Several VC readers have asked me the following question: can we not have free immigration into the United States, but deny immigrants welfare benefits? Several European nations, such as Denmark, already have watered-down versions of this idea, here is one recent proposal.
Can immigration without welfare work? Yes and no. I favor increasing legal immigration, and I have no problem with restricting welfare benefits for new arrivals. That being said, completely open doors and zero welfare won’t work. I see two major and related problems:
1. Even with zero welfare, large number of immigrants will show up hoping for something good to happen. Read my MR post on current life in Haiti, for instance.
2. The welfare state, whether you like it or not, exists for a reason. Every wealthy nation has a welfare state, nor has any reforming economy (e.g., Chile, New Zealand) gotten rid of its welfare state. The Eastern Europeans aspire to build new welfare states. For whatever reasons, it has proven politically unacceptable to have large numbers of non-welfare-protected individuals in a society. Calling these people “immigrants,” or seeing them with a different skin color, won’t make this problem any easier.
Welfare is, in part, a way of controlling and regulating the poor (for better or worse). If the United States had, say, another 100 million poor to worry about, some of them desperately poor, we would have to turn to some other means of regulating and controlling them (again for better or worse). We could make sure they all have jobs by creating a class of guest workers, somewhat akin to European models. I do take this option seriously (though read Randall Parker’s critique), but it does not come close to the ideal of allowing free immigration.
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