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.
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 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.
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.
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.