Bryan Caplan argues that the so-called “cultural costs” of immigration would have to be astronomical to outweigh the tens of trillions of dollars of gains we’re forfeiting every year from restricting it:
And they’re clearly not. If natives really cared so much about their cultures, they would be migrating en masse to low-immigration areas of their countries. They aren’t.
[…]
Since they almost never do, we should infer that their cultural attachment is weak.
This first comment, from Torches Together, offers a British perspective:
The first point seems incredibly poorly thought through.
People very clearly do move away from high-immigration neighbourhoods! This is well documented in the UK and France at the population level.
White Britons tend to move to majority-white (95%+) areas in their 30s when having kids.
We also see macro-level shifts in the classic “white flight” cases: Bradford, Saint-Denis, Southall, Blackburn, Tower Hamlets. Entire neighbourhoods that were 99% White in the 1950s are now over 90% minority.
And the answer to the question “Why don’t people move across the country?” is already in the preceding paragraph. “Somewheres” are defined by attachment to place, not race or nation or ethnicity. If you’re from south London and you’re uneasy about the pace or nature of demographic change, your options typically look like:
1) Stay put – keep your attachment to place, with less attachment to the area’s shifting ethnic profile. Quite common.; 2) Move nearby to somewhere whiter but still kinda “your area” (Essex is the classic example) – also common. 3) Move across the country to somewhere 99+% white – this is less common because you have no attachments there!
Living near productive people is attractive to other productive people and to parasites.
Bryan offers the straightforward economic solution no one seems to consider:
If the problem is negative externalities, then the usual Pigovian logic applies: Governments should measure these negative externalities — remembering to subtract any positive externalities — then impose an immigration tax of equal magnitude. Anyone who pays the tax gets in.
A tax on work visas would resolve many issues — as would stricter enforcement of ordinary laws:
I keep “gushing” [about the United Arab Emirates] because it’s living proof that “trillion dollar bills on the sidewalk” is not silly blackboard economics. Emirates is a cruise ship the size of a country, where the world’s poorest and richest come together for the betterment of both. The West is demonstrably missing a golden opportunity to enrich their citizens and humanity by tens of trillions of dollars.
The US lacks the will to enforce the rules that would make mass immigration feasible.
Are the UAE similar to Qatar, where the immigrant population are effectively slaves (Passports confiscated, not permitted to travel freely, etc.)?
Caplan knows f-all about the UAE. It has a highly selective immigration system, almost never grants citizenship, and if you lose your job you go home.
Migration is war. Migrants are invaders.
We are in the midst of the largest migration/invasion since the Germanic tribes overran the Western Roman Empire.
Bryan Caplan visited the UAE and wrote up his thoughts.
His economically informed recommendations are simultaneously extremist and centrist: far more legal immigration, no benefits for immigrants.
Caplan is right that mass immigration is an economic benefit as long as immigrants are a tightly controlled helot class.
Like most economic theories, this ignores an obvious externality, the evil of having a tightly controlled helot class.
And like most stuff on immigration that gets through D media censorship, this is blowing smoke to cover for the evil of the D party importing a hundred million ringers.
Do the offspring of aliens acquire a U.S. citizenship owing merely to their birth on the soil of one of the States? The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment did not intend such an outcome. If the Donald causes the undoing of the twisted juridical “logic” that led to the appearance of such supposed Fourteenth Amendment citizenship, precipitating the mass ostensible denaturalization of one hundred million from the United State, he will go down as the most consequential president in American history.
McChuck says:
Led by whom? (thoughtful_frog.jpg)
No cost is too high when those who pay it are not the same people who reap the gains. As usual.