The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (121): Unconscious Deportation

A group of illegal Mexican laborers from the northern Indiana and Illinois region walk to board a train in Chicago, Ill., to be deported to their native Mexico, July 27, 1951

(source)

The AP is out with an incredible report detailing the stories of undocumented immigrants who were deported by American hospitals, while they were unconscious.

Two of the immigrants profiled, Jacinto Cruz and Jose Rodriguez-Saldana, were unlucky enough to be involved in car accidents and their punishment was being flown to Mexico while still in a coma.  The kicker is, they had health insurance, because they had solid jobs, but without documentation proving legal immigrant status, the hospital took it upon themselves to deport Cruz and Rodriguez-Saldana. ….

When the men awoke, they were more than 1,800 miles away in a hospital in Veracruz, on the Mexican Gulf Coast. (source)

More absurd human rights violations here.

Migration and Human Rights (46): The “Criminal Immigrant” Stereotype, Ctd.

Fox News stirring up some anti-immigrant sentiment

As is often the case, there’s public opinion, there’s empirical reality, and there’s a lot of space between the two. One particularly harmful public myth is the one about the “criminal immigrant”. It’s harmful in several ways: it whips up support for immigration restrictions, which help to keep many foreigners poor, and it contributes to feelings of insecurity, which in turn lead to tough-on-crime policies and high rates of incarceration.

I’ve already argued several times before against this stereotype, but for some inexplicable reason my writing doesn’t seem to sway public opinion. Hence, here I go once again.

First, here’s U.S. public opinion on the matter (via the General Social Survey):

Other countries have similar numbers:

Kitty Calavita’s recent study in southern Europe, for example, reports that in Spain in 2002 a national poll found that 60 percent believed that immigrants were causing increases in the crime rate, while a survey conducted in Italy found that 57 percent of Italians agreed that “the presence of immigrants increases crime and delinquency.” (source)

Now, the facts:

Both contemporary and historical studies, including official crime statistics and victimization surveys since the early 1990s, data from the last three decennial censuses, national and regional surveys in areas of immigrant concentration, and investigations carried out by major government commissions over the past century, have shown instead that immigration is associated with lower crime rates and lower incarceration rates. (source)

Some data are here and here. In the U.S., crime rates have gone down when at the same time immigration rates have gone up.

More posts in this series are here.

Migration and Human Rights (45): Open Borders, Luck Egalitarianism, and the Common Ownership of the Earth

[This post originally appeared on Openborders.info as a guest post.] 

Luck egalitarianism is a school of thought in moral philosophy that argues in favor of interventions in people’s lives aimed at eliminating as far as possible the impact of luck. If you have the bad luck of being born into a poor family, your prospects in life should not be harmed by this and society should intervene in order to correct for it.

I’m not going to endorse luck egalitarianism because it’s a theory that suffers from some serious defects. However, the basic intuition seems sound to me and can be used to argue against immigration restrictions. Your country of birth is also a matter of luck, good luck or bad luck, depending on the country. It’s either good luck or bad luck because the place where you are born has a profound impact on your life prospects. The mere fact of having been born in Bolivia rather than the U.S. makes it statistically more likely that you will be poor, uneducated and unhealthy. Since no one chooses to be born somewhere, no one can be said to deserve the advantages or disadvantages that come with being born somewhere.

Hence, if Americans for example are just lucky to have been born in the U.S. and didn’t do anything to deserve being born there, what right do they have closing their borders and allowing access only to a chosen few selected according to criteria that they have unilaterally decided and that mainly serve their own interests? None whatsoever. In claiming that right they make it impossible for others to do something about the misfortune of having been born in a poor country. Hence, they double other people’s disadvantage.

As Joseph Carens has put it, immigration restrictions are the modern equivalent of feudal privilege, inherited status, birthrights and class rule. In our current, so-called modern and Enlightened societies, the good luck of being born in a wealthy country supposedly gives you the right to exclude others, just as in the olden days the fact of having been born in the class of nobles or aristocrats gave you the right to condemn others to the class of paupers. The lottery of birth yields unfair advantages in both cases.

One may claim that none of this necessarily argues in favor of open borders. The fortunate of this earth could compensate for their good luck by other means. For example, they could have a duty, not to open their borders, but to transfer money and resources to those who have had the bad luck of being born in the wrong country.

Obviously, assistance is a moral duty, but I fail to see how the fulfillment of this duty could grant you the right to close your borders. Those who argue that assistance is enough often use a domestic analogy. Consider Hugh Hefner, for example. The point is not that he probably wouldn’t have had the wealth he has now if he hadn’t been born in a country (or granted access to a country) where the average citizen is wealthy enough to spend large amounts of money on soft porn. The point is that there are millions of other people in the U.S. who, through no fault of their own, are burdened with bad luck, a lack of talent or a lack of education opportunities making it difficult or impossible for them to collect a Hefnerian amount of wealth, or even just a fraction of it. These people don’t deserve their lack of talent etc., just as poor Zimbabweans don’t deserve to have been born in Zimbabwe. Should Hefner therefore open the doors of Playboy Mansion? Or is it enough that he pays taxes to fund the welfare state? Most would choose the latter option.

What’s the difference between this domestic situation and the international one? If Hefner doesn’t have to welcome thousands of unfortunate U.S. citizens to his Playboy Mansion, why should the whole of the U.S. citizenry have to welcome millions of immigrants onto their territory? Well, because it’s not their territory, at least not in the way Playboy Mansion is Hefner’s property. People don’t have property rights to a part of the surface of the earth like they may have property rights to things. I have a long argument here in favor of the common ownership of the earth, and I invite you to click the link and read it. It’s too long to repeat it here, but suffice it to say that it leads to a strong presumption in favor of open borders without destroying the possibility of having borders and states in the first place.

More on open borders here.

Migration and Human Rights (44): Welfare State Incompatible With Multiculturalism?

David Miller has argued in favor of an affirmative answer to this question. My view is different. Miller’s story goes somewhat like this. The welfare state predates multiculturalism: most western countries have adopted some form of welfare state in the late 19th century or during the first half of the 20th century, whereas these countries only have become truly multicultural in the second half of the 20th century (as a result of decolonization, guest worker programs etc.).

According to Miller, a welfare state requires a strong sense of national solidarity. People will only contribute to the welfare system if they know that others contribute as well and that they themselves will be protected by the contributions of others when things turn bad, when they get sick or old or when they lose their job. Hence, everyone should contribute in the same way and rules about reciprocity and fairness should be respected. A welfare state is only possible when society is a warm nest where everyone cares for everyone, looks after everyone and uses the system in a fair and reciprocal manner. Free riders by definition don’t care about others and if there are too many of them, the welfare system breaks down.

Miller fears that a multicultural society can undermine support for the welfare state because large immigration flows can undo the fairness of the system. This fairness is based on the assumption that you can only withdraw from the system if first you have contributed to it (reciprocity). Newcomers are often seen as people who withdraw without contribution.

In a sense, this is the classic welfare tourism argument. It’s a popular argument against multiculturalism and immigration, especially on the right of the political spectrum, and it’s disappointing to see a noted philosopher give credence to it. He should know better. Why? Well, first, it’s simply not true that immigrants abuse the welfare system. Some do, of course, but in many cases immigrants withdraw comparatively less than natives and they often have higher labor force participation (see here for instance). Furthermore, many of the native poor withdraw a lot more than they contribute, over a lifetime. This “unfairness” is identical to the supposed unfair use of the system by immigrants, and raises similar complaints about the “undeserving poor”. And yet, even though the unfairness is the same, it doesn’t result in arguments that all welfare states are impossible. Or is unfairness only a problem when colored people are unfair?

Hence, Miller seems to be rushing to accept defeat in the face of xenophobia. He preemptively gives up the attempt to widen the circle of empathy and to correct misinformation about unfairness. If it is really the case that a population loses trust in and withdraws support from a welfare system because it believes that solidarity is only something for “people like us” or because it believes that rules of fairness and reciprocity are violated, then perhaps we should try to change people’s minds rather than hastily agreeing with them.

Something about a similar argument by Milton Friedman - “you cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state” – is here. More on the role of group identity in public support for redistribution is here. More posts in this series are here.

The Causes of Poverty (66): Immigration Restrictions in Wealthy Countries

Four immigrants and their belongings at Ellis Island, circa 1912

(source)

It’s intuitively obvious: if you allow more people to migrate to wealthy countries, global poverty rates will come down because people will have more and better labor opportunities. Conversely, immigration restrictions keep poverty levels high. Here‘s a paper that actually tries to measure the effect on poverty of migration restrictions:

[R]ich nation migration barriers impose huge losses on the global economy. This paper … estimates, for the first time to my knowledge, the global poverty implications of those barriers and finds that freeing migration into rich nations would reduce global poverty by at least 40% and as much as 66%. This corroborates the conclusions drawn by others that opening rich nations to freer migration may do more to reduce poverty around the world than any other policy.

Another study finds similar results:

[O]pen borders could yield huge welfare gains: more than $10,000 a year for a randomly selected worker from a less-developed country (including nonmigrants). Another is that these gains are associated with a relatively small reduction in the real wage in developed countries.

More on the impact of immigration on native wages is here and here. A related post on the possible effects of a “brain drain” on poverty rates in migrants’ origin countries is here.

More posts in this series are here.

Migration and Human Rights (43): The Impact of Immigration on the Educational Attainment of Natives

Young Chinese immigrant students in New York City, 1910

(source)

Those opposed to immigration - or better to high or increased levels of immigration – often, but wrongly, argue that a large scale presence of immigrants forces down the wages of natives and drives expensive native workers, especially the low-skilled, out of the job market. Or that it ruins social security systems, destroys the native culture and leads to higher crime rates.

There’s also a less common and a priori sensible argument regarding education. When there are many or rising numbers of immigrant children, then these children compete for schooling resources with native children. One can’t assume that those resources go up at the same rate as the total number of children. Immigrants are generally poorer than the average citizens and hence pays less in taxes. It’s therefore not silly to assume that higher rates of immigration put a strain on education resources. If that is the case, then the quality of education may go down, including for native children.

That is a potentially strong argument against an open borders policy or against relaxed immigration restrictions. Yet, surprisingly, you hardly ever hear it. Maybe that’s because it’s not as strong as it looks. After all, there can also be an opposite effect: higher rates of immigration may encourage native children to study harder – to complete high school and to go to university - so that they can avoid competing with immigrant high-school dropouts in the labor market.

Fortunately, there’s a paper here (possibly gated) that looks at those two competing effects, and finds that

both channels are operative and that the net effect is positive, particularly for native-born blacks, though not for native-born Hispanics. An increase of one percentage point in the share of immigrants in the population aged 11-64 increases the probability that natives aged 11-17 eventually complete 12 years of schooling by 0.3 percentage points, and increases the probability for native-born blacks by 0.4 percentage points.

More posts in this series are here.

Political Graffiti (201): Closed Borders

(source unknown)

More on immigration and open borders. More graffiti.

Migration and Human Rights (42): The Labor Cost Argument Against Open Borders

(source)

I’ve argued many times before against the popular view that increased immigration is detrimental to native employment and income. The simple argument about an increase in supply of cheap labor driving down wages and forcing expensive native workers out of the job market is just that: simple, too simple. There’s even evidence that the opposite is true: immigration increases native wages (because it allows native workers to move up the pay scale). But even if immigration did impose a cost on the host country, that wouldn’t be the final argument against immigration, since such a cost could be seen as a form of global redistribution and global justice: improving the lot of the poorest of the world surely justifies imposing a burden on those who have more wealth and who had the good fortune of being born in the “right” part of the world. True, this burden shouldn’t fall on the poorest members of the “right” countries, but if it does that can be corrected by national redistribution.

Still, let’s return to the labor cost argument against immigration. Here’s another piece of evidence that tips the scales yet a bit further against the view that the extremely low cost of immigrant labor results in displacement of low-level native labor. The evidence I want to cite is about internal migration in China, but it’s perfectly possible to use it against arguments favoring restrictions on international migration:

Hundreds of millions of rural migrants have moved into Chinese cities since the early 1990s contributing greatly to economic growth, yet, they are often blamed for reducing urban ‘native’ workers’ employment opportunities, suppressing their wages and increasing pressure on infrastructure and other public facilities. This paper examines the causal relationship between rural-urban migration and urban native workers’ labour market outcomes in Chinese cities. After controlling for the endogeneity problem our results show that rural migrants in urban China have modest positive or zero effects on the average employment and insignificant impact on earnings of urban workers. When we examine the impact on unskilled labours we once again find it to be positive and insignificant. We conjecture that the reason for the lack of adverse effects is due partially to the labour market segregation between the migrants and urban natives, and partially due to the complementarities between the two groups of workers. Further investigation reveals that the increase in migrant inflow is related to the demand expansion and that if the economic growth continues, elimination of labour market segregation may not necessarily lead to an adverse impact of migration on urban native labour market outcomes. (source, source)

More posts about arguments against open borders are here, here and here. More posts in this blog series are here.

Related Articles

• Pros of Rural-urban Migration (socyberty.com)
• Worker Shortages Seen in Chinese Export Centers (nytimes.com)
• Immigration and the economy: Everything you believe is wrong (blogs.berkeley.edu)
• Why an immigration amnesty could benefit British workers (newstatesman.com)

Migration and Human Rights (40): The Economic Efficiency Argument for Open Borders

immigration cartoon by Angel Boligan

(source)

Immigration restrictions are often defended on the basis of economic arguments. I’ve repeated often enough why these arguments won’t work (see here, here, here and here for example). What I want to do now is spell out one of the strongest economic arguments against immigration restrictions and in favor of open borders, and I mean completely open borders (which doesn’t mean that completely open borders are necessarily the right thing to do; there may be other arguments against completely open borders that override the economic ones in favor).

Restraining the movement of people between national territories creates the same inefficiencies as restraining the movement of goods and services. Free international trade in goods and services increases overall wealth and prosperity, as I’ve argued here, here and here. Trade enhances specialization and the use of comparative advantage. It’s easier to grow bananas in the tropics and then trade them, than to make every country grow its own bananas. Similarly, free movement of people makes it possible to make better use of people’s talents. Just as it was an inefficient waste to relegate women to the household – not to mention a gross violation of their rights – we are now depriving the world of good workers in all fields of life because of immigration restrictions. Potential immigrants have a hard time going to other countries in order to develop their talents, and can’t move freely around the world to use their talents. Those of you who worry about the effects of a so-called brain drain should read this.

More on open borders is here.

Related Articles

• #9: Open Our Borders (bigthink.com)
• The case for open borders (trueslant.com)
• The Conservative Case for Open Borders — By: Ramesh Ponnuru (corner.nationalreview.com)
• Sure, It’s Obvious Economics, But Do We Really Want to Import Millions of Conservative Christians?: (brothersjuddblog.com)
• Should the U.S. Restrict Immigration? (psychologytoday.com)
• Immigration Myths — By: Mark Krikorian (corner.nationalreview.com)
• Economists are making the case politicians are afraid to: Immigration is great for the U.S. (slate.com)

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (33): Nefarious Political Metaphors

(source unknown)

I want to go out on a limb here and argue that most if not all human rights violations as they have occurred throughout human history can be explained and have been directly caused by the persistent and widespread use of metaphors. (Which doesn’t mean that there are no other causes).

But before I list some of the metaphors I have in mind, a few general words that may help to explain why I think simple metaphors can do so much damage. The fact that we constantly use metaphors in language and thought may buttress the thesis that they have some effect on our actions. The same is true for the fact that metaphors are not just figures of speech but are cognitively important as well: by claiming that some things are alike – metaphors are descriptions of one thing as something else – they help us understand things.

For example, if we say that compound interest is like a snowball rolling off a snowy mountain side, we use something we already understand – the snowball – in order to understand something else that looked and sounded strange before the application of the metaphor – compound interest. And when we then understand things in a certain way, we act according to our understanding of things – in our example, we put our money in a savings account that offers compound interest rather than in one that just offers a fixed interest on the basic sum.

Or let’s use another, more appropriate example (one which I will return to below): if we have difficulties assessing the impact of immigration on our own society and culture, then the metaphor of the “tidal wave of immigration” can help us to “understand” this impact and to do something about it (stop the wave, for instance). Immigration is like a wave because it’s equally overwhelming and harmful. It’s clear from this example that the word “understanding” should not be understood (pun intended) in an epistemological sense: the point is not that understanding produces correct knowledge about the world, but simply that we believe it does. In this case, I personally think the wave metaphor does not help us to understand the phenomenon of immigration (on the contrary), but many people believe it does and it inspires their actions.

If all this has convinced you that metaphors can indeed cause political actions, then it’s now time to list what I believe have been and to some extent still are some of the most destructive political metaphors in history. (Do tell me in comments if you think of other examples).

Moral Balance

Wall Painting in a Jain Monastery, Sravanabelagola

This metaphor is most clearly expressed in lex talionis – an eye for an eye – which is a form of criminal justice that claims to balance crime and retribution. A softer version is proportionality: even if people shouldn’t be punished in a manner that strictly balances out their criminal acts, they should get what they deserve and they deserve tougher sentences when their crimes are worse. There may also be a deeper metaphor at work here, one in which there is some kind of cosmic moral balance that shouldn’t be disturbed and that should be corrected when people do disturb it. Failure to correct it leaves moral imbalances intact, and that is damaging in some unspecified and metaphysical way.

Many people agree that the moral balance metaphor has done a lot of harm in the case of capital punishment, but I argue that it poisons our entire criminal justice system. We shouldn’t incarcerate people in order to punish those who deserve some amount of incarceration proportional to their crime. If we have to incarcerate, it’s because that’s the only way to protect other people’s rights. And this rule would drastically reduce the number of inmates currently in prisons all over the world. It’s fashionable to say that we have come a long way since the time of medieval criminal punishment, but I believe our current judicial practices – even those in “developed countries” – are still among the worst human rights violations in the world.

Bootstrapping

Von Munchhausen bootstrapping

This metaphor is most harmful when it blocks assistance to the poor (and poverty is a human rights violation). It promotes an “understanding” of the phenomenon of poverty that paints the poor as lazy, self-destructive and undeserving people who only have themselves to blame and who could easily save themselves were they willing to invest the necessary effort. This “understanding” obscures many other and often more important causes of poverty and therefore perpetuates it.

Dirt

nazi propaganda about "jewish dirt"

Genocide, mass murder, ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity are made easier when the target group is persuasively depicted as some sort of “dirt”, “cockroaches“, “vermin” or any other dehumanized entity. The best way to violate human rights is to deny people’s humanity. However, dehumanization also occurs on a much smaller and seemingly harmless scale, in advertising, gender stereotypes, popular culture etc.

The dirt example shows that people often don’t even realize that they are acting on the basis of a metaphor and actually view what is supposed to be a similarity as being an identity. Many Rwandan Hutus implicated in the genocide probably believed that Tutsis and cockroaches were quasi-identical.

The Family

a family

The metaphor of the family of fellow citizens is often used to justify differential treatment of citizens and non-citizens. For example, social security offers protection to fellow-citizens who are nationally the worst off but who are nevertheless relatively wealthy when compared to the poorest in other countries. And development aid is usually much less generous than social security. I would argue for a more cosmopolitan stance as a better means to protect the equal human rights of all human beings.

The same metaphor is used to justify excessive patriotism and the wars that seem an inevitable result of it, as well as authoritarian government by a father figure or by people who think they know better.

The Wave

Hokusai great wave off kanagawa, early 1830s

As mentioned earlier, this metaphor is used to counter immigration, when in fact increased immigration could do an enormous amount of good, not only for millions of poor people all over the world, but also for the populations in the more wealthy destination countries.

The metaphor does some more damage when it’s used in overpopulation discourse. Horrible population control policies are supposedly justified by the “wave” of overpopulation, and as if these policies aren’t harmful enough by themselves, they have disastrous side effects such as gendercide.

The Child

Jackie Coogan in Chaplin's "The Kid"

This metaphor has often been used to subjugate women, those supposedly childlike creatures unable to control their emotions or to marshal the forces – physical or mental – necessary for many social roles. Slaves and colonized peoples as well were often viewed as childlike beings in need of the White Man’s guidance.

Conclusion

So, what can we take away from this? It would seem that we can’t do much about human rights violations: metaphors are notoriously hard to weed out and if they caused rights violations in the past they will continue to do so. But that’s not entirely true. While we may not be able to remove certain metaphors from common language, we may reduce their impact on real life events and their salience in certain circumstances. We can chip away at their nefarious role in rights violations, and that’s exactly what we already did in the past.

For example, the child metaphor used to be an important conduit in the submission of blacks, but that’s no longer the case today. The metaphor is still there and is still doing damage (in criminal justice for instance, as an analogy for punishment based on a supposed lack of self-control), but its range has been curtailed. Curtailment of harmful metaphors often means dismissing the similarity between things that a metaphor has tried to establish. For example, if we can show that immigration doesn’t do the same damage to a society as a “tidal wave” but actually has a lot of benefits, then the metaphor of the “tidal wave” can be curtailed.

Other posts in this series are here. More on the effect of language on human rights is here.

Human Rights Maps (164): Largest Chinese and Indian Immigrant Communities

More than 60 million Chinese and more than 20 million Indians live abroad. If all of the world’s migrants from all nationalities would form a separate nation, it would be the world’s fifth-largest.

Largest Chinese and Indian immigrant communities

(source)

Another version, only for China:

(interactive version here)

Within the US, this is the distribution of the Chinese population:

Percent Chinese population by US county

(source, the same map for the Indian population is here)

Also interesting, but without information about the origin of the migrants:

(source)

Amsterdam	Netherlands
Auckland	New Zealand
Brussels	Belgium
Dubai	United Arab Emirates
Frankfurt	Germany
Hong Kong	China
Jerusalem	Israel
Jiddah	Saudi Arabia
London	United Kingdom
Los Angeles	USA
Medina	Saudi Arabia
Melbourne	Australia
Miami	USA
Muscat	Oman
New York	USA
Perth	Australia
Riyadh	Saudi Arabia
San Francisco	USA
San Jose	USA
Singapore	Singapore
Sydney	Australia
Tbilisi	Georgia
Tel Aviv	Israel
Toronto	Canada
Vancouver	Canada

If you’re wondering in what sense immigration is a human rights issue, go here, here and here. More maps on immigration are here. More human rights maps in general are here.

Human Rights Maps (162): Apprehensions of Illegal Immigrants at the US-Mexico Border

A combination of better law enforcement and an economic recession has resulted in a steep decline of illegal immigration from Mexico to the US. One way to measure illegal immigration is to extrapolate on the basis of the number of Border Patrol apprehensions. These went down fast, as is shown by this map:

(source)

Here are the total numbers:

(source)

I personally regret this since I’m in favor of open borders (see here). If it’s the recession that drives down illegal immigration, then that means an increase in poverty or at least an absence of a decrease. And if it’s border apprehensions that drive it down, then that means a violation of people’s freedom of movement, freedom of association etc.

More about the recession and immigration here and here. More immigration maps and statistics. Something on the measurement of the number of illegal immigrants here. More human rights maps here.

Human Rights Maps (144): The “Criminal Immigrant” Stereotype

I’ve argued many times before that the link between immigration and crime is a particularly nasty piece of political cynicism and populism, completely fact-free but unfortunately not devoid of harmful consequences. Three different groups suffer these consequences:

• potential migrants who have beneficial opportunities taken away from them
• existing migrants who are unfairly targeted by law enforcement
• and the native populations who also can’t benefit from increased immigration.

Here’s one sickening cartoon in map form, claiming that Mexico, following the example of Colombia, is drowning in blood, and that the blood is spilling across the border, when in fact immigration reduces crime rates:

(source)

More maps on migration are here. More human rights maps in general are here.

The Causes of Poverty (49): Brain Drain?

People with socially useful skills – such as nurses, doctors and teachers – often desire to leave their poor native countries and migrate to the West. A higher wage and the chance of escaping some of the world’s most dysfunctional societies trumps national and social attachments.

However, some argue that this “brain drain” is detrimental to the prosperity of developing countries: not only do they lose their best and brightest – emigration of skilled citizens makes it more difficult to prepare younger generations for their role in society (teachers leave, and governments faced with the risk of brain drain are less eager to invest in education – and even if they are eager they will have a smaller income from taxes necessary to fund education).

And indeed, the better educated citizens of poor countries are more likely to emigrate. You need some money and know-how to move to the West, and you have to expect some value-added. A poor farmer in Africa doesn’t have the money to leave, and his chances of finding a socially useful role in Europe or America, compared to his fellow-citizens who are doctors or engineers, are small.

However, when assessing the economic impact of the brain drain, one has to take all effects into account. For example, criticism of the brain drain often fails to mention the clear benefits for those who decide to leave their countries. More counter-intuitively, those who stay behind may also gain rather than lose: people who spend time abroad often return home with socially valuable skills and savings, and while they’re abroad they send home remittances. Also, the possibility of leaving a country incites many people to improve their skills and education, even if ultimately they stay home. And when they stay home, their higher education is a net social gain. Governments of developing countries may also benefit: perhaps they’ll lose some money when people leave after finishing their government subsidized education, but they gain money when the families that stayed behind spend their remittances, or when they don’t have to pay unemployment benefits to those who leave – some of those would have been unemployed had they stayed home.

It seems that the brain drain is no more than a catchy phrase, and certainly not an important cause of poverty in developing countries.

More posts in this series are here.

Measuring Human Rights (14): Numbers of Illegal Immigrants

caution sign depicting running illegal immigrants at a border crossing

Calculating a reliable number for a segment of the population that generally wants to hide from officials is very difficult, but it’s politically very important to know more or less how many illegal immigrants there are, and whether their number is increasing or decreasing. There’s a whole lot of populist rhetoric floating around, especially regarding jobs and crime, and passions are often inflamed. Knowing how many illegal immigrants there are – more or less – allows us to quantify the real effects on employment and crime, and to deflate some of the rhetoric.

Immigration is a human rights issue in several respects. Immigration is often a way for people to escape human rights violations (such as poverty or persecution). And upon arrival, immigrants – especially illegal immigrants – often face other human rights violations (invasion of privacy, searches, labor exploitation etc.). The native population may also fear – rightly or wrongly – that the presence of large groups of immigrants will lower their standard of living or threaten their physical security. Illegal immigrants especially are often accused of pulling down wages and labor conditions and of creating native unemployment. If we want to disprove such accusations, we need data on the numbers of immigrants.

So how do we count the number of illegal immigrants? Obviously there’s nothing in census data. The Census Bureau doesn’t ask people about their immigration status, in part because such questions may drive down overall response rates. Maybe in some cases the census data of other countries can help. Other countries may ask their residents how many family members have gone abroad to find a job.

Another possible source are the numbers of births included in hospital data. If you assume a certain number of births per resident, and compare that to the total number of births, you may be able to deduce the number of births among illegal immigrants (disparagingly called “anchor babies“), which in turn may give you an idea about the total number of illegal immigrants.

Fluctuations in the amounts of remittances - money sent back home by immigrants – may also indicate trends in illegal immigration, although remittances are of course sent by both legal and illegal immigrants. Furthermore, it’s not because remittances go down that immigrants leave. It might just be a temporary drop following an economic recession, and immigrants decide to sweat it out (possibly supported by reverse remittances for the time of the recession). Conversely, an increase in remittances may simply reflect technological improvements in international payment systems.

Perhaps a better indicator are the numbers of apprehensions by border-patrol units. However, fluctuations in these numbers may not be due to fluctuations in immigration. Better or worse performance by border-patrol officers or tighter border security may be the real reasons.

So, it’s really not easy to count illegal immigrants, and that means that all rhetoric about illegal immigration – both positive and negative – should be taken with a grain of salt.

More posts on this series are here.

Related Articles

• Study: 340,000 Babies Were Born to Illegal Immigrant Parents in 2008 (washingtonindependent.com)
• Study Looks at Babies Born to Illegal Immigrants (nytimes.com)

Migration and Human Rights (39): The Democracy Argument Against Open Borders

Usually, arguments against open borders and in favor of varying degrees of immigration restrictions are based on economic or cultural considerations. Often, such arguments can be easily dismissed as prejudiced, chauvinist and selfish, and the data don’t support them anyway. However, a potentially stronger argument against open borders is based on the requirements of democracy. It’s potentially stronger because it goes to the heart of the same liberal values that animate the push for open borders.

Central to the idea of democracy is that those who are governed by laws should have a say in the drafting of the laws. In the words of Jürgen Habermas:

Gültig sind genau die Handlungsnormen, denen alle möglicherweise Betroffenen als Teilnehmer an rationalen Diskursen zustimmen könnten.

Jurgen Habermas

People are obligated to obey the laws of government only insofar as they have consented to those laws (or to the power exercised in passing those laws). That’s the whole idea behind self-government.

Now, what would happen to this idea where we to open the borders? It’s claimed that the constant coming and going of people that would result from open borders, would make self-government impossible. People would vote on laws that would not apply to them in the future because they come and go, and other people would not be able to vote on laws that would apply to them because they won’t be here yet. Open borders would mean that people are allowed to decide on things they don’t care about and won’t have a stake in. Self-government would not be possible because the “self” that governs would never match the “self” that is governed.

Another democracy based objection to open borders is a practical one. The effective functioning of democracy requires a common language, since democracy is essentially deliberation. It also requires knowledge of the political system and the political culture, and a feeling for what is achievable and acceptable to the wider community. Open borders inhibit this effective functioning.

There are basically two ways to respond to these arguments. First, the arguments seem to confuse access rights and citizenship rights. It’s correct that citizenship in a democracy should be tied to certain conditions, such as knowledge of the language and permanence of residence, and that citizenship is a necessary condition for most democratic participation. I made that argument here so I won’t repeat it now. Suffice it to say that there are good reasons to distinguish – but not separate – different parts of humanity by way of conditional acquisition of citizenship – with each part hopefully having democratic rights within its own country. However, these reasons don’t, by themselves, justify closed borders. Access rights and citizenship rights are different things.

Michael Walzer

However, as Michael Walzer has argued, when we decide to allow people in but at the same time deny them citizenship, we run the risk of creating a permanent underclass of disenfranchised non-citizens, who live and work in the country but can’t effectively protect their interests through political participation. Hence, an open border policy should also include a pathway to citizenship. The problem is then to strike the right balance between the need for flexible citizenship and the risks to democratic governance resulting from a notion of citizenship that is too weak.

Secondly, the central idea of democracy – that people governed by laws should have the right to participate in the framing of those laws – can be used to argue in favor of rather than against open borders. A decision by one part of humanity to exclude others from a certain part of the earth’s surface clearly violates this central idea. The potential immigrants who are excluded obviously don’t have a say in this decision, and yet they are governed by it. If they had a say, they would probably carry the day, given their numerical strength.

Some would claim that it’s foolish to allow potential immigrants to participate in such decisions. Would we allow a mob of homeless people, demanding access to our house, to vote, together with us, whether or not they have a right to access? No we wouldn’t, but the analogy is baseless. We do have a legitimate property right to our house (at least most of us do), but the citizens of a country don’t have a similar right to a part of the surface of the earth.

It’s of course an open question how we would practically organize such a common decision. Perhaps we should take the next logical step and institute some kind of federal world democracy. But that’s for another post.

More on open borders here.

Related Articles

• The Conservative Case for Open Borders — By: Ramesh Ponnuru (corner.nationalreview.com)
• The case for open borders (trueslant.com)
• The Social Security Argument Against Open Borders (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)
• The Cultural Argument Against Open Borders (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)

2010, Homefront and Worldfront

On the “home front”, 2010 was a good year. In our third year of blogging (we started this blog in April 2008), we had more than 1,8 million pageviews (up from 1 million in 2009 and 193.000 in 2008). That’s an average of 5000 a day. The most popular posts in 2010 were:

• The Anti-Democrat’s Paradox
• Human Rights Quote (68): Aids Disaster
• Invasion of Privacy, A Collection of Images (must have had something to do with the new airport security measures)
• Human Rights Facts (5b): Poverty, Types, Causes and Measurement, and
• Statistics on Capital Punishment

We also, finally, finished tinkering with the blog’s layout, something which may lower frustration levels here and there. (If there’s still something bothering you, about the layout or anything else, tell us). Perhaps you’ve also noticed the little “satisfaction survey” we have at the bottom of each page (maybe you’ve even voted, in which case, thanks). We’ll keep it there, since there’s a steady stream of new readers who may also want to express their satisfaction/dissatisfaction/opinions. The current state of opinion regarding this blog is as follows:

Pretty positive, I would say. Of course, we should add all of those who believe the blog is so bad that it’s really not worth scrolling all the way down in order to vote. Personally, I blame the relatively high number of votes for “this blog sucks” not on the general suckiness of the blog but on juvenile excitement about finding some bloggers who actually allow you to say that they suck. But I may be wrong. The “other” category yielded answers such as: “biased”, “informative”, “fucking sucks” (sic), “offensive”, “much appreciated”, “too long”, “useful”, “well written but incorrect” etc.

Also good in 2010 was the publication of my latest book.

However, looking at the world beyond this blog, it’s pretty hard to say whether or not it’s been a good year. If we limit ourselves to the topic we’re dealing with here, it’s a disgrace that we still can’t say if respect for human rights has increased or not compared to 2009. We’ll keep asking for progress in human rights measurement.

Looking at individual human rights, the record is mixed. There has been progress in the fight against capital punishment, poverty, government secrecy and discrimination, for instance. But in other areas, things have probably gotten worse: immigration, torture, privacy, hunger, criminal justice etc. You do your own math. And while I know it’s useless to make other people’s new year’s resolutions for them, I would suggest that there’s probably some inspiration to be found in human rights.

The Causes of Wealth Inequality (12): Immigration

Immigrants are usually somewhat poorer than natives, mainly

• because they come from poorer countries,
• because they are less well educated and less skilled (on average) and
• because they are often more at risk of being unemployed.

So it’s tempting to use data on increasing immigration flows – such as those that occurred in the U.S. during the last decades – in order to explain rising income inequality. Inequality is then viewed, not as the result of an unjust economic system, but as the mechanical result of demographic changes.

Image via Wikipedia

The timing is hard to ignore. During the Great Compression, the long and prosperous mid-20th-century idyll when income inequality shrank or held steady, immigration was held in check by quotas first imposed during the 1920s. The Nobel-prizewinning economist Paul Samuelson saw a connection. “By keeping labor supply down,” … a restrictive immigration policy “tends to keep wages high.” After the 1965 immigration law reopened the spigot, the income trend reversed itself and income inequality grew. (source)

However, there’s little evidence that immigration keeps wages low at the bottom end of the native income distribution (except for high-school dropouts and to a limited extent), which is where immigration’s effect on inequality is supposed to occur. See here for a discussion of the evidence. One can even make the case that immigration benefits the poorest sections of the native population. See this post. So, immigration can’t explain rising income inequality. But perhaps the sheer number of poor immigrants can account for rising inequality? Maybe immigration doesn’t produce inequality by pushing down native wages but simply by changing the demographic: more poor people (in this case immigrants) means higher inequality.

Gary Burtless [notes] that immigrants “accounted for one-third of the U.S. population growth between 1980 and 2007″. [E]ven if they failed to exert heavy downward pressure on the incomes of most native-born Americans, the roughly 900,000 immigrants who arrive in the United States each year were sufficient in number to skew the national income distribution by their mere presence. [However,] [h]ad there been no immigration after 1979, he calculated, average annual wages for all workers “may have risen by an additional 2.3 percent”. (source)

And that number would have been hardly sufficient to stop the actual increase in income inequality. So even if there had been no immigration, inequality would have increased. There must therefore be other causes and explanations.

Maybe you’re wondering what the problem is, in which case you can go here. More on immigration is here. More posts in this series are here.

Related Articles

• BERNANKE: Growing Inequality Is Destroying America (businessinsider.com)
• The Causes of Wealth Inequality (10): Racism (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)
• Top Culprits for Income Inequality? Exec Pay and Educational Failures (emptywheel.firedoglake.com)

Migration and Human Rights (38): The Cultural Argument Against Open Borders

People have a legitimate interest in the preservation of their distinctive cultural identity, their language, customs, habits, institutions, traditions etc. Opening the borders and welcoming massive numbers of immigrants – something that I favor – is supposedly incompatible with this interest. Relatively wealthy countries in particular risk being overrun by masses of poorer migrants, often from very different cultures. Opening borders or even relaxing immigration restrictions in such countries means cultural suicide.

There are some hidden assumptions behind his argument:

Artwork depicting the first contact between the Gweagal Aborigines and Captain James Cook on the shores of the Kurnell Peninsula. The natives seem to be opposing the arrival of the colonizers.

• There is a uniform culture of the host country.
• The culture of immigrants is fundamentally different from the culture of the host country.
• Immigrants will be numerous and permanent enough to make a difference.
• Immigrants will, on balance, influence the hosts more than vice versa. In other words, they will generally fail to assimilate and they will be hostile to the host culture.
• Cultural change, occurring independently or following intercultural contact, is a bad thing.
• Cultural change in the host country would not occur independently, i.e. without the physical presence of immigrants in the territory of the host culture, or will do so less rapidly or extensively (e.g. cultural change through other causes such as globalization and intercultural exchange).
• Because people have an interest in preserving their cultural identity – to the extent that this identity exists – they also have an absolute right to preserve it.
• The right to preserve a cultural identity supposes a right to exclusive control over a part of the surface of the earth.
• The right to preserve a cultural identity always trumps the right to free movement of immigrants.

I would argue that none of these assumptions is correct. More here, here and here.

Related Articles

• Understanding Cultural Diversity for International Students (brighthub.com)
• The case for open borders (trueslant.com)
• One Way to Help Immigrants to Assimilate (immigration.change.org)
• A Human Right to Free Movement, Immigration, and the Common Ownership of the Earth (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)
• White Britons ‘will be outnumbered’ by 2066 if immigration continues (dailymail.co.uk)
• The Social Security Argument Against Open Borders (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)

Migration and Human Rights (37): Hostility Towards Immigrants Caused by the Economic Recession

restricting immigration

(source)

I’ve written a few times before about the possible effects of the current economic recession – or of any recession for that matter – on human rights. Now its seems that there’s some proof for the common notion that recessions promote anti-immigrant feelings:

Macroeconomic conditions have long been suspected of increasing hostility toward ethnic outgroups. Integrating prior work on macroeconomic threat with recent threat-based models of prejudice, the current work employs an experimental approach to examine the implications of economic threat for prejudice toward ethnic outgroups. In Study 1, participants primed with an economic threat (relative to a non-economic threat and neutral topic) reported more prejudice against Asian Americans, an ethnic group whose stereotype implies a threat to scarce employment opportunities. In addition, economic threat led to a heightened state of anxiety, which mediated the influence of economic threat on prejudice against Asian Americans. Study 2 replicated and extended these findings by demonstrating that economic threat heightened prejudice against Asian Americans, but not Black Americans, an ethnic group whose stereotype does not imply a threat to economic resources. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the role of macroeconomic conditions in potentiating antisocial responses to particular outgroups. (source)

Anti-immigrant hostility as such isn’t a human rights violation, but it can lead to discrimination and even violence. In most cases, it will just make restrictions on immigration more likely, and we know that migration is an important route out of poverty for many. Hence, immigration restrictions exacerbate poverty, and that’s a human rights violation. Not to mention the right to free movement and residence.

Some data on hostility are here.

Related Articles

• Rethinking immigration (politico.com)
• Race baiting: firing up the in-group (psychologytoday.com)
• Study: Harsh Anti-Immigrant Law Drove Legal Hispanic Residents Out of Community (alternet.org)

Migration and Human Rights (36): The Social Security Argument Against Open Borders

If there’s one Milton Friedman quote that’s repeated far too often it’s the following: “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state”. The income of relatively rich people in many poor countries pales in comparison to what the poor, unemployed, sick, young and elderly in rich countries get from welfare and social security transfers. Hence, the argument goes, opening borders and eliminating immigration restrictions would cause massive flows of people to those rich countries. Perhaps some of these people would come in the hope of finding a good job, but at the same time they have the certainty that, if they fail, they will enjoy generous social protection. And all the rest will come just for the benefits.

The problem, some say, is that rich countries can’t afford large increases in the numbers of welfare beneficiaries, and that they therefore must limit immigration. Open borders are only feasible when global poverty has been solved and income levels are more or less comparable across countries. Or, when rich countries would decide, unrealistically, to eliminate their welfare systems or at least coldheartedly decide to exclude all immigrants from welfare.

However, as I’ve stated before, immigrants in the U.S. use welfare at lower rates than natives and have higher rates of labor force participation. In the U.K., immigrants represent about 13% of all workers, but only 7% percent of unemployment benefits (source).

Anyway, even if we assume that open borders will be a net negative for western welfare systems, there’s no need to limit the options to the stark choice between welfare and open borders. We could, for example, give immigrants access to labor markets but only limited access to unemployment benefits, or we could delay their benefits, demanding that they first contribute to the system during a number of years (something which might actually strengthen the system). However, we’d have to be careful and not create inequality, discrimination and a class society.

Or we could decide to grant immigrants full access to welfare because we believe that global inequality should be reduced. Access to welfare would then be a kind a development aid.

And, finally, it’s possible to view matters from an entirely different angle. Large chunks of welfare transfers go to the elderly. Given the demographic evolutions in many rich countries, it may be that immigration will be the only way for aging countries to sustain their welfare states.

More here and here. More on open borders here.

Related Articles

• Immigrants — Good or Bad? (realclearpolitics.com)
• Should the U.S. Restrict Immigration? (psychologytoday.com)
• Who is Eligible for Welfare in the United States? (brainz.org)
• The Aging, Crisis-Prone Welfare State Must Confront The Problem Of Welfare Migration (businessinsider.com)

Migration and Human Rights (34): The “Criminal Immigrant” Stereotype, Ctd.

I presented some data debunking the criminal immigrant stereotype a few times already. It’s simply not true that immigration leads to an increase in crime rates. True, immigrants are often – but not always – relatively poor, undereducated and – initially at least – not well adjusted to their host community. But none of that seems to be a sufficient reason for higher crime rates among immigrants.

On the contrary, there’s some evidence here of immigration actually reducing crime rates:

During the 1990s, immigration reached record highs and crime rates fell more precipitously than at any time in U.S. history. And cities with the largest increases in immigration between 1990 and 2000 experienced the largest decreases in rates of homicide and robbery. … Wadsworth contends that looking at crime statistics at a single point in time can’t explain the cause of crime rates.

Using such snapshots in time, Wadsworth finds that cities with larger foreign-born and new-immigrant populations do have higher rates of violent crime. But many factors—including economic conditions—influence crime rates.

If higher rates of immigration were boosting crime rates, one would expect long-term studies to show crime rising and falling over time with the influx and exodus of immigrants. Instead, Wadsworth found the opposite. (source)

There’s yet another study here showing that Hispanic Americans are less violent than whites or blacks.

A simple juxtaposition of immigration trends and crime trends can already make clear how silly it is to claim that higher immigration rates produce higher crime rates:

(source)

Property crime rates in the United States (1986-2005) Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reports

What could be the explanation? Why does immigration reduce crime rates? Maybe the culture and religion of the immigrants has something to do with it. Or maybe it’s true that people migrate because they want to have a better life, and that engaging in crime is incompatible with this motivation. Or perhaps the fact that immigrants tend to live in extended families and close-knit communities discourages crime.

I’ve said it before: although correlation doesn’t always equal causation, these numbers are compelling, even if we accept some possible caveats (illegal immigrants, when committing a crime, are perhaps more likely to flee abroad and hence not end up in incarceration statistics, and there may be some underreporting of crime in communities with a lot of illegal immigrants). Politicians should therefore stop exploiting irrational fears about immigrant crime for their own partisan gain. You don’t solve the crime problem by closing the border, and certainly not by ignoring overwhelming scientific evidence.

Related Articles

• Massive Drop in Crime Accompanies Major Wave of Immigration (criminaljustice.change.org)
• Fox: Confusion on illegal immigrants, crime (boston.com)
• New study on challenges ‘immigrant criminality’ theory (thegrio.com)
• more illegal immigrants does NOT = more violent crime (schansblog.blogspot.com)

Migration and Human Rights (33): Immigration = Importing Poverty?

Let’s jump to the conclusion: no, immigration is not “the importation of poverty”, at least not in the U.S. and probably not in other developed countries either.

When talking about “importing poverty” we should make the following distinction.

• Immigration can affect a country’s total poverty rate. Many immigrants are less well off than the native born, even after they’ve immigrated, because they come from poorer countries and because they’re usually lower skilled than the native born. Hence, an increase in immigration will push up the national poverty rate. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, since the same immigration flow will probably push down the global poverty rate: migrants usually improve their lot by migrating – they probably wouldn’t migrate if that were not the case (I focus on economic migrants here, not refugees or displaced persons). They are, on average, poor relative to the native population, but they were, in absolute terms, even poorer before they migrated.
• Immigration, however, can also affect, not the total poverty rate of the destination country, but the poverty rate of the native population in the destination country. This supposed effect occurs because immigration is said to alter the levels of supply of workers with different skills. These alterations (or “immigration-induced labor supply shocks”) can, theoretically, have an negative impact on wage levels or employment rates of the native population. This impact of immigrant-native labor market competition can in turn affect native (but also immigrant) poverty levels, since poverty is closely linked to wage evolutions.

It’s this second, supposed effect which of course produces the most political heat, spawning xenophobic political parties or a “push to the right” in existing parties. I already cited a few studies disproving this effect, and here‘s yet another one:

we find little evidence of an impact of immigration on native poverty through immigrant-native labor market competition. Despite adverse wage effects on high school dropouts and small effects on the poverty rates of members of this group, the effects on native poverty rates are negligible. This latter result is largely driven by the fact that even among native-born poor households, most have at least one working adult with at least a high school education.

Apart from distortions in labor competition, there’s possibly a third effect through which immigration could have an impact on native poverty levels: anti-immigrant propaganda often includes statements about “welfare tourism”, immigrants coming over just to cash in on unemployment and other benefits. In doing so, the claim goes, they sap the country’s economic efficiency because high welfare spending implies high taxes. And an economy that’s weakened because of high taxes can result in more poverty. However, this as well is basically a myth. For the U.S., we have the following numbers disproving those claims:

Those immigrants aren’t coming here to have babies and they aren’t coming here to abuse social services. … [I]mmigrants use welfare at lower rates than natives. I should also add that if your concern is that some immigrants are receiving more in public benefits than they pay in taxes, you should keep in mind that so do 67 percent of Americans. … [T]he labor force participation rate for illegal immigrant males (ages 18 to 64) was 92 percent, compared to a rate of just 83 percent for native-born males. (source)

In the U.S., immigrants are just as likely to be unemployed as native born Americans. However, that’s not the case in all rich countries. In Belgium, for instance, the unemployment rate for immigrants is nearly two and a half times as high as it is for the native-born:

(source)

In the U.S., all talk about “welfare tourism” is highly dubious in light of the following:

The contributions by unauthorized immigrants to Social Security … are much larger than previously known… Stephen C. Goss, the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration and someone who enjoys bipartisan support for his straightforwardness, said that by 2007, the Social Security trust fund had received a net benefit of somewhere between $120 billion and $240 billion from unauthorized immigrants. The cumulative contribution is surely higher now. Unauthorized immigrants paid a net contribution of $12 billion in 2007 alone… Somebody ought to say thank you. (source, source)

See also here, here, here and here.

Related Articles

• Why MigrationWatch are wrong: a plea for a more robust debate on immigration (newstatesman.com)
• #9: Open Our Borders (bigthink.com)
• The Job Market for Immigrants (economix.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Fact Check: Undocumented Immigrants Don’t Take Jobs From American Workers (immigration.change.org)
• Why an immigration amnesty could benefit British workers (newstatesman.com)
• Mega payoff of more immigration (washingtonpost.com)

Migration and Human Rights (32): A Human Right to Free Movement and the Common Ownership of the Earth

I’m consistently in favor of increased immigration, and skeptical of the arguments against (such as those based on notions like “importing crime“, “importing poverty” or “watering down culture“).

However, if the arguments against immigration fail, how about the quality of the arguments in favor? Poverty reduction is a strong one: the prosperity of immigrants obviously increases when they are allowed to immigrate, but so does the prosperity of the families left behind (as a result of remittances). But a more interesting argument is based on the concept of the common ownership of the earth. Humanity collectively owns the earth and its resources because the earth is simply there. No one has created it and no one therefore deserves credit for it. Consequently, all individuals have an equal claim to every part of it and collectively own every part of it. (That’s an old idea, going back at least to Kant and Grotius).

Immanuel Kant

Accidents of birth do not destroy this common ownership. They don’t yield private ownership rights to those parts of the earth where they take place. Hence, these accidents should not determine who gets the exclusive usage rights over parts of the earth. Immigration restrictions are morally arbitrary since they differentiate between people based on the lottery of birth. They take the accident of being born somewhere and turn it into a rule to stay there. They are equivalent to other morally arbitrary differentiations, such as those based on race or gender. However, contrary to what happened to those other differentiations, a majority of public opinion has yet to be convinced of the morally arbitrary nature of immigration restrictions.

From the notion of the common ownership of the earth follows that every kind of private property, not only the state as the exclusive property of a part of the earth claimed by the citizens who happen to live in that state, is a privatization of common resources. I think any justification of such a privatization, and therefore any justification of any type of private property, is bound to be difficult.

John Locke

If the justification of privatization – whether of territory or commodities – does not succeed, then private property and the state are by definition illegitimate. So there’s a lot at stake here. The reason why such a justification is difficult, is that private property is necessarily based on an original theft of common ownership. Even if you cultivate the land you appropriate or privatize (or better steal from the collective of humanity), and even if you incorporate your labor in the product you make based on natural resources (Locke’s justification for private property) and thereby create added value, that doesn’t change the original sin: you’ll still be like the thief who takes care of the car he’s stolen and gives it a new color.

The same is true for a farmer fencing a part of the earth, a state imposing a border and restricting immigration, an oil company extracting the oil and refining and selling it, and a primitive tribe settling down in the jungle somewhere and keeping strangers out. Even nomadic tribes are guilty of the same sin by letting their cattle graze the land and keeping other tribes away.

Pierre Joseph Proudhon

So this reasoning a priori invalidates all talk about immigration restrictions. But it seems that I have proven too much: all private property, not just private property of land or a country, is, in the words of Proudhon, theft. Yet, private property is extremely important from the point of view of human rights, as I’ve argued elsewhere. Private property also seems to be fueling economic efficiency, as the communist experiments have shown, a contrario. Especially private property of land – important in the context of immigration – is important for prosperity (see here). I don’t want a justification of policies removing immigration restrictions that destroys all possible justifications of all forms of private property. Moreover, while I consider existing immigration restrictions unjust, I do recognize the value of some types of restrictions. Some restrictions used by citizens to limit access to a territory that they claim is theirs are legitimate. A state is necessary for democratic self-government and for the legal and judicial protection of human rights (proven a contrario by failed states), and it would seem impossible to imagine the concept of a state without some immigration restrictions.

These are moral goals – rights, democracy – that are at least equivalent to the moral goal of not stealing and to the moral rights of immigrants. The problem is that stealing – namely stealing a part of the earth from humanity – is precisely what seems to be necessary to achieve these moral goals. So we have a conflict between moral goals. The fact that these moral goals all seem to be equivalent – it’s not obvious that stealing is always more wrong than protecting human rights for instance – indicates that it should be conceivable to violate – or limit the force of – the principle of the common ownership of the earth in order to create private property, both of commodities and land/territory. Hence, immigration restrictions are not necessarily morally wrong, although I would still claim that the existing restrictions of all countries in the world go much too far: they don’t take the moral claim of the common ownership of the earth seriously enough, and they overemphasize the goals of residents over those of immigrants.

So how exactly do we balance these different and equivalent moral goals? For example, a country violating human rights has less rights to impose immigration restrictions because such restrictions will not serve the goal of rights. (Unfortunately, this won’t promote migration since such a country will not attract many immigrants if it winds down its immigration restrictions). A wealthy country – like wealthy people – have less rights to exclude others from a share of their wealth, since their wealth is based on the use of common property. In that case, immigrants can demand entry rights based on common property.

While national borders are drawn in a morally arbitrary way, as argued above, and while immigration restrictions that go together with the drawing of such border are therefore equally arbitrary, they are not morally meaningless. They are a morally arbitrary fact that has acquired moral significance: they have resulted in a tool – the state – that can do morally good, e.g. protect human rights and democracy.

More on immigration, freedom of movement and open borders.

Migration and Human Rights (31): Illegal Immigration and GDP

I’ve argued before that immigration – even illegal immigration – is economically beneficial for the host country, contrary to widespread belief and propaganda. There’s some new evidence for this claim in the following graph:

(source, source)

These figures suggest that illegal immigrants in the US – or undocumented workers – are making a substantial contribution to the U.S. economy and to U.S. prosperity, given what would happen to U.S. GDP were they to be deported.

Comprehensive immigration reform – in short, legalizing undocumented immigrants (the dreaded “amnesty”) together with a review of the rules regarding future flows – would be very beneficial for the US economy.

The graph above clearly shows the devastating economic impact of one very severe anti-immigration policy, namely deportation (“impact” here means on the host country; the impact on the migrants themselves doesn’t need spelling out). But there are numerous other types of restrictive policies.

A wave of local anti-immigration laws has swept the country… The laws take different forms – some authorize local police to enforce federal immigration laws, some restrict benefits like housing and employment to those with legal immigration status, and some require all government transactions to be conducted in English only. … [What] is the economic impact of these laws: are jurisdictions with them better off economically than those without them? (source)

Because these laws were enacted in some counties/cities and not elsewhere, you have a natural experiment in which you can compare counties/cities with restrictive regulation to more hospitable counties/cities.

The results show that the restrictive laws had a negative but small economic effect on the jurisdictions where they are enacted. Specifically, we find that these laws had a 1 to 2 percent negative effect on employment; for the average U.S. county, this translates to about 337 to 675 jobs (40 to 80 jobs for the median county). Consistent with the effect on employment, payroll was also negatively affected. This drop in employment includes both authorized and unauthorized workers. We also find that the laws reduced employment in some industries, such as the restaurant industry, while increasing employment in others, such as the grocery and liquor store industry. This suggests that affected workers may be switching jobs, rather than leaving a particular jurisdiction altogether. (source)

More here.

Migration and Human Rights (30): Leviticus

Hebrew Bible

(source)

When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. Leviticus 19:33-34 (NIV)

More on open borders here. More human rights quotes here.

Related Articles

• A Bible-based Immigration Policy (beliefnet.com)
• The Undocumented and the Laws of the Bible (beliefnet.com)
• Brad Hirschfield: A Hebrew Bible-Based Immigration Policy (huffingtonpost.com)

Migration and Human Rights (29): Is Freedom of Association a Means to Promote or to Restrict Immigration?

Arizona immigration cartoon by Clay Bennett

(source)

Freedom of association is an important human right (see here for example). Linked to freedom of association is the right to exclude: groups that aren’t allowed to exclude whomever they want from membership aren’t free to associate. Another reason why the right to exclude is an important consequence of freedom of association is that association is meaningless without the concept of group identity. People associate in groups because these groups have a certain identity, and this identity is or becomes an intrinsic part of the individual identities of the members. Hence, groups should be able to have a coherent identity and that means allowing them to exclude people who don’t conform to or accept this identity.

For example, freedom of association means that Christians have a right to join a “truly” Christian group. And if the meaning of the word “truly” means excluding gay Christians or atheist (people who, according to some, don’t “conform to” or don’t accept “true Christianity” respectively), then that is what is required by freedom of association. (Which doesn’t mean that this freedom of association or this right to exclude is unlimited. Non-discrimination is also a right and sometimes we’ll have to make a trade-off. Non-discrimination can sometimes prevail over freedom of association. And yet, every exclusion from a group or every exercise of the freedom of association which in some way harms outsiders isn’t a case of discrimination. I, a non-Scot, may fail to be accepted in the clan of the MacDonalds, but I’m not discriminated against by this decision, even if it hurts my feelings and my sense of identity).

Some see a link between freedom of association and immigration restrictions. If groups are allowed to exclude, why not countries? Countries are also groups. If you force Americans, for example, to take in immigrants, despite majority opposition, then you violate their freedom of association and their right to exclude. In addition, you are accused of harming their identity – in this case national identity – because the stated reason they associated and continue to exclude, is precisely the preservation of their groups identity (made up of US values, the English language etc.).

People who don’t take a restrictionist position on immigration – such as myself – can respond in two ways.

• First, one could claim that the rights of immigrants should be taken into account. The American freedom of association isn’t the only right in the world. When rights clash, they should be weighed against each other and the path of the “least violation” should be chosen. In the current case, one could easily argue that violations of the rights of immigrants (i.a. the right to a certain standard of living) caused by restrictions on immigration are much more severe than violations of the right to associate caused by relaxed immigration. After all, do people really believe that a culture as strong as that of the US would be harmed by immigrants? Or that immigration would change the nature of US society beyond recognition?
• Another way to respond to the restrictionist arguments based of the right to associate, is to use the right to associate against the restrictionists. Many immigrants come or would like to come to a country because employers in that country (would) like to have them as employees. Immigration restrictions therefore violate the freedom of association of employers. Even if the country as a whole – or better the majority – feels that its right to free association is violated by immigration, it’s not obvious that the rights of the majority automatically trump the rights of a minority, however tiny this minority may be (and it’s not tiny in this case). If anything, human rights are there to protect minorities against majorities. You can make the same argument for nationals wishing to marry a foreigner, immigrants already in the country wishing their families to join them etc.

More on association and on immigration.

The Causes of Wealth Inequality (7): Education and Demographics

First education. Many people believe that increasing income inequality in countries such as the U.S. should be blamed on immigration: low-skilled workers have to compete against low-wage immigrants with similar skills. However, immigration’s effect on wages is one of the biggest political myths out there. If you want to understand the income stagnation at the bottom of the income distribution – mostly unskilled workers – you have to compare this group of people, not to immigrants, but to the high earners.

Starting about 1950, the relative returns for schooling rose, and they skyrocketed after 1980. The reason is supply and demand. For the first time in American history, the current generation is not significantly more educated than its parents. Those in need of skilled labor are bidding for a relatively stagnant supply and so must pay more. … In contrast, from 1915 to 1950, the relative return for education fell, mostly because more new college graduates competed for a relatively few top jobs, and that kept top wages from rising too high. Tyler Cowen (source)

Hence, income inequality rose not because of downward pressure on the lower wages (supposedly caused by immigration) but because of upward pressure on the higher wages (caused by increasing returns for schooling, which are in turn caused by stagnant supply of high education). That means we can do something about income inequality. We can improve education levels, diminishing inequality both at the bottom – by giving low-skilled people a better education and hence a better income – and at the top – by reducing the scarcity of supply of the higher educated and hence lowering the relative wages at the high end.

Now to demographics.

In general, there is more income inequality among older populations than among younger populations, if only because older people have had more time to experience rising or falling fortunes. … Since the United States is growing older … income inequality will naturally rise. Tyler Cowen (source)

Other posts in this series are here. Some data on income inequality are here.

Religion and Human Rights (25): The Eurabia Falacy

If immigration isn’t opposed because of bogus economic reasons (“importing poverty” and unfair wage competition – see also here ) or bogus law and order reasons (the criminal immigrant stereotype), it is on the grounds of equally bogus cultural reasons. Excessive immigration is said to fundamentally change the culture of the destination region: Europe will turn into Eurabia, just like the Protestant U.S. were once believed to be on the verge of a Catholic takeover following Irish and Southern European immigration.

But even limited immigration will not save us given the supposed “high fertility rates” of immigrants:

That Muslims are grinding out babies ready to take over Europe is an outdated canard. The Eurabia authors worry about declining European fertility, but in fact the Muslim decline is much sharper. In 1970, women in Algeria and Tunisia averaged about seven children each. Now, according to the CIA World Factbook, they average fewer than 1.8. The French rate is almost exactly two. Parisian demographers Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd demonstrate in their 2007 book “Le Rendez-vous des Civilisations” that after most men in a country become literate, eventually a majority of women becomes literate, and then fertility plunges. This demographic transition has now happened in most Muslim states. At last count Algerian women living in France averaged an estimated 2.57 children, or only slightly above the French rate. Moreover, the fertility rate of north African women in France has been falling since 1981. Eurabia is not a demographic prospect. …

The other problem with forecasting numbers of European Muslims in 2100 is the presumption that sixth-generation European Muslims will still be a foreign body here: Islam as a bacillus that even secular former Muslims carry around, forever dangerous. This ignores the transition affecting many nominal Muslims in France. …

Although here and there Muslims have made France a little more north African or Islamic, the influence seems to be more the other way: Muslim immigrants are being infected by Frenchness. (source)

Remember also that people in the 1960s were saying that the higher birthrates among Catholics would mean a swift “Catholic takeover” of Europe and the US:

In the United States the lower birth rate of the Anglo-Saxons has lessened their economic and political power; and the higher birth rate of Roman Catholic families suggest that by the year 2000 the Roman Catholic Church will be the dominant force in national as well as in municipal or state governments. A similar process is helping restore Catholicism in France, Switzerland, and Germany; the lands of Voltaire, Calvin, and Luther may soon return to the papal fold. (source)

Now, of course I’m not insensitive to the plight of culture. A national or regional culture is an important source of identity and wellbeing, and I believe the whole world gains when even a small culture is allowed to survive. I have an older post here lambasting the demographic aggression of China in Tibet. My point is not that immigration can never be a cultural problem, but that the size of the problem is systematically inflated, possibly as a cover for outright xenophobia. In this respect, the “problem” resembles the two other “problems” caused by immigration: more poverty and more crime.

More on immigration, islamophobia and fertility rates.

Human Rights Maps (84): Potential Migration

The Gallup Potential Net Migration Index estimates what would happen to countries’ populations if everyone in the world who wanted to migrate were able to, and if everyone who wanted to leave were also able to. So the index gives the net national (adult) population growth from unrestricted international migration, or, in other words, national population growth as it would occur when there wouldn’t be immigration restrictions and when all those who desire to migrate permanently to other countries would actually move where they wanted today.

Mathematically, it’s the estimated number of adults who would like to move permanently out of a country if the opportunity arose, subtracted from the estimated number who would like to move into it, as a proportion of the total adult population. A country’s population size affects how high or low its index score is and its ranking, since the score is expressed in terms of the percentage increase or decrease of the pre-immigration population. So a country with a small current population but a relative high number of foreigners wishing to go there, will figure high in the ranking. The absolute numbers of foreigners wishing to go there can, however, be much lower than the number for another country lower in the ranking but with a larger pre-immigration population. That’s why Singapore ranks higher than the U.S., although more people want to migrate to the U.S. If all people were allowed to migrate to the U.S. their impact on the total population number for the U.S. would, however, be smaller.

The index offers an indicator of the relative economic attractiveness of countries, or their relative state of misery.

(source, click to enlarge)

We often focus on what happens to the human rights of migrants once they have migrated: how are they treated when they arrive in a certain country, can they find a job that respects certain minimum labor standards (especially when they are “illegal”), do they end up in poverty, what kind of education to their children get, are they more likely to end up in prison etc. However, it’s obvious that the human rights situation in the country of origin is also relevant, because it’s likely that the desire to migrate – 16% of the world’s population or about 700 million people want to migrate if given the chance - is fueled by rights violations, poverty included.

More maps on migration. And something more on migration and human rights. Some statistics on actual migration are here.

Migration and Human Rights (27): The Economic Benefits of Immigration

The prevailing thought in most Western countries is that immigration is a bad thing, and it’s a thought shared by both governments and public opinion (see also here). Western countries, it is believed, can only accommodate a limited number of immigrants – a few hand-picked high-skilled ones, some low-skilled ones in very special circumstances for special industries and for a limited amount of time (when local labor can’t or won’t provide), and a few lucky ones who might otherwise face certain death or extreme pain in their country of origin (generously called “asylum seekers“). People merely fleeing the horrors of poverty (“economic migrants”) should think again.

When the numbers of immigrants surpass this threshold, it’s imminent disaster for these proud former rulers of the world with their efficient economies, exemplary political and legal systems and strong moral and religious traditions. Two disasters, to be precise: on the one hand, cultural and religious destruction (Eurabia style, those Muslims do multiply like rabbits, don’t they) and, on the other hand, economic destruction. Let’s focus on the latter shall we. (An age-old culture or religion that can’t withstand the onslaught of a few million poverty stricken and low-skilled nannies, builders and factory laborers doesn’t seem to deserve survival).

Immigrants are said to be a burden on social safety nets; and they bring down wages for local workers because they are willing to work for less (especially the illegal immigrants). Never mind that this is completely and utterly wrong.

However, not only are the disadvantages of immigration overstated, the advantages are understated. It turns out that relatively high levels of immigration are beneficial for the receiving economy, at least in the U.S.:

[C]omprehensive immigration reform* would raise wages, increase consumption, create jobs, and generate additional tax revenue. … This is a compelling economic reason to move away from the current “vicious cycle” where enforcement-only policies perpetuate unauthorized migration and exert downward pressure on already low wages, and toward a “virtuous cycle” of worker empowerment in which legal status and labor rights exert upward pressure on wages. …

[L]egalizing the roughly 12 million undocumented immigrants through comprehensive immigration reform as well as making future flows more flexible would grow the economy by $1.5 trillion over 10 years. … [I]n the short term (three years) [it would] generate $4.5 to $5.4 billion in additional tax revenue and consumer spending sufficient to support 750,000 to 900,000 jobs. … Conversely, the deportation prescription that is offered by immigration restrictionists would poison the already anemic U.S. economy by draining $2.5 trillion from the economy over 10 years, even before factoring in the costs to deport 12 million people and permanently seal the border. (source)

And this isn’t just left-wing extremism. Here’s another quote, from a right-wing think-tank:

This study finds that increased enforcement [of immigration law] and reduced low-skilled immigration have a significant negative impact on the income of U.S. households. … A policy that reduces the number of low-skilled immigrant workers by 28.6 percent compared to projected levels would reduce U.S. household welfare by about 0.5 percent, or $80 billion. … In contrast, legalization of low-skilled immigrant workers would yield significant income gains for American workers and households. Legalization would eliminate smugglers’ fees and other costs faced by illegal immigrants. It would also allow immigrants to have higher productivity and create more openings for Americans in higher skilled occupations. The positive impact for U.S. households of legalization under an optimal visa tax would be 1.27 percent of GDP or $180 billion. (source)

* legalization of illegal immigrants combined with visa reform

Much of the economically inspired opposition to immigration is about the wellbeing of local low-skilled workers. These people, the narrative goes, are unable to compete with low-skilled immigrants who ask lower wages, especially if they’re illegal (and don’t have to pay taxes, and their employers don’t have to pay taxes for hiring them). In the best case, this competition pushes down the wages of local people; in the worst case it pushes these people into unemployment.

The studies cited above show that such claims aren’t compatible with the facts: low-skilled local workers actually benefit from low-skilled immigration, especially if this is legal (or legalized) immigration, because it allows them to move to higher skilled positions. It also makes it possible for them to spend less time on low-skilled and non-paid activities that they can outsource, and hence they can spend more time on paid activities, which increases their income. And there’s another way in which the indigenous population – including the less wealthy parts – can benefit from immigration: legalization of immigrants pushes their wages up and increases tax revenues. Higher earning immigrants consume and invest more, which creates higher economic growth that benefits everyone. And the taxes that they pay can be used for social safety nets that also benefit everyone.

There’s actually some data showing that immigration doesn’t push down low-skilled wages. Take a look at this graph:

This chart tracks the average median hourly wage for high school drop outs - the very subgroup that immigrations most pressures – in a variety of states. If, as some claim, high levels of immigration exert relentless downward pressure on unskilled native wages, you’d expect states with large immigrant populations to exhibit very low wages for unskilled workers. That doesn’t appear to be the case. … [E]ven George Borjas, the economist most often used by restrictionists, estimates that under realistic assumptions, the drag immigrants exert on native, unskilled wages is about 4 percent. Given the universe of things screwing over the working man, immigration just ain’t that large a player. (source)

And here are some other data confirming that the effect of immigration on the wages of low-skilled workers is negligible:

California may seem the best place to study the impact of illegal immigration on the prospects of American workers. Hordes of immigrants rushed into the state in the last 25 years, competing for jobs with the least educated among the native population. The wages of high school dropouts in California fell 17 percent from 1980 to 2004. But before concluding that immigrants are undercutting the wages of the least fortunate Americans, perhaps one should consider Ohio. Unlike California, Ohio remains mostly free of illegal immigrants. And what happened to the wages of Ohio’s high school dropouts from 1980 to 2004? They fell 31 percent. (source)

More on the benefits of immigration, on the legalization of illegal immigrants (and here). More on “importing poverty“. More on open borders. A reminder of why migration is a human rights issue can be found here.

Migration and Human Rights (26): The “Criminal Immigrant” Stereotype, Ctd.

Contrary to right-wing rhetoric and popular belief (examples here and here), there isn’t much of a correlation between Latino immigration in the U.S. and crime rates. That’s something I discussed before, but I want to revisit the subject because there’s an interesting new article about it here confirming my claims (to make it even more interesting: it’s from a conservative magazine).

Nearly all of the most heavily Latino cities have low or even extremely low crime rates, and virtually none have rates much above the national average. Eighty percent Latino El Paso has the lowest homicide and robbery rates of any major city in the continental United States. This is not what we would expect to find if Hispanics had crime rates far higher than whites. Individual cities may certainly have anomalously low crime rates for a variety of reasons, but the overall trend of crime rates compared to ethnicity seems unmistakable.

Maybe we should assume that the numbers are bit too rosy because of the tendency of illegal immigrants to underreport crime (although the article tries to correct for underreporting by comparing homicides – almost no underreporting – to overall crime). Also, the likelihood of underreporting by illegal immigrants can be offset by a possibly equal effect of criminal restraint on the part of illegal immigrants: for the same reasons that they underreport crime – fear of contacting the authorities and being identified as illegal immigrants – they stay out of trouble with the police and try to act decently.

However, if we look at it from another side, we see that incarceration data show somewhat higher levels for Hispanics or immigrants (although most Hispanics are American-born, the vast majority still comes from a relatively recent immigrant background):

the age-adjusted Hispanic incarceration rate is somewhat above the white rate—perhaps 15 percent higher on average. (source)

Still, one can’t simply conclude from this that crime is more rampant among Hispanics or immigrants. It’s still possible that instead of higher criminality we simply witness the result of harsher treatment of those sections of the population by the judicial system. Also, incarceration rates are inflated because many immigrants are in jail not because of ordinary crimes, but because of infractions of immigration law; you should exclude the latter if you want to compare Hispanic and white criminality (unless you consider infractions of immigration law as essentially equivalent to ordinary crime, which is not altogether insane; but the point of this post is to examine the claim that there are more ordinary criminals among Hispanic immigrants than among [longtime] citizens).

In addition, you should correct incarceration rates for age and gender: in general, most criminals are young men, and it happens to be the case that most immigrants are also young men. So the likelihood that immigrants end up in prison is – slightly – higher compared to the general population, not because they’re Hispanics but because they are young men. Any other, non-immigration related influx of young men in a certain area – e.g. military demobilization or a huge construction project – would have an effect on crime. (If you don’t correct for this, you’re making a common statistical mistake: see here for other examples of the “omitted variable bias”).

Finally, immigrants are relatively poor and there is a link between poverty and crime. So that can also explain the higher incarceration rate for immigrants. If you link the higher probability of poor people engaging in crime with the fact that poor people have lower quality legal representation, you have a double explanation. So, again, if Hispanics do end up in jail more often, perhaps it’s because they’re relatively poor, not because they are Hispanics and somehow racially prone to crime.

All this is limited to the U.S. People can still make the case that immigration in other countries promotes crime, but that case is made harder by the false claims about the U.S. (At least in France there’s no proof of the share of immigrants in the population having a significant impact on crime rates). These false claims are always based on anecdotes, and you’ll always be able to find criminals with foreign sounding names in order to whip up a frenzy against immigration, thereby satisfying your racist hunger and building a political following of ill-informed voters. Again a clear demonstration of the usefulness of statistical analysis in human rights issues and the danger of anecdotal reasoning.

Bonus paper here. Quote:

We examine whether the improvement in immigrants’ relative incarceration rates over the last three decades is linked to increased deportation, immigrant self-selection, or deterrence. Our evidence suggests that deportation does not drive the results. Rather, the process of migration selects individuals who either have lower criminal propensities or are more responsive to deterrent effects than the average native. Immigrants who were already in the country reduced their relative institutionalization probability over the decades; and the newly arrived immigrants in the 1980s and 1990s seem to be particularly unlikely to be involved in criminal activity.

More on migration.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (30): Giving Birth in Shackles

One of the many outrageous interventions by Maricopa county sheriff Joe Arpaio, the anti-illegal immigration zealot who thinks he’s just America’s “toughest sheriff”. It’s the story of a woman who, while 9-months pregnant, was detained after a traffic stop on suspicion of being in the country illegally:

The very same night of her arrest, Chacon went into labor and found herself afraid and alone, being rushed to a local hospital with her hands and legs chained in shackles.

Once she reached the hospital, nurses repeatedly begged the Sheriff’s staff to allow them to unchain the mother, but they refused and Chacon was forced to give birth while still shackled to the bed. At one point, the nurse asked for them to release her so that she could be escorted to the bathroom for a urinalysis, but even that request was denied. But the worst came once Chacon gave birth to her baby girl.

Still chained to the bed, Arpaio’s police staff refused to allow Chacon to hold her newborn baby and then warned her that if no one came to pick up the child within 72 hours, she would be turned over into state custody. (source, source)

More on immigration control. More absurd human rights violations.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (27): Immigration Control and Cultural Purity

From the Wall Street Journal:

When Jordan Peimer booked an Argentine band that fuses Jewish Klezmer music with tango, he thought he had the perfect act to headline his “Fiesta Hanukkah” concert.

“It is hard to imagine any band more fitting than Orquesta Kef,” says Mr. Peimer, the program’s director at the Skirball Cultural Center here. The event was designed to attract a Jewish audience and the city’s burgeoning Hispanic community.

That was before the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services weighed in with some cultural commentary of its own. The band couldn’t travel to the U.S., the agency ruled, because it didn’t satisfy a “culturally unique” requirement for a performer visa called P-3.

“The evidence repeatedly suggests the group performs a hybrid or fusion style of music…[which] cannot be considered culturally unique to one particular country, nation, society, class, ethnicity, religion, tribe or other group of persons,” read the denial.

More about the freedom of movement. More absurd human rights violations.

Racism (9): Race and Employment

Racism and racial discrimination are obviously human rights issues, but so are work and unemployment. If you have doubts about the latter, maybe this will sway you. Moreover, protection against unemployment is also a human right.

Racism expresses itself in different ways, one of which is discrimination in employment:

In 2004, Jean-François Amadieu, a sociologist at the Sorbonne, sent out 500 CVs replying to ads for sales jobs in the Paris region. The CVs were identical except in one regard: some applicants had north African names, and others traditional French ones. The white male French names received five times as many job offers as the north African ones. When Amadieu repeated the exercise in 2006, the ratio was 20:1. (source)

Such examples of racism in employment policy have an impact on unemployment rates across races. Here are some data for the U.S.:

racial differences in joblessness

(source)

unemployment by race

(source)

And these numbers exclude those who are in prison. Given that there are 5 times as many blacks behind bars as whites in the U.S., including them in unemployment statistics would make the gap even wider. (And why shouldn’t we include them? They obviously don’t earn a living and can’t provide for their families).

Of course, this difference between the unemployment rates for blacks and whites isn’t entirely caused by direct discrimination in employment decisions. Other elements play a part:

• Jobs are often concentrated in white suburbs, difficult to reach for blacks without cars.
• Blacks can’t rely on networks of family businesses as much as whites or Latinos.
• Blacks ”have been relegated to precarious, low-wage work … at disproportionate rates” (source), making them more vulnerable to recessions, outsourcing and competition from immigrants.
• Indirect discrimination: if blacks receive substandard education, are less healthy and more poor, then this will affect their employment prospects:

(source)

Migration and Human Rights (25): Immigration Restrictions

Showing that increased immigration tends to benefit natives reduces resistance on the margin, which is worth doing. But, in my experience, laying out clearly the immense benefits to the immigrants is extremely powerful. It highlights the needless misery caused by the heartless status quo. Even then, it is more powerful still to illustrate clearly how the status-quo system of borders, passports, visas, and citizenships systematically violates basic human rights to free movement and association. Will Wilkinson (source)

The statement that migration benefits the migrants is largely self-evident. Migrants wouldn’t migrate if staying home would be more advantageous. Hence, poverty reduction and development aid can benefit hugely from more open borders. What is less clear is that migration can benefit the population of the destination country. There’s a lot of political rhetoric, especially on the extreme right, about the adverse consequences of migration, both economically and culturally. Take for example the talk about unfair competition in the labor market, “importing poverty” and profiteering from social safety nets, the “criminal immigrant” stereotype, Eurabia hysteria etc.

So it’s encouraging to find this useful study:

Using the large variation in the inflow of immigrants across US states we analyze the impact of immigration on state employment, average hours worked, physical capital accumulation and, most importantly, total factor productivity and its skill bias. We use the location of a state relative to the Mexican border and to the main ports of entry, as well as the existence of communities of immigrants before 1960, as instruments. We find no evidence that immigrants crowded-out employment and hours worked by natives. At the same time we find robust evidence that they increased total factor productivity, on the one hand, while they decreased capital intensity and the skill-bias of production technologies, on the other. These results are robust to controlling for several other determinants of productivity that may vary with geography such as R&D spending, computer adoption, international competition in the form of exports and sector composition. Our results suggest that immigrants promoted efficient task specialization, thus increasing TFP and, at the same time, promoted the adoption of unskilled-biased technology as the theory of directed technological change would predict. Combining these effects, an increase in employment in a US state of 1% due to immigrants produced an increase in income per worker of 0.5% in that state.

More on immigration. More on the freedom of movement. More on the freedom of association. More human rights quotes.

Immigration, A Collection of Images

There’s more on immigration here (including a discussion of the links between migration and human rights). Other collections of human rights images are here.

U.S. ark welcoming immigration

(source unknown)

Canada welcoming immigrants

(source)

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The Causes of Wealth Inequality (3): Marital Homogamy and Declining Manufacturing & Unionization

We had two previous posts on the causes of wealth inequality here and here. (If you want to know why we think this is a human rights issue, go here or here first). This is another quote identifying some of those causes:

Part of the increase [in inequality during the last decades, particularly in the U.S. and the U.K.] stems from declining manufacturing employment, part from shrinking unionization and fragmenting collective bargaining, part from heightened immigration [see also here] and other aspects of globalization, and part from technological change. … [A]nother source of the rise in inequality: changes in household size and composition. Due to later marriage and more prevalent divorce, more and more households have just one adult, and hence only one potential earner. At the same time, coupling between people with similar education and thus similar earnings potential (“marital homogamy”) has increased, and the share of highly educated women who are employed continues to rise. The result of these developments is that many countries have more two-adult households with high earnings and more one- or two-adult households with low earnings than used to be the case. Lane Kenworthy (source)

Here’s a graph showing the decline of the manufacturing sector in the U.S.:

distribution of workers by sector, decline of the manufacturing sector

And here’s an overview of unionization:

(source, I must say I’m a bit surprised to see France here at the bottom)

If we put these causes of income inequality together with the causes identified in previous posts, we get this tentative overview:

• Decline of the manufacturing sector, and rise of the services and creative sectors (which are, on average, better paid)
• Decline of unionization, especially in the U.S.
• Immigration,  especially of low-skilled migrants
• Technology, requiring higher skills and outperforming lower skills
• Family structure (single parents and marital homogamy)
• “Positive feedback”: wealth begets wealth, wealth produces the information, networks and resources (such as education and good health) necessary for further wealth creation (this is also called the Matthew effect).

More on income inequality.

Migration and Human Rights (24): The Impact of Remittances on Global Poverty

There are about 200 million people working abroad, which is a stable 3% of the world’s population. The money that these people send home is called remittances. Remittances can be viewed as a kind of development aid and is a very important bonus for the families that stayed behind in often impoverished countries. In fact, the total amount of remittances exceeds the value of official development aid (see a graph here).

However, remittances aren’t entirely positive, generally speaking. They are of course beneficial for those receiving them, but one shouldn’t overestimate their effectiveness in the fight against global poverty.

Disadvantages of remittances

• Most of the remittances do not go to the most needy. Poland and Mexico receive large chunks of total remittances; African countries much less.

remittances by destination

(source)

• Even the remittances that are sent to the poorest countries don’t necessarily benefit the poorest people in those countries. You need money to emigrate, hence migrants tend not to come from the poorest families.
• It’s impossible to target remittances towards development priorities.
• The emigration that is presupposed by remittances is often a brain drain, although not necessarily. Some groups of immigrants are above average in education, some are below.

Advantages of remittances

• The money goes directly and almost completely to the beneficiaries (minus the commission taken for the international payment by remittance agencies). This is not the case with official development aid where there’s always a margin taken by the overhead of aid agencies or NGOs.
• Similarly, there’s no part of the money deviated by corrupt officials, also contrary to official development aid which is often easier to steal.

All in all, remittances are a powerful, if not very accurate weapon in the fight against poverty. There is therefore a strong case in favor of allowing more migration and lowering the restrictions on the free movement of labor (see here). Migration can of course create problems (especially when it leads to cultural friction), but it is also a solution. The migrants themselves often have a better life. Around 75% of them go to countries with a higher score on the Human Development Index. Their families at home obviously benefit as well. And if we believe in trickle down economics (which we should to a limited extent) then we can assume that when these families have more money, the economy around them also benefits to some degree.

But there’s not only the money. There are also knowledge transfers, and we can reasonably hope that migration promotes intercultural understanding. It’s often easier to fear and hate what you don’t know. The countries of origin, which are often less free and democratic than the countries of destination, may also learn the benefits of freedom.

More on remittances. Some statistics and maps. More on migration. Something on the strange case of reverse remittances is here.

Human Rights Maps (68): Immigration in the U.S.

The maps below show - for the years 1920, 1980 and 2000 – the percentages of foreign born populations in the different counties of the US (foreign born by country/continent of origin). You’ll have to click on the images to enlarge them. A fantastic interactive version is here (where you can see the actual numbers for a specific county, select a specific country of origin, look at other years etc.).

(source)

Other immigration maps are here and here. More textual information on the subject is here. Statistics on migration (in the US and worldwide) are here. An explanation of why this is a human rights issue is here. Other human rights maps are here.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (11b): U.S. Citizen Mistaken for Illegal Immigrant

The son of a decorated Vietnam veteran, Hector Veloz is a U.S. citizen, but in 2007 immigration officials mistook him for an illegal immigrant and locked him in an Arizona prison for 13 months.

Veloz had to prove his citizenship from behind bars. An aunt helped him track down his father’s birth certificate and his own, his parents’ marriage certificate, his father’s school, military and Social Security records.

After nine months, a judge determined that he was a citizen, but immigration authorities appealed the decision. He was detained for five more months before he found legal help and a judge ordered his case dropped.

“It was a nightmare,” said Veloz, 37, a Los Angeles air conditioning installer.

Veloz is one of hundreds of U.S. citizens who have landed in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and struggled to prove they don’t belong there, according to advocacy groups and legal scholars, who have tracked such cases around the country. Some citizens have been deported.

By law, immigration authorities have jurisdiction only over noncitizens. Citizens, whether native-born or naturalized, cannot be deported. (source)

Guilty until you’re able – from behind prison bars – to prove your own innocence. Yes, the Land of the Free… More on illegal immigration. And some statistics. And here are other absurd human rights violations.

Islamophobia, A Collection of Images

Islamophobia is an interesting phenomenon from the point of view of human rights. The “fear of Islam” has many different causes:

• outright racism
• Muslim terrorism, resulting in genuine fear combined with unwarranted generalization
• Muslim immigration, resulting in worries about employment and about cultural survival
• certain Islamic practices and values related mainly to the rights of women, homosexuals, convicted criminals, apostates and those who criticize Islam
• the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the way in which many Muslims deal with the Holocaust.

(Click on the links above for more information). What you see in islamophobia is that certain elements of a religion that deserve criticism are blown out of proportion, become an obsession, eclipse other problems in other cultures or civilizations that deserve equal criticism, and are mixed with prejudice, racism and generalization. You end up with a “clash of civilizations” that is in fact a self-fulfilling prophecy. The targets of islamophobia see some of their own prejudices against the West confirmed and step into the roles written for them by the other side.

Here are some images depicting islamophobia:

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More on islamophobia. More collections of images.

Human Rights Nonsense (5): Defending Freedom by Burning Books

Geert Wilders

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Geert Wilders, chairman of the Dutch Party for Freedom and international role model for cartoon characters, is so anxious to defend western freedom against Islam, that he proposed to prohibit the Koran, a “fascist book” in his words (and, while we’re at it, stop Muslim immigration and “incite” those who are already in the Netherlands to gently leave ASAP, and take their Korans with them I guess).

Most likely he won’t have the courage to erect a huge pile of confiscated Korans on the central square in Amsterdam and set a light to it, but what he wants will amount to the same. And then you go and call your party “Party for Freedom“. Oh wait, didn’t Hitler call his party “socialist” while at the same time exterminating the “other” socialists? I see …

Migration and Human Rights (19): The U.S. Wages War on Illegal Immigration, and Kills the Fourth Amendment

(forgot where I got this from; sorry)

OK, maybe not kill, but it felt good writing it. In the U.S., about 100 seven-member Immigration and Customs Enforcement teams conduct regular raids across the country in search of illegal immigrants. Normally, they are supposed to look for fugitive illegal immigrants who have committed crimes, but it’s not unusual that they go about and round up undocumented workers who haven’t committed a crime. Illegal immigration isn’t a violation of criminal law; it’s a violation of civil law.

These teams make house calls before dawn. They have guns although they are supposed to “knock and talk” their way into a home. In reality, they often force their way in. And instead of search warrants issued by a judge, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have administrative warrants issued by their superiors.

All this flies in the face of the Fourth Amendment which protects “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” and demands that police have warrants issued by independent courts and based on “probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized” (see here). The Fourth Amendment applies to illegal immigrants as it does to U.S. citizens.

The Gates affair may have captured the public’s imagination, but it’s small beer (sorry for the pun) compared to what illegal immigrants – or those mistaken for one – have to put up with.

More on privacy, arbitrary arrest and illegal immigration.

Political Artist (26): Luba Lukova

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More on immigration.

Political Jokes & Funny Quotes (40): Immigrants

More on immigration and on public opposition to immigration.

Migration and Human Rights (17): Immigration is Caused by Oppression and Dictatorship

John Rawls

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There are numerous causes of immigration. I mention several and suggest that they would disappear in the Society of liberal and decent Peoples. One is the persecution of religious and ethnic minorities, the denial of their human rights. Another is political oppression … Often people are simply fleeing from starvation … Yet famines are often themselves in large part caused by political failures and the absence of decent government. The last cause I mention is population pressure in the home territory, and among its complex of causes is the inequality and subjection of women. Once that inequality and subjection are overcome, and women are granted equal political participation with men and assured education, these problems can be resolved … The problem of immigration is not, then, simply left aside, but is eliminated as a serious problem in a realistic utopia. John Rawls (source, source)

Of course, Rawls doesn’t mean to say that immigration will cease once all countries respect human rights and are governed more or less democratically. There will always be migration. Our globalized economy seems to require it. But migration will be a rational choice for the benefit of all parties. It will be neither a life and death necessity for those who move, nor a major or minor inconvenience for those who receive migrants.

More on migration here.

Migration and Human Rights (15): Growing Support for Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants

The graph below shows that a large majority of U.S. citizens, and an even larger majority of young citizens (73%) is now in favor of some kind of amnesty measure for illegal immigrants:

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Even despite the recession, support has grown considerably (one would assume that a recession pushes down support, and even leads to xenophobia, see here).

Part of this is altruism, but voters have clearly come to understand the benefits of immigration. Many of course still believe in certain myths about migration:

• the myth of the ”criminal immigrant“
• the myth of overpopulation
• the myth of “importing poverty” (see also here)
• or myths about pandemics (see the excitement over Mexicans carrying swine flu into the U.S.)

and oppose immigration (legal or illegal) because of these myths. So it’s important to debunk them. For example, rather than importing poverty, immigration often means importing wealth. Take this graph for example:

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Some data on illegal immigrants in the U.S. And here is a post explaining why migration is a human rights issue.

Human Rights Maps (34): Illegal Immigrants in the U.S.

Where do they come from:

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Where are they:

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More data on immigration, legal and illegal.

More information on the human rights implications of migration is here, here, and here.

Migration and Human Rights (13): Immigration and Unemployment

People go to other countries to escape the – often combined – horrors of war, oppression, persecution and poverty. Wealthy and peaceful states that protect human rights within their borders, usually accept a number of the people looking for a more peaceful and just society. However, people looking merely for a more prosperous society and for opportunities to have a better life, are often not allowed to immigrate. Personally, I think this is wrong and unjust, because poverty is a human rights violation that is not essentially different from for example persecution on religious grounds. The reason governments give for refusing this kind of immigration are varied but mainly focus on the dangers of “importing poverty“.

One piece of evidence to substantiate this fear is the level of unemployment in migrant communities:

(source; solid line: unemployment among immigrants equal to unemployment among natives)

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These data are not surprising because immigrants usually lack certain essential skills necessary to find their place in the labor market: language, networking, adequate education etc. Moreover, they often come to places that already have strained labor markets.

The following graph shows the hopeful fact that, in Australia at least, unemployment levels of immigrants drastically decrease after a number of years in the country, suggesting that once they have acquired some new skills and have learned the language, they integrate into the host society and economy. Instead of being a burden they can even contribute. (I didn’t find any similar data for other countries).

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Some numbers on immigration can be found here.