root we have a housing problem, not a drug problem. We don't build nearly enough housing, largely because the housing regime is far too regulated and not libertarian enough, and this is a far more important reason for the problems on our streets than the availability of drugs.
If you poll people on Martha's Vineyard if they want more immigration they would say yes, but like fifty people or whatever show up and they call in the national guard.
Like COVID policy or plenty of other things, there is a big difference between what people tell a pollster and what they do in the voting booth. De Santis just became the first Republican to win an outright majority of Hispanics while engaging in the largest public rebuke of immigration this cycle.
"A 90% more tolerant drug regime could still disallow selling fentanyl openly on the street. "
I can get pot whenever I want at ease and doctors literally wrote prescriptions for our last drug epidemic. Just how much looser do you think things can get?
Look, people are in jail because they are violent criminals. Most people on drug charges are violent criminals, even when it's absent from their record as part of the plea bargain. Most people involved in the drug trade are looking for any excuse to play in a violent tournament, they would just as easily kill each other over dice or whores or who dissed who at a party.
The sooner you stop blaming the drug war for every facet of dysfunction in society the sooner you can start coming up with more realistic solutions.
"there are far less restrictive keyhole solutions that would address them"
There is a 0% chance of keyhole solutions working and you would not like what it would take to make them work.
"it becomes clear that at the root we have a housing problem, not a drug problem."
Housing can not get cheap enough for drug addicted street shitters to be able to live in it.
Anyway, have you considered that your inability to control this behavior is one of the big reasons WHY people protect their zoning so zealously? We've decided that the only way to avoid public disorder is to buy property so expensive that undesirables can't live near it.
The most pro YIMBY policy would be to absolutely and ruthlessly crack down on social dysfunction. Once people believe they can live in cheap housing without having to live near underclass dysfunction the housing will get built.
Here we have common ground. I'm 100% in favor of more federalism and agree that most Californians are not sufficiently willing to let other US jurisdictions have very different policies from the ones we favor. Immigration is an unfortunate exception-- as long as we have internal open borders between states, we'll be arguing over the right policy for the national border-- but we should strive to have as few such exceptions as feasible.
1) The electorate would not agree to higher legal immigration amounts (they would also change the nature of immigration, like source country).
Therefore, illegal immigration is “necessary” if you want higher immigration.
The thing to question there is if it’s really “necessary”.
2) While it’s true that higher immigration has some domestic winners on some timescale, I think the main driver of tolerating illegal immigration is the main driver of tolerating crime in general. Nobody wants to do “cruel” things to poor brown people. But the only way to prevent at activity is for the likelihood and magnitude of punishment to exceed the perceived gains of the crime. If moving to America really is worth millions to immigrants, only drastic punishments are going to dissuade.
‘The story of the increase in the number of people being educated...’... is the increase in the number of poorly educated people. I blame the schools.
100.4? That essentially means an unintelligent person is as likely to graduate college as the intelligent. I don't think so. Seems illogical for many reasons. What is the explanation?
Well of course you write the last sentence, you're male.
Steelman, the female side. (Steelwomen?)
The Conor Fitzgerald post makes me think of the book I have almost finished, Joyce Benenson's Warriors and Worriers (Oxford, 2014).
Her thesis is that during the many millennia of human evolution, human bands without effective warriors either were pushed into resource poor areas or were conquered, the latter often meaning males taken as slaves and women as mates. So the male genes that survived were those that predisposed the males to be good warriors. Women, on the other hand, were the main determinant of the survival of their children. So they had to worry about their own health, and get along with the other people in the band while still pursuing their (and their children's) interests.
So men are predisposed to explicit aggression, risk taking, etc. Women, on the other hand, are predisposed to hidden competition and to be especially concerned about safely and health.
One reason women do so well in modern schools is that they are female-friendly. One could look at it the other way and say, poetically, that schools are a "hostile environment" for males. As a former high school teacher, I was struck by this from pages 178-9, "Unlike boys, girls almost never boast, command each other, tell jokes at one another's expense, try to top another's stories, call each other names, or in any way show off." All of those are things that a teacher today would warn a student are "not appropriate" in school.
In 1970 it was not uncommon to post student grades on the classroom wall. A teacher who did that today would immediately be called into the principal's office. Perhaps that is symbolic, one reason 57% of college students then were male and 42% are today.
Re: Immigration policy. I have a question about economics, and an observation about political psychology.
Can open international trade largely make up for closed borders, as a policy to foster domestic economic growth and reasonably broad domestic prosperity?
If so, then might a policy mix of (a) low levels of immigration (with diligent, effective border enforcement) and (b) more open trade be a pragmatic way to balance law and order, demographic conservatism, and economic growth?
Or would more open trade durably harm a substantial fraction of domestic workers? As far as I can tell, economists seem to find that any adverse effects on employment in the past generation have been caused more by automation (technology shock) than by trade shock.
Casual observation suggests that most people who want to reduce immigration want to reduce imports, too; and most people who want more immigration want also more open trade.
It seems that the policy pair, 'Closed Borders + Open Trade,' is counter-intuitive in American folk political psychology.