Legal Immigration, Freedom of Movement, and National Sovereignty
The school year has begun and immigration policy is in the news. Current national and Texas debate topics focus on immigration policy and values.
The national NSDA (and UIL) policy topic is: Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially reduce its restrictions on legal immigration to the United States. And the Texas UIL Lincoln-Douglas (value) debate topic is: RESOLVED: In matters of immigration, freedom of movement ought to be valued over national sovereignty.
So, resolutions inviting students to consider the benefits and costs of immigration (for the policy topic) and the values of a freedom of movement clashing with national sovereignty (on the value side).
“Sovereignty” is a key concept for both policy and value topics. The United States is a federal republic with sovereignty shared between state and federal governments. The U.S. federal government (like the European Union) allows a freedom of movement for people between states, which generates significant economic benefits plus encourages political competition. Americans can choose the state government they prefer with a simple call to U-Haul, Mayflower, or other moving company. Citizens of Vermont, one of the economically least free can relocate to next-door New Hampshire, one of the economically most free. See Freedom in the 50 States.
But that freedom to move from less-free to more-free places is one that few in smaller poorer countries enjoy. They are stuck living under often corrupt governments and in dangerous cities and communities.
As people move to freer places, less-free cities and states face challenges from depopulation. These states often want more immigrants. Millions more people used to live in Detroit, Cleveland, and dozens of “rust belt” cities. Detroit’s population in 1950 was 1.8 million, but now it’s just 700,000. Over 900,000 lived and worked in Cleveland in 1950, but under 400,000 live there today. St. Louis had 857,000 in 1950, but by 2016 just 311,000.
“Targeted immigration” policies are recommended in this 2012 article, 4 Ways to Increase Immigration, Cultivate Highly Skilled U.S. Workforce (The Atlantic, December 27, 2012):
Many American cities have depopulated over the last generation or two; they have ample infrastructure that would welcome new families and skilled workers. New Orleans, Detroit, Cleveland, Rochester, and Buffalo, among others, have lost thousands of people yet still offer big city infrastructure, education and opportunities. And since the financial crisis, there is excess housing ready to be absorbed. Targeted immigration policies could be meshed with special economic zones and other incentives to revive cities, fill skills gaps, and restore greater long-term stability and competitiveness to our labor markets.
On immigration, let the states decide for themselves (USA Today, August 4, 2017) explains a state-based approach modeled on the Canadian system:
…State Sponsored Visa Act of 2017. Introduced in the Senate last month, this bill is modeled after Canada’s highly successful Provincial Nominee Program. And like that program, it would give states the option to write their own guest-worker programs.
Let the states decide: Congress shows no sign of fixing America’s broken immigration system. It is time to give the states a go (The Economist, February 5, 2015) outlines a similar state-based immigration policy reform. And in the LA Times, Immigration reform: Let the states lead the way, (June 16, 2015), begins:
Texas and California are trying to reform legal migration on their own. The politics in these two states couldn’t be more different, but legislators in both states recently proposed running their own guest-worker visa programs to get around the federal immigration reform gridlock. Relying on states to create their own migration systems may well be the solution to America’s immigration woes.
This 2017 Cato Institute brief offers more detailed analysis of the proposed 2017 legislation: State-Sponsored Visas: New Bill Lets States Invite Foreign Workers, Entrepreneurs, and Investors.
For policy debaters and the general public, it may seem radical to let states control legal immigration levels since that would involve restricting new immigrants to particular states (this concern is discussed in the articles above).
But a basic review of American history shows that shifting to a state-based system would be no more radical than the early Progressive Era immigration restrictions, from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Immigration Act of 1924. These immigration restrictions emerged from the eugenics movement which believed some “races” were inferior and immigration to the U.S. was a problem that would get worse if U.S. borders stayed open.
Over America’s first century, only northern Europeans could afford to migrate. Travel from Eastern and Southern Europe was too expensive and took too long for all but the wealthy. But the Industrial Revolution created steam-powered ships and railroads, reducing travel costs and time for goods and people dramatically (80% or more). So instead of just northern Europeans coming to the U.S., millions from Eastern and Southern Europe came, with far fewer speaking English or German or being Protestant. Lower travel costs allowed far more people from China and Japan to travel to the west coast. Eugenics researchers claimed these new immigrants would harm America for genetic and cultural reasons.
This is a deeply disturbing and controversial episode in American history, so students should do their own careful research. On the past scholarly support for eugenics see, for example, Harvard’s Eugenics Era: When academics embraced scientific racism, immigration restrictions, and the suppression of “the unfit” which begins:
IN AUGUST 1912, Harvard president emeritus Charles William Eliot addressed the Harvard Club of San Francisco on a subject close to his heart: racial purity. It was being threatened, he declared, by immigration. Eliot was not opposed to admitting new Americans, but he saw the mixture of racial groups it could bring about as a grave danger. “Each nation should keep its stock pure,” Eliot told his San Francisco audience. “There should be no blending of races.”
Eliot’s warning against mixing races—which for him included Irish Catholics marrying white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, Jews marrying Gentiles, and blacks marrying whites—was a central tenet of eugenics. The eugenics movement, which had begun in England and was rapidly spreading in the United States, insisted that human progress depended on promoting reproduction by the best people in the best combinations, and preventing the unworthy from having children.
Harvard alumni believed new immigration was as a key problem, and organized to do something about it:
In 1894, a group of alumni met in Boston to found an organization that took a eugenic approach to what they considered the greatest threat to the nation: immigration. Prescott Farnsworth Hall, Charles Warren, and Robert DeCourcy Ward were young scions of old New England families, all from the class of 1889. They called their organization the Immigration Restriction League, but genetic thinking was so central to their mission that Hall proposed calling it the Eugenic Immigration League.
For further research with original documents, Eugenics, Race, & Immigration Restriction:
This resource consists of primary documents about the international eugenics movements in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Its goal is to show how eugenics influenced immigration laws and how eugenics theories and policies circulated across national boundaries as tools of the state in controlling population and immigration.
Background on the Immigration debate topic
The UIL 18-19 CX Debate Topic page provides overview of topic.
Advanced debaters can employ nuanced and specific critical and policy arguments. Immigration reform offers a rare example of federal policy where the key questions do not often involve spending money. Instead, the debate will focus on matters of social justice and fairness. Defenders of immigration reform argue America is a nation of immigrants, and a progressive immigration policy will strengthen the economy, as well as enrich our culture.
But money is a big part of the ongoing immigration debate: many conservatives claim immigrants are a net cost to society as their children crowd public schools and hospital emergency rooms, and access available welfare and refugee program services. Labor unions are critical as well, claiming immigrants pull down wage rates across industries.
Economists dispute these claims. See, for example:
• No, Undocumented Immigrants Aren’t Stealing Your Benefits, (Huffington Post, November 21, 2017),
• Immigrants Are a Fiscal Boon, Not a Burden: After a few years in America, the foreign-born pay more into the safety net than they take out, (Bloomberg, September 22, 2017),
• Poor immigrants are the least likely group to use welfare, despite Trump’s claims, (Vox, August 4, 2017)
• Immigrants and Their Children Use Less Welfare than Third-and-Higher Generation Americans (Cato at Liberty, June 4, 2018)
• Undocumented immigrants pay billions of dollars in federal taxes each year, (Vox, August 28, 2018)
Economist Stephen Moore (a strong Trump Administration supporter) outlines the net economic benefits of immigration and makes the case for an “American First” immigration reform that could generate some $20 billion a year from market-based work-visas. Moore further argues that without increased legal immigration, the baby boom generation retiring will sink Social Security and Medicare:
Immigrants are especially beneficial now because of our unfavorable demographic situation. We have some 75 million baby boomers who are retiring at the pace of 10,000 a day, and there aren’t enough young people to fill the gaps. Immigrants can and hopefully will — or else Social Security and Medicare will go belly up much faster than anyone imagines.
For more background on the topic, student can read the original Immigration Reform topic proposal on the NFHSA website (pdf).
Back to Values…
Moving back to value perspectives, consider the nature of a freedom to move and freedom of association. Many have friends and relatives living in other U.S. states, and other countries, from Canada and Mexico, to countries in Europe, India, Africa, Asia, or Central and South America. Do we have or should we have a freedom to associate with our friends and relatives from other countries? Should they be able to visit us and stay in our homes? And if so, while visiting, should they be free to work for or with us, if they want to and we want to pay them?
Who is or should be sovereign or “overlord” for our choices about who to associate with, and who to voluntarily exchange good and services with? (link is to a Cato Unbound debate on Property Rights in Social Democracy)
A friend from Mexico or Argentina could help us learn Spanish. Is it okay to pay them for education services? People associate over the Internet for online education, but guests from other countries face various regulations limiting their opportunities to work and earn income.
Much of what people think of as immigration issues are actually labor policy issues. The U.S. government doesn’t care with foreigners travel to the U.S. to visit, or as tourists, or even to gamble. But any hint of productive work that is compensated, and whole new complex layers of government regulations are suddenly involved.
Many opposing current or increased immigration compare a country to a house. Visitors, they say, have no right to enter your house without permission, and neither should they have a “natural right” to enter “your” country. But it’s misleading to compare a country to a private home. Maybe a better comparison would be to a shopping mall.
Shopping mall owners and businesses renting space welcome anyone who wanders in (though they prefer people likely to make purchases). Imagine a giant shopping mall along the U.S/Mexico border, maybe a “Mall of Mexico and America” with hundreds of shops and food courts, plus parks, schools, hospitals, and offices and apartments on the higher floors.
People could enter The Mall of Mexico and America from the southern entrances on the Mexico side of the border, or from the northern entrances in the United States. The mall would have its own security guards and contracts would provide the needed legal institutions (much as in European airports where people from many countries can stay and shop between flights without officially entering the host country. The movie The Terminal, with Tom Hanks is based on the true story of Merhan Nasseri who was stuck at Charles DeGaulle Airport from 1988 to 2006).
Similar areas exist now around the world, called SEZs, or Special Economic Zones. They have their own legal systems lowering tariffs and regulatory barriers for investors and companies. There are proposals for “Startup Cities” for current refugee challenges. See “Start-up cities” for refugees: a long-term solution to the migration crisis? (CAPX, July 18, 2016), A Place for the Stateless: Can a Startup City Solve the Refugee Crisis? (FEE, September 24, 2015), Honduras experiments with charter cities, (The Economist, August 12, 2017). Many past Economic Thinking posts on Charter Cities here. See also Refugee Cities website. [Update, see also: The team trying to end poverty by founding well-governed ‘charter’ cities, 80000 Hours, March 31, 2019]
Migration is the fastest ticket to prosperity. It is good news that in recent years hundreds of millions found paths to prosperity. And those paths usually began with a bus ticket to a city. In cities around the world poor villagers are able to tap into the global economy and earn wages far higher than in rural areas. Here is an NPR story:
Want To Help Someone In A Poor Village? Give Them A Bus Ticket Out, (NPR Morning Edition, December 28, 2017) offers an example:
Beginning in 2008, Mobarak and various collaborators set up a series of experiments. During the monga season, they give farmworkers a one-time, very low-interest loan — it’s now about $19 — that they can use to get to the city.
“We chose that amount because it pays for the round-trip bus fare — plus a few days of food,” says Mobarak.
The result: The villagers who’ve been offered the help have been about 60 percent more likely to try their luck in a city. In virtually all cases, it has been the men in a family who’ve made the journey. And once there, the vast majority of them have succeeded in getting a temporary job — mainly pulling rickshaws. Most significantly, with the extra money, their families have consumed an average of at least 36 percent more food. That is a much better track record than the traditional food-for-work or food distribution programs. “About five times as cost-effective,” notes Mobarak.
The global economy expands with the hundreds of millions migrating to and working in the world’s cities. Shanty towns around developing world cities are terrible by standards of wealthy countries, but offer cleaner water, more light, and more opportunity compared to rural villages people migrate from.
[Okay… long post so far. Below is updated from earlier post and looks at the ongoing international migration to cities around the world.]
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Hernando de Soto’s 2011 documentary Globalization at the Crossroads looks at the central role of legal institutions to enable the poor to engage in exchange, open enterprises, and register their property. From the documentary narrator:
Poor people are migrating to the world’s cities in astounding numbers, embracing globalization despite the risks and when the laws they encounter don’t work for them, they create their own.
Their quest is no different than millions of Europeans, Americans, and Japanese over the past two hundred years. They too migrated by the millions, broke the back of the old order with new legal systems to launch the industrial revolution that became globalization.
Migration to cities has for centuries been a global reality, for in cities people gain access to capital and opportunities to buy and sell goods and services with others around the world.
Nations and nationalism play no role or no positive role in this process. Borders place limit on legal migration (though China also restricts legal migration within its borders).
Interesting and relevant for the migration and national sovereignty topic is the reality and benefits of migration across the European Union and United States.
Hernando de Soto runs the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD) and through research and consulting works to persuade governments to recognize the informal legal norms that already operate among the poor.
These issues matter because the traditional faith in nation-states can cloud thinking about troubled nations like Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan. These are artificial countries left over from colonial times. It will be left to local tribes (or ethno-religious groups) living in the cities within the borders of Libya to decide if they want a future democratic nation-state to continue, or whether a formal or informal alliance of cities and regions might suit them better. (From Brookings Institution ten years ago: The Case for Soft Partition in Iraq and from the Council on Foreign Relations, Plans for Iraq’s Future: Federalism, Separatism, and Partition).
Consider the different histories and institutions of Egypt and Libya:
“There are, in Egypt, some well-established national institutions such as the armed forces, the government, the judiciary,” he said. “They may not be perfect, but they are established. There’s nothing comparable in Libya.”
An alternative to nationalism–which should be familiar to Americans–is federalism. Libya, Iraq, Syria could flourish as federal republics, providing a kind of soft-partitions protecting ethno-religious group from political control by central or national governments. That means the central government shouldn’t control or finance education, for example. Otherwise, whichever tribal alliance gains power by majority voting can (and likely will) push its doctrines on other tribes.
Nationalist scholars have long claimed national governments are sources of stability and prosperity. Every crisis brings media reporting of government officials meetings and new plans, initiatives, and policies, pretending they know what is going on and what should be done. Congress, the Federal Reserve, and Federal regulatory agencies claim to be fine-tuning the economy, protecting workers and consumers from predatory business practices, and securing the general welfare.
Not states but cities are the dynamic engines of economic development. People gathering together in cities create ever more opportunities for gains from exchange, gains from specialization and division of labor, and gains from cross-fertilizing technologies and enterprises. Successful cities don’t need to be as big or a prosperous as New York City or Boston or London, but they do need enough economic freedom to maneuver around local officials and entrenched elites. Cities like Cleveland and Detroit are burdened with thousands of regulations, licensing restrictions, arbitrary taxes, and corrupt city agencies, and now lack prosperous industries creating enough wealth to cover their tax and regulatory overhead (see What Detroit can Learn from Bangalore for examples).
A century and a half ago, New York City was as poor as any big city in today’s developing world. Horatio Alger, Jr.’s popular novel, “Ragged Dick or Street Life in New York with the Bootblacks.” This short novel is full of scenes of 1860s New York City street life. Though written for young people, Alger’s novels on “Street Life in New York City” are realistic, fun, and fascinating. They tell stories relevant to all times and places: success is never certain but progress depends on the everyday virtues of honesty, savings, and self-improvement.
Alger’s novels are full of scoundrels. Young americans would do well to learn more of the many deceptions and cons surrounding them, preying on those wishing too much for too little. We regularly hear get-rich-quick ads on TV or talk radio, read or glance at endless email scams, and hear the misleading statements made daily by politicians. These are all tricks and deceptions similar to those practiced daily in 1860s New York City.
On the other side of the planet a century and a half later, the Chinese movie of rural China, “Not One Less” tells the story of a young girl teaching at a village school. The movie’s realistic portrayal of rural poverty explains why tens of millions of Chinese migrate illegally to cities. The young teacher is told she will be paid only if no students run away to the nearby city.
The movie has a surprise at the end, and there is a key scene when the runaway boy is being driven back from the city and interviewed by TV reporters. They ask about city life (where he was alone and hungry before clearing tables at a small restaurant): “The city was wonderful,” he says, smiling.
I wonder if Horation Alger novels are available in the developing world? I just finished “Ben, the Luggage Boy” and it includes footnotes where Alger cites newspaper articles or personal interviews with the real boys whose stories are part of the novel. I expected in Alger’s novels to have fanciful rags to riches themes (“Horatio Alger stories”). But in the dozen or more I’ve read, the stories are more “rags to a new suit and entry-level job.” The key is always the decision to think ahead, and the decision to begin the discipline of savings and self-improvement. Each young man is struggling upward, through a world of opportunities, but also through a world teaming with con-artists, thieves, bullies, and occasional friends and mentors.
In Ben the Luggage Boy, a stubborn ten-year-old runs away to New York City after a fight with his father. Arriving in the city, he looks around for work and learns quickly from other street kids. Like a cat gone feral he gradually learns to get by making enough day-to-day, but slowly forgetting his early home life and book-learning. He adjusts to enjoy life in the city, with its wide variety of work and fun, including occasional cheap cigars and evening entertainment. Later an incident motivates “our hero” to reform and start savings.
A similar story of rural poverty to city opportunities to engage the global economy is told by successful Hong Kong entrepreneur Jimmy Lai in the Izzit.org video segment “A Taste of Chocolate” (after brief introduction).
What does all this have to do with globalism and nationalism? Well, consider the numbers: New York City in 1870 was home to over 1 million of which at least 500,000 were immigrants. In 2010, New York City is listed as having nearly 10 million, and 350 cities around the world have over one million residents. None are as economically free as New York City was in 1860, but now all have relatively cheap clothes, Internet, and cell-phones. Increased trade, travel, and international investment, combined with communications technologies, open the door for tens of thousands of new textile, light manufacturing, and service enterprises. Teenagers in rural India advise grandfathers in America how to operate their cell phones and computers (though partly because U.S. regulations make it difficult for U.S. teens to provide consulting services for pay). Communications technologies cheap in any city open windows to the world.
[The paragraphs above are from earlier DailySpeculations post: “Street Life in New York City and in Cities Around the World.”]