Immigration, Free Trade, and the Fruits of Civilization
A comment on free trade and liberal immigration policies.
Obviously not everyone in the U.S. is happy.[citation needed] We are far from what you might call a good society. (I mean, not so far, seeing as how Canada is right across the border.) But we are doing relatively well. More than most places in the world, our government and our society have created the preconditions for a good life. A lot of this is path-dependent and contingent, and we don't really know why it works here, much less how to make it work elsewhere. Or if we do, we lack the... transmission mechanism to cultivate these institutions around the world. We try: Jimmy Carter goes to young democracies and certifies the fairness of their elections. We provide reduced-cost HIV drugs. We try to induce countries to develop the institutions that we believe deserve the credit for our own success: democracy, free markets, rule of law, pluralism, strong civic institutions, free press, freedom of conscience. But these things don't always take root, and it's not as though the U.S. is always so pure. Quite often we undermine the institutions to which we pay so much lip service.
Anyway my point is that we have had very limited success "exporting" our contented way of life. But we are quite successful at "importing" people who seem to thrive here. Again, I don't want to exaggerate how happy immigrants are. They are probably not much happier than the rest of us, if at all. But many of them are quite pleased to be here, which indicates that they enjoy some of the fruits of the civilization that we have stumbled into. There are millions, maybe billions, of people who are desperate to live in a place where human life isn't cheap, where there are decent jobs, where murders are punished. Since we can't (or at least haven't) accomplished that there, there is a compelling case to bring them here.
So that's our humanitarian situation. It seems that by far our most effective means of sharing the benefits of this model we have inherited is to let people in. Trade is also reasonably effective, if it is conducted within a basically decent framework. (Our demand for narcotics has ravaged Mexico, but our demand for, say, washing machines and avocados has probably helped a lot of Mexicans escape poverty.)
All of this is why cosmopolitan leftists are relatively unsympathetic to the native-born blue-collar workers who have borne the brunt of our liberal policies. From a political and distributional perspective, we are essentially telling our low-skill workers: "I hear you, but it would be racist to use restrictive policies to help you enjoy the fruits of our prosperity. Would you like maybe some food stamps? Also, did you know our elite colleges are mostly need-blind?" And maybe this is morally right, in some sense, but it is an awfully bitter pill to swallow while the elites in the U.S. benefit tremendously from almost every aspect of our globalized, (classical) liberal policies.
Of course one answer is social democracy, but this is not politically realistic or sufficient. (Or maybe a better way to put it is: what is politically feasible is insufficient, what is sufficient is politically unfeasible.) Anyway a thorough-going social democracy really can't afford to let that many people in, unless it is willing to discriminate against the recently-arrived.
Another answer is to "compensate" the "losers" from our policies. But how? And why are they deserving of more help than people who were going to be impoverished either way? Should we prop up $70,000/year jobs in Michigan (which are being destroyed by trade/immigration) but allow people in rural Kentucky to live in squalor? The whole thing bogs down and is basically guaranteed to be unworkable and unfair.
So we live in a world of extreme global inequality, with billions of people living under terrible conditions, and no obvious way of helping them that doesn't involve extremely distasteful distributional consequences for our own citizens. This isn't meant to be a counsel of despair, but these are the lines my mind is following as we (maybe) confront the political consequences of our mostly well-intentioned choices.
Obviously not everyone in the U.S. is happy.[citation needed] We are far from what you might call a good society. (I mean, not so far, seeing as how Canada is right across the border.) But we are doing relatively well. More than most places in the world, our government and our society have created the preconditions for a good life. A lot of this is path-dependent and contingent, and we don't really know why it works here, much less how to make it work elsewhere. Or if we do, we lack the... transmission mechanism to cultivate these institutions around the world. We try: Jimmy Carter goes to young democracies and certifies the fairness of their elections. We provide reduced-cost HIV drugs. We try to induce countries to develop the institutions that we believe deserve the credit for our own success: democracy, free markets, rule of law, pluralism, strong civic institutions, free press, freedom of conscience. But these things don't always take root, and it's not as though the U.S. is always so pure. Quite often we undermine the institutions to which we pay so much lip service.
Anyway my point is that we have had very limited success "exporting" our contented way of life. But we are quite successful at "importing" people who seem to thrive here. Again, I don't want to exaggerate how happy immigrants are. They are probably not much happier than the rest of us, if at all. But many of them are quite pleased to be here, which indicates that they enjoy some of the fruits of the civilization that we have stumbled into. There are millions, maybe billions, of people who are desperate to live in a place where human life isn't cheap, where there are decent jobs, where murders are punished. Since we can't (or at least haven't) accomplished that there, there is a compelling case to bring them here.
So that's our humanitarian situation. It seems that by far our most effective means of sharing the benefits of this model we have inherited is to let people in. Trade is also reasonably effective, if it is conducted within a basically decent framework. (Our demand for narcotics has ravaged Mexico, but our demand for, say, washing machines and avocados has probably helped a lot of Mexicans escape poverty.)
All of this is why cosmopolitan leftists are relatively unsympathetic to the native-born blue-collar workers who have borne the brunt of our liberal policies. From a political and distributional perspective, we are essentially telling our low-skill workers: "I hear you, but it would be racist to use restrictive policies to help you enjoy the fruits of our prosperity. Would you like maybe some food stamps? Also, did you know our elite colleges are mostly need-blind?" And maybe this is morally right, in some sense, but it is an awfully bitter pill to swallow while the elites in the U.S. benefit tremendously from almost every aspect of our globalized, (classical) liberal policies.
Of course one answer is social democracy, but this is not politically realistic or sufficient. (Or maybe a better way to put it is: what is politically feasible is insufficient, what is sufficient is politically unfeasible.) Anyway a thorough-going social democracy really can't afford to let that many people in, unless it is willing to discriminate against the recently-arrived.
Another answer is to "compensate" the "losers" from our policies. But how? And why are they deserving of more help than people who were going to be impoverished either way? Should we prop up $70,000/year jobs in Michigan (which are being destroyed by trade/immigration) but allow people in rural Kentucky to live in squalor? The whole thing bogs down and is basically guaranteed to be unworkable and unfair.
So we live in a world of extreme global inequality, with billions of people living under terrible conditions, and no obvious way of helping them that doesn't involve extremely distasteful distributional consequences for our own citizens. This isn't meant to be a counsel of despair, but these are the lines my mind is following as we (maybe) confront the political consequences of our mostly well-intentioned choices.
posted by James | 10:21 AM
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