2,076 words
Bryan Caplan
Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration
New York: First Second, 2019
Libertarians have long advocated open borders, viewing any limit on immigration as an infringement on personal liberty. To my knowledge, there has never been a book-length treatment of the issue from a libertarian perspective — until now. Bryan Caplan, professor of economics at George Mason University, makes his case for open borders in a graphic novel. Visually, the book reminds me of the For Beginners series, which uses comic illustrations to make difficult philosophical concepts easy to understand. The concepts Caplan discusses however are comparatively easy to understand and the book is opinionated. It is not an overview of the issue, but a polemic. To this reader, the artistic style of Caplan’s book had the effect of trivializing and distorting the issue. Perhaps Caplan chose this style to broaden its appeal, but it isn’t likely to win over immigration critics, who will feel their concerns have been mocked and oversimplified.
In the first chapter, a cartoon version of Caplan wonders why people from poor countries can’t migrate to first-world countries whenever they please (what he calls the “trillion-dollar question”). He pivots from this question to the claim that restrictions on immigration amount to “global apartheid,” adding that they stifle personal and global wealth. In one panel, Caplan is shown pointing at Uncle Sam and demanding to know what “moral right” the government has to regulate contracts between consenting adults. Since open borders are not the status quo, it’s not clear why Caplan thinks opponents of the policy need to shoulder the burden of proof. It’s also not a self-evident truth that people have a moral right to settle wherever they wish. It may be self-evident to Caplan, but it is not self-evident to most Americans, Canadians, Brits, Germans, Frenchmen, and Australians, who favor some form of regulation on immigration. How, then, does he know there is a moral right to migrate freely across national borders?
Caplan’s argument for this “right” is not an argument at all, but a personal preference. It rests on a thought experiment that imagines a person named “Starving Marvin,” who is starving due to a natural disaster. Marvin walks to the store to buy some food, but is held at gunpoint on the way there. If he starves, the gunman is at fault. Caplan thinks this mirrors immigration restrictions because in both cases individuals are prevented from making voluntary exchanges with other parties. Migrants wishing to settle in first-world countries may not be fleeing life-or-death circumstances, but they are prevented from bettering themselves economically. At base, their activity is no different than that of a man buying goods at a store. If it is wrong to stop a man from making a peaceful transaction with a store owner, then it is wrong for governments to stop people from entering their borders to make peaceful transactions with employers and landowners.
The issue with this type of thinking is that it assigns a status to rights that they don’t have. There has never been a time in recorded history where rights fell out of the sky and became enshrined in law. Rights are human constructs that serve various pre-determined ends (liberty, fairness, communal well-being, etc). Rights are made by people, for people. Rights don’t apply to trees, rocks, and dirt. Even so-called “animal rights” are imposed on animals by human beings. If Caplan wants to claim that there is some extralegal or transcendent source of rights, he needs to give reasons for thinking so. The right of a person to move freely across the globe proceeds from a commitment to a specific type of liberty. Caplan needs to defend that commitment before he can start talking about the right of people to immigrate to other countries.
The closest Caplan comes to making a case for the right to immigrate is in chapter 6, where he surveys different moral and religious traditions and finds that they all support open borders. But it’s not clear which perspective Caplan favors and how any of them help his case. For example, what sin is committed by someone who recognizes that Kantian ethics might not agree with immigration restrictions? If you don’t treat people as ends in themselves, what does that mean, morally speaking? Is it an offense to human dignity? If so, what is the basis for human dignity? Since Caplan is an atheist, the foundation of human dignity must be something we impose on it. How could it be anything else, since there is no God to give it value and the laws of physics and chemistry are mum on the subject? In other words, Caplan’s high-minded moral talk boils down again to his personal preferences. He needs to give a non-circular reason why his personal preferences are better than the preferences of people who wish to restrict immigration.
To ethnonationalists, the difference between a starving man trying to feed himself and entire populations moving across borders is the perceived cost. As anyone who has studied economics knows, a “cost” is anything given up for something else. Thus, Icelanders could decide that the cost of being outnumbered by foreigners outweighs the economic benefits of open borders. If Caplan wants to say that this violates the right of people to make voluntary transactions with employers, Icelanders can reply that rights are human conventions and that they don’t share Caplan’s personal preference for libertarianism.
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Caplan acknowledges that migrants prefer to live around members of their own ethnic group, writing in chapter 2 that “migrants crave their countryman’s company. Chinese migrants, for example, prefer destinations with large Chinese populations.” It doesn’t occur to Caplan that natives might share this preference, too, and express it through immigration restrictions. To some people, the cost of open borders — namely, ethnic homogeneity and culture — will always be higher than the benefits. Caplan can’t prove that sacrificing ethnicity homogeneity for economic benefits is a better trade-off. How could he? Costs are subjective.
Caplan does offer an argument for open borders, but it involves so many unknowns that prudence rules against it. Caplan argues that if people from third-world countries came to the first world, it would increase global GDP because people working in the first world earn more. This is true — low-skilled workers from the third world earn more doing the same tasks in the first world because they have more high-value capital to work with. A janitor cleaning the floors of a software company in Bangladesh earns less than a janitor cleaning the floors of a Silicon Valley software firm because the capital of the Silicon Valley firm is more valuable. The value of the intellectual capital is greater (the employees went to MIT and Caltech vs. Bangladeshi universities). The land in Silicon Valley is more valuable, the patents are more valuable, and the product itself is more valuable. There is a scarcer set of inputs than there is in the Bangladeshi firm which creates greater value and higher wages for the workers.
Caplan admits that average incomes in the first world would “almost certainly” fall under open borders, but says not to fear, because it won’t cause your income to fall. He compares an influx of low-skilled workers to a group of children entering a gymnasium full of basketball players. As soon as the children enter the room, the average height falls, but that doesn’t mean the basketball players got shorter. In the same way, an influx of low-skilled workers will pull down average national incomes but won’t cause anyone’s income to fall.
The analogy fails, because Caplan doesn’t know how many people would enter the first world if caps on immigration were lifted. Caplan writes that “transportation alone is a major bottleneck” to the number of people who can immigrate, but it’s not necessary for Central and South Americans to travel by plane or bus to the United States when they can simply cross the border on foot. Africans could cross into Europe through Turkey and the Strait of Gibraltar. Under open borders, the populations of major cities could double, triple, quadruple, and beyond in a matter of years. That means more people using water, electricity, gasoline, streets, and public transportation. People use these resources in specific locales that make use of specific grids, water mains, gas pumps, streets, and land. Imagine if the population of Los Angeles doubled in 5 years. Streets would be clogged with cars. Taxi and Uber fares would increase. Utility bills would increase. The price of gasoline would increase. Rent would increase. Rising property values would lead to higher property taxes. It’s easy to see how millions of people pouring into urban areas could result not only in falling average nominal incomes, but in real incomes as well. A man who was earning $70,000 before open borders would be earning less in real terms if the cost of living rose due to immigration. I’m not saying this would happen, but it could happen, and it would leave native-born Americans economically worse off. How can Caplan guarantee this won’t happen? Rapid population growth isn’t farfetched under Caplan’s vision. The population of Sydney, Australia has grown about 15% over the last decade under a fairly restrictive immigration policy. Under no immigration policy whatsoever, the populations of major cities could explode rapidly, and along with it the cost of living, which eats into real incomes.
When Caplan turns his eye to arguments against open borders, he frequently pulls a bait and switch. He begins chapter 4 by considering how “Enlightenment ideals” and other Western concepts might go by the wayside if the West is swamped by people who don’t share them. But that’s as far as his investigation takes him. The rest of chapter 4 is about the probability of terrorist attacks, immigrant crime, and the percentage of immigrants who don’t learn the native language. What do terrorism, crime, and foreign language have to do with Enlightenment ideals and Western culture? These are not mutually exclusive categories. It’s possible for someone to be a terrorist, criminal, or foreign-language speaker and embrace these values. Caplan does the same thing in chapter 5 when answering the “Magic Dirt” objection to immigration. Caplan wonders if America would be just as wealthy if Americans were replaced by a primitive tribe of hunter-gatherers and left to start over. But Caplan avoids answering the question, saying that he believes in “magic culture,” which just means that since America is already rich, foreigners are able to exploit it to become successful.
The obvious question is why some countries are rich while others are poor. It’s no good to say that wealthy countries are wealthy due to an abundance of human and physical capital, because that just raises the question of why some countries have more robots, computers, and scientific patents than others. To his credit, Caplan analyzes the relationship between IQ and national wealth, but suggests that “reverse causation” may be at play, whereby nutrition, education, and healthcare raise IQ. But if wealth raises IQ, as Caplan claims, how did anybody get wealthy in the first place? Did the people in today’s wealthiest countries get access to proper nutrition, education, and health, and then become rich? It’s impossible to say exactly how countries become rich. Since Caplan doesn’t know the specific causes of national wealth, isn’t it better not to tamper with it by mixing populations?
It’s hard to imagine someone who doesn’t have strong feelings about immigration being swayed by Caplan’s reasoning, let alone ethnonationalists and others who want tougher immigration laws. When he chastises opponents of immigration on moral grounds, what he is really saying is that they are bad libertarians. But what is the point of that if the book was written to persuade non-libertarians to adopt his view? The most one can say for the book is that it will amuse libertarians, but leave everyone else unmoved.
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23 comments
Basically, the anti-immigrant issue comes down to this: allowing free movement of wanna-be immigrants will eventually overrun and kill the Geese — Western Civilization — which are laying the Golden Eggs.
Alexandra’s comments alone are worth coming to this CC website!
Actually, I don’t think Whites are in for extermination, even if we are overrun by sheer numbers. We’ll watch what happens, but I think the tide is turning and things are going to get ugly in the next few years. Whites aren’t going anywhere.
Thanks for the kudos — sometimes, I believe our White Nationalist voices are so weak that we are only talking to ourselves. I am, however, entirely enmeshed with our very valiant cause, and spent the past year at home, while saving my elderly neck, by writing small missives and answers on FB and elsewhere, properly veiled and snarky, until I was given a ‘time-out’ on FB yesterday. That told me our message is getting through. “Keep on truckin” as we used to say.
Libertarians.
I dislike them even more than I dislike Leftists.
I don’t, especially as these days virtually all liberals are open bordersites. Old-fashioned trade unionist anti-immigrationists are nearly extinct in the West. However, in a political sense, libertards may be more dangerous than libtards, if only because their sound understandings of things like the free market economy, the nature of money, and the Constitution make them appealing to conservatives, who can then be (and for many decades were) misled into thinking that free immigration is somehow morally and economically equivalent to free trade (another questionable practice, but one with a far stronger analytical basis and intellectual pedigree than open immigrationism). Open immigration is a form of imperialism- the characteristic form in the contemporary world. It properly has nothing to do with the core libertarian agenda of radical state minimization and private property rights maximization. That so many libertards are also immigrationists shows that, as I have been saying for decades, most libertards are really just “free market liberals” (or “liberals who understand and appreciate economic wisdom”) – supporters of liberty and capitalism, but otherwise, men of the Left.
“Caplan is shown pointing at Uncle Sam and demanding to know what ‘moral right’ the government has to regulate contracts between consenting adults.”
OK, so one consenting adult makes a contract with another consenting adult to burglarize Caplan’s house. The contractor will pay the contractee “X” dollars (in Federal Reserve notes, gold dust, hempscrip, whatever) for walking off with Caplan’s widescreen TV, computer, etc., which said contractor will then fence at a profit in “Y” dollars. OK with Caplan, right, because both the contractor and contractee will gain in wealth?
The obvious point is that government does have a right (moral or otherwise) to regulate contracts in all sorts of matters. One is the case of contracts which harm the persons and property of others. Another involves what are termed “unconscionable contracts,” situations where one side holds all the cards. Like when an individual deals with a monopoly which controls a vital utility system.
Test case: borders are being opened up in Western European and North American countries with a massive influx in third world immigrants. Are these countries becoming more libertarian?
Well, does Professor Caplan have the liberty to speak in his own classroom? Could he, say, contract with Jared Taylor or Ed Dutton to guest lecture on the relation between genetics, IQ, crime and wealth creation? He wouldn’t see various third world campus groups initiate force (say, by rioting) to block such guest speakers, or demand that Prof Caplan be hauled before the university’s “diversity” commissars to have whatever tenure he might claim cancelled?
We have today a living laboratory for the effects of open borders on liberty. The certified results: increasing censorship, suppression of scientific research on race, destruction of historical monuments, indoctrination replacing education on the campus and in the workplace, establishment of third worlder dominated no-gone zones from Calais to Seattle where the writ of lawful government does not rule…
What the Caplan party line misses is that in order to have a free country, you first have to have a country. Which means borders and a people with a common belief in liberty. It’s something someone once called a social contract.
Libertarians will never get out of their “borders are only lines on a map” rut. Never mind that law abiding people draw lines to protect their future; libertarians just don’t believe in a future.
Those of us who had party cards long ago were specifically opposed to the sweeping loss of liberty in the US because of intrusive drug laws, taxation policies, and the like. But the party was swamped with utopian L5 freaks, former communards who think what worked for a dozen hippies in the 70s can work for the whole world, and the morons who want to erase borders because they conflict with some human right of “freedom of movement.”
Sam Francis, while he lived, made people aware of societal property rights, an idea finally picking up steam. Native born Americans, Irishmen, Germans, and so on, have a RIGHT to their lands and a DUTY to pass it up to their progeny as best as they can. The current regime of all these nations are denying them that ability. It remains to be seen how these traitors are dealt with. But the current crop of libertarians with their “rights without responsibility” are complicit in the destruction of their nations, and they deserve to hang right along side the policy makers.
Apparently this book is a long exercise in tailoring arguments carefully to produce a desired outcome.
I wonder if Bryan Caplan locks his door? If so, how could be so cruel as to choose the people he wants to let into his living space? I mean, what’s the real harm in it if some homeless guys who desperately need shelter camp out in his living room, or even curl up in his bed with him? And if they raid the fridge every now and then, big deal, Bryan can just buy more food, now can’t he? If someone boosts his TV to buy dope, then that helps the economy by making him buy another idiot box – it’s Bastiat’s “broken window” theory, dude! Now… what kind of a monster wouldn’t allow all that???
And moreover:
http://stonetoss.com/comic/crossing-the-line/
Yeah, it’s such an easy argument to dispel; do you have a door, liberal idiot? Do you keep it locked? Why? etc.
Re the “broken window fallacy”: someone reading your comment might mistake that piece of idiocy as deriving from 19th century French classical liberal (free marketist, proto-libertarian) Bastiat. I want to make sure people understand that the truth is quite the opposite. Bastiat absolutely understood that destruction always reduces living standards. It was the infamous JM Keynes whose entire complex system is based on the broken window fallacy (that destruction can stimulate ‘demand’, and so lead to eventual greater levels of economic growth and prosperity). To my knowledge, that fallacy was recognized a very long tine ago, but was first named as such by Henry Hazlitt in his Economics in One Lesson.
It is the mechanism that they use to drive demand for fraudulent usury debt as part of their global grifting operations and goal to achieve global communistic (ie. only they will own property globally) absolutist monarchy.
As Thomas Jefferson pointed out: ” The story of the American political order, at least to this point, is the collapse of the influence and autonomy of the local into a consolidated [global] political and financial order, what Jefferson’s people called monarchy. This order is not merely political, it includes cultural, social, RELIGIOUS, and political mores and habits [globalist/universalist] in their scope and often emanating from institutions (trans-national/supra-national] closely aligned with the centers of political and economic [ie. trans-national/supra-national private “money” of a foreign power] power. ” ~ https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/poison-under-the-wings/
“I wonder if Bryan Caplan locks his door? If so, how could be so cruel as to choose the people he wants to let into his living space? ”
Thats the annoying thing. Libertarians believe on private property but not community owned property (the commons). Which is completely insane by the way.
What a waste of time. This is like reviewing a book that claims it’s a good idea to chop your own head off.
One could go through the trouble of doing an early-life check for Mr. Caplan and Mr. Weinersmith, but we already know how that would turn out, don’t we?
It is admirably brave and principled of Professor Caplan to promote his book in the State of Israel.
Caplan or Kaplan. Wikipedia:
“Kaplan or Caplan is also a surname common among Ashkenazi Jews, usually indicating descent from the priestly lineage (the kohanim), similar to the etymological origin of the common Hebrew surname Cohen.”
I’ll just leave that right there.
If all welfare and giveaway programs including free government schools were stopped tomorrow our border crisis would be pretty much solved.
Libertarians are worse than Leftists. Absolute scum of the Earth.
No they are not, but maybe you are. Leftists of every type are the scum of the world.
Libertarians are generally well-meaning but naive liberals, who, as I pointed out above, understand liberty, but not the conditions required for the preservation of really existing liberty. Open borders is not a moral imperative of libertarianism, anyway. If Caplan thinks it is, then he is an idiot as well as an ignoramus.
REAL Americans (of which class maybe you are not a member) LOVE our liberty, and do what we must to protect and preserve it. Property rights are a foundation stone of the Anglo-American understanding of the free society. Libertarians are absolutely correct on this, as they are about the importance and desirability of liberty generally. But they err in ignoring the biological and ethnohistorical underpinnings of liberty, which leads them to suppose that the racial and ethnic composition of a society are irrelevant to its remaining free. In this, they are gravely mistaken, as events of the past half century have proven.
Libertarians are the perfect black market operatives in democratic societies. To my way of thinking, their position on immigration is the same as that of the kooks in this country that desire to defund and eliminate the cops.
No libertarians are not worse than leftists. They are just too ideological (leftists aren’t actually all that ideological. They are pragmatic and power hungry to the point of imposing tyranny without restraint). Libertarians, for the most part, have difficulties with translating high minded ideals into real-world politics. They will never gain any power in government because wielding power in itself is antithetical to their philosophy. (Which lends to the theory that libertarians make prefect controlled opposition).
In this way, libertarians are admirable but useless. They are purposefully weak, but at the same time, admirably honest with their convictions. Libertarianism is a perfect philosophy for a high trust, ethnically and culturally cohesive society with strong moral underpinnings (i.e the America of pre-WWII or perhaps pre-Civil War), but it is utterly useless in a Globalist, multicultural, New World Order.
THERFORE, I strongly disagree that libertarians are worse than leftists, because at least libertarians have their heart in the right place. Leftism is rooted in manifest hatred based on lies (objectively evil), so I can not accept the position that libertarianism is worse, even if I concede that libertarianism is inherently weak.
“Globalists. An Exploration of The Depths of Psychopathy.”
That’s what I’d call my book. And I just know Greg Johnson would be eager to publish it, right up there with the latest Heidegger tome.
Don’t like that title? How about “Move Over, Mohammed. There’s a New Nut in Town: Globoman.”
Regarding the IQ question, scientists can predict the average IQ of people in a gene pool given optimal education, nutrition, etc. by seeing how frequent genes are which are associated with high IQ. Even with optimal education, the genetic IQ of west Africans is still 82 or borderline mentally challenged, so Caplan is ignorant to suggest better environment can solve their IQ problem. He would have been better off claiming only the best come from dumb countries, that if they have the means to flee those places and want to come to the US, they must have higher IQ, but we can measure the predicted IQ of immigrant gene pools too. Why leave something to speculation which we can figure out with gene studies? Empiricism trumps opacity in the service of ideology every time.
We also need to challenge the notion that merely because a social arrangement is consensual that it is good. When women practice hypergamy, it causes leftover poor men and rich women, which makes the population plummet and the civilization end. This is a terrible negative externality. There is also a negative externality of introducing low IQ black genes into your population and having Jews schlep in and take a disproportionate number of the good jobs from the host population.
The immigrants who come to the US typically do smart jobs in tech or medicine or below average cognitive demand jobs in warehouses and construction. It stops otherwise upwardly mobile whites from getting good jobs in tech as easily and is bringing the kind of slave style grueling pace from China to the US, and low skilled workers are feeling it. A spoiled Gen Xer Jew professor like Caplan has no idea what that’s like.
His analogy of home workers being like tall basketball players and immigrants being like little kids who don’t compete with them is disingenuous. Many Hispanics take construction jobs which a lot of white guys still want. Maybe a Jew professor like Caplan doesn’t have to worry about a Mexican taking his job, but a white construction worker does because his market power or bargaining power as a laborer will be reduced because of the migrant flood. What’s more, construction can’t be outsourced because the buildings must be built in the US, so if we kept out Hispanics, the supply of construction workers would be lower relative to demand, so white construction workers could bargain for a better wage. Caplan wouldn’t like that though because he wants to buy a house for cheap, and his Jew real estate developer co-ethnics want them built for cheap too. It means more profit for a few at the expense of the white working class.
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