Immigration Debate Won't End Without the Fall of Mercantilism | Hacker News Reader

Immigration Debate Won't End Without the Fall of Mercantilism

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22 pointskevin_morrill16 comments

The fact that everyone would be broadly better off in the long run doesn't change the fact trade and immigration barriers do indeed benefit the local incumbents (At least on career (ie, decades) timescales). It's similar to the idea that a monopoly is bad for the economy as a whole, but great for the monopoly.

Though I strongly support relaxing immigration constraints for principled reasons, from a personal financial standpoint, it's almost certainly better for me if no foreign programmer was ever allowed to work in the USA.

And that is why the debate will continue: Rational Self Interest (admittedly, at the expense of the "greater good"), not economic misconceptions.

You're not even doing a good job being selfish, since you'd actually benefit a lot more from more people having the opportunity to create value.

The "it is better personally for me" argument could also have been made against women working in your role, or black people. Do you realize how screwed up that line of thinking is?

> You're not even doing a good job being selfish, since you'd actually benefit a lot more from more people having the opportunity to create value.

Well, that's sort of the question, isn't it? Will the benefit I receive from other people's production of value outweigh the devaluation of my own productivity? I don't think there's an easy way to answer that, though my suspicion is that there is a large number of people for whom the answer is no.

Note, I don't advocate this line of thought; I'm just saying that it's not irrational for someone to advocate it.

"Rational self-interest" does not include violating individual rights.

If an employer wants to hire someone outside of the U.S., that is his decision, not yours or anyone else's.

Exactly!

Ideally, human rights should include ...

1. The free movement of ideas

2. The free movement of capital

3. The free movement of goods & services

4. The free movement of labor

Right?

I have two questions for the people commenting who think immigration barriers actually benefit the local incumbents.

1) Since the economic argument for free trade applies to the labor market as well, one cannot logically be an advocate of free trade and anti-immigration at the same time. Do you maintain that free trade is actually bad for the United States?

2) If free immigration between countries is bad, then it follows that it is also bad between states, between cities, and between neighborhoods. Do you believe that your state, your city, and your neighborhood would be better off if there was a legal barrier to immigration at the state, city, and neighborhood level?

2. Not if there were reciprocity. Btwn states there is reciprocity. I can move to RI and an RIer could move to CA without limit. Someone from the US can't easily get a job in BR, for example, unless business could prove no BRlian could do the job.

Free market immigration is neither open borders (forced integration) nor closed ones (forced segregation). Social security impact of immigration falls under forced integration.

I can't say it better than Hans Herman Hoppe: "First, with the establishment of a state and territorially defined state borders, “immigration” takes on an entirely new meaning. In a natural order, immigration is a person’s migration from one neighborhood-community into a different one (micro-migration). In contrast, under statist conditions immigration is immigration by “foreigners” from across state borders, and the decision whom to exclude or include, and under what conditions, rests not with a multitude of independent private property owners or neighborhoods of owners but with a single central (and centralizing) state-government as the ultimate sovereign of all domestic residents and their properties (macro-migration). If a domestic resident-owner invites a person and arranges for his access onto the resident-owner’s property but the government excludes this person from the state territory, it is a case of forced exclusion (a phenomenon that does not exist in a natural order). On the other hand, if the government admits a person while there is no domestic resident-owner who has invited this person onto his property, it is a case of forced integration (also non-existent in a natural order, where all movement is invited)."

Many people -- including a lot of economists -- inhabit an echo chamber where "globalization=good, protectionism=bad" is a sacred dogma.

But the investor's investor, Warren Buffett, has said that tariffs would be good for the US [1] [2].

Protectionism/mercantilism works, but what we have is a half-and-half system: Goods, services, and capital can move relatively freely through US borders, but labor cannot.

Throwing open our borders to trade -- Nixon's visit to China, NAFTA -- resulted in real US wages that have been stagnant for decades.

I.e., in many jobs, our workers are still competing against overseas workers, without those workers physically moving to the US. Those third-world workers don't have to worry about all the silly laws we have regarding minimum wages, limited workweeks, child labor, environmental protection, workplace safety, etc. If we want to keep those policies, and still have good jobs available to our citizens, we have to ditch free trade.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Import_Certificates

[2] http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/...

Buffett is a mercantilist, not a capitalist

He invests his money in companies. I always thought that "capitalist" was simply another word for "investor".

Edited grandparent to say "investor" instead. Happy?

This author has obviously never been to Latin America nor understands that America is situated next door to a third world county. We limit immigration for a reason, and it is not mercantilism. We limit immigration because hypergrowth from third world immigrants hinders our infrastructure, which gives us things like traffic, crowded emergency rooms, and high unemployment.

I don't think Latin America makes a difference. In Britain, our immigration laws lack true stringency, yet we suffer from those same third-world immigrant issues to its fullest effect even though we're only surrounded by first-world countries.

I'm from Latin America, and I think you have the causality wrong. We don't limit immigration because immigrants hinder our infrastructure, rather, our infrastructure is hindered because we limit immigration. Smart people leave to more immigration friendly countries and build infrastructure there, and the people who would have come to our countries to build our infrastructure are not allowed to come in.

The west (particularly the US, Germany isn't quite as stupid) has been playing innocent globalist at the ongoing mercantilist game table for 30 years. Western multinationals got labor and environmental arbitrage, Asia got the middle class jobs. And here we are.

But, yeah, sure, western mercantilism is the problem...

both the Republican and Democratic parties support the "protectionist" policies

...and I stopped reading. In fact, both parties are deadly committed to mass, even endless, immigration. It's the people who oppose it.

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