As far as unworkable policies go, though, I’d support Open Borders before I’d support Basic Income.
Free movement of labor would reduce world inequality and poverty much more than a guaranteed income would. And it would increase world output by somewhere between 60 and 147 per cent [1,2]. GI wouldn’t do that.
And implementing GI would make real improvement in migration policy that much more difficult.
In many places the disability pension already is a basic income, just one that requires pervasive corruption to acquire, includes perverse incentives against paid work, pushes people to take medications they may not need, and ingrains habits of learned helplessness.
Free movement of people would be great, but it’s not really practical without resources to acquire housing, unless we allow shanty towns. The US has free movement of people, but it hasn’t created a utopia.
If we had to pick one unworkable policy, I would actually go for basic income first, and work to resolve the other issues that make migration policy so fraught.
unless we allow shanty towns
The point…is to allow “shanty towns” / tenements / whatever other word is used for the kind of housing very poor people can afford to live in.
The problem is that countries like the US / Australia / Western Europe are, in global terms, country clubs for rich people. And our immigration restrictions are like policies for the country club saying we’re not going to hire any poor people to come in and cook the food or clean the toilets because they’ll stink up the place. So here we are as the rich people having to pay other rich people exorbitant sums to do these jobs ourselves—or increasingly, having to go without because we can’t afford it—rather than condescending to hire some of the poor people outside the club.
If you had open borders but said “Oh, but you can’t work for under $10 an hour and besides we’re not going to allow the kind of low-quality housing you could afford”, then it would basically be useless. If you’re not going to allow poor people to have jobs and housing suited to their earning potential, you might as well not let them come at all.
The US has free movement of people, but it hasn’t created a utopia.
I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean. No one is saying that it will create utopia, but it’s a lot better to have the right to live and work in the US (or an equivalently nice place) than not to have it.
Moreover, the US is a utopia compared to, like, the Congo…
The point is to allow people from the Congo or equivalent places to come and work “shitty” jobs for “shitty” pay—by American standards—but which is nevertheless a large improvement for them and a win-win deal for both parties.
If your concern is purely for the welfare of Americans / Australians, then I still think open borders is the superior reform. (Well, I don’t think basic income is desirable at all from that perspective, either…) But especially if you claim to be utilitarian/cosmopolitan, I can’t imagine how you could think basic income does more to help the truly needy of the world.
Basic income for Americans or Australians is like the people at the country club passing around the collection plate because one of their friends has to sell his $2 million house and move down to a $1 million one. It’s not exactly a pressing need compared to the dire poverty abroad.
I think the idea of importing the poor to make them our servants at marginally higher quality of life than they had in their home countries is not well thought out.
Economically it might make sense in the short-term, but people are not perfect economic maximizers and that has to be taken into account.
Creating a large disadvantaged underclass with a sharp racial distinction doesn’t lead to a peaceful and stable polity, I think.
So unless you combine mass immigration with large scale redistribution as well, the outcomes probably won’t be ideal.
The median Mexican immigrant household in the US has an income of an income of $37,390 [1], compared to $54,565 for the native-born population, and $13 085 in Mexico (PPP adjusted) [2]. (This third figure is after-tax income, while the first and second doesn’t say whether it is before or after tax, so I’m going to assume that it’s before; I don’t know what Mexico’s tax situation is like, but I don’t think it’s likely that it will have a major effect). That is an increase in income by almost a factor of three. I hardly call that “marginally higher quality of life”. Moreover, Mexican immigrant households make 69% percent of what native households make; this is noticeably less, but hardly qualifies them as an underclass.
Of course, these stats apply only to the current margins. It is likely that as immigration is allowed to increase, the gains to the marginal immigrant will decline until they reach the point where the prospects of immigration cease to be so appealing. When this happens, net immigration will likely cease. I predict that this will happen long before we need to start housing them in shantytowns.
Finally, the US has a long history of taking in economically disadvantaged immigrants who are perceived as being racially other by the native population, which actively discriminates against them (the Anti-Irish Know Nothing Party received 21% of the popular vote in the 1856 election) . The precedent is that within a few generations, they are completely de-ethnicized and assimilated into the population at large. (I seem to recall a discussion on my dash a few weeks ago about a Chinese-American actress being declared “functionally white” by the tumblr commentariat.)
As you say, the economic gains from immigration decreases as the number of migrants increases. However, you assume this process will terminate purely on economic grounds, but people may have other reasons to migrate, like war and famine. The economic rationale for open borders suggests that unfortunate victims of persecution should be hired as servants by the rich, on low wages obviously because they are competing with every other immigrant. This may rankle people on justice grounds.
Arguably it is a lot easier for the Irish to assimilate into America than other ethnic groups that are not phenotypically indistinguishable from Anglo-Americans.
(Phillipa Soo is not just Chinese-American, her mother is white, and she can often pass as white just as Obama can pass as black).
Creating a large disadvantaged underclass with a sharp racial distinction doesn’t lead to a peaceful and stable polity, I think.
Well yes, that’s why the world is as fucked up as it is. The inequality is already there, we are just uninterested in addressing it properly because it isn’t living in a slum next door and begging us for money each morning; instead they are living in a slum on the other side of the world and begging other poor people for money.
The way the “country clubs for rich people” have consistently created something of a welfare state for themselves but utterly disregard filthy foreigners (filthy because they can’t even afford proper sanitation because the rich people’s tax dollars are more pressingly spent on weaponry to shoot the poor people with if they make the rich people nervous, or tax credits to the even more rich rich people so they can be a bit more comfortable) demonstrates clearly that merely being located inside certain arbitrary boundaries makes one much more eligible for sympathy; and if one supports redistribution for the global poor and/or revolution, importing the global poor over here so that we can see the need for redistribution/they can see the need for revolution (Isn’t it convenient that opening the borders would be beneficial no matter which perspective one starts from?) would thus likely be a very powerful first step in creating the political will to do it even if we ignore the massive redistribution not cartellizing rich countries’ economies to rich people would inherently cause in the first place (remittances already being three times as large as international aid, etc.).
1 month ago · 157 notes · source: scabphobic · .permalink
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Obviously we need to upzone the regions around San Francisco very hard. If we don’t want people to live in shantytowns,...
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Maybe. Though I’m not exactly willing to just grant this in either case.But even if it is, then unfree migration and...
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For most part I agree, if it doesn’t cause things to swing the other way too hard that we become the next Nazi Germany...
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