I haven't blogged much about immigration issues; it's a difficult empirical question on which I have little expertise, and my sense is that it would take more time than I now have to acquire enough expertise to be able to say something useful. So let me ask this question, stressing that it's just a question and not an answer:
Say that we consider largely removing limits on immigration, as I've heard some people suggest, and as was indeed the law throughout much of the nation's history. (Let's set aside narrow limits, such as on people with criminal records, terrorist connections, or easily communicable diseases.) Say also that we will offer these now largely legal immigrants those social welfare benefits that are in fact politically likely — not the bare minimum that some libertarians might like, nor the vast amount that some welfare-state proponents might suggest, but those benefits that are likely: Public education for their children, emergency health care, whatever nonemergency health care is likely to be broadly offered under either current health subsidy plans or under whatever plans are likely in the future, and the like.
Say also that we maintain the traditional liberties that we have long offered legal immigrants, such as the right to settle wherever they want (which likely means where they can find relatives, people from their home country, and jobs), rather than requiring them to stick to (say) South Dakota and avoid already crowded places like New York City or Southern California. And say that we likewise maintain the various traditional restraints that are in fact unlikely to be politically changed, such as imperfectly enforced minimum wage laws, imperfectly enforced tax laws, imperfectly enforced housing laws, and the like.
Of the world population of 6 billion, how many people are likely to want to come to the U.S., and stay for the indefinite future, under this model? Ten million? One hundred million? More? Less? Is it even possible to estimate this? Relatedly, if one goal of allowing broader immigration would be to avoid the problems caused by illegal immigration, would capping the limit at some number (2 million per year? 5 million per year?) dramatically decrease illegal immigration by offering the prospect of legal immigration to those who stand in line? Or would it increase illegal immigration, as people see more of their acquaintances and family members living in the U.S., and thus conclude that moving here illegally would be easier and less painful than it once was?
Why would we want more?
Steve Sailer wrote:
The Diversity Visa Lottery gets up to ten million applications per year. And those are just from foreigners outside the 15 countries, such as Mexico, China, and India, that send the most immigrants to America and hence don’t qualify for the Diversity Visa.
This suggests that, across the world, scores of millions would like to immigrate to America right now.
What about in the long run? We have two informative examples:
1. The U.S. maintains an open border with its territory of Puerto Rico. One-fourth of all Puerto Ricans live on the U.S. mainland, according to Harvard economist George Borjas, and that proportion is kept down only by paying generous benefits to Puerto Ricans who stay home.
2. There are currently 106 million people in Mexico and approximately 25 million people of Mexican descent in the United States. In other words, just under 1/5th of all Mexicans in the world now live in America. And they got here without an official open borders plan.
So what does that imply?
There are currently over six billion people who live neither in America nor Mexico. So, if one-fourth of the rest wanted to move to America, as happened with Puerto Ricans, that would be 1.5 additional billion people, compared to the current American population of 296 million.
If only one-sixth wished to immigrate, that would be a mere one billion people.
But, surely, Puerto Rico and Mexico are special cases—where extreme poverty triggered radically high immigration rates?
No. In reality, almost five billion people (4,976 million to be precise) live in countries where the average per capita gross domestic product is lower than Mexico's mean of $9,600. (These numbers are from the CIA World Factbook, and are calculated in terms of purchasing power parity.)
Despite generations of Mexican self-pity—"Poor Mexico! So far from God and so close to the United States"—it turns out that being so close to the world's strongest economy is the best thing Mexico has going.
And, at $17,700 per capita, Puerto Rico is downright affluent by global standards, albeit not when compared to the USA ($40,100).
Puerto Rico and Mexico are different only because they are more conveniently situated for getting into the U.S.
But travel costs are becoming less daunting for other Third Worlders.
These are 2 separate questions. Throughout US history, we have seen far more cases of people coming here for a limited amount of time, making it or not making it, and going home than those who choose to stay indefinitely as LPR's or naturalized citizens. If we are broadly defining immigration policy, then sure, anybody who stays for a longer period than a typical tourist visa is an immigrant. But here is where we need a policy that separates out guest workers (and I would include H-1B's here) from those who intend to go through the drawn out process of obtaining a green card or naturalizing. I submit the latter number is far less than anti-immigration advocates project.
If we gave people reasonable hope of coming here legally, you probably would find that a lot more people would sit around for a year or two waiting to come here legally than would just decide to try to sneak into the country illegally.
I personally like a modified version of system proposed by Judge Posner on his blog. Open up immigration to anyone (or anyone who isn't a terrorist, criminal or carrier of an infectious disease), figure out how much an immigrant is likely to cost the system over the next 5 years or so and require immigrants to pay this amount up front. Then treat this as a credit against their taxes for the next 5 years. By doing this, you will assure that anyone coming to this country will be an asset rather than a liability, or at least expect to be and be willing to put their money where their mouth is.
(According to the CIA Factbook, China has 25 million "extra" males aged 15-64, and 17 million more boys than girls, so they could easily see this as two birds with one stone.)
I tend to favor immigration, but I don't think we can just open the gates and not pay any attention.
Unless things have changed, they'd be looking to offload their excess women.
One variable making it impossible to predict the number of immigrants in your hyothetical is changing/improving economic conditions in foreign countries. People usually immigrate for jobs. If their home countries offered jobs, they would stay home.
It is even possible, though not popular, to imagine a scenario where Americans would emigrate to other, more prosperous, countries.
It would take the others a bit longer to scrape together the necessary resources...
In terms of national security (I'm kidding here), if we really get stuck, we could open the borders and let everyone into the United States. That will leave us the rest of the world -- which we will promptly sneak into. (We'll disable the nukes before we go.)
Things have changed. A lot.
In some cases, recent immigrants are returning to their own countries as economic conditions in the U.S. worsen. For example, there is a wave of Brazilian immigrants repatriating themselves from New England, as the Brazilian currency and economy strengthens. Recent oil discoveries also make it likely that a typical Brazilian may be better off staying put than emigrating to the U.S.
I still think the proposition in the question, that the U.S. has a "closed" immigration policy is faulty. Legal immigration is somewhere between 1 and 2 million per year, and is impossible to determine exactly since many temporary visas (H1-B, L1) become permanent. There is only token enforcement of immigration law against visa overstayers.
The 1-2 million level of legal immigrants is still greater than all other nations combined.
At some point, as Candide says, we have to cultivate our own garden. We need to invest in our own people and turn our attention to assimilating those already here.
npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4801941
And, what would happen is a snowball effect from various countries, including those with few current immigrants. The first arrivals would form networks that would help bring over others from the same country. That's how large numbers of Somali refugees were moved from GA to ME.
As for Dan Weber's concerns about China, look into Mexico's various activities (scan my archives). Their prez recently encouraged their citizens in the U.S. and others to push their agenda, they've explicitly stated that they're going to be using U.S. non-profits to push their agenda inside the U.S., they paid someone linked to Bush 3/4 of a million to run an ad campaign inside the U.S. and they apparently paid someone else several millions to run another one, their consuls go as far as attending city council meetings to get those cities to accept their ID cards which they pass out to illegal aliens, they have links to those who organized the recent marches, and their former foreign minister even made what sounded like a threat of civil disobediance.
Professor Volokh's question is impossible to answer only because the levels of immigration we'd be talking about would change the various programs we have as well as the employment prospects for those who came. We just wouldn't be able to afford the same types of benefits if there were another billion people seeking to claim them.
Now, if we assumed that wouldn't be the case, there's no reason not to think that most of the world's population who now subsist on a fraction of our minimum wage wouldn't want to move here.
As for barriers to entry, I think people are significantly overstating them. The costs of the getting to the US are high for a person living in poverty abroad, but we're talking about less than a thousand dollars in most cases. It's nothing that most of the world's population couldn't save up.
You don't have to imagine, it's happening now. Americans move to countries all over the world. Sometimes they stay, sometimes they come back home, but in each case it's an individual decision. You just can't conceptualize it on a societal level. Obviously it will happen more if countries become more prosperous than the US.
The first is that their are certain reasons why people are better suited in their countries of origin than in the US. Often there are family structures there, they speak the language in that country but not English or there are other cultural advantages to staying in their own country. Combine this with the costs that anyone faces in moving, particularly in moving long distances and the fact that people are risk adverse, and you will find that the US can be a lot better for the average American than country X is for a citizen of that country but people will still decide to stay put.
A great example of this is inner city poverty. The cost of living in NYC is significantly higher than the cost of living in almost any other part of the country. The cost of living is about 30% less in Montana than it is in the NYC area. You would think that all the poor people in NYC would be itching to move to Montana so that they can stretch their minimum wage dollars further. To the best of my knowledge, this migratory pattern is almost non-existent, presumably because the costs associated with the move are too high to make it worth the risk.
There are approximately 150 million internal immigrants in China - people from the mainland who have gone to the coast because of the job opportunities available there. The total Chinese population is around 1.3 billion, so 150 million is around 12% of the total (of course, at least part of the population lived on the coast to begin with and so wouldn't be counted among the internally displaced). Of course, the Chinese share a common culture and language, which makes it significantly more likely that someone would move from mainland China to the coast than from mainland China (or Africa, or wherever) to the U.S. I'd also note that this massive immigration doesn't seem to have stopped China's economic growth or increases in its standard of living.
Britain has more or less open borders with other EU members (the same is not true for other Western European countries). Since 2004, when ten of the former Eastern block countries joined the EU, it has received around 450 thousand immigrants from those countries. I calculate the total population of those Eastern European countries at around 75 million, which would put total immigration at around one half of one percent over two years. Granted the difference in the standard of living between Eastern Europe and Britain isn't nearly as large as the difference between the U.S. and much of the world, but then the "culture shock" involved in such a move is probably also much less.
I would also note that even if the U.S. were to fling open its borders, this doesn't mean that other nations would open theirs. Mexico is actually pretty rare in its encouragement of people who want to immigrate to the U.S. A lot of countries, especially those which people would most want to leave, would probably find the prospect of mass immigration out of their countries quite disturbing and would do what they could to put a stop to it.
Of course, the crush of poor people would make it impossible to maintain the benefits, and as the quality of life in the United States became more like that in Pakistan or Haiti, eventually very few people would attempt to emigrate to here.
Understood (and I think inertia is oft understated reason as well), but that's why I limited my assertion to most of those who live on a fraction of our minimum wage. Surely there are many who are destitute who would not leave for the reasons you mention (among others). But even if we discount the world's poor to account for those who would decide not to leave, we're still left with hundreds of millions of potential immigrants, more than enough to overwhelm US social services and take every minimum wage job we could create (though it'd be interesting to see whether manufacturing and other industries that have been sent overseas would come back). Heck, even if you limited your inquiry to countries where English is fairly common (India, Kenya, Nigeria, the Phillipines, etc.) and assumed only half of the poor would make the trek, you're still talking about hundreds of millions of people.
and? I explicitly made that point in my first post (ie the employment prospects of those who enter would be reduced over time). And the minimum wage doesn't "prevent" immigration. It may discourage it, but as we've seen with Central American immigrants, the US economy is flexible in its ability to create jobs.
When I go to China, I see lots of young people who are highly motivated and many are well educated. Most would jump at the chance to immigrate to the US.
Then I see cities like Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Detroit (among others), that are losing populations and are declining cities, at least economically. There are wide swaths fo the city that have abandoned houses or empty lots.
I would love to have 100,000 chinese who have a degree is something, give them US citizenship, and require that they must live for at least five years or ten within the city limits of their new city. Hell, I would even give them a free abandoned house.
These cities could do worse that to instantly boost their population by a quarter or a third with educated and motivated people. If I know the chinese, there is no way they *wouldn't* make it -- they would start restaurants, software companies, perhaps even a chinese laundry or two. That means new jobs and taxes, and revitalization of these cities.
It's win-win for everyone.
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