A critical look at: Open Borders by Bryan Caplan
In this book Caplan basically argues pro fully open borders all over the world so that anyone anywhere can freely immigrate to any country at any time for any reason (note that he has made some restrictions to this in podcast interviews). I will argue that some of the logical arguments in this book are vague or confusing at times.
I gave the book a 3,5/5 rating, because I don’t feel all arguments are tight or unbiased enough. Please buy the book if you like to know more about his ideas. It doesn’t have a plot or clear structure so it can be a slow read at times but it’s very much worth it if you like thinking. There are a ton of new ideas here:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/42867903
Caplan is one of those idealistic people who values freedom in all areas of the government, a libertarian. He’s one of the biggest intellectual minds today but does have some biases mainly caused by his narrow libertarian ideology where the strive for nearly unlimited freedom at times causes such people to overlook regional culture and human instincts.
By the way. I got inspired to write a review of the book by reading Jonatan Pallesen’s review. He’s a real Dane and knows more about immigration stats than I do:
“Open Borders: The Case Against” by Jonatan Pallesen https://link.medium.com/tV86pIENQab
Chapter 1: Global Apartheid
I picked out some of the main claims in this book I felt were a bit too bareboned. There are probably still twice as many such claims left but overall I feel like I make my main critique clear in this blog-post. You may want to scroll down and read the comic book images before reading my critical review text above them.
Caplan says that the improvement of living standards is very fast today (page 5) but “poor countries won’t be rich for many decades” so therefore we must act now by opening all borders. But according to his first claim just waiting will solve many of the economic problems he talks about. So you have to consider a very extreme open borders solution vs. waiting and seeing how much things improve under current safe road conservative conditions. It’s not clear what the economic limit is for either one of these solutions. So far capitalism has made everyone much richer so either solution will make us even richer still to some degree at some pace.
His moral argument about workers rights is spot on. It is immoral to stop people from moving to where they want to move and it’s also very immoral for the government to tell companies who they can’t or can’t hire. It would of course also be immoral to demand that people in richer countries pay for the welfare of unskilled immigrants too. And then there is the question of how immoral the various factors are in comparison to each other. Personally I avoid moral discussions 99% of the time as they kinda lead nowhere unless you are debating a top 0,1% mind.
Notice that Caplan doesn’t say that open borders is good because it’s economically advantageous. He says open borders are a very great moral right and then they are also economically advantageous. Which is why even hypothetically disproving every single of his economic claims won’t change his mind or the point of the book.
Here is his main argument in the book. There should be no country borders anywhere on Earth. So this is what he tries to argue for in the book? Well, not really as such. It is kinda his main claim but he largely focuses on USA and American stats so he doesn’t really seem too worried about the rest of the world except for when he needs outside the country examples to support his open borders claims, like for example EU. But I’ll get into that later.
Chapter 2: Trillion-dollar Bills on the Sidewalk
Another great point by Caplan. When workers produce more stuff then basically everyone’s living standards improve to sky high levels. And free trade and worker migration is part of this magic trick that would make kings in the Middle Ages jealous. Of course his personal wish is open borders for anyone. So this includes people who never plan to take a job but rather want to take advantage of a rich society with a very big welfare system.
Also, notice that he says “almost everyone ends up better off.” There are still some low-skilled workers in the Western countries whose wages will fall because of the low-skill immigrant competitors. We are talking about an overall economic improvement on a country scale, but some low-skilled native groups may still have a personal need to vote against immigration even in an utopian scenario where all the newcomers will be able to find a job.
And this is Caplan’s main logical argument pro open borders. If workers could move freely across borders, to work where they are needed at any given time, then the world GDP could improve about 100%. This is a gain produced by workers such as engineers and programmers moving to a country where their skills are more useful and produce a greater surplus. But this issue could largely be solved without open borders but by universal worker or company rights, right? Is there a need for fully open borders? What would the economic gain be if only workers could move freely across borders?
It’s another good point by Caplan. But this argument in itself is overlooking all the welfare programs. You need to earn a certain amount to produce a surplus for the state over a lifetime as there will be long periods of time where you don’t pay taxes or just consume more than you give back. The average of the group is also dragged down by unemployed workers in your group bracket.
The average foreigner’s wage may go from $5,000 to $20,000 a year as they emigrate to a Western country. But the $5,000 may have produced a surplus over a lifetime for Pakistan while the $20,000 may be too little for the Western country to cover your Western welfare over a lifetime. With millions of these new low-skill workers the Western country may go bankrupt. Of course these new immigrants are personally better off. But it could be 10 times cheaper for the Western country to just pay them to stay in their home country while improving the conditions of their whole village at once. If an immigrant produces a minus of $200k over a lifetime in the West then what if instead of taking in 10k such immigrants you could offer their poor home area of 200k people $2bn over the next 40 years? Or you could offer each one of the 10k people $190k to stay in their country of birth.
Right now in Denmark, where I live, this is a big issue because the population needs to pick between things like current eldercare levels and then still allowing low IQ immigration that will take up the care kroners. You can’t have both. Both the immigrant numbers and elder numbers just grow and grow to unimaginable heights. And it’s easier for voters to just ignore the problem for now even though we have very clear and negative prognoses for the future. Something needs to be done, but no solution is popular across party lines so it’s easier so just adjust stuff as you go along or just let the next government deal with the issue.
Caplan argues that natural bottlenecks will make sure there is no swarm immigration. This is again more true for the outskirts USA than countries where the poor immigrant group may be just kilometers away. Europe is already experiencing a huge immigration flow from Africa and the Middle East even though the borders are somewhat guarded. It’s not that hard or expensive to throw away your passport and travel from Syria to Sweden. You just pay for a truck ride and then hide in the back of the truck with 20 other people. Other immigrants use small cheap inflatable boats. In other places you just walk across the border. A Spanish city in Africa, Melilla, has huge border fences and constant border surveillance keeping it from being more overflown with African immigrants. Look at the photo in this article. And some of these African groups are not 90 IQ Mexican’s willing to work the fields and other menial tasks. They may be people unable to read who have never seen a toilet. They may be unable to find jobs in an area with a ton more worker rights and wage rules than in the libertarian USA where you can just show up without papers and experience and find work on a heavily subsidized farm. This is a swamping that will in fact happen right away if Melilla opens their borders. You don’t need to pay for an expensive trip to USA on a huge fancy ship or anything as complicated as that. The anti-open borders claim that Caplan disputes is: “An influx of migrants more massive than any country can handle.” And the supporting claim is: there will in fact be some countries who cannot handle the immigration flow. The world is huge. There are various groups in various places. Caplan focusing on USA as an example is his lazy and easy way out…
Caplan is right. Today 5,8 million Puerto Ricans live in mainland USA. 3 million live in Puerto Rico. His claim here is that immigrants won’t just arrive right away, but they will in fact arrive. Now, the claim he disputes here is: “An influx of migrants more massive than any country can handle.” There is in fact no initial swamping in this specific case where immigrants had to cross the ocean to get to paradise. But even so they did end up emigrating at some point and maybe the swamping was just delayed — look at the decade 50–60 in his chart.
Also, yet again he is looking at a group with lower job skills than the average American, but higher job skills/IQ than Africans. He should ideally look at the worst cases and dispute them instead of using feel-good examples.
The counter-argument of brain drain is also a good one. The high IQ people with useful job skills will move for much better paid job offers in richer countries. Countries like Nigeria and India have a huge brain drain problem. The well-respected founding father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, has talked about genetic IQ differences between ethnic groups and how Singapore was created and made into a successful and extremely rich country based on meritocracy instead of affirmative action ideals. Singapore is a melding pot of various ethnic groups and cultures but is very safe and rich. The high IQ Hong-Kong people produce a great surplus while the lower IQ Malaysians are made happy with… well, affirmative action and specific cultural advantages as in all other countries, but largely they try to avoid it. Anyhow, his brain drain example is a telling one. According to him just a few high-skilled people made Singapore possible. Remove 200 of the best government people from a top-down run city of over 5 million people and the society will break.
Caplan’s answer to this problem is extremely fascinating but in my mind not fully encompassing. He is applying his utilitarian mindset by talking about the common good for the world overall. While the brain drain issue is actually about the lower IQ population staying behind while the high productivity people emigrate. The zombie economy towns are a negative overall. They do need to be cut down to increase the overall productivity of the country and lower avoidable subsidies. But then what about a historical regional culture losing mainly high IQ people? The brain drained country will remain where it is but just become more poor. For them conditions get worse regionally even though the overall conditions of the world improve as their high IQ people now work in more productive jobs. I assume Caplan’s claim that immigrants send a lot of money home (page 48) will solve some of their economic issues. And he is of course correct in that it is good for the economy overall that people move away from low production areas. But while I can see that ghost towns should be abandoned I can’t see how Nepal can be abandoned or how their culture can be let go.
Chapter 3: The Native’s Burden
High-skill immigrants are a plus! Very good point. But then free immigration is a different issue entirely. Many libertarians support open borders but not if the big welfare state remains intact as in that specific case the numbers don’t add up as often. If immigrants have to work to get by then largely the hard worker immigrants will arrive. This happened in USA 100 years ago. Today things are not quite the same as the welfare state is much bigger and attracts all kinds of people.
I also want to point out how the book depicts Milton Friedman. Caplan in this book easily “defeats” anyone who dares to argue against him. This strawman argument version of Friedman is later presented as a bumbling fool who is so clearly proven wrong that he is ashamed of himself (page 77). And the Caplan character has a knack for simplifying any counter-claim he doesn’t like into a simple strawman argument he can easily dispense off. There is always some loosely fitting evidence he can use so support his claims and win any argument against some of the greatest intellectuals we know of.
Here Caplan tackles the issue of great welfare expenses I mentioned before. Immigrants are often young adults so their education is already paid for, if they have one. Age wise they are ready to work. But what if your calculations show that some batches of immigrants are a net negative over a lifetime even if they are a net positive while still young? …
Of course the current immigrant batch will get old! But if you ALWAYS have a new batch of immigrants that is even bigger coming in then you constantly expand the foundation of the pyramid. So you always have an expanding stream of immigrant workers to make sure your welfare programs don’t produce a minus overall no matter if every single generation by itself will produce a minus over a lifetime. Please invest.
I don’t even need to say anything here. I hope you see my issue with this endless immigration logic that I put my sarcastic spin on.
Here Caplan tackles the issue of Net Present Value per immigrant over a lifetime. As you can see if you select for high-skilled workers you’ll get a surplus. While people who didn’t finish high school are a huge net negative for USA, and USA is not even a country with as big a safety net as many other Western countries. This low-skill group is the group most countries try to keep out and the main group of immigrants that will finally get into USA if the borders are opened.
Right now immigration is a net positive according to his numbers. But the numbers will change a lot if the borders are opened.
If immigrants overall have a negative Net Present Value then it’s a pyramid scheme that will go bust the very moment the free flow of new immigrants subsides for any reason no matter when that is. I assume progressives will tell Caplan that capitalism has the sustainability of nature as a barrier and that a constantly expanding free flow of people is not endless. But let me take the open border side here, at some point technology will solve many of our issues and capitalism will produce robots so cheap that most expensive menial government workers can be replaced and the state can supply the same level services for lower cost. Caplan’s capitalistic dream of an endlessly expanding stream doesn’t need to last forever to work out at the end.
Chapter 4: Crimes Against Culture
Here Caplan tackles the European immigrant issue! Yes! This group has a high crime rate so I wonder how Caplan will… oh, he looks at their terrorism rates. And as we all know your chance of dying in a terrorist attack in a Western country is very slim (page 88). He could have looked at ethnic groups and their rates of terrorist attacks and not death rates, that would be a proper counter-argument. But even if we just look at deaths alone it’s still a needless gamble some voters may not want to take. If you live in a high population area your risk increases. Then the victims themselves are worse off no matter how unique they are. And the worry is very much real too no matter if it’s rational or not. The fear is still a negative factor in our lives day to day. At the end of the day you may also just see the dilemma as eating from a bowl of millions of skittles and 3 poison pills or eating from another bowl of millions of skittles but no poison pills. If you look at the choice like that the logical option is quite different. No terrorists are better than few terrorists. And if the poison skittles instead are MENA immigrant criminal percentages then suddenly the high sugar content in skittles is not the main health risk. He is very much correct that we shouldn’t worry about current terrorist levels in the West overall. But you can still worry about specific groups with high terrorist rates and their new neighbors. And either way rational claims won’t convince mass media to stop printing their scary best-seller stories that are scaring the population into irrational blindness. If terrorists didn’t scare the population they’ll largely stop their attacks in the West. So it’s a chicken and egg dilemma. You can’t stop one and not the other. In any scenario where you exclude only one you are only doing so on paper.
This point becomes extremely relevant if you add in the cost of being safe from terrorist attacks. One truck killing tens of people in a Christmas market in Germany may not be “horrible” number wise. But then as Germany invests in protective road barriers and other safety measures as the shopping declines it gets costly. These things can easily cost millions or even billions of euros. And voters are for greater protection to some degree so it’s not just politicians being over protective. How many lives could those billions of euros save in a German hospital or Middle Eastern hospital run by Germany? How many skittles can you buy for a million Euros?
His crime stats may be true for non-open borders USA. They are not true for other Western countries, and as Caplan has stated on page 71, open borders won’t deselect some of the low-skill immigrant groups anymore. This means a higher percentage of criminals being able to move to USA. The current stats look good because USA takes in immigrants from England, Germany and France with low crime rates. While some Latinos stopped at the border and sent back have high crime rates. This very thing probably makes immigrant crime rates much lower. So this and other factors such as USA not neighboring Muslim or African countries, and having lower welfare access for immigrants makes USA overall is a positive immigration example compared to the rest of the West no matter how you crunch the numbers.
Notice how Caplan went from mentioning European immigration when talking about overall rare terrorist attacks deaths, but then as he started talking about crime rates he picks stats that show the most positive picture possible. It looks a bit like cherry picking data. He constantly does it in the book. I just looked past other such examples as the data does seem valid so I can’t disprove any small concrete claim by itself. But this enthusiastic illustration of reality is not unlike those constantly negative news stories Caplan complains about (page 95). Caplan’s stories instead have an overly positive spin. It’s irritating, but not in a big way as I do understand that the goal of the book is to convince the reader not to present both sides with equal enthusiasm. If this book also made a case for the close borders argument it would be a 5/5 book.
Caplan’s culture arguments unfortunately don’t take up much of the book. This page is basically his main point just hand waving the overall culture claims away. More varied culture = better. He sees ideal culture as a free market of ideas. Competition will make the best ideas survive and the final common culture will be a mix of all the best ideas. I think conservative people will find his lack of deeper culture thinking on the open border issue worrying. Just assuming that basically any and all culture is fine and that it will sort itself out is not really a calming claim for people who have a strong local culture they want to protect. Some cultures live off their history and culture so losing it is losing most of their profit and meaning in life. Others have traditions they want to remain intact that newcomers may want to abolish. At any rate your unique culture may change or disappear and you may not feel fine about that.
In a utopia we do in fact hold hands and sing Kumbaya. The real world is not that simple. There are constant group conflicts and fights. Caplan is lucky as he lives in a country surrounded by water and therefore largely safe from warfare harm. This is not how many more primitive African or Middle Eastern cultures thrive. And these cultural fights are exported to other countries where the fights continue via gangs.
There is also yet again the thing about expenses. A culture may be founded on having a surplus of wealth the way the Roman Empire was. In Denmark adult students get paid to study but this wage, called SU, has been declining in recent years because of a vulnerable economy. If it went away Denmark would become a bit less Danish. It’s always a choice between keeping such things and having open borders. Even if the immigrants produced a surplus in Denmark, which MENA immigrants won’t ever come close to, the average wage and IQ will go down and higher education and public art may not be something the public wants to pay for anymore. The Danish culture is already experiencing great changes and even left-wing people don’t like all of them as basically all Danes have a culture in common as something that gives them meaning.
Open borders supporters may fully disagree with the claim that culture is important or that any regional culture is valuable. But one ought to fully explore this point in a pro open borders book no matter what the conclusion in the book will be.
Chapter 5: The Golden Goose on Trial
I think this is such a strong counter-argument that Caplan doesn’t give it quite enough weight. For conservatives, Republicans, right-wingers, or even libertarians for that matter immigrants are a group that thinks opposite of them. They vote for the opposite political parties. They vote for a much bigger welfare state, higher taxes, pro hate speech laws, more immigration, identity politics, affirmative action, less border protection, and pro women and minority quotas in universities and companies. They will elect political candidates right-wingers don’t like. For right-wingers immigrants are in fact “worse voters than natives”.
I think this argument alone would convince quite a few right-wingers and conservatives to not be pro open borders as they have some cultural traditions and freedoms they want to protect.
Maybe this is the solution to Caplan’s proposed pyramid scheme? There is one standpoint where immigrants greatly stand out from natives, they want more immigration. As long as you take in more and more immigrants and they keep reproducing at a higher rate than Western natives then “immigration” will remain constantly free flowing that way. Once you start it it will continue and grow.
This counter-argument is great. On the next page, page 119, Caplan argues that this problem is not that serious as these people vote less. We do need to consider that the open border argument will make the USA immigration look more like the EU immigration and this is how it looks like overall. No matter if they vote less than the native population they still have a voice in the society overall via groups, gangs, Mosques, and identity politics left-wing groups. Anti-free speech measures don’t need to come from politicians alone. They are also implemented via cultural forces. For example, today many people in Denmark are afraid of criticizing Islam as there are a lot of Muslims in Denmark now. This is not because of any radical Muslim politicians. It’s caused by single violent repercussions towards cultural transgressors. The fear keeps the rest in line. A guy who drew Muhammad with a bomb in his turban for Jyllands-Posten in 2005 now lives with constant police surveillance in my city with a panic room in his house he in 2010 used to escape from a mad axe slinging Muslim. This is not to say that not being able to criticize the Quran is a huge problem in itself right now. But this is just a minor illustration of the larger issue of diminishing free speech. Immigrants are more anti-free speech overall in most aspects of it. Muslims in Denmark are extremely anti-free speech on many issues. And free speech is about being able to say what you feel and think. It’s not just about the state punishing you for saying something they find irritating.
The next 2 pages is where the book truly shines as Caplan tackles the hardest counter-argument he can find. It also reveals that Caplan is not just your average lazy academic debater. He doesn’t just try to convince by emotional appeal but actually looks into difficult counter-claims. Yet even so he does skim past most of the critical local culture and IQ claims. The book can’t really mention all counter-arguments, but it does seem weird that he doesn’t tackle even a single specific local culture or ethnic group counter-claim.
All the world moving to USA will make USA’s per-capita GDP take a nosedive as the IQ will decline. In this example it falls from $57,600 per person to $29,400 per person. Of course this anti-open borders claim is completely “defeated” by the per capita world GPD overall raising in such a case. The super smart green alien mentally breaks down as he is defeated by the knight in shining armor. The sheep watching (page 130) all surely clap at Caplan.
Moving populations to another country and assuming they will just assimilate and take on most of the culture is maybe misguided. Some will try to persuade people to follow Allah‘s commands. Maybe even create an army and call it ISIS. Others will create cities with equally low IQ people completely ruining parts of the country that will take billions to clean up and repair later on. It’s not really relevant to the math, but still factors one should consider.
And wouldn’t all this be solved by only allowing immigrants with a certain IQ level? This would largely solve the economy, personal health, crime rate, low grades and most other problems. Actually, it would solve basically all of his mentioned problems and he doesn’t even make a case for this argument.
Caplan is not done though. He has more arguments for his point. It’s true that IQ does not change because of culture or any environmental differences internally in the first world. IQ is stable over time and is largely defined by genes. But it’s also true that open borders would allow some extremely poor third world immigrant children to move to the Western world where they won’t starve which will allow their brains to fully develop. For example, African Americans have a very high IQ compared to native Africans. This is because extremely negative environmental conditions do actually have an effect on IQ. But taking in such single immigrants to raise their potential IQ may not be the best use of resources. The cheaper option of sending food aid to third world countries so that mass starvation is not a factor will also lead to IQ increases.
The third world does experience such Flynn effect and at some point the Flynn effect ceiling will be reached if the high IQ West subsidizes the third world to a large enough degree and keep subsidizing these countries forever if they don’t start producing their own food. I’m not claiming such subsidies are a good thing overall. They are in fact often a huge waste of money. But it’s just a potential solution to this specific problem as we can’t just take in 1bn Africans. Some African nations do in fact have potential to raise their IQ from 70 to their true potential of maybe 85 at which stage heritability will become up to about 70% of the intelligence makeup and the specific environmental influence on IQ will disappear. At that point they will have enough human capital to slowly become more self-sustainable.
This is mending words on my part. But Caplan does mislead the reader a bit here. In fact there was a worry about the horde of low-skilled communist immigrants:
The sluggish work ethic in East Germany is causing West German businesses to rethink how much they will benefit from what has been viewed as the main reunification payoff for West Germany: armies of young, well-trained and presumably willing East German workers.
Of course some East Germans had a rebuttal to these accusations of laziness by appealing to their common ethnic group. The laziness in their case is just culture:
‘’So don’t talk to me about being lazy. Yes, we’ve had 40 years of socialism and that hurt. But we are Germans, and by nature we are diligent, hard-working people. That’s at our core and I believe it will see us through what lies ahead.’’
This is also the case today with Korea where some South Koreans feel that North Korea cannot become part of their country as the economic numbers don’t add up. But who knows what will happen?
And these are of course examples of how ingroup thinking works. A line of thinking Caplan has been against looking deeper into in other arguments too. This is about expanding your wonderful nation borders not removing them! China for example is against open national borders in both directions, but they dream about expanding their borders. If, or when, they invade Muslim countries they have a functional solution to expel Islam from inside borders as they have shown with the Uighurs. Furthermore they have shown that they have zero scrupples about controlling reproduction rates either as they have shown with their whole population and now the Uighurs.
This presents another counter-claim. There is a difference between USA making Puerto Rico part of the country and therefore later unwillingly being forced to allow immigration from there and then a hypothetical case of just allowing unlimited immigration from Haiti while it remains a separate country. But of course these counter-claims don’t dispute many of Caplan’s logical claims. I just feel that his appeal to emotions here is misplaced. The internal high IQ EU immigration is not the same as accepting a free flow of poor African immigrants. For Europeans it’s not at all the same thing. EU is basically like the United States but with greater local control and not fully open borders.
Chapter 6: Keyhole Solutions
In this chapter Caplan reveals that there may be small keyhole solutions for some of the issues natives have with unlimited immigration. Caplan just wants open borders as that to him is a greater moral right than any other option, but he does admit that open borders with some focused solutions may be what we can agree on politically.
Here Caplan tackles the issue I mentioned before. Low-skilled native workers will lose jobs as immigrants will compete for these jobs. While academics and programmers shouldn’t fear losing their jobs to a group that can barely multiple. In Caplan’s suggested solution I don’t see how the state will repay the groups that suffer the consequences. Either it’s lower taxes for all natives which won’t be enough to repay for lost jobs in a specific sector. Or it will be personal compensations that will be easy to take advantage of.
Another keyhole solution tackles the issue of a welfare state that can’t remain on the current level or even pay the promised pensions due to expensive immigration. This solution is also one you may accept. But there is a good reason it’s not implemented everywhere right now. In Denmark we don’t tell illegal immigrants that they can’t see a doctor or that their kids cannot attend public schools. How many Western countries could do that? So I do feel his “solution” as impossible and will by many be considered more inhumane than closed borders.
But there is also another thing to consider in his moral argument. For him not allowing all foreigners to come into your country is a great moral injustice that’s more evil than any other alternative. If the foreigners get to Scandinavia and get free healthcare without the keyhole solution then shouldn’t they also have a moral right to Scandinavian healthcare and free university education in their home country? Why should people who are healthy and rich enough to travel get this extra automatic advantage in life while their neighbors who are harder working but sick or injured and unable to take the trip won’t get this advantage? I actually don’t even understand his full moral argument in a current big nanny-state system. A sleazy lazy guy stealing $5000 and paying a truck driver to take him to Sweden before his village finds out would be better off than similar villagers not doing so.
The first drawing itself actually illustrates my counter-example well. How can you not allow a group free vaccines when they arrive to your country? Who will that harm? In Denmark we have a big region, Vestegnen, where about 50% of new Covid-19 cases were among Pakistanis. An interesting activity for Americans: Try to find Pakistan on a world map then find Denmark.
This argument yet again doesn’t take birth rates into account. Muslims have much higher birth rates than Westerners who sometimes don’t even have a high enough total fertility rate to replace their current native population. Muslims moving to the West will spread them all around the world to maybe lessen their dominance on some Middle Eastern regions for a short while, but they will take over Western towns, cities and states at some point. And there is little reason to suspect that extra emigration from the Middle East will cause their populations overall to decline long-term as they have a very high total fertility rate in some Muslim areas. Actually, their high reproduction rates are often a bigger issue than the new immigration. If immigrants just arrived to work or for free welfare and didn’t have kids I don’t think many would have big issues with this group. But when the local population has a sub-replacement fertility rate and if the immigrant Muslims have a total fertility rate of 3 that’s an issue that you cannot just ignore. Islam is the fastest growing religion in Europe even with closed borders.
This all yet again touches on his IQ argument. This will lower the IQ of the Western nations year after year even if you at some point decide to stop ALL immigration to “fix” the problem. Then the problem becomes reproduction and even stopping the immigration flow won’t really stop the issue of a growing number of foreigners. We are actually already past that point in many European countries.
Chapter 7 — All Roads Lead to Open Borders
To me this comparison is not fully convincing because there are plenty of ways to be anti-socialist without hating every area of your public state. I don’t think the antithesis to socialism is anarchist thinking as many socialist ideals are themselves anarchistic. For libertarians socialism and supporting some areas of the state may seem like similar lines of thinking, but in reality plenty of Western on paper socialists actually hate; country borders, the Western military, the police, Western culture, any religion besides socialism, and nuclear family structures. And the people who love these things often hate socialism more than any other group. Socialism requires extreme societal restructuring so that liberals and conservatives can lose power and socialists themselves can gain full control of the state. This initial revolutionary stage contains quite a few anarchistic ideas and at this stage anarchists are essential for communists to gain full top-down control.
For Caplan the issue is that it’s immoral and therefore kinda “socialistic” when the state tells people how to act. But many anti-immigration ideas are founded on anti-socialist thinking lines as immigrants and especially their children tend to vote far-left to a high degree. Protecting your national borders is actually an anti-socialist idea… on paper. Socialists need a break down of Western norms and values so that their own values can have an unstructured fertile soil to grow in. This requires borders to break down and an inflow of multicultural immigration. Then workers rights are supposed to be the cultural binding glue in the fight against companies and the upper class. Races and regional cultures are an antithesis to socialism in many aspects. But of course in real life socialism becomes extremely nationalistic and closes borders when they gain control of the state as that’s the only way to keep hold of power once the population gets angry about worsening conditions.
This page is to me completely misleading even though I cannot speak one the behalf of conservatives and they may disagree with me.
“Conservatives should oppose immigration restrictions in the name of…”
Freedom? Maybe overall worldwide, but possibly not for their own nation as the immigrants vote for a bigger state and more top-down restrictions regionally. The freedom in their own religion and culture will also be diminished.
Free markets? Yes, obviously, this is the whole point of a libertarian economist writing this book. Open borders are in fact good for the world economy overall as they give capitalism more leeway to make a profit. Caplan would still believe in open borders even if the numbers didn’t add up. But as an economist he wouldn’t dare to write a full book in support of such a moral argument without some numbers supporting his moral claim.
Small government? Because the border guards depicted in the image will disappear? But… how do immigrants vote? Pro smaller or bigger government? In my Denmark examples it goes both ways though. 89% of Muslims vote for left-wing parties, even when center-right parties are an option, but they have very high unemployment and crime rates and are very costly so that way they actually force the state to cut spending on state sectors unrelated to them such as higher education and elder care. So I guess Caplan is right in some weird way in this example.
The work ethic? Yes, Chinese immigrants have higher IQ than Whites and work smarter which may look like them working “harder”. But most countries already take in most of the high IQ people that want to immigrate. Actually, countries fight for these people. Even very anti-immigration countries are desperate for high IQ workers and work hard to get them to come and settle down there.
Meritocracy? Some may argue that allowing the best workers to come into the country because they work hard is meritocracy. But most likely Caplan is right here in that meritocracy will strive much better with open borders as long as the country doesn’t break down. Fewer top-down restrictions will create a more fair playing ground with winners getting their due while making people around them that much better off too.
This is his best pro open borders argument in the book — repeated. But yet again this is an argument made without looking at the expenditures of the welfare state. Getting free goods is a good thing. Getting free unskilled people may be an economic disaster even if the group overall only produces a small surplus for a short while until they retire.
Open borders is not like getting a cheap car, but rather millions of cheap cars being forcefully sold to the population. The cost of getting rid of the cars when they break down is higher than their usefulness over a lifetime. And you can’t even choose to buy into it or not.
Caplan: “Whatever your philosophy, whatever your party, open borders is the right policy.” I’ll let the reader think about this one. The chapter does make a long case for it, but I don’t even feel like I need to mention my counter-arguments again.
Caplan also again talks about the world economy improving being a reason for regional voters needing to open their borders. Those can be vastly different things. Italy alone opening their borders to all of the world tomorrow will not work out for them as it would cause a huge swamping of low IQ African immigrants. Maybe if all countries allow unlimited immigration at the same time Italy won’t be overrun by Africans? I don’t see this as a proper solution either because Italy is very close to Africa and a logical first destination. A large part of immigrants want to reach the richer Scandinavia, but many will just stay in the first Western country they arrive at. And even if all of the rest of the world opened their borders Italy would still profit from keeping their borders closed at least to MENA countries. I don’t see what reason Italy would have for taking in millions of immigrants who often have 50% unemployment and crime rates. Even morally they can just spend more money on foreign aid and make up for it like that.
Free travel inside EU is not the same as huge swarms of non-workers arriving. We know that only allowing the best and most productive groups is an extremely profitable solution. But what about open borders? Why are countries picking and choosing immigrants if basically any new citizen is a plus? Wouldn’t there be a European country that would figure out that unlimited immigration is a huge plus and outcompete all other countries in 2020? Do we have similar cases from the business world where all 100% of companies in a sector refuse to do something extremely profitable? We tend to do what is profitable for ourselves yet basically no country no matter how greedy or pro immigration has open borders. Weird…
What if there were open borders between Western countries only then?
Chapter 8: Fantastic Journeys… … and How to Finish Them
This is an example of a good semi-open borders policy between first world countries that improves trade but doesn’t cause mass a migration of unemployed people or criminals. Exactly what Caplan dreams about would happen is ALL borders everywhere were open. But the EU as a pro open border example can only be used if all countries have similar high IQ and no immigration group will ruin your national economy. And EU is not open borders, but rather semi-open borders. EU also doesn’t take in all members who apply. Turkey and Ukraine wanted to join but both countries will likely never be allowed into EU. So the free-trade zone is between countries selected for this project based on meritocracy. No one is calling up Somalia and asking them to join anytime soon — well, progressives do.
I wanted to point out some weird drawings yet again. Of course libertarians and right-wingers often bicker. But the drawings in the book are drawn by a progressive left-winger and maybe Caplan didn’t decide how everything should look like? At any rate such images reveal how the book depicts right-wingers and conservatives wanting to protect their regional culture. Their ideology is instead seen as smashing their regional culture as supposedly foreigners traveling across borders built the Italian and French monuments (page 201). In reality the images are at best misleading and at worst directly wrong. Ms Le Pen expelled her father, the former leader, from her party when he said offensive remarks and she surely wants to protect historical monuments.
Low-skilled immigrants to USA producing a surplus “as long as they arrive as young adults” is not a great case pro open borders but is a good case for not accepting older immigrants. If you could open borders to all immigrants expect for people over 60 that would actually be more profitable for your country than just having fully open borders. Of course it’s just another lock the state puts on our behavior and it feels demeaning and terrible when states sling their sabers this way. But that doesn’t mean it’s illogical or completely unfair. Caplan needs to decide what matters more in this specific example, capitalistic profit or freedom to act as one pleases.
Caplan makes quite a few extra claims about open borders in other places. In James Miller’s podcast he even brings up some good counter-points. China could in principle solve their elderly population problem by putting millions of elders on planes and send them to the West.
Just societal critics alone would make up millions but they could also do it with a large group of low IQ people. Or just all cancer patients whose medicine may cost €100k a year. That will surely overwhelm the Western system making China able to sling their saber in the South China Sea taking over any territory they may wish while the West is busy solving their new regional issues.
In the podcast episode he also says that open borders doesn’t apply to criminals which is interesting too and would solve quite a few problems with the idea. Would Western countries also be able to send back those 30–50% of some immigrant groups who break the law? It should have been a keyhole idea in the book.
