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Comment by nugget | Hacker News Reader

I'm a fan of the theory of basic income but it seems incompatible with an open border/immigration policy. Given how many refugees are already migrating into Europe (many for economic reasons), how would a basic income change the incentives and migration patterns even further?

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Why do you see it as different from any other positive thing about a country? Good educational and job opportunities, lack of pollution, effective healthcare and so on, your children not having bombs dropped on them, pretty much anything that makes a country better for the people who live there will make it more attractive to immigrants.

Basic income would become a part of the whole picture, for sure. But take Norway as an example: 5 million people and around a trillion dollars in sovereign wealth, which could yield ~ $8k per person (man, woman, and child) per year in perpetuity. All Norwegian citizens now own a share of ''Norway Inc'' as their birthright and receive a healthy dividend. Now 5 million people - that isn't a lot, and it's easy to imagine that over a generation, at least another 5 million immigrants would be interested in migrating. Now we're at 10 million people and our benefit is cut in half. If we're Norwegians, does the entitlement to basic income make us a little more defensive and nationalistic than we otherwise would be? It seems that, while many forces in Europe for decades have successfully pushed towards more open borders and more flexible immigration policies (ultimately spurring GDP growth), the transition to a basic income economy (if it occurs before the developing world catches up to the west) could act as a strong headwind in the other direction.

On the other hand, those 5 million additional people probably aren't going to sit around doing nothing. That's not how human nature works, either - most people are happier doing something rather than nothing! Self actualization and all that.

So are they going to contribute as much to the sovereign wealth that funds the basic income as the citizens?

And is the basic income extended to guest workers / temporary residents as well as citizens? I would think it would be limited to citizens.

So you would actually have immigrants contributing to funding basic income without benefiting from it until they obtain citizenship.

This is really the core assumption behind Marxism; perhaps not so much the sclerotic centrally-planned dictatorship of the proletariat 'Marxism' we saw in the 20th century as the idealized communal society that Marx envisioned, but un-monetized self-motivation is still required for either.

Does that make it wrong? I don't think so; but at least we should think carefully about how we arrange incentives for work in our shining city on the hill. Even if most people aren't working, we still need for that motivated and creative minority to be putting in some hours and to be happy about it.

Un-monetized self-motivation is not required, here. They would be have the opportunity to earn above and beyond the basic income. It's not Marxist or communal at all. We are not talking about abolishing work for pay. We are simply talking about an un-earned payment in addition to whatever they earn in conventional jobs.

The previous poster made the point,

I don't think that it's completely relevant to the BI debate, but what if everyone actually did just decide to sit around doing nothing?

I think the general response is, in a real world it's never an all or nothing proposition, and even if it were, the fewer people contributing, the greater the opportunities for those who do. (greater uncontested target market share, less competition, more demand, less supply.) The economics 101 supply demand curve hopefully helps incentivize ENOUGH people at sufficient levels to do what productive work needs/is desired to be done.

And if then everyone STILL decides to do nothing, I think we have bigger problems than a matter of economic policy :)

The majority of Norway's sovereign wealth is derived from oil exports, it does not scale with population.

So the basic income doesn't induce cash flow by supporting local businesses?

I've heard the (not so intuitive) assertion that unemployment insurance payouts and welfare actually bring back $1.73 for each dollar the government hands out - primarily because the people who need such money are most likely to immediately spend it (and support small businesses who then buy other goods), whereas more wealthy are more likely to bank it and not circulate it back into the economy directly.

I think the fear is that it will disproportionately attract people who are a net drag on society. People being born into a society will show a wide range of personality types and can be molded further by society into what it needs, but people who move to a country specifically for a basic income might tend to be pathological cases.

Nobody who is so lazy that they won't work a job is going to go through all the challenges of legal immigration just for welfare. It's a basic logic issue.

Having gone through immigration myself (and still working on citizenship 7 years later...) I agree 100%.

The process is extremely long and difficult, and while I persevered, my brother who is an Engineer gave up because it was too much hassle.

Why do you see it as different from any other positive thing about a country?

All properties of a country are either intensive or extensive of migrants and of existing citizens.

Intensive properties would be nice weather and a rich history.

Extensive properties are things like public healthcare, public schools, and a civil society.

Basic income is no different than other extensive properties; all of these are affected by the culture of and the wealth generated by the country's citizens. Immigration, by changing the properties of the citizenry, will affect all extensive properties of a country, positively or negatively.

Basic income wouldn't pay out to everybody: the obvious example is that it wouldn't be paid to people in country on tourist visas. Full citizens obviously would get it. Where to draw the line between those two determines how generous you want to be.

Most immigrants / refugees I know would be happy not receiving benefits such as basic income as long their children get all the benefits and opportunities that natives do.

Bear in mind there are 500 million eligible persons within the EU that may move to Finland if they choose. Once there they cannot legally be treated any differently to a Finnish native.

Not really true, if you move to Finland as EU citizen, you won't get Finnish social security right away. You have to work here to apply for it.

How would that work in the case of an unconditional basic income though? If you're not going to have a pre-requisite for native Finnish people to have had a job in order to receive it, can you have a pre-requisite for EU nationals to have a job before they can claim?

The concept you are looking for is that of residency: because you are physically in a country doesn't mean you are a resident of that country. There are rules of residency even within the EU.

I'm not sure, but perhaps it is similar to local voting rights? Do tourists get the right to vote in local elections, or do they have to prove to have lived there for some length of time first?

Here in Norway you have to be a permanent resident to vote in local elections and a citizen to vote in national elections. I think it is broadly similar in the rest of northern Europe.

I think the rules are quite different, or at least they used to be.

For instance as a French citizen if I find a job in Finland and want to move there, all I have to do is fill a EU form, and there I go. Finnish immigration is not allowed to throw me out of Finland, or deny me the right to work there, because it is my right as a European citizen to work wherever I want in the EU.

But, if I were to simply want to go live in Finland (without a job), I do think Finland is allowed to treat me as a perpetual tourist, that is to say not as a Finnish resident: no state benefits, etc. It might even be allowed to send me back to France, but I am not quite sure about it...

Do their children get basic income (not sure how citizenship works in Finland, but if it is like the US where being born in the country is enough to get citizenship and thus basic income)?

Isn't it the same today for Finland? They have extensive social benefits already, and this plan is mostly just a restructuring of the current wealth redistribution schemes in place. I assume you only give BI benefits to full residents.

Maybe basic income for citizens only?

> I'm a fan of the theory of basic income but it seems incompatible with an open border/immigration policy.

No it isn't. It is very simple to say "Green Card (no basic income) -> Citizenship (basic income) transition depends on N years of taxes paid on time with a dollar value greater than 25 hours/week at minimum wage (or some equivalent proxy value)."

It's very simple and almost certainly a practical necessary to do this, but changing the logic behind the programme to "nobody in this country should have to work" to "only foreign-born people in this country should have to work" rather undermines the idealism of the whole project...

Introducing a work requirement - even if only for some people - is of course rather more compatible with the traditional welfare state view that entitlement to state handouts should be linked to evidence of willingness to contribute to society through paid work. In which case, why not go the whole hog and not pay out to citizens that don't need the money enough to be prepared to look for work?

You need some sort of immigration control. No country has the wealth to support 100% of the human population of the world. The work requirement seems the fairest way to handle it to me.

That isn't a problem if it's only available to citizens of the country which introduces it. (It's sometimes called Citizen's Income.) It's usually intended to replace benefits so it would act as a disincentive to would-be migrants.

Because Finland is in the EU you would have to apply to all EU citizens moving to Finland and pretty much all EU citizens (500 odd million) are legally allowed too move to Finland if they choose too.

You're correct that it wouldn't have to apply to anyone outside of the EU.

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