I often ask myself this question when I read Matthew Yglesias or Brad DeLong, two of the smartest liberals in the blogosphere. I can think of a few reasons why I am not a liberal, but here is arguably the most fundamental.
Immigration is a better anti-poverty program than is welfare spending. At the relevant margins, I would rather devote public sector resources to coping with additional immigrants rather than funding more domestic transfers.
Unlike many libertarians, I don’t believe that we can do without welfare spending. Welfare, at the very least, contributes to political stability. So we need some welfare spending to keep the gears of capitalism in motion. That being said, I don’t see the egalitarian case for increasing welfare spending above this basic level. People in other countries are much needier. Furthermore immigration is the best anti-poverty institution we have. A rural Mexican earns $1 a day; in Houston he earns $10 an hour (admittedly his rent goes up too). The next generation does even better, and legal immigrants do better yet. How many government programs bring that much value added?
To draw another contrast with (some) libertarians, I don’t believe that additional immigration is necessarily a win-win game at all margins. More immigrants will bring some very real fiscal burdens, ask anyone in California, or any hospital near the Mexican border. So if we want more immigrants, at some point it will cost us something. Furthermore the bigger the welfare state, the more the costs of immigration are socialized in an unfair, unsustainable, and undesirable way. So immigration and the welfare state are substitutes at the relevant margin. I choose immigration.
Modern liberalism might defend itself by embracing some form of anti-cosmopolitanism. Along these lines, it could be argued that our government has a special duty to its own citizens. I take this argument seriously, but it does not convince me. First, more workable and affordable immigration will benefit the majority of Americans. Second, I take national borders to be in the final analysis morally arbitrary, even putting aside the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Third, this case for liberalism is very different from what is usually presented. Modern liberalism would in essence be required to oppose a principle of beneficence, rather than favoring it.
So that is a significant reason why I am not a liberal. I prefer high growth, minimum domestic transfers, and a higher rate of immigration. Growth plus resource mobility is the best anti-poverty strategy we are likely to find. And this recipe is closer to classical liberalism than to modern liberalism. I might also add that the United States, through immigration, satisfies the Rawlsian formula better than does Western Europe.
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