Um, a lot of people are already rankled at not letting refugees escape war or famine. Some of them are just regular liberals who don’t care about skilled immigration at all.
I’m not sure what you mean by economically? Are we talking about maximizing world utility or utility of the current citizens of the developed country in question?
Most people are incoherent on the refugee issue. I mean sure, you can welcome the ones that manage to survive the incredibly dangerous journey. But true compassion for victims of war or persecution would involve buying them airline tickets on the first flight out, or chartering a ship.
Some economists have pushed for open borders on the grounds that it would boost GDP by allowing cheap labour to move to expensive locations.
How exactly is cheap labour going to afford to live in San Francisco?
So you allow shanty towns to spring up around the major cities so that poor people have somewhere to live and they can take the bus to their jobs working as servants for software developers and this two-tier society will over time become less unequal instead of more? It just sounds somewhat optimistic.
The other problem is that it leaves open the problem of how to deal with weak states, rogue states, and civil wars, which will remain troublesome even if some fraction of the population manages to escape them.
If there are places in the world that are horrible places to live, maybe we can consider doing something about that, since we’ll have to eventually anyway.
Obviously we need to upzone the regions around San Francisco very hard. If we don’t want people to live in shantytowns, we should do the thing which makes them not live in shantytowns instead of the thing that makes the shantytowns keep away from us.
If we remove the option of “make them live in shantytowns in Guatemala instead”, the only solution to “people living in shantytowns in the US” is “give them something better than shantytowns”.
That, in turn can be pursued by liberalizing urban planning (and I don’t mean fire codes and earthquake resistance, but the pointless regulations that mainly just subsidize rich people and make poor people keep away; for example I was utterly astonished that in some places it’s illegal to build houses that are smaller than 100m2 because they wanted all people to be able to afford properly sized houses or something and I’m like what the fuck; poor people who can’t afford non-shitty housing are inevitably going to live in some kind of shitty housing, and if you ban all the shittiness that isn’t location (such as smaller homes, families living together, creative ad hoc arrangements) then congratulations, achievement unlocked: shitty ghettos) and doing some deliberate social engineering to ensure that the poor and the rich mix as much as possible, because empirically living in an area with rich people is better for poor people (who could’ve guessed that having access to the quality of services that is considered adequate for rich people, instead of that which is considered adequate for poor people, would be beneficial? and considering that most of the US is the product of deliberate or incompetence-induced social engineering in the other direction I don’t think reversing the process a bit would be any worse than stealing from a thief).
Now, phrasing it as “servants to sofware developers” is rightfully ugly and I agree that we should seek a society with no servants, but the reality is that with the inequality we already have “servant to software developers” is a pretty damn good deal to the people we are talking about. Software developers are lazy af and thus are v willing to pay other people to do stuff they don’t want to do, which is an opportunity for other people to acquire currency. If I had to be poor af I’d very much prefer to be poor af in a place where I can be a servant to software developers instead of something even worse.
And empirically, the answer to “would they magically become less unequal over time?” seems to be: yes. San Francisco and San Jose have some of the highest social mobility for poor people in the country, so this would suggest that being a servant to software developers gives better prospects to one’s children than flipping burgers to other poor people in a place with only poor people in it.
Furthermore, visible inequality is a very big thing. I knew that gig contractors often were in a shitty situation, but actually hearing a Lyft driver tell he doesn’t really have any dreams was a very visceral gut-punch over the society we’ve allowed to form because we hadn’t been giving af and I couldn’t receive the emotional effect from just reading thinkpieces. Personally knowing someone who was hurt by a tropical disease I had never even heard of before made me emotionally acutely motivated to do EA in a way soulless statistics alone never could. Having to walk around a roma beggar on my way to buy groceries reminds me that the world is broken and needs to be fixed immediately because this was the best this person could do for themselves; if they had stayed in Romania they wouldn’t have been cold, poor and miserable on a sidewalk on the 60th latitude N, they would’ve been something even worse and I just wouldn’t have seen it.
(On a darker and more cynical side, I just love the aesthetic of local inequality and global equality over local equality and global inequality. Every location I find instinctively appealing to myself is characterized by a comparatively “v”-shaped distribution of rich and poor people, while homogenous locations are not my taste. If a place is like “/” you get smug self-congratulatory assholistan that’s detached from reality; if it’s a “" you get a shitty slum; if it’s a ”^“ you get boring ‘burbs. Thus, open borders would replace inequality across borders with inequality inside borders, which is the prettier kind of inequality and if there must be inequality at least let it be pretty.)
In addition, I’d expect open borders to help with failed states and other such problems too. Tyrants can’t stay in power as easily if their subjects can just pack up and leave, and local tragedies get more attention in the west if the tragedy shows up on the west’s own doorstep wearing rags. (Of course, it’s usually the educated middle class which brain-drains and leaves the strongest, but emprically the educated expatriates seem to be pretty good at helping their countries and hurting their governments.)
The west is already v v good at completely ignoring the problems of Shitholistans, or if it intervenes, intervening badly; but I’d trust people from Shitholistan to have a bit of a better idea on what their country of origin needs. For example, I don’t think Somalia would be any better off if the diaspora hadn’t been able to get money and degrees in the west which they could then use to reconstruct their country and institutions; and if some place is creating massive refugee flows, taking away the easy option of just keeping the refugees away would be a powerful incentive for the west to actually do something about the thing which creates the refugees in the first place.
We’ve been trying the "borders closed, [pretend to] help them where they are” option for decades and it hasn’t been achieving shit because with closed borders it’s way too easy to “”“forget”“” to do the “help them where they are” part; then we got globalization and stuff basically FOOMed. Furthermore, I just don’t think it’s okay to let people’s accident of birth determine their status in the world for the rest of their lives; we were supposed to have gotten over this serfdom/caste system/aristocracy deal in the 19th century already. It’s nonconsensual and monopolistic to force people to live under a shitty government they didn’t get a choice in (or if they did, only the “”“choice”“” of a democracy which was probably corrupt and controlled by some foreign cronyist imperialists or local robber barons, or usually both).
TL;DR: if you want global equality you must first redistribute the inequality equally.
1 month ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 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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