Comment by setgree | Hacker News Reader

Comment by setgree | Hacker News Reader

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> we're trapped in a system that doesn't provide workable means to solve our pressing problems

Generalization: most of those problems are political rather than technical, and unlike with technical problems, if you make a wrong guess about how to solve a political problem, the costs might be unboundedly catastrophic (e.g. world war).

I personally believe that the best response to global warming is open borders, because it would mean that all the people who:

* are living in the global south could relocate somewhere colder and further inland, if they wanted;

* are subsistence farming, but who would be great engineers, scientists, etc. given the right opportunities, would be more likely to get those opportunities.

Most people think that open borders would be bad, and I don't think I will be able to persuade them otherwise in my lifetime.

In general, alternatives to persuasion in politics amount to seizing power and/or changing the rules of the game. Even if I thought I could do that, which I don't, I wouldn't, because all too often in history, the cure is worse than the disease.

That's why I think these problems are hard -- and why I'm scared of people who propose grand solutions to them.

The more obligations a state takes to its population (not limited to citizens), the harder it is to enact an open-borders policy while keeping these obligations.

The US used to accept basically anyone, but it did not have any Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, unemployment benefits, etc. In EU states, the problem is even more severe, as they provide more benefits, to those who pay taxes an to those who don't alike.

So, high life standards, advanced social protections, open borders: pick any two.

> The more obligations a state takes to its population (not limited to citizens), the harder it is to enact an open-borders policy while keeping these obligations.

The opposite is true. Immigrants generally work very hard and accept minimal wages. (This is one reason why many citizens would prefer not to compete with them in the labor market.) Their labor can be highly effective in supporting an economy with strong, potentially expensive, social programs.

In the US, our problem is that we've found that we can make them work even harder for even lower wages, and provide them even less social support, by making them "illegal."

The opposite is true. Social programs are funded by tax dollars, not cheap labor that may or may not be reported for taxes at all. If you want to make an argument that immigrants are good for these programs you need to limit immigration to higher economic output (and thus tax revenue) individuals like many other countries do.

> Social programs are funded by tax dollars, not cheap labor that may or may not be reported for taxes at all.

The economy provides tax dollars. If immigrants are working hard for low wages, they're supporting the economy and economic growth. You're thinking very unclearly if you gauge the economic impact of a worker, or a class of workers, solely on how much income tax they pay.

> The economy provides tax dollars. If immigrants are working hard for low wages, they're supporting the economy and economic growth. You're thinking very unclearly if you gauge the economic impact of a worker, or a class of workers, solely on how much income tax they pay.

That economic growth is going to shareholders, not the immigrants who are being squeezed for their labor at low wages.

People with high wages pay into social programs (Medicare and Social Security comes out of W2 income). Shareholders, via taxes on capital gains, do not. Ergo, underpaid immigrants are exploited by the shareholder class, at the detriment to society as a whole.

Economic growth for growth’s sake is not a metric to be chased when you're discounting quality of life to achieve it.

==If you want to make an argument that immigrants are good for these programs you need to limit immigration to higher economic output (and thus tax revenue) individuals==

Do you have any sources on this claim? I'd be interested to read.

I suppose similar was the reasoning behind the H1 visa program, which explicitly limited the lower bounds of salaries for the immigrants. (It did not limit other immigration types, of course.)

Sure, see pages 35-36 (combined with the previous section on poverty) of [1]. Note that most studies claiming otherwise do not account for income level of immigrants, which is what I am responding to here. Higher income immigrants are generally a net positive for social programs, but lower income immigrants are not.

[1] https://cis.org/sites/cis.org/files/articles/2001/mexico/mex...

1. I don’t see where your charts show that lower income immigrants leading to a deficit in the safety net.

2. Your study is 20 years old.

3. The Center for Immigration Studies is not un-biased on immigration. The exclusive focus on Mexico might have been a giveaway. The first section of their Wikipedia entry:

“The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) is an anti-immigration think tank. It favors far lower immigration numbers, and produces analyses to further those views. The CIS was founded by historian Otis L. Graham and eugenicist and white nationalist John Tanton. The organization was founded in 1985 as a spin-off from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and is one of a number of anti-immigration organizations founded by Tanton, along with FAIR and NumbersUSA.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Immigration_Studi...

> Immigrants generally work very hard and accept minimal wages.

Not if they are eligible for social programs without working hard, then you get a different kind of immigration than US gets. US gets hard working people since immigrating there as a non hard working person is just dumb. However when Europe takes refugees who are eligible for social programs as soon as they arrive then they don't really get hard working people, those are the kind of people you would get more of if you opened your border and gave everyone the same social security nets.

If you haven't seen it, you might like Open Borders by Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith[1]. Comic-book form advocating for open borders, with pretty good reasoning.

[1] https://smile.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Science-Ethics-Immigra...

Ha, I originally provided a cite to this but took it out to make my comment shorter :) Glad you liked it!

My issue with open borders is that everyone seems to come to the most populated places.

It seems kind of insane how everyone crams into the same old cities.

Companies do it because the workers are there, workers do it because the companies are there, and every city just becomes a crowded, unaffordable hellscape.

Is it not possible to build new towns and expand them anymore? There's plenty of land as far as I can tell...

What we've experienced is not open borders, at least in America it's mostly a mix of unskilled workers coming in over the Southern border and high-skilled workers coming in via visas. Naturally those recruited specifically to join companies are going to cluster where those companies are.

I also think that immigrants from a generation or two back tend to be spread out much farther. There's a large Indian population in the Detroit area, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indian_Americans_in...

Bottom line: Immigrants, like the rest of Americans, go where the jobs are, and if that gets more spread out -- as might happen as a long-term response to COVID -- then so will the distribution of new arrivals.

Can't really speak to the experience elsewhere.

You can build new towns, but they tend to have a chicken-and-egg problem with respect to jobs. No employers will set up shop in a new town because there are no employees, people moving in get jobs in the nearest city because there are none suitable in town. These places are often called bedroom or commuter towns.

If those cities are so bad, why does almost everyone want to live there?

If you don't like the cities, why not take advantage of open borders leave?

Open borders seems to be the solution to your problem, not the cause.

I think that some of the issue is that cities have more opportunities even outside of employment. Arts, dining, sporting events, museums, world class instructors in various hobbies, cultural events, etc.

There is simply an advantage to being close to a network node with multiple connections that outweigh the costs. Whether you define that node in people in your field, different fields, different cultures, different ideas, availability of direct flights, trains, highways, whatever connection it may be. There is an advantage to maximizing available connections that can't be ignored.

And ultimately, it may even work out in your favor to live in a high COL place. The rents are higher, but usually your pay is relative so proportionally cost of living is about the same. That means in a high cost of living state, x% of your income is more money to invest and grow, and over a career that can lead to a significant difference in wealth.

FWIW I moved to Tokyo in part because it’s not a hellscape, but a great place to live if you like cities (and have income). I guess if you only consider American cities then maybe you might conflate cities with hellscapes.

I am a fan of open borders, but you can't have any kind of public assistance and open borders.

Bryan Caplan addresses this as one of his "keyhole solutions" to various perceived negative externalities: [0]

> For instance, if the problem lies with migrant welfare use, the most keyhole solution-like approach is to change the rules, or enforcement of rules, surrounding migrant welfare use.

Another option is open borders with a migration tax [1].

At the end of the day, I think that once someone adopts the mindset that, prima facie, it's morally wrong to deny people the right to move where they wish,[2] it becomes a lot easier to shift one's thinking away from "identify that there are hard problems and give up" to solving those problems.

[0] https://openborders.info/keyhole-solutions/

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2035616

[2] http://www.owl232.net/papers/immigration.htm

this raises more questions than it answers for me. the migration tax in particular doesn't make a lot of sense to me. immigrants are either going to a) consume more services than they pay for in "normal" taxes, or b) make enough money that their taxes more than offset the services consumed. in case b), the people probably already have some valuable skills; you don't want to discourage these people from entering with a special tax. they would already be a net benefit to the balance sheet upon entry. in case a), they probably couldn't afford to pay a meaningful migration tax in the first place. do you just turn them away if they can't pay?

restrictions on use of welfare for immigrants seems "fair" in a sense. at least, it doesn't leave them worse off than they were in the first place. I have to suspect this is a non-starter politically though. outside of a certain group of libertarians, most people who think it's morally wrong to prohibit free movement probably also consider it morally wrong to let people starve in the streets once they get there.

These are fair points, all of which I think could be addressed by finding the optimal taxation point.

The keyhole solution I favor would be something like: a US passport for 10 years, with no political rights or access to SS/Medicare/medicaid/etc., costs $10k, if you lived here for 10 years and didn't get arrested or anything then that transitions into full citizenship; maybe if you earned a certain amount of money/paid a certain amount of taxes in that time, you get your 10k back. Something like that, anyway.

(FWIW my first choice would be a much, much lower barrier to entry -- this is what I came up with to try to address concerns like those raised in this thread.)

But, again, if you accept that the default moral position is non-violence -- i.e. people have a prima facie right to move where they want, and if you threaten to hurt them for doing so (by putting them in jail, or making the only available border crossing extremely dangerous), then you are acting wrongly -- then I think it becomes natural to begin looking for solutions to whatever externalities you can think of. That's why I favor arguing the moral case for immigration before anything else: http://www.owl232.net/papers/immigration.htm

Most countries have "migration tax" - wealthy investors can buy visas. That's obviously not "open borders" the way most people understand that expression.

> For instance, if the problem lies with migrant welfare use, the most keyhole solution-like approach is to change the rules, or enforcement of rules, surrounding migrant welfare use.

This is just bad. The quality of my life is directly related to the amount of support people around me get. I'm expecting a reduction in social support for the poorest would directly lead to increase in crime. In addition, people generally want things like emergency services being available to everyone, otherwise they'd have to see people dying on the street. I'd rather avoid both of those, and avoid open borders, than have open borders, rampant poverty, crime and people dying on the street. "But without open borders, that problem just translates elsewhere - there are poor people dying of crime on the streets of Africa right now!" Yeah, but then let's solve that problem instead. It's much cheaper for me & my taxes to give someone in a low-PPP country social support, basic job, housing and medical insurance.

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