Yesterday at Hit & Run, Kerry Howley put up a brilliant post on Milton Friedman’s most misused utterance (riffing off Bryan Caplan’s also outstanding post) which I thought was more or less dispositive.

But in the comments, MikeP (this man needs his own blog, if he doesn’t have one) points to this immensely useful post containing a partial transcript of a much more considered and representative discussion of immigration by Friedman from a lecture titled “What Is America.” It really puts the wall-builders’ favorite Friedman quotation in its proper context.

You had a flood of immigrants, millions of them, coming to this country. What brought them here? It was the hope for a better life for them and their children. And, in the main, they succeeded. It is hard to find any century in history, in which so large a number of people experience so great an improvement in the conditions of their life, in the opportunities open to them, as in the period of the 19th and early 20th century.

[...]

You will find that hardly a soul who will say that it was a bad thing. Almost everybody will say it was a good thing. ‘But what about today? Do you think we should have free immigration?’ ‘Oh, no,’ they’ll say, ‘We couldn’t possibly have free immigration today. Why, that would flood us with immigrants from India, and God knows where. We’d be driven down to a bare subsistence level.’”

“What’s the difference? How can people be so inconsistent? Why is it that free immigration was a good thing before 1914 and free immigration is a bad thing today? Well, there is a sense in which that answer is right. There’s a sense in which free immigration, in the same sense as we had it before 1914 is not possible today. Why not? “

Because it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promised a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.

Look, for example, at the obvious, immediate, practical example of illegal Mexican immigration. Now, that Mexican immigration, over the border, is a good thing. It’s a good thing for the illegal immigrants. It’s a good thing for the United States. It’s a good thing for the citizens of the country. But, it’s only good so long as its illegal.

That’s an interesting paradox to think about. Make it legal and it’s no good. Why? Because as long as it’s illegal the people who come in do not qualify for welfare, they don’t qualify for social security, they don’t qualify for the other myriad of benefits that we pour out from our left pocket to our right pocket. So long as they don’t qualify they migrate to jobs. They take jobs that most residents of this country are unwilling to take. They provide employers with the kind of workers that they cannot get. They’re hard workers, they’re good workers, and they are clearly better off.

Friedman’s point about free immigration and the welfare state, then, was simply that if the U.S. is going to offer welfare payments to anybody who legally migrates, then we’re going to have to put a limit on legal migration. But because free migration is such an unmitigated good, limits on legal migration make both the immigrants and the natives worse off. So, illegal migration, which severs the fact of residency from welfare eligibility, is therefore desirable in the context of a regime that guarantees welfare eligibility to all legal residents.

Friedman’s considered view is that free migration without a welfare state is first best. Welfare for all legal residents makes first-best free migration impossible. In that case, a high rate of illegal immigration is the second-best solution.

Now, Friedman’s discussion would have been much clearer had he recognized the logical and practical possibility of severing legal residency from welfare eligibility. It need not be the case that all legal residents are made eligible for welfare. Indeed, there are many actual effective restrictions on welfare eligibility based on legal immigration status. In the 1999 ISIL interview, Friedman says of this possibility: “I don’t think that it is desirable to have two classes of citizens in a society.” And then he admits that he had never thought about it before. Well, if he had, he would have grasped that illegal immigration — which, remember, he thinks is pretty great — ensures a very stark separation of classes. Because tight immigration restrictions hinder pareto-improving mobility, create underground economies that encourage corruption and abuse, and do much more to create invidious structural inequalities than would a formalized guest worker system, Friedman’s own logic clearly leads toward opening up labor markets while restricting welfare eligibility. It is no accident that Lant Pritchett, an economist very much in the Friedmanite mold, argues for precisely that.

But the important takeaway here is this: Friedman’s view is that a certain kind of unrestricted welfare state makes illegal immigration good, because it severs residency from welfare eligibility. Friedman is unequivocal about the desirability of free migration. Anyone really committed to Friedman’s stated view about welfare and immigration should by no means try to restrict immigration, but instead should try to enable illegal immigration. A devout Friedmanite should stand stoutly against every fence, every border cop, every increase in the INS budget, any proposed database check for a new workers’ legal status, etc. I think it makes more sense to argue first for a guest worker program. But if that is in fact impossible, then Friedman has it right: more illegal immigration is the best we can do.

Please direct your attention to this excellent post on the economics of remittances by YouNotSneaky! (for my money far and away the best anonymous econblogger):

But what about the argument that remittances are all biscuits and gravy with tiny bits of sausage in it? Welllll, no. Sort of. I mean, yes, but, let’s think about things more carefully here.

Exactly. But more technically…

Bottom line is that most of the so called “gains from remittances” are straight up gains from IMMIGRATION. Or in other words, they are gains from the fact that some person from a poor household in a poor county has managed to make their way to a rich country and now has a richer income. Strictly speaking the gain from remittances is just the gain from INTER-HOUSEHOLD reallocation of income between the migrant and those who stay behind, not the overall increase in household income due to migration.

A bunch of illuminating graphs intervene and then:

All that basically means that the observed benefits from remittances that people rave so much about are mostly just straight up benefits from LABOR MIGRATION. Which are huge, but somehow that just isn’t being said.

It is interesting that people fix on the humanitarian effect of migrants sending money back home. The immigrant, prior to migration, was presumably just about as poor as the people he or she is sending money home to. So if it’s so good for those people to get that money, then it was just as good for the migrant to make it in the first place. But I’m just saying the same thing.

There’s a lot more, all of it interesting.

[Hat tip: Ambrosini.]

The estimable Shika Dalmia, in a WSJ piece in favor of scrapping the current cap on H1-B’s, informs me:

In response, most industrialized countries, facing their own skills crunch, are liberalizing their immigration policies to make themselves more attractive. England recently scrapped its Byzantine work permit program in favor of a Canadian-style point system that will allow entry to some skilled workers even before they get a job. New Zealand has a remarkable program that gives accredited private companies fast-track access to work visas that they can hand to foreign workers along with a job offer. Australia is considering modifying its skilled visa program along similar lines.

Even more radical is the blue card program that the European Union proposed last year to bump up its skilled workforce by 20 million over 20 years. The card will admit not only skilled workers – but their entire families – and give spouses the legal right to work in all 27 EU countries within three months of applying. By contrast, the U.S. Congress recently questioned even a relatively modest suggestion by Bill Gates to raise or scrap the annual H-1B visa cap. Astoundingly, this cap was lowered to 1990 levels four years ago.

I want a blue card! The right to work in 27  other countries? Wow! That would be an immense increase in real freedom. I seriously want to look into this.

My own interest I guess is a clue to how this could work out in the long run, which is that an already stratified system of mobility rights will come to favor the wealthy and skilled even more heavily as jurisdictions compete for the most productive workers. I suspect that an increased volume of global migration among the skilled would do a good deal to acclimate incumbent residents to foreigners, thereby softening the ground for more general liberalization. But I’ll have to think about it. What do y’all think?

Heads up, globalist pigs! Kerry’s interview with Lant Pritchett, now online, is full of great stuff about how to increase liberty and well-being at the same time! Here’s a taste:

Pritchett: [...] Being against migration to the United States is wrong for two reasons. One, I don’t think it gets the scale of the poverty in the United States vs. poverty in the rest of the world right. Second, if you are really concerned about inequality in the United States, there are many things you can do that would be better than blocking other people from coming to our country. I don’t want to say that people who are concerned about inequality in the U.S. aren’t right to be concerned about inequality in the U.S. But I think taking that concern and using it to keep people from coming to the United States is victimizing the world’s true victims in favor of people who happen to live closer to you.

Reason: It seems strange to worry more about inequality within the arbitrary boundaries of a nation-state than about much larger global inequalities.

Pritchett: Exactly. I’ve never understood a view of the world in which the place in which a person was born becomes the key factor in whether you care about them.

Pritchett is nice; he says he doesn’t understand this view of the world. What I’d like to think he means is that it is obviously a sign of a shamefully stunted moral sense to see shared national membership as the key condition for giving a damn.

The conclusion to Kerry’s prelude is great:

What’s keeping so many would-be migrants in place? “Men with guns,” Pritchett says. His message is less a call to arms than a call to lay them down, less a provocation than a vision of a richer, better, freer world.

That’s libertarianism right there.

Thanks to Kerry, there has been a great deal of stimulating cross-blog discussion of the desirability of an expanded American guest worker program compared to other policies. As far as I can tell, a good number of smart, well-intentioned folks see a big guest worker program as a second-best substitute for an increase in permanent migration and the supply of citizenships. (For example, Tim Lee here.) I think this is mistaken. While I also would like to see the United States mint millions of new passports, I think this is an entirely separate issue from the right of individuals to cross borders and enter into productive agreements with other human beings. It may be the case that the current public understanding of migration confuses these logically separate issues. And it may therefore be the case that the status quo, on-the-ground politics of immigration requires some kind of strategic trade-off between a new guest worker program and an upsurge in permanent residents and citizens. I have my doubts, but I really don’t know. The point I want to get across is that if we currently do have to make such a choice politically, we’re probably thinking about this complex of issues sloppily, and ought to do better starting now.

I suspect that some of us are talking past one another because of differences in political aims. My long-term aim regarding migration is the best feasible approximation of a single global labor market–a world in which people are free to travel the world in search of the most valued use for their skills. That this idea should seem shocking to some (most?) of us reveals how deeply-seated are our essentially illiberal nationalistic impulses. But there is nothing new here. Mises had this all nailed down tight in his chapter on “Liberal Foreign Policy” in Liberalism, written eighty years ago. A politics aimed at world peace requires an integrated world of peaceful cooperation. Here is your bracing refresher statement of ideals:

The starting point of liberal thought is the recognition of the value and importance of human cooperation, and the whole policy and program of liberalism is designed to serve the purpose of maintaining the existing state of mutual cooperation among the members of the human race and of extending it still further. The ultimate ideal envisioned by liberalism is the perfect cooperation of all mankind, taking place peacefully and without friction. Liberal thinking always has the whole of humanity in view and not just parts. It does not stop at limited groups; it does not end at the border of the village, of the province, of the nation, or of the continent. Its thinking is cosmopolitan and ecumenical: it takes in all men and the whole world. Liberalism is, in this sense, humanism; and the liberal, a citizen of the world, a cosmopolite.

As I’ve argued before, I think this conception of cosmopolitan liberalism almost got lost in the Cold War, during which cosmopolitan, internationalist ideals were largely ceded to the communists while liberalism rode out the red tide by tying itself defensively to nationalist feelings in those nations with a more or less liberal identity. The Cold War has been over for almost twenty years now. It is time to get back to the project of securing world peace through extending the scope of mutual cooperation. It is time to get back to the cosmopolitan ideals of liberal humanism.

So that’s the backdrop. Against it, questions of the American interest are instrumental, not ultimate. “What’s in it for us?” is such a pressing question because Americans need to see how their interests are compatible with the aim of a free, just, and peaceful world. For a liberal, it is not surprising that they are.

The U.S. has a serious problem regulating movement over the southern border by Mexicans and Central Americans. The main source of the problem is high U.S. labor demand and wage rates. The policy most likely to solve this problem is not a militarized border, which, as Douglas Massey explains, is completely counterproductive.

The net effect of our harsh border policy has been to increase the rate of undocumented population growth in the U.S. By lowering the rate of return migration to Mexico while leaving the rate of in-migration largely unaffected, it has increased net migration from around 180,000 persons per year in the late 1970s and early 1980s to around 368,000 per year over the past decade.

The increase in border enforcement has actually reduced the probability of apprehending undocumented border crossers to a 40-year low by pushing the flows into remote territory where fewer officers are stationed. But it has also tripled the death rate.

It is logically contradictory, and impossible in practical terms, to create a single North American economy that integrates markets for goods, capital, raw materials, services, and information but somehow keeps labor markets separate.

Nor is liberalization of permanent residencies and citizenships the ticket. There are simply too many people who want to work in the U.S., and the political will to hand out that many Green Cards just isn’t there. Even a significant liberalization on the path-to-citizenship front isn’t going to do much to regulate the flow of labor across the southern border. This is a real issue we need to address. Moreover, a large number of the people now crossing the border illegally don’t especially want to become Americans and would like to go home after a while. A large guest-worker program aimed specifically at these workers really is the best bet.

So a guest-worker program would have a real short-term benefit to the U.S. in terms of increased border security, return migration, and labor market efficiency. The medium-term benefit of a large guest worker program aimed at our neighbors to the south is this: Once the program is established and has demonstrated its efficacy, it will be possible to make a persuasive case for further North American labor-market integration, pushing toward a common North American labor market. In the long term, large regional labor markets, such as the EU and a North American market (and a South American market, an African market, an Asian market, etc.) can begin to integrate, moving us toward the ultimate liberal aim of an open world of mutual cooperation.

Thinking of this issue primarily in terms of the distribution of legal permissions to stay for good is a recipe for confusion. We need to build the infrastructure of a well-regulated system in which people are free to come and go in a dynamic global economy where the demand for various forms of human capital comes and goes. Thinking about in terms of Green Cards and passports seems to me to take for granted that if people are going to cross a border to work, they are going to do it just once, and to stay.

Kerry’s spate of recent writing on immigration is making me think differently.

First, prior to reading her interview with Laura Agustin, I had not occurred to me to think of a Mexican gardner as an “expat” or that relatively poor people might also be interested in traveling across borders out of curiosity or a sense of adventure. That really is shameful. My inner Kant, my inner Christian, recoils at my failure to see persons as persons as persons, all with reasons worth taking seriously, all very like my own.

Second, Kerry’s latest reply to Megan makes me realize that I have dated a guest worker! She was an au pair from Germany, in the U.S. under a J1 “exchange visitors” visa. She worked for a living, taking care of children. She came because she wanted to see America. A year later, she left, having lived the expat life while helping raise some small girls. Like most transient guest workers, she left America no worse. On the contrary. Now, if you think this case is different because she was (still is!) German, then clearly your problem isn’t really with guest workers, is it?

If you have yet to read Kerry’s Reason cover on guest-worker programs, you’re falling behind. It is simply the best thing anyone has lately done on guest-worker programs, beautifully written and brilliantly reasoned. This part is phenomenal:

As Americans struggle with the implications of immigrants who come to live but not to stay, their single greatest objection to a guest worker plan may have nothing to do with migrant well-being. The gains for immigrants are demonstrably too big and the need too great to lend credibility to those who cast all guest workers as victims. According to the Inter-American Development Bank, migrants send $62.3 billion in remittances to Latin American and the Caribbean last year, keeping 8 to 10 million families above the poverty line. The unexplored opportunities for mutually advantageous cooperation are massive and undeniable. But it seems dirty. “It simply feels exploitative and un-American to allow migrants in without giving them a shot at becoming citizens,” writes Jacob Weisberg in Slate.

The economist Lawrence Summers, a former president of Harvard, has expressed this objection in somewhat loftier terms. In a critique of Harvard’s Pritchett, Summers explains: “Lant’s kind of compassionate libertarianism carries the risk of a morally problematic coarsening that we resist in many other ways.” The problem with guest worker programs, in other words, has nothing to do with the good of guest workers, and everything to do with the moral harm that proximate poverty might cause to their hosts. Allowing workers entry to the United States might be mutually beneficial for employer and employee, all the while producing corrosive cultural externalities. Summers seems to think that guest workers will inure Americans to a system of class stratification and undermine a shared, naive sense of global solidarity.

The moral calculus, then, is to be weighed between the welfare of potential workers and the preservation of an idealized American narrative. Does it reflect better on the American character to lock poor people out than to permit them entry on limited terms? Guest worker programs do clash with deeply held mythologies about our relationship to the global poor. We live in a state of relative political equality nested awkwardly within a deeply unequal world, and it can seem better, kinder, to keep the inequality outside, walling it off and keeping our hands clean. Perhaps American egalitarianism, like a dress too precious to be worn, is a value too dear to expose to the real world. As the essayist Richard Rodriguez, himself the son of Mexican immigrants, has written, “Americans prefer unknowing.”

Do you prefer unknowing? Read it.

At VoxEu Esther Duflo outlines a new study on assimilation of Muslim immigrants in Britain by LSE’s Alan Manning and Sanchari Roy:

Manning and Roy rightly conclude that, on the basis of available evidence, Huntington’s pessimism – that Muslim immigrants will prove “indigestible” to non-Muslim societies, seems unjustified indeed. If anything, the constant reminders of “native” Europeans that there is “us” and “them”, the new, scary, Muslim immigrants and their offspring may do substantially more to create a rift than any religious or cultural feeling these immigrants have brought with them and transferred to their children.

So chill.

Steve Burton helpfully lays out his version of the exchange between Daniel Larison and me. Isolated posts tackling complex issues are sure to lack the context of a broader set of assumption laid out across many different posts, no one reads every blog post, and anyway many of my posts are dashed off, unclear, and confused, so Steve bears no blame for mischaracterizing my argument:

In other words, maximizing the minimum (i.e., making the least well-off better off) should be our overriding moral goal. So Americans should welcome unlimited immigration from Mexico, Zimbabwe, etc., even if it makes most Americans worse off, because it makes the immigrants from Mexico, Zimbabwe, etc., better off — and Mexicans, Zimbabweans, etc. are less well-off than Americans. So, from a Rawlsian (or Rawlsish) point of view, their interests count for more than ours do.

I think this actually misunderstands the point of the difference principle in Rawls — or at least the way I like to interpret him. It is in everyone’s interest to live in a peaceful society of mutual advantage. A system of institutions requires that everyone living within it have reason to support it, and to comply with the terms of association it lays down, if it is to be well-ordered and stable. If the basic structure of institutions leaves some people much worse off than they could be under a feasible alternative, then they have no reason to accept its terms, or to comply with them. Now, I reject a strict maximin rule. I think it would be ridiculous to expect the wealthiest to make huge sacrifices to make the least well-off only marginally better off. The “strains of commitment” matter, and asking too much of the top can be as unjust and destabilizing as asking too much of the bottom. But, generally, asking if a system leave the least well-off better-off than the alternatives is simply a focused way of asking whether the system benefits everyone, and not only those with the most power to ensure that it benefits them.

In the post Steve references, I’m trying to draw attention to the fact that the basic structure of the global system of border enforcement and legal exclusion from labor market participation badly disadvantages millions and possibly billions. These people have no reason to accept or comply with the terms of the current dispensation, and in fact, many millions do not, crossing borders and working illegally. This non-compliance is a sign of the system’s injustice. Many millions of people are harmed by the status quo, which is why those people, who weigh their interests as heavily as we weigh ours, revolt against it by sneaking across borders and taking jobs that are offered to them. If we reject Thrasymachus, and seek justice and not merely advantage, we will take the harm we cause into account when considering how our domestic policies contribute to the justice of the overall global scheme.

I think our duties of beneficence are quite weak, unlike the utilitarian. We do not have great positive duties to others simply in virtue of their existence. We come to have strong positive duties due to our agreements and our special relationships. I deny that shared citizenship is a special relationship that confers especially strong positive duties. But however strong our duties to compatriots may be, they do not outweigh our negative duty not to harm or to respect basic rights. I may give my children everything, and others’ children nothing. But I may not kill anyone, no matter how much it helps my family. My argument is not so much that the policies of most wealthy countries represent a greedy parochialism, but that they actively harm and violate fundamental rights to physical movement and voluntary association. The essentially cooperative nature of justice is highlighted by the fact that we can ameliorate some of the harmful effects of the present system by implementing reforms policies that would make natives of rich countries better off on average. Though, of course, our strict duty not to actively harm others does not end when it begins to cut into our privilege.

There much more, naturally. For now, I hope that leaves things a little clearer.