A world of free movement would be $78T richer

Increased demand for housing will cause costs to spike, which means that those most willing and able to pay larger amounts will live where they wish, and everyone else will be relegated to far outskirts, including nonimmigrants whose incomes fall further behind cost of living. In this scheme, generous profits will be made by landowners of high-demand locations, and shareholders of corporations who can take advantage of the influx of labor and the expanded customer base. It's not too different from our world's current direction, except within a particular state, the absolute numbers of the wage class and the underclass would be much larger.

Even after decades, and generations, immigrants from certain regions have absolutely abysmal rates of employment in more developed countries they have settled in. How would an even larger scale of immigration flip the trend we can already witness, a complete 180 degrees? Many seem completely content on living on benefits alone, or fully unable to find employment with the skill set they have gathered, even when they have born in the country where the natives fare much better. The way I see it, the money that is being spent on these people could be spent with a far better interest elsewhere.

78 trillion, truly, is a fantasy pulled from a behind.

...A world where everyone's mother is a prostitute would be considerably more economically active.

Its a shame the economy is seen as a end rather than a means.

I'd like to see more modelling on wage depression to see why this wouldn't have a widespread negative impact.

Additionally this seems like a weird point:

>Unskilled migrants care for babies or the elderly, thus freeing the native-born to do more lucrative work.

If lucrative work were available, wouldn't native-borns already be doing it?

This is actually an interesting idea worth thinking about more. If the concern for those on the right is that more immigrants to the US would cause a permanent electoral Blue Wall by flipping Texas in a couple election cycles, and those on the left see economic migration through a humanitarian lens, then re-thinking what Citizenship means and the rules for participating in a democracy could be on the table as part of a compromise. I imagine a sizable percentage predicate their reason on wanting to come to the United States on earning money, not voting in elections (though I could be wrong, but I don't think I am and I doubt this question gets asked to newcomers). The natural reaction to such a proposal would be that we'd be creating tiers of citizens (Native Born vs Full Citizens vs residents or something along those lines). I don't have a problem with that, per se, but I can see how a lot of people would.

It's efficient because it reduces the bargining power of labour to nothing, and those that gain are the owners of capital. With no bargining power, benefits will disappear and everyone will be non permanent except those in very secure positions or in very specialist jobs.

People will no longer have a home - a place to belong, they'll either break up families with parents working on other countries, or children will endure an existence of jumping from place to place eroding the chance for normal development.

Society will be broken and the ability to self organise to build political movements will evaporate.

This will not be a nice world to live in for 99.9pc of the population.

If we are thinking of pie-in-the-sky ideas like open borders, then why also try to think of a way to spread good government and wealth across all parts of the world? I.e., spread the best practices so they become universal.

Some ideas in the past, like Europe colonising and controlling much of the world, are obviously out of fashion today. Yet ironically many people have voted with their feet (or would like to, if given the opportunity) and moved to Europe.

Complete and total globalization of everything on the planet (and perhaps beyond) might be inevitable, but I don't trust the people who are trying to make it happen right now to have any common peoples' best interests in mind, because I'm not naive to human nature (plus I've read up on them).

Why dont we experiment in smaller scale with liberal companies like facebook/google/microsoft opening its employment where anyone from anywhere can come and say i want to be employed here and goog/fb/msft have to take them in? Lets even throw in a restriction that person should be cs degree holder from anywhere in the world. Lets see how it goes.

Look around your own country and ask if the movement to the richer areas has helped the areas the people come from, or the all the people that were there in the first place or even really those that did the moving.

We keep recreating the slums of 1840s Manchester with every cycle and still we never learn.

Never take open borders arguments from anybody with a lock on their front door. Free movement is essentially the privatisation of borders for the benefit of the rich. You can have a border if you can afford to purchase enough land, put a fence up and hire the heavies to keep the riffraff out. Everybody else gets to fight it out in the mud pool.

Firstly, the core thesis of the argument is that merely by moving to a richer country, people become automatically more productive:

> Workers become far more productive when they move from a poor country to a rich one. Suddenly, they can join a labour market with ample capital, efficient firms and a predictable legal system. Those who used to scrape a living from the soil with a wooden hoe start driving tractors. Those who once made mud bricks by hand start working with cranes and mechanical diggers

This can only be described as some sort of fantasy. People who have spent their lives making mud bricks by hand don't suddenly become qualified crane operators by mere virtue of migrating to a developed country. They need the same training any native born person would, but they also need to learn the local language and customs too.

Indeed, a common effect of mass immigration is that mechanical diggers and cranes are less used, because why buy expensive automated machinery when labour is nearly free?

A clear counterpoint is the state of Germany. Over 1 million migrants from Africa and the ME let in with no border controls worth talking about. Did they all immediately become high earning crane operators. No. Aydan Özoğuz, commissioner for immigration, refugees and integration, told the Financial Times that only a quarter to a third of the newcomers would enter the labour market over the next five years, and “for many others we will need up to 10”.

The Institute for Employment Research (IAB) found only 45 per cent of Syrian refugees in Germany have a school-leaving certificate and 23 per cent a college degree.

Statistics from the Federal Labour Agency show the employment rate among refugees stands at just 17 per cent.

The Economist also seems to struggle with the basics of why some countries do better than others. They do sort of comprehend the shape of the problem:

> On the contrary, the reason why migration is so attractive is that some countries are well-run and others, abysmally so.

> It is very hard to transfer Canadian institutions to Cambodia, but quite straightforward for a Cambodian family to fly to Canada.

Hmmm. So. Some countries are run abysmally, and others are well run. Why is that? The Economist acts like good governance is a feature of geography, something the Canadians dig out of the ground. But it's not, government is people, so presumably the people in those countries aren't very good at building wealthy societies. For example their cultures frequently turn a blind eye to graft, dictatorship is common, installing relatives in government posts is expected, work gets done slowly or not at all, votes are seen as things useful to sell for a bit more income and so on.

So what happens if all those people simply move to another country? Does their culture change overnight? And if not, what makes The Economist so sure that the bad administration and poverty those people were trying to escape won't just follow them to the west?

This problem is not theoretical or simply scaremongering. The sad tale of Lutfur Rahman is a warning sign of what can go wrong when large numbers of people settle in the west from parts of the world where western values are not well established - they don't simply change overnight and instead western political systems start to look like third world countries too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutfur_Rahman_(politician)#Cor...

Also as a side note, Why is it that more developed nations have to find solutions for failed states by re-homing the population which voted for those same policies instead of leaving them to fight and improve the conditions in their own countries. Absolute globalist non sense.

But what if people could migrate from the developed world to resource rich regions (like Africa and South America) and have the chance to unlock the potential of those regions? All that potential wealth which is currently held back by corrupt governments and non-progressive cultural habits could be unlocked.

Wait, that happened before and was called colonialism and wasn't good for the natives. But neither is uncontrolled inflow of third worlders into industrialized nations. Is growing global wealth more important than effects on local populations?

>This, they fear, would make life worse, and perhaps threaten the political system that made their country worth moving to in the first place.

The latter part of that sentence is of key importance. Ask the people of Denver what they think of migrants from CA, ask Mainers what they think of the Massholes and the way those groups have affected their society (comically, most Mainers would rather have more poor Somalis than MA migrants). It's really easy to say "well it wasn't that bad" as an outsider 50yr or 100yr after the fact but for the people who have to live through it these changes really suck.

>for five years, ten years or even a lifetime. This may seem harsh, but it is far kinder than not letting them in.

I support this so, so, so, much. So many cultural problems caused by migration would be solved if when moving somewhere your vote counted as 1/X and increased to 1/1 over some period of time. This should apply to citizens too. If I move to the next town over my vote should count at 1/X in town elections but still count as what it previously did in state/federal elections

As an aside, I thought this was going to be a piece about the cost to the economy of transportation and physical distance but I was disappointed.

The reason why Mexican immigrants make more money as mentioned in the article in the US would be erased under open borders. It would be a race to the bottom, globally.

Like hell they do.

In the first two scenarios, the hypothetical worker is almost certainly not qualified to be operating any sort of heavy machinery. In the third, stylists/barbers tend to require certification.

I'm sure this paragraph wasn't meant to be taken literally, but it does nonetheless betray a gross underestimation of the costs of actually training someone to be an effective and safe worker in a new, more technologically-driven environment.

This would also affect government. You either end up with a large underclass that doesn’t have voting rights (see Qatar for example) or else they have voting rights and the laws of the receiving country change to reflect the culture of the immigrants.

If this is per month then its an interesting idea. But if this is per year then there is no incentive for the Western citizens to open their borders. Average income is about $30,000 per year right now. If the job market is flooded with workers then there is no way that people will keep on earning that much. Additionally, the housing market will explode and people who rent their homes will have to move.

I wouldn't be surprised if opening all borders would lead to even bigger gains. After all, China's source of income is their huge pool of workers. But I don't think that $78T profits are a good argument to convince the West to open its borders.

What if the entire world (democratic regions at least) sign some sort of pact, each city-state gets 1 vote. Each state is taxed x amount to preserve an international military force that's goal is to thwart axis-type powers that might arise, but needs a 60%+ vote from city states.

Maybe an ai of some sort could decide the size/scope of region that equates to fair city-states. -- Travel between cities/states would be open as long as you don't mean harm to the area. Cities/states could set their own solutions to problems like healthcare, drugs, basic income, jobs, etc...

I think large governments like USA/Canada/EU/China create represive regimes, smaller self-governed entities could run things better locally, and still have open communications/trade/etc with nearby states/cities. It would also be less-prone to corruption as you'd need to pay thousands more politicians (ones in each locality) instead of just in D.C.

Personally, I'd love to start a blockchain/identity project to create a universal basic income with fool-proof/sybil-attack proof identity system, making fiat currencies un-needed and creating one-world blockchain-based currency, that helps alleviate pain caused by automation. I think a monetary system like this could take away some of the power and corruption from government.

"If we had open borders we'd be $X trillion richer" is silly. It makes the huge assumption that institutions would stay the same, or inexplicably trend better everywhere, instead of worse. There is no thesis for why this is so, it is hand-waved here.

> Suddenly, they can join a labour market with ample capital, efficient firms and a predictable legal system.

This should prompt some navel gazing about:

* Why some countries succeed in building institutions and what is different about them.

* Why some countries used to have good institutions and now have dysfunctional ones. (Like say, Argentina, Lebanon, etc)

They might even learn something about why free movement isn't common.

> A Nigerian in the United States cannot be enslaved by the Islamists of Boko Haram.

The author has almost figured it out.

> If lots of people migrated from war-torn Syria, gangster-plagued Guatemala or chaotic Congo, would they bring mayhem with them? It is an understandable fear (and one that anti-immigrant politicians play on), but there is little besides conjecture and anecdotal evidence to support it.

Okay, he hasn't quite.

The planet is awash with dysfunctional institutions clawing away at function and semi-functional ones. Just going off of his Boko Haram example, the South Thailand Islamic insurgency is 13 years and counting of fighting from Muslim separatists. The Myanmar Islamic insurgency has been going on for 70 years and counting. The Somali civil war has been ongoing for my whole life, the Nigerian insurgencies over the years are numerous and ongoing, boko is just a continuation. I'm sure you know the story of other countries, weary reader.

So why isn't the thesis "A world of free movement would spawn a new era of separatists"? Crazy, yes, but at least we have some precedent for it as a nonsense headline.

No discussion of why nations differ in institutional quality is one thing, but no explanation of why the good-institution countries wouldn't degrade is another. As Taleb says, Economists don't seem to understand things that move.

~~~

A little tangential, but one of the things I think is under-discussed, is what happens to the places where people mass migrate from.

Recently there has been massive brain drain from Southern & Eastern Europe to West: Half of Romania's doctors left between 2009 and 2015: http://www.politico.eu/article/doctors-nurses-migration-heal...

In Venezuela, 40% of recent medical school graduates have left. Medicine shortage + lack of physicians = countrywide health crisis: https://panampost.com/sabrina-martin/2017/12/12/venezuela-he...

Other countries, like Lebanon after its civil war, are similar. Syria might end up similarly, I don't know.

It is hard to fault people moving en masse for a better life, but it further solidifies that the places they leave behind will continue to be governed by the looney bin for the decades to come. I wish there was a more thinking about solutions to this problem, and less glee at the capital class counting chips over the obverse.

The author uses Greece as an example, but Greece has nowhere the poverty of much of the developing world (and that’s a big number).

What incentive is there for the average middle class American to partake in such a grand experiment? Look at what happened when you introduced scarcity to an educated and industrious population after WW1. Mass genocide.

And let’s not forget housing inflation in developed countries. Immigrants are not going to head to Reno, they’re going to go to cities like NY, SF, LA, London—cities that they’ve heard about and where there are already large immigrant communities. Good luck adding another million people to NY over a three year period.

The economist is like an anti-oracle.

Maybe open border can work for trade and business related immigration with sponsors on either side.

The US has long had immigration criteria that ruled out such people.

Okay, now take a US citizen that on qualifications is a good match for such an immigrant and see what their job and career prospects are. As we know very, very well, they are unemployable or nearly so. Well, so will be the immigrant. The ability of the immigrant to get a job, have a career, and support themselves and their family is from poor to zero.

So, why do such immigrants want to come to the US? And how can they hope to make it?

First, the usual way has been the immigrants were young men who left their families, friends, villages behind and did common labor, e.g., picking fruit. They lived several to a room sleeping on a mat on the floor. They were here only the warmer parts of the year, not through the winters. They got paid in US cash with no deductions for taxes or US Social Security. Then at least for the winter, they went home and took their US cash with them. Due to currency value differences, their US cash would go really far back in their home village. Of course, that whole situation is wildly illegal, on taxes and more. A US citizen here for 12 months a year can't do that and support a family or even themselves.

Second, if the immigrant brings their family, with children, then the family and especially the children are one heck of a huge expense for the US education and welfare systems, paid for by US workers paying taxes.

More broadly the OP does poor accounting: Sure, there are a lot of people in the world who are, in US terms, not very productive. Some of these people are current US citizens, and the US is struggling to get those people trained, into jobs, and productive. The US has many dozens of job training programs. Those candidate immigrants are on average less well qualified than the millions of current US citizens struggling to be productive in the US economy. Where do the OP authors get the funny stuff they've been smoking to conclude that immigrants much less well qualified than millions of US citizens who are already struggling to get good jobs in the US will do better than those already struggling US citizens?

Or, if those immigrants are such a valuable, neglected resource, then, sure, take some US tools, supplies, know-how, etc. to some foreign countries and give the people there jobs. Chrysler tried that in Mexico and has decided that it was a mistake and are returning to Detroit.

Uh, apparently to make people as productive as in the US takes more than just some people and training for a job; also required are huge investments in infrastructure from water and sewer, roads and bridges, suppliers and supplies, communications, regulations, laws, law enforcement, public health, medical care, citizenship, ..., the whole thing. The OP is being simplistic, straining over gnats and forgetting elephants.

IMHO, too many powerful people in US business see the immigrants as a new version of slave labor. In 1861, the US had a lot of slave labor and people who liked that situation; we fought a bloody war over that issue, killed IIRC 600,000+ US soldiers and maybe a comparable number of other US citizens. Net, slavery was a big mistake. Bringing back slavery will be a bigger mistake. The forces in favor of slavery have been strong for thousands of years and did not end in 1865 or so.

If the authors of the OP want to take some funds, rush to some country with lots of really poor people that are unproductive, set up some businesses, give those people jobs, training, etc., so be it. People have been trying that off and on around the world for a long time. We've long had international organizations for such development. Successes have not been anything like the claims of tens of trillions of dollars claimed in the OP.

So, the OP looks like really bad, simple economic and business arithmetic, so bad the OP does not look like economics. So, what really is the OP? Hmm .... For a candidate answer, consider the advice "Always look for the hidden agenda.".

As the article argues, this is better than excluding them from our labour market.

But discrimination like designating people as 2nd class citizens is probably more repundant to people's sense of ethics than closed borders.

And perhaps these moral tabu's are not without importance. I'm not sure, but "closed borders" do seem worse than a 2nd class of citizens.

Reducing people down to a line in a calculation of your bottom line is dehumanising.

http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/...

Combine this dynamic with our current world in which the gulf between a small elite class and everyone else is widening with the middle class in between deteriorating, and you have a recipe for disaster. The modern welfare state that exists in Europe and to a (much) lesser extent in the US would crumble from the stress of millions of new individuals flooding the economy at the low end and being stuck there because of economic dynamics beyond anyone's control.

Rather than importing the impoverished from poor nations to rich nations, we should be working together as a community of nations to establish law and order where there is lawlessness. Once law, order and in particular property rights are followed and enforced, wealth can and will grow as it has in places like China and Vietnam.

Encouraging freedom of movement will result in poor regions becoming even more destitute. As one of my wealthy friends from Pakistan lamented to me once when considering whether she should move to Canada or stay in Pakistan, "if people like myself flee Pakistan, who will stay to build it into a strong and prosperous nation?"

Overall, free movement would be a terrible idea for most people. This article does a really poor job of considering the issue.

There is no excuse.

Borders serve no useful purpose in a globalized economy. Can you imagine how terrible it would be if the states had hard borders between them?

People act like having open borders mean invading marauders of foreigners, but did everyone from Ohio invade Maryland because of the open borders the states have? In reality, most people would stay where their family and relatives are.

"My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, sometime in the future with energy that's as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere." - Hillary Clinton

Let's start by making annexing the states of Canada and Mexico into the US, and work other countries from there.

Do it.

An internet with no firewalls and free, unauthenticated root access would be $78T richer.

Let's not pretend the majority of that wealth wouldn't accumulate in a small number of pockets.