This is the intuitive case. It is not all of, but much of why we open borders people are where we are. What is our reaction to people trying to make an honest living here, because their life back home sucks. Haiti and Cuba are the clear examples.
Mr. A, from Country Z makes $0.16 per hour ($2/12 hour day) living in his home country, and because of the kleptocratic government and extra-crappy institutions, he sees no future wherein he makes more than that. So, he takes both items that he owns, sells them to his neighbor, and leaves, heading for country Y, in which unskilled laborers tend to make $6.25 per hour ($50/8 hour day), by simply being willing to do work, with the intention of doing work.
Case 1: Mr. A arrives in country Y, finds regular work, rents a room from someone, and life is good.
This is a pure win for pretty much everyone.
Case 2: Mr. A arrives in country Y, and finds very little work, averaging only $10/day of work, but that's enough to pay for food, and still save half his salary...even if he can't find a room. Maybe he finds a room in a poor part of town for $50/month.
This is still a pure win for pretty much everyone.
Case 3: Mr. A arrives at country Y, and is sent home
This screws A, and the people who hire A to do their work, the landlord, and the taxpayers.
Case 4: Mr. A arrvies at country Y, and is thrown in Jail
This is a win for Mr. A (It's better than his old situation), but a loss for country Y. In this case, Z and Y are indonesia and Australia respectively.
Case 5: Mr A arrives at country Y and is shot.
Ummm?
Case 5.5: Country Y makes it hard enough to get in that Mr. A dies trying to find a way in.
Nearly equivalent to 5.
What will/do people do? In all cases, people basically take some (erroneous, self-favoring) model of the probabilities, sum the product of the probabilities and the payoffs across likely results, and life is good.
From the calculus of Mr. A...the only thing that would prevent him from doing the trip is: high probability of the case 5s.
Case 3 sucks, but no more than before. Case 4 is a win for A.
10% case1 + 10% case2 + 80% case3 is still a win.
From the calculus of a anti-immigrationist, the only thing that's going to stop a relatively steady flood of immigrants is a high probability of case 5s...which is monstrous.
They're coming for opportunity...the laws aren't going to stop them from coming. Now what?
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What about case 6:
Mr. A arrives in country Y, having only the address of a relative or friend, so he goes there and lives with them, at least initially. (Frankly I find the idea that Mr. A, all by himself, knowing no one, finds work and a place to rent a bit unrealistic. Which city does he even go to, and how does he know to go there? Relatives/friends, of course.)
Now, it's a 4 bedroom house with only 9 people living in it, so plenty of space. The relatives/friends have a network and support system of people who know how to get him signed up for various welfare/aid programs, so that's what he does.
Yes, perhaps he finds informal/under the table work to some extent. Again, the idea that this step came first and the other steps later, beggars belief.
Sure, this all is a win for him. Is it a win for country Z? That is open to debate. Different people in different categories will feel different effects of his presence (the local contractor surely enjoys him being in the <$50/day labor pool at the Home Depot parking lot; the neighbors may not be so pleased; a diffuse 'unseen majority' may disapprove of his marginal impact on their taxes, if they could see it). It's inherently a *political issue*.
But any such debate of that political issue is cut off and disallowed by moralistic talk of rights and freedom-of-movement (and race-card-playing) of the open-borders contingent, so those concerns don't get aired, and we have set in motion a dynamic where the US government and its members consistently work to ignore the preferences of a substantial number of US citizens and try to conceal the impact of its policies from them. Which is all very healthy.
Sorry, what was this supposed to be an argument for?
First:
...which is monstrous.
I object to this appeal to emotion.
To quote Moldbug: "Every city in the world has the death penalty for stepping in front of a bus. How do we live with this draconian, irrational, and instantly enforced rule? By not violating it. Most of us never give the matter a second thought."
To mix in Yudkowsky, I only find your case monstrous to roughly the same extent that I find it generally monstrous that people die. If a person displays such commitment to illegal acts that I have to imprison him for life or shoot him to get him to stop, that sucks, but it's not an outstanding level of suckage.
OTOH, to the extent I find this monstrous, I also find it a proportionate response to your argument, which feels monstrous to me: it's vaguely as though you're implicitly extorting me with the threat of a giant criminal horde, while simultaneously insulting me for not wanting to give in to extortion.
Giant criminal horde?
The flood of people coming in spite of laws.
Is there any chance that Mr. A can be given permission to work for Mrs. B, rent from Mr. C, and buy from Ms. D, but *not* be given permission to vote for their leaders? We currently consider those positions pretty inseparable (could you ask anyone to list 5 examples of moral progress without hearing about an expansion of suffrage?), but there might be perverse effects in a world where each country's export rate of government-designers is directly correlated to how "kleptocratic" its government is.
Let me second Lurking Apple there.
All law is enforced, ultimately, by monstrosity. Deadly force. As a libertarian, you should be familiar with this idea; when we argue with progressives that taxation is wrong, for example, we often rub their noses in just how exactly the law is enforced. That is we get them to agree with the idea that the law must be enforced using deadly force. Are they willing to kill to just to get our money? They are.
But of course, any real progressive will not be converted by such an argument. How does she counter? She says that while, yes, in the abstract ultimately monstrous deadly force might have to be applied, in practice it is not. And her good goals -- leveling in many ways -- are a much greater good than the bad of very mildly strong-arming the reluctant. If it really did take monstrous mass political murder to gather taxes, the progressive would halt; but it does not and so she does not.
And so for your would-be illegal immigrant A. You have drawn him as a rational homo economicus. Thus he knows the law, and the penalties for breaking it. These do not have to be death to get him to cooperate. Indeed, I see no reason that a homo economicus would put up with your mild and tolerant (3) -- but only if (3) was the odds-on result of his criminality. As you say: result (3) "screws" A. He has spent time and all of his paltry savings in the attempt, and it has failed. He is necessarily worse off than he was before he commenced his criminal plan. Why would he intentionally set out to screw himself? He would not. Thus, (3), and not death, is sufficient. A never makes the attempt.
We do not need to kill all the illegals to stop them. It is sufficient, but not necessary. All we need to do is deport them -- mildly, gently, humanely; but consistently and reliably. We must actually do so; as you say the existence of a law will not stop them. Only the enforcement of a law will.
RWCG,
Are we arguing proportions now?
If there are 80% case 1, 20% case 6, it's a pretty clear win for a lot of folks...and the problem is the welfare system, having nothing to do with immigration.
If it's 20% 1, and 80% 6, it's still a pretty clear problem with the welfare system...which due to the benefits gleaned by the 1, means the welfare system needs to be fixed pronto.
LA,
This entire argument is an appeal to emotion/ethics ON BOTH SIDES.
We are not arguing about what is true, we are arguing about what is good. And the psych literature is very very clear on the topic. What is good/preferable is ENTIRELY an emotional topic.
Roy,
That's basically the German/Swiss solution to immigration. Many commentators have suggested that as well.
I've proposed before that someone should have to pay $100K in taxes to earn the right to vote.
Leonard,
Yes, that's exactly how the progressives, the communists, the fascists, and the conservatives argue.
And libertarians are solidly opposed to that line of thinking.
That is to say, you are still pushing this as a strictly moral issue. Yes, I grasp that it is a moral issue to you.
But the point of your post here was to try to make it be an economic issue. Your claim is that immigration enforcement is only possible via means (genocidal anti-immigrant massacres) that everyone abhors; lacking the will for such even among us opponents, you claim the economics works out to be immigrational. That is, you argue that reality has a liberal bias. This comes across to me as suggesting that your opponents should just lie back and think of Atzlan.
My point was to refute your point. Thus I pointed out that it does not in fact require genocidal violence to deter illegals. It does, of course, require violence; but this is no different than any other law enforcement. If men do enforce it, the law can, in fact, stop immigration. The USA has done it before; many countries do it today. Japan, for example, has no problem with illegals (or legals, for that matter) in spite of being just as rich as America. How do they do it? This is not rocket science, and it is also not genocide.
Leonard,
1. I hear you re: it being able to work in Switzerland/Japan.
2. I would like you to try the exercise of trying to address immigration as a non-ethical issue. I am assertint not that it's a strictly moral issue for me, but that it's clearly about ethics for EVERYONE. The only reasons it doesn't land as ethics for some folks is they haven't clarified their statements enough. Or because group loyalty is prior to ethics for many?
'pretty clear win for a lot of folks' does not preclude, and probably goes hand in hand with, 'big loss for a lot of other folks'.
So, we have various subsets of folks who get affected by immigration in different ways - with different signs. Agreed? In other words, it's an inherently *political* issue.
Now then: why would anyone expect the folks in the 'negative effect' category to favor open borders?
One tack (the tack usually taken by libertarians) is to go full-on morality and insist that the government has no right whatsoever to restrict immigration. I agree, as anyone would, that if that's true, then there must be open borders. On the other hand, if the moral argument is correct, and you're relying on it crucially for your argument, then none of this proportions stuff matters one iota.
Meanwhile, if the moral argument is *not* correct - for example, if it's absurd (which as you know, I think it is) - then the open borders case collapses. We're just back to 'it's a political issue', which is basically my position.
Best
Even under your proportional argument, do you have a win today in the USA?
Our economy has slowed in conjunction with recent big immigration. Where's the win? What has improved in any non-trivial way from areas or times of immigration restriction?
You find one equation that yields immigration as a plus, then push the result as a course of action. But reality goes differently, like the quants from Wall Street that calculated housing prices would never fall. "Aretae calculates that immigrants always bring an economic benefit, so load up on synthetic derivatives and don't look back."
Oh, and as long as we're talking about making voting rights more fine-grained:
Has anyone (other than that bit in the Constitution about budget bills starting in the House) ever seriously considered the assumption that the right to decide on budgetary expenses and the right to decide on criminal and civil law definitions should be exactly equally shared? The risks of over- or under- expanding each right seems to be quite different.
What is our reaction to people trying to make an honest living here, because their life back home sucks.
>Assumption here is that immigrants are here only to make an honest living. How about the recent Liberian immigrant in my neighborhood on trial for attempted murder, an immigrant here on some kind of kindness program? He is a criminal, but we don't filter for that. If your supplier is pumping dog $hit into your ice cream, one first shuts off the pipeline, then fixes it. You don't run around telling people to enjoy the ice cream despite.
>Assumption here is that "life back home sucks." It is not good policy to take people just on differential improvement of their GDP. If you want to play the "I'm a good liberal who signals my fitness to the in-group by giving other peoples' stuff away" game, then a better policy is to seek out those below a certain standard of living, and raise the standard where they live.
Importing people under the guise of humanitarianism is a losing game, because, for the most part, we don't get humanitarian cases; and in the long run we do not get any return on investment for such humanitarianism. (Or maybe a negative return.)
RSF,
You're playing proportions as well. Do you have some numbers? Last I heard, criminality of immigrants (apart from the crime of moving) was below that of natives.
Native crime rates are way too high. Why should I accept any from immigrants?
Most "immigrant as choir boy" studies I've seen have looked at a subset of legal immigrants. If you throw illegals into the mix, things change, but we've got a narrative to push. I suppose you and I read different things.
You push immigration as a simple good, like clean water, or a commodity import, like wood products. But it really is a long term investment with many variables. What cohort of today's world can really contribute to a modern economy? 20%? 5%? 1%? Why should we accept any economic sinks, just on the basis that we can give them a "GI Joe with the Kung Fu grip"?
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