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

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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.

Human Rights Maps (180): The Death Toll of Illegal Immigration

The days when border guards deliberately shot and killed would-be migrants are over, with a few exceptions. However, illegal migration remains a risky business in many parts of the world. Border fortifications, unsafe means of transportation (such as containers, inappropriate boats or the wheel storage rooms of aircraft), travel by night, unscrupulous “coyotes” combined with a choice of dangerous routes such as deserts (where there’s less border patrolling) result in numerous fatalities among would-be illegal immigrants. Here are some data:

Locations of 1755 deaths at the Arizona-Mexico border

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fatalities among illegal immigrants in Europe

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And even those illegal immigrants who manage to survive their journey – a large majority fortunately – face certain risks in the places where they live: racist attacks, police brutality etc. Not always fatal, but always bad enough.

See also this depressing anecdote.

More maps on migration are here.

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (47): Globalization

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Human history is often viewed as a widening circle of moral concern. In the olden days, the claim goes, people cared only about their siblings and tribe. Then they started to care about their class, their nation, their religious community, their civilization, and ultimately their shared humanity. Cosmopolitanism, or the equal respect for all human beings whatever their affiliation or location, is then the end-state of morality (although some want to go further and include animals or even inanimate objects in the circle of moral concern). This end-state dovetails with human rights concerns because human rights are also the rights of all humans, whatever country, class or culture they belong to.

The widening of moral concern – if it indeed occurred as described – went in tandem with other and more familiar globalization processes, such as increased international trade, integration of different economies, the development of international law, increased communication through the internet, easier transportation, intercultural dialogue, migration etc. And all these different processes interact: communication and transportation foster trade, trade fosters communication, communication widens the circle of moral concern etc.

This story implies that globalization – of any kind – is always or unequivocally beneficial from the point of view of human rights. However, that may not be true. Let’s look at some of the pros and cons of different types of globalization.

Pros

• Increased migration is almost without exception beneficial to the prosperity and freedom of all parties involved, although the migrants obviously benefit most.
• Intercultural dialogue promotes tolerance and agreement on human rights, and this dialogue is not only fostered by new technologies but also by international trade. Better communication as well makes people care more about what happens in the world and makes it more difficult for oppressive regimes to hide their oppression. In this sense, communication and trade drive the widening circle of moral concern.
• Economic interdependence between countries creates a self-interested incentive for governments to promote rights and democracy elsewhere in the world and makes it more likely that international law can impose itself over concerns about national sovereignty. Global economic collaboration requires international regulation, and economic regulation can open the door for other types of regulation, including rights regulation. Countries that depend economically on an international institutional and regulatory system, will have a much harder time invoking their sovereignty when faced with accusations of rights violations, since they already lost a huge chunk of their sovereignty due to economic integration.
• The increasing importance of multinational companies makes it easier for consumers in one part of the world to lobby for corporate responsibility elsewhere in the world.

a somewhat far-fetched representation of the widening circles of concern

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Cons

• Outsourcing, a commonly cited aspect of globalization, can result in people losing their jobs, and the threat of outsourcing can force people to accept lower wages or inferior labor conditions. And work is a human right.
• The threat of cheap foreign labor and cheap foreign products can lead to protectionism and immigration restrictions, two major causes of poverty in developing countries.
• Globalization may erode the welfare state because a large part of the tax base – corporations, financial intermediaries and skilled workers – become internationally mobile and can thereby avoid to pay the taxes that governments need to finance their welfare systems. The tax base can also decrease because governments cut taxes in an effort to maintain the competitiveness of local businesses.
• The previous three phenomena – outsourcing, labor and product competition and pressure on the welfare state – may not only lead to restrictions on international trade and migration, but can also counteract the widening circle of moral concern: politicians and local businesses can and often do use these threats to stir up xenophobia. A xenophobic public is more likely to vote in favor of trade and immigrations restrictions. On the other hand, there’s some evidence that people’s circle of moral concern is wider in countries that are more affected by globalization.
• Globalization implies a certain degree of power deflation: states lose power vis-à-vis the market, multinationals, international institutions and each other. This in turn means that decisions affecting the well-being of people are taken by outside forces. Democratic self-government – which is a human right – is then threatened.
• The interconnectedness of international financial markets increases the likelihood that a local financial or economic crisis spreads to the rest of the world.
• A higher number of increasingly globalized multinational companies also means a higher risk that some of those threaten indigenous cultures, exploite poor workers etc.

On balance, however, I believe that globalization is good for human rights, even though I can’t quantify the pros and cons.

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

Four immigrants and their belongings at Ellis Island, circa 1912

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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.

Political Graffiti (201): Closed Borders

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More on immigration and open borders. More graffiti.

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

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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 (41): What Will Happen When We Open Our Borders?

Regular readers know that I often advocate an open border policy on this blog. I do so because most of the arguments in favor of immigration restrictions don’t survive a confrontation with the data, but also, more positively, because I think there are four important reasons to favor open borders:

1. Allowing immigration means respecting certain human rights, such as the right to free movement and the right of free association (most people migrate because they want to associate with employers elsewhere). Closed borders on the other hand result in various rights violations: illegal immigrants incur physical risks while traveling, and exploitation upon arrival (because they have diminished bargaining power and because they live with the constant fear of apprehension). Furthermore, they are almost permanently separated from their families and friends back home etc. That’s a heavy burden of rights violations.
2. Immigration reduces poverty. Strictly speaking this is not conceptually different from the previous reason, since poverty is a human rights violation, but it’s worth mentioning separately because many fail to see this point.
3. Third, allowing immigration is a matter of justice because monopolizing a piece of the earth goes against the principle of the common ownership of the earth, and because nobody deserves to be born in a certain place.
4. Fourth, immigration restrictions are inefficient because they require resources that can better be spent elsewhere, and because efficient economic activity requires a high degree of freedom of movement for workers as well as goods. Moreover, aging populations in developed countries will need more immigrants to keep their economies going.

I agree that these arguments don’t necessarily establish the soundness of an open border policy. They do, however, make it harder to argue in favor of restrictions and they put the burden of proof on those arguing in favor of restrictions.

I can imagine that many of those people aren’t convinced by the rather abstract arguments given above. Hence it may be useful to try to estimate the consequences of a significantly higher number of immigrants in wealthy countries. I’ll assume that this increase won’t be sudden, because restrictions can be removed gradually. Hence we can discount the “shock” of increased migration as a possible negative consequence.

Wouldn’t massive immigration strain the domestic economy and possibly destroy it? I never quite understood that argument. For one thing, if that would happen, I guess the immigrants would decide to just go back home; immigrants are drawn to economic opportunity and typically return when opportunities become rare. But it won’t happen, because immigrants produce and consume. The “destruction argument” sounds ridiculously zero-sum, as if the presence of immigrants in a country is similar to leeches draining the blood from a healthy body. Immigrants generally come to work, to produce and to consume. Some of them may be a net loss for the native economy, but it’s silly to claim that most of them are or will be. In fact, in the U.S. most immigrants currently use welfare at lower rates than natives and have higher rates of labor force participation. Even if massive immigration brings in a lot more slackers their numbers will be swamped by the even larger number of productive immigrants.

So I don’t think we should compensate an open borders policy with a denial of welfare for immigrants. Most immigrant won’t come for welfare, and if you allow a whole lot of new immigrants, most of those will work and pay taxes (also because they won’t be illegal) and will thereby contribute to the funding of the welfare system rather than be a drain on it.

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Perhaps the arrival of a lot of immigrants won’t destroy the destination economy or the welfare state, but maybe it will hurt certain groups of people, for example low-skilled native workers with whom the immigrants will compete for jobs. Again, that’s too much of a zero-sum focus. Immigrants are usually complementary to native workers and don’t necessarily have to replace native workers. And when they are not complementary, they can allow the latter to move to different and often better paying occupations.

To the extent that massive immigration will drive down wages in some sectors and skill levels, I would ask the following: if an immigrant is willing to work for a lower wage, why should the rights of relatively more wealthy native workers (“relatively more wealthy” because they earn a higher wage) trump the rights of the immigrant? If rights have any meaning it is that they protect the weaker against the stronger, not vice versa. From a cosmopolitan point of view it’s more important to help poorest people find a better job than to protect the jobs of the relatively less poor.

What about higher rents and house prices? Surely massive immigration would price almost everyone out of the housing market. And then what? I would guess that this will be self-correcting: huge housing prices will reduce the inflow of immigrants or increase the supply of houses. In the latter case, demand for labor – including native labor – would increase. Again, let’s drop the zero-sum thinking: why should we assume a constant supply of housing with an increasing demand for it?

What about security issues? Will open borders policies flood us with criminal immigrants? Immigrants with contagious diseases? What about the smuggling of drugs? Or terrorists moving freely into the country? Well, open borders as it’s understood here means free immigration, not the absence of borders or border controls. Allowing massive immigration doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t keep track of who or what is coming in and is going out. And we have domestic criminals, whom we don’t systematically banish. Let us also not forget that immigrants are on average less likely to be involved in crime (see here and here).

The fact that open borders doesn’t equal “no borders” should also calm certain fears about sovereignty, “nationhood”, national culture, community and national solidarity.

The same is true for the fact that an open borders policy doesn’t equal “free citizenship“. Obviously access to citizenship would not be possible for all immigrants at the moment of arrival, otherwise an open border policy would undermine the very notion of citizenship. That restriction includes voting rights.

What about the consequences for the origin countries which will lose a lot of highly skilled professionals? That’s difficult to tell but if we extrapolate from the current state of affairs, this might not be a problem. There’s already a huge brain drain going on from developing countries to developed ones, but the pernicious effects of this brain drain are heavily overstated, and compensated by the gains from remittances. Of course, this compensation effect depends on the number of people involved. Drastically higher numbers of migrants may provide a different outcome, or maybe not. And there’s also some evidence of other beneficial effects of the brain drain, unrelated to remittances.

More posts in this series are here.

Related Articles

• The Social Security Argument Against Open Borders (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)
• The Democracy Argument Against Open Borders (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)
• The Cultural Argument Against Open Borders (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)
• Immigrants — Good or Bad? (realclearpolitics.com)

Human Rights Maps (173): Migrant Boat Tragedy Off the Coast of Libya

In the early spring of 2011, in the middle of the conflict in Libya, 72 desperate sub-Saharan men, women and children tried to get to Lampedusa. Instead, they were left to die in a small, overcrowded inflatable rubber dinghy as their calls for help went unheeded. When things first started to go wrong and fuel and food supplies were dwindling, a call was made from a satellite phone to Father Zerai, a contact person whose number they had been given in case of an emergency and who subsequently notified the Italian coast guard. By that time, the boat was drifting with little fuel left and taking in water. The phone call enabled the Italian coast guard to establish the boat’s location. A helicopter was sent to drop some drinking water and food.

The boat was now drifting in the middle of the Mediterranean. Rough waters threw some people overboard and currents sent the boat back to Libya. Fishing boats in the vicinity ignored the vessel. On the 5th day at sea, people started dying onboard. A large military vessel also failed to assist. On the 15th day, only 11 people were still alive. On April 10th, the boat stranded on the Libyan coast. The 11 survivors were arrested. One died in custody due to lack of care.

Here’s an animated map depicting the events:

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Those who ignored the boat could possibly be facing judicial action.

More on migration and Libya. More human rights maps.

Human Rights Maps (165): Some of the World’s Most Fortified Borders

All national borders are the locus of strict enforcement: there is no country on earth where foreigners can just come in as they wish, and all states are eager to defend the integrity and completeness of their territory and the security of their citizens against attacks by other states or by terrorist infiltrators. Some authoritarian states also use force to keep their people inside their territory.

However, certain borders are fortified more than others. The US-Mexican border, the India-Pakistan border, the separation wall between Israel and the Palestinian territories, and the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea are among the places where the toughest national security and anti-movement policies are in force. Below are some maps and aerial images that illustrate the extent of these policies.

The US-Mexican border

The US is constructing a border fence in order to stop illegal Mexican immigrants - as well as “terrorists” according to some. This fence currently covers about a third of the border. Right wing politicians want to expand it, even though the non-fenced areas are so remote or rugged as to make a fence pointless or impractical. Together with drone aircraft, helicopters, video surveillance, seismic sensors, infrared sensors, private vigilantes and thousands of border patrol guards in all-terrain vehicles and on horse-back, it has indeed driven down the numbers of illegal immigrants – although the recession has also done its bit.

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aerial photo of border at Imperial Beach, CA

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The India-Pakistan border

The border between these two countries is hotly contested, especially in the region of Kashmir. India is also wary of terrorist infiltration along the entire border. Sometimes called the “Berlin Wall of Asia”, the border has only one road crossing. Half of the border is floodlit, and hence can be seen from space:

India Pakistan border as seen from the International Space Station (southern part to the right side of this image)

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India Pakistan border as seen from the International Space Station (northern part on the left side of this image)

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The separation wall between Israel and the Palestinian territories

To so-called Westbank Barrier between the West Bank and Israel will be approximately 760 kilometres upon completion. In some places it’s a concrete wall. 12% of the West Bank area is on the Israel side of the barrier, meaning that parts of the occupied territories captured by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967 are now “in Israel”. The main rationale for the barrier is protection against terrorist incursions, specifically by suicide bombers. The barrier severely disrupts free movement in the Westbank as well as access to Israel for Palestinians working there. Some Jewish settlers, on the other hand, condemn the barrier for appearing to renounce the Jewish claim to the whole of the “Land of Israel”.

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The DMZ between North and South Korea

Since the end of the Korean war, there’s a country-wide demilitarized zone between the two Koreas, cutting the Korean Peninsula roughly in half along the 38th parallel. It’s 250 kilometres long – plus extensions into the sea – and approximately 4 km wide. It’s the most heavily militarized border in the world.

Korean dmz map

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The South has discovered four tunnels crossing the DMZ, dug by North Korea. The North claimed they were for coal mining but no coal has been found in the tunnels, which are dug through granite. Some of the tunnel walls have been painted black to give the appearance of anthracite. Not very cunning. The tunnels are believed to have been planned as military invasion routes.

The border is visible from space at night, not because it’s floodlit but because of the large difference in electricity use between the prosperous South and the impoverished North:

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And, no, it’s not dark because they’re all building tunnels…

All these borders are sad reminders of humanity’s penchant for xenophobia, exclusion, parochialism, national hostility and war. And a testimony to almost universally shared misconceptions about property rights over the earth, about freedom of movement and about the value of diversity and equal opportunity.

More human rights maps here. More on satellite images and human rights 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.

Human Rights Ads (63): Open Borders

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More on open borders, free movement and migration. More human rights ads.

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)

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)

Human Rights Maps (104): Human Development Index, Migration and Borders

If you’re not familiar with the Human Development Index, go here first. In essence, the HDI combines measures of life expectancy, literacy, educational attainment, and GDP per capita for countries or regions.

When checking differences in HDI scores between countries or between regions of a country, you can clearly correlate those differences with migration patterns. The purpose of a lot of migration is to leave a low HDI region for a high HDI region. Take a look at these two beautiful maps:

(source, the border locality in the US with the lowest HDI still has a higher HDI than the Mexican border locality with the highest HDI)

(source)

Obviously, there can also be a reverse causation taking place: poor migrants move to richer places, but these places can – in part – be richer because of the activities of migrants.

Also, one wouldn’t want to imply that economic opportunities explain all the reasons why people migrate, but they obviously do explain a lot.

More human rights maps.

Migration and Human Rights (35): The Economic Benefits of Immigration, Ctd.

(source, photo by Daquella Manera)

In two previous posts (here and here), I offered some evidence debunking the populist claim that immigration is bad for the economic wellbeing of (parts of) the native population (a claim that’s based on fears about unfair labor competition pushing down wages or pushing natives out of work, and about burdens on social safety nets resulting from so-called “welfare tourism”).

In a rational world, that kind of evidence should help to weaken anti-immigrant sentiments and policies, and to promote more open borders, which would be a good thing for the wellbeing of potential immigrants. But it would also be a good thing for the natives of the destination countries: it’s not just that immigration fails to harm the native population, but it actually provides some benefits. And those benefits exist even when we don’t limit immigration to high-skill immigration. That means that immigration restrictions can hurt the destination country, as is evident from the numbers cited here.

How does immigration benefit the host country?

• First, low skilled immigrants allow relatively low-skilled native workers to move to higher skilled or more specialized positions, for example as supervisors of the new immigrant workers. And those positions yield higher incomes.
• Secondly, low skilled immigrants make it possible for natives to spend less time on non-paid, low-skilled activities that they can outsource. As a result, the latter can spend more time on paid activities, which increases their income. And even if they don’t (choose to) increase their income they probably increase their wellbeing.
• Thirdly, immigrants produce tax revenues which contribute to social safety nets that benefit everyone.
• And finally, immigrants consume, which creates higher economic growth which in turn benefits everyone. And when we legalize immigrants, they are likely to earn more, pay more taxes and invest, which will increase the productivity of the host economy, again to everyone’s benefit.

NYC - Chinatown - Doyers Street

(source, photo by Wally Gobetz)

There’s some additional evidence in favor of these claims here. In short, this is what it says:

The effects of immigration on the total output and income of the U.S. economy can be studied by comparing output per worker and employment in states that have had large immigrant inflows with data from states that have few new foreign-born workers. Statistical analysis of state-level data shows that immigrants expand the economy’s productive capacity by stimulating investment and promoting specialization. This produces efficiency gains and boosts income per worker. At the same time, evidence is scant that immigrants diminish the employment opportunities of U.S.-born workers.

The anti-immigration claim that immigrant labor competition harms native workers, especially the low-skilled ones, is easily refuted by the simple fact that

U.S.-born workers and immigrants tend to take different occupations. Among less-educated workers, those born in the United States tend to have jobs in manufacturing or mining, while immigrants tend to have jobs in personal services and agriculture. Among more-educated workers, those born in the United States tend to work as managers, teachers, and nurses, while immigrants tend to work as engineers, scientists, and doctors. Second, within industries and specific businesses, immigrants and U.S.-born workers tend to specialize in different job tasks. Because those born in the United States have relatively better English language skills, they tend to specialize in communication tasks. Immigrants tend to specialize in other tasks. (source)

The role of language provides an example of how immigration allows native workers to move to higher skilled or more specialized positions:

in states where immigration has been heavy, U.S.-born workers with less education … have shifted toward more communication-intensive jobs. Figure 3 [below] shows exactly this. The share of immigrants among the less educated is strongly correlated with the extent of U.S.-born worker specialization in communication tasks. Each point in the graph represents a U.S. state in 2005. In states with a heavy concentration of less-educated immigrants, U.S.-born workers have migrated toward more communication-intensive occupations. Those jobs pay higher wages than manual jobs, so such a mechanism has stimulated the productivity of workers born in the United States and generated new employment opportunities. (source)

Therefore, immigration pushes up the income of native workers.

To better understand this mechanism, it is useful to consider the following hypothetical illustration. As young immigrants with low schooling levels take manually intensive construction jobs, the construction companies that employ them have opportunities to expand. This increases the demand for construction supervisors, coordinators, designers, and so on. Those are occupations with greater communication intensity and are typically staffed by U.S.-born workers who have moved away from manual construction jobs. (source)

Of course, there are bound to be some distribution effects, which means that there will be natives who benefit and other natives who don’t and who may even be harmed by immigration. However, it’s the complete picture that counts.

More here.

Related Articles

• “FRBSF Economic Letter: The Effect of Immigrants on US Employment and Productivity” and related posts (economistsview.typepad.com)
• Immigration Boosts Wages, Employment And Productivity, Fed Study Finds (huffingtonpost.com)
• Immigrants Are the Key to Prosperity (observer.com)
• Immigrants Make U.S. Workers Richer (blogs.wsj.com)
• Immigrants Don’t Take Jobs Away From Americans, Fed Study Finds (businessweek.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 (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.

Political Jokes & Funny Quotes (95): The Efficiency of Development Aid

From The Onion:

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI—Three months after a 7.0 earthquake rocked the impoverished island nation of Haiti, 36-year-old Brad Halder visited its demolished capital to see firsthand how his $10 donation to a relief fund was being spent. “It’s been a little while, so I just wanted to check in and make sure my money was being put to good use,” Halder told reporters while surveying the still largely devastated region. “To tell you the truth, I was kind of expecting to see a lot more new homes by now. And, I don’t know, maybe some new hospitals or something. But, jeez, did they get any of the $10 I sent them?” After noting that nearly 90 percent of the country still lived in abject poverty, Halder announced that any funds left over from his donation should probably go toward rebuilding Haiti’s infrastructure.

More serious posts on the earthquake in Haiti are here and here. The effectiveness of development aid is a highly contested topic. Here‘s one example of inefficient aid. Some even believe that we should stop giving aid altogether, perhaps with the exception of disaster relief after earthquakes and such. Dambisa Moyo is a well-known propagator of that argument (see here and here). Others believe that we should on the contrary increase the levels of development aid, while spending the money in a more efficient way (the U.S. is regularly scolded for it’s relatively low levels of development aid, and the joke above obviously refers to the U.S. in general rather than just one bloke). One way to make aid more efficient is cash transfers. Other types of efficient development aid – albeit indirect types of aid – are trade liberalization, investment, the promotion of migration and debt relief.

More jokes here.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (54): Use Landmines to Keep Immigrants Out

Tom Mullins, the Republican nominee for a New Mexico Congressional seat, has suggested that it might be a good idea to mine the US-Mexico border.

During the May 18 interview with KNMX radio in Las Vegas, N.M., Mullins said the U.S. could mine the border, install barbed wire and post signs directing would-be border jumpers to cross legally at designated checkpoints.

“We could put land mines along the border. I know it sounds crazy. We could put up signs in 23 different languages if necessary,” Mullins says in the radio interview, where he also expressed concern that terrorists could carry a nuclear weapon across the Mexican border.

He explained Monday the suggestion about land mines was something he’d heard while campaigning, and that it came in response to a complaint that nothing could be done to secure the border.

“When I heard it, I said, ‘Well, that’s an interesting concept,”’ Mullins said. (source)

More on migration and on landmines. More absurd human rights violations.

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.

What is This Graph About? (9)

The answer is here. More mystery graphs.

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.

What is This Graph About? (8)

The answer is here. More mystery graphs.

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.

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

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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.

Migration and Human Rights (23): The Recession and Reverse Remittances

I’ve discussed the negative effects of the current economic recession on human rights several times before on this blog. I’ve focused on the right not to suffer poverty, because that’s obviously one human right that is particularly affected by the recession, but I also mentioned other rights (see here, here and here for instance). (I even found an example of how the recession can be beneficial for human rights; see here. Unfortunately, that’s the exception and not the rule).

Coming back to poverty: remittances – money sent home by migrant workers – are an important part of many people’s income in developing countries. (In some countries, the total amount of remittances received even surpasses the amount of official development aid received). It’s no surprise that remittances are going down because of the recession. What is surprising is the phenomenon of reverse remittances. From the NYT:

MIAHUATLÁN, Mexico — During the best of the times, Miguel Salcedo’s son, an illegal immigrant in San Diego, would be sending home hundreds of dollars a month to support his struggling family in Mexico. But at times like these, with the American economy out of whack and his son out of work, Mr. Salcedo finds himself doing what he never imagined he would have to do: wiring pesos north. …

With nearly half its population living in poverty, Mexico is not well placed to prop up struggling citizens abroad. … Still, poverty is a relative concept. It is easier to get by on little in Mexico, especially in rural areas, allowing the poor to help the even more precarious. … In other cases, the migrants are returning home, as the many passengers who hop off the bus that runs regularly from northern California to a gas station in Miahuatlán make clear. “There’s nothing up there,” said a young man with an overflowing suitcase who returned one recent night. (source)

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.).

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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.

Migration and Human Rights (21): China’s Demographic Aggression and Provocation of Racism, The Cases of Tibet and Xinjiang

Dalai Lama

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If only Han Chinese inhabit Tibet, what is the meaning of autonomy? Dalai Lama (source)

The recent protests and violence by Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang province are reminiscent of the March 2008 protests in Tibet. Like the Tibetans, the Uighurs believe that they are colonized by Han Chinese who have settled in the Tibetan and Uighur provinces in large numbers, and continue to do so. (92% of Chinese are Han). As a result, the ethnic Turkic Muslim Uighurs now make up less than half of the 20m population in their province, and probably less given the tendency of official Chinese statistics to underestimate internal migration flows. This is compared to 75% in 1949. (In Tibet, the indigenous population is still the majority according to official statistics, but this is likely to change with the new train link to the province).

It is widely accepted that these migration flows are part of official Chinese government policy. Populating border regions with Han Chinese is believed to lessen separatist tensions and demands for autonomy, and is handy when it comes to expropriating the local resources. The local populations however see this as demographic aggression and an attack on their culture. If their land is taken over, so will their culture, language, traditions and religion. In Xinjiang, evidence of this is the prohibition on headscarves, the languages used in schools etc.

Not surprisingly, these policies of demographic aggression – which the Dalai Lama has called a form of cultural genocide – combined with other authoritarian policies, provoke a reaction, and unfortunately, this reaction often takes the form of anti-Han racism. (Most victims of the recent clashes in Tibet and Xinjiang were Han, although – as usual – the victims of the government’s reaction don’t get mentioned).

More on Tibet.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (15): The Treatment of Roma Immigrants in Italy

Read the full story here. Here’s a similar case, of sunbathers ignoring a migrant’s corpse, in Tarifa, Spain:

(source)

More on migration.

Political Artist (26): Luba Lukova

(source, source)

More on 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:

(source)

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

Migration and Human Rights (14): Migration and Overpopulation

(source, cartoon by Manny Francisco)

The topic of overpopulation has been discussed several times already on this blog (e.g. here and here), but now I want to focus more specifically on the links between overpopulation and migration. People often, but mistakenly in my view, see two types of links:

• The pressure to migrate from the undeveloped South to the richer North is mainly if not exclusively caused by overpopulation in the South.
• The reason why countries in the North restrict immigration from the South is the fear of overpopulation in the North, resulting from immigration. The relatively healthy economies of the North would not be able to withstand the population shock of major inflows of immigrants, especially given the fact that most immigrants are not high-skilled and tend to be a burden on an economy rather than an asset. Immigration needs to be restricted because it means importing poverty.

I’ll try to argue that both these arguments are wrong and that it is a mistake to link migration to overpopulation in these ways. I’ll start with the first point.

Two things are true about the first argument: migration towards developed countries has increased sharply during the last decades (see here), and population growth in the South has been faster than in the North (see here). What is not true, however, is that the latter has been the cause of the former.

Other social and economic factors, rather than overpopulation, have driven migration. Given the highly regulated nature of migration to the North (green cards, other types of labor certification, visa, border controls etc.), it’s obvious that the people who are able to immigrate are not the poor that are supposedly driven out of their own economies by overpopulation. Only the “jobworthy” who are successful at applying for entry-visas can migrate. (See also here.) And the same is true for illegal immigrants, i.e. those bypassing the regulations. They as well tend to be people who have work prospects in the North, or at least enough money to pay human traffickers.

All this also serves to disprove the second argument above: if migrants in general are not the poorest of the poor, then the second argument doesn’t hold.

However, back to the first argument for a moment. Another economic factor driving migration and completely unconnected to population levels, is the globalization of economic production. Employers in developed countries actively look for relatively cheap workers from the South, and technological improvements in communication, transportation and travel are making this easier.

(One could also point to war and violence as driving forces behind migration, but Malthusians would reply that the real driving force is overpopulation, causing first war and conflict, and then migration. There’s a lot to be said against this, but I’ll keep that for another time).

Regarding the second argument, one can make the following counter-claim. Let’s assume that immigration controls indeed serve the only purpose of keeping people out so as to keep the economy healthy and avoid population shocks which the economy wouldn’t be able to withstand. (Of course, immigration controls in reality serve many other purposes, e.g. pampering xenophobes). If we assume this, we should further assume that existing quotas on immigration (quotas as the result of visa policy, labor permits, family reunion policy etc.) are set in such a way that the number of migrants that are allowed into the country is roughly the number that the economy can sustain. Not higher because then immigration policy would defeat its purpose, but not much lower either because then the restrictions would be unjust and arbitrary.

Given these two assumptions, how do we explain the failure of massive numbers of illegal immigration to destroy host economies? Take for instance the U.S. It’s in an economic crisis right now, but nobody in his right mind claims that immigration is the cause. The U.S. economy was booming for years, and at the same time accommodated millions of legal and illegal immigrants.

To sum up, the tidal wave paranoia of the poor masses of the South engulfing the developed world is just another example of Malthusian hysteria. A simple look at population growth numbers make this abundantly clear. Population has indeed grown more rapidly in the South than in the North (partially because of higher birth rates), but only to return to the same proportion as a few centuries ago. The industrial revolution in the North resulted in more rapid population growth, and the South is now catching up. Fears of growing imbalances and “tsunamis of the poor” aren’t based on facts.

Human Rights Maps (43): Dependence on Remittances

Remittances are money sent back home by migrant workers. Sometimes these amounts are more important than foreign aid and some developing countries are heavily dependent on them in the sense that remittances represent a large share of their national income or GDP.

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More on remittances here.

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.

Human Rights Maps (33): Iraqi Refugee Routes

(click on image to enlarge)

More on refugees. More on Iraq.

Migration and Human Rights (12): Public Opposition to Immigration

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Just a short follow-up on my previous post on the subject. For those anxious about immigration and about the burdens it places on the host-economy and on the welfare state (“importing poverty“), here’s a graph comparing immigration and unemployment numbers in Spain:

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This shows that high levels of immigration do not necessarily lead to economic ruin. Granted, some of the immigrants in Spain are wealthy pensioners from colder regions of Europe, but they are only a small fraction of the total.

Migration and Human Rights (11): Public Opposition to Immigration

I’ve often discussed migration here on this blog. For example:

• There’s this post on public fears that migration means importing poverty and putting the social security system in danger.
• There’s this one on xenophobia.
• There’s this one on the “criminal immigrant” stereotype.
• There’s this one on migration and education.
• And there’s this one on public opposition to migration.

I want to come back to this last one because there’s now a new study showing some interesting results:

A reminder of why migration is a human rights issue can be found here.

Human Rights Maps (32): African Refugee Routes

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More on refugees.

Migration and Human Rights (10): Immigration and Poverty

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It’s a widely shared opinion, especially among those on the right of the political spectrum, that immigration means importing poverty and burdening economic growth. Immigrants are said to cause an unbearable strain on social security systems, thereby endangering the fight against native poverty and possibly leading to the collapse of the entire system if their numbers aren’t limited.

Some politicians even propose to pay immigrants a fee when they return – a so-called “fuck-off bonus” or “get lost check” – on the assumption that this will be less costly than having them on welfare. “The taxes they pay are greatly outweighed by the costs of the government benefits they consume” (source). When one points to the fact that not all immigrants are poor and on welfare, one gets the reply that on balance immigration still means importing poverty because the taxes paid by the “few” high-skilled and high-earning immigrants don’t compensate for the benefits taken by the rest. Hence the repeated call to encourage high-skill immigration and strictly limit or even undo low-skill immigration.

However, this study

reveals that poverty rates would have been only slightly lower and median income only slightly higher between 1994 and 2000 if immigration rates had remained constant.

It’s true that immigrant families, and even their descendants, are in general more at risk of being poor, and that’s a scandal.

(source)

The obvious cause is the relatively lower education and skill level of most migrants (see here). But that’s nothing a good education can’t undo.

Moreover, we see, at least in the U.S., that poverty rates of immigrants fall faster than for natives, and that’s a hopeful sign:

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Given the responsibility of the people in West for reducing worldwide poverty (see here and here), one could call immigration a kind of development aid for the “huddled masses“.

More on migration.

Political Graffiti (11): No Border No Nation

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More on immigration.

Migration and Human Rights (9): Immigrants and Education Levels

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Immigrant children typically do worse at school than their fellow pupils. There are many reasons for this difference in performance and in test scores:

• Immigrant families are often poor
• Immigrant children’s parents are often undereducated: immigrants are attracted to low-paid, low-skilled jobs because that’s where the opportunities are; and even though many immigrants work below their level of education, the labor market may exert a downward pressure on the levels of education of the entrants, and hence also of their children
• Immigrant families often do not know the language as well as the locals (or their children start school without any knowledge of the language at all)
• etc.

However, even when we correct for these disadvantages, as the OECD does in its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), not all of the gap is closed. See this graph:

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Apart from some exceptions – notably the Chinese immigrants – there is still a gap and immigrants are underperforming in schools.

The interesting thing about this graph, as pointed out by The Economist, is that it allows us to compare the results of one type of immigrant community in different host countries. Turkish immigrants, for example, do much better in Belgium or Switzerland than in Austria or Denmark. If children do differently depending on where they end up, then it’s possible to conclude that the schooling systems in the host countries play a part in the performance of the pupils. Or, if not the schooling system as such, then the way in which the system deals with immigrant children (does it treat them fairly, or does it automatically side-track them in low-level schools or disciplines?).

Of course, we should be careful not to put all the blame on schools, poverty, language etc. Immigrants are to a certain extent responsible for their own behavior and accomplishments.

Some more data, specifically for the US this time:

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