Miles Kimball on the Extraordinary Inequities of Restrictions on International Migration: Monday Focus (February 3, 2014)

Miles Kimball starts a train of thought that leads to the conclusion that our descendants 500 years in the future–if we have a good future, that is–may well likely to regard our tolerance of our present-day restrictions on global migration from country to country with roughly the same kind of horror that we today regard James Madison’s, Thomas Jefferson’s, and Aristotle’s tolerance of slavery.

The equities seem considerably analogous: a social institution that causes misery for many but gives others at and near the top of the social pyramid preferential access to the good things of life. Yes, an immediate move to global open borders would be immensely disruptive. Yes, many would find themselves much poorer as a result. But is there any doubt that globe wealth would increase? And is there any doubt that any Benthamite utilitarian calculus would conclude that–provided societies did not collapse into chaos during the transition–that the utilitarian value of each dollar wealth that was transferred to the previous losers would outweigh its value to the previous winners?

So, from today’s perspective, it was with chattel slavery. So–if the future holds a good world–we might suspect that our descendants 500 years from now to think about us

Miles Kimball: “The Hunger Games” Is Hardly Our Future–It’s Already Here:

Here is the full text of my 40th Quartz column, “The Hunger Games is hardly our future—it’s already here,” now brought home to supplysideliberal.com. It was first published on December 8, 2013. If you want to mirror the content of this post on another site, that is possible for a limited time if you read the legal notice at this link and include both a link to the original Quartz column and the following copyright notice: © December 8, 2013: Miles Kimball, as first published on Quartz. Used by permission according to a temporary nonexclusive license expiring June 30, 2015. All rights reserved.

The Hunger Games paints an eerily apt picture of the world’s reality. The Capitol is the rich nations of the world: the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, Israel, New Zealand, some oil kingdoms, most European nations. The Districts are the poor nations of the world—Haiti, Nepal, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, Papua New Guinea, many countries in central Asia and Africa, all of which have per capita incomes less than $10 per day.

The Capitol, with all of its abundance of food, advanced medical care, and gadgets, is surrounded by a giant high-tech, booby-trapped WALL. The point of the Games is to burrow through the WALL to get to the material paradise of the Capitol without getting killed or caught and sent back to the Districts to starve.

The most important difference between Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games and my variant is that the poverty in the real world is unfathomably worse than the poverty depicted in the series…. The other difference is that, in Suzanne Collins version, the evil the Capitol does with its Games has roots as deep as the nation itself, while in the United States, at least, we build a wall to keep immigrants out in contradiction to our own historical traditions and the example set by the founders of our nation. We do this not only heartlessly, for the sake of what are in all likelihood relatively small gains for a modest slice of our population, but also stupidly. The tight restrictions we impose on immigration come at great cost to our economy, to future government budgets and the future geopolitical power of the United States.

Are immigration restrictions necessary? There may be some limit to the speed at which we can take in newcomers. But there is good reason to think it is much higher than the current rate of immigration. In the decade from 1900 to 1910, immigration was over 1% of the US population per year. There were some strains, but things didn’t fall apart, and America is much stronger now because of those early 20thcentury immigrants and their descendants. For comparison, the number of permanent legal immigrants into the US now is only 0.33% of the US population per year and the entire stock of undocumented immigrants in the US, from many many years of migration, is only 3.7% of the US population—nothing close to the 1% immigration rate the US had in the first decade of the 20th century. And those immigrants would assimilate much more quickly into our communities if they didn’t have to hide in the shadows because of the laws that brand them as criminals.

The philosopher Michael Huemer gives a good discussion of the ethics of immigration restrictions here.  A key point is that many US citizens would love to host immigrants from other countries. Some Americans are preventing other Americans from welcoming immigrants as they would like to. And many people around the world would be delighted to come to the United States even if they were totally barred from receiving any public assistance whatsoever.

In the real world, exclusion is a form of cruelty that we take for granted. Keeping people out of a material paradise for no good reason turns utopia into dystopia. By keeping immigrants out, the United States—like the other rich nations of the world—plays the role of the Capitol in my twist on The Hunger Games. But all we need to do to change that is to honor once again the words on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free …”