Talking More to Mark Krikorian, by Bryan Caplan

Last week the Center for Immigration Studies' Mark Krikorian answered my post-debate questions.  Here is my delayed response.  Mark's in blockquotes, I'm not.  My original questions for Mark are in italics.

[Caplan's] argument was that
treating foreigners in any way
differently from Americans was invidious discrimination, morally identical to
"mandatory discrimination against blacks, women, or Jews." He seemed to confine
his comments to employment, but if not allowing a foreigner to take a job in
the United States is morally impermissible, then isn't denying him the vote
also impermissible? If welfare programs exist, how can he be barred merely
because he came here last week?

I didn't say that treating foreigners in any way differently from Americans is morally identical to mandatory discrimination against blacks, women, or Jews.  I said that mandatory discrimination against foreigners is morally identical to mandatory discrimination against blacks, women, or Jews.  I am appealing to the common moral intuition that the moral obligation to help others is subject to numerous caveats, but the moral obligation to leave others alone is subject to few caveats.

And
also I wish more people on his side of the debate would emulate him -- but they
would not be more influential
thereby. Caplan's honesty about his rejection of the American people's right to
limit access to their country is, in fact, what most of the high-immigration
Right and Left believe, but are not forthcoming enough to express publicly.

In the short-run, Mark's probably right.  I'd be more persuasive to undecided Americans if I spent my time arguing for extra H-1Bs.  In the long-run, though, principled rejection of the status quo often works.  "Liberalize Jim Crow" failed; "End Jim Crow" triumphed.  And even in the short-run, radicals like me make moderate reformers more palatable by moving the goalposts. 

[Caplan] ends his post on a sour
note:

Though anti-immigrant, I
doubt Mark actively hates them. What I sense, rather, is strong yet
polite distaste for foreigners. He's like a husband who makes
nice with his mother-in-law, yet groans whenever he finds out she's
visiting. The key difference: Mark is hypersensitive. The husband
feels fine once his mother-in-law is out of his house, but Mark's distaste for
foreigners is so intense that he wants them out of his entire country.

This is one of those "when
did you stop beating your mother-in-law?" questions, so I'm not going to
protest my lack of "distaste" for foreigners. But it does highlight the
inability of open-borders folks to be able to appreciate how those who disagree
with them think.

Opposition to
immigration is not an exotic position I've only heard about in books.  I
have spent my life around normal Americans with conventional views
about immigration.  When they feel free to speak their minds, they routinely voice
distaste for foreigners.  They voice distaste for foreigners' failure to
speak English, for their accents, for their distinctive clothing, for
their religions, for their customs.  They voice distaste for foreigners'
failures and successes. 

I don't know what drives Mark.  But I know that what drives normal Americans to oppose immigration is distaste for foreigners.  Normal Americans have told me so many times.

Ironically, on the immigration issue Caplan fails the very "ideological Turing
test" that he himself devised.

Questions for Mark: Does he doubt that white Southerners' distaste for blacks drove their support for Jim Crow?  If Jim Crow proponents denied that such distaste motivated them, would Mark believe them?

Turning now to Mark's responses to my questions.

How much would open
borders have to raise living standards before you'd reconsider? Doubling
GDP clearly doesn't impress you. What about tripling? A ten-fold
increase?

How much less would gravity
have to be to enable me to win a marathon? Hypotheticals like this are
meaningless. And immigration policy isn't purely an economic matter in any
case.

Actually, hypotheticals are one of the most enlightening intellectual tools human beings have.  The point of this particular hypothetical is to measure the intensity of Mark's opposition to immigration.  Of course immigration isn't "purely an economic matter," but you'd still expect there to be some price where Mark would relent. 

Suppose the U.S. had a
lot more patriotic solidarity. In what specific ways would it be better to
live here? 

Less animosity between
races, ethnic groups, classes leads to greater social and political harmony.

"Greater social and political harmony" seems awfully vague.  And if Mark named specific countries that exemplify social and political harmony, many Americans would be unenthusiastic ("Wouldn't it be great if we were as harmonious as Canada?") or repulsed ("If only we could be as harmonious as Japan"). 

Aren't there any
practical ways you could unilaterally adopt to realize their benefits? Are
you using them?

I don't know what this
means. I'm not being cute; I just really don't understand the question.

I mean things like: Moving to a low-immigration state or gated community, or joining a selective church or club.  Instead of complaining about immigrants, why not abandon politics and build a Bubble?

Do you really think
low-immigration parts of the U.S. are nicer places to live? If so, why
aren't more natives going there? Why don't you?

Some are, some aren't, but
it misses the point. Both natives and immigrants will go where the jobs are.

Jobs are one factor in locational decisions, but hardly the only factor.  As Collier explains in his work on diaspora dynamics, immigrants have a strong tendency to move to places - even intrinsically unappealing places - full of co-nationals.  That's why so many Arabs live in Michigan.  Contrary to Mark, then, my question is relevant, and his lack of a confident answer is telling. 

Doesn't patriotic
solidarity often lead people to unify around bad ideas? Think about the
Vietnam War or Iraq War II. If so, why are you so confident that we need
more patriotic solidarity rather than less?

All good things can have
bad consequences. Love for your spouse may lead you to steal. Pride in your
children's accomplishments may lead you to be an insufferable jerk around other
people.

Right, so why are you so eager to increase patriotic solidarity above its current level?  You don't seem to have any empirics showing that the marginal benefit of additional solidarity exceeds the marginal cost.  Yet in our debate, you named national solidarity as a primary reason for tighter immigration restrictions.

By the way, Mark, what specific countries do you think have excessive patriotic solidarity, and do you advise these countries to increase immigration to solve their troubles?

I'm sincerely
puzzled. How exactly is discriminating against blacks worse than
discriminating against foreigners?

Black Americans are our
fellow members of our national community and treating them differently because
of their race or ethnicity is to admit to different levels of membership,
something which is contrary to our ideal of a republic of equal citizens.

So suppose white Americans had long ago officially declared that blacks aren't members of our "national community."  Would Jim Crow have been OK then?

Foreigners are not members of our national community and thus are legitimately
treated differently. They have human
rights, but not civil rights.
And those human rights do not include moving into my house without my
permission.

No one's proposing that immigrants move into your house without your permission.  But under the status quo, immigrants can't move into my house without the American government's permission.  That's the heart of my case, and you still don't seem to appreciate it.  At risk of failing my Ideological Turing Test, you seem to think that my house is actually the government's house.

Suppose you were
debating a white nationalist who said, "I agree completely with Mark, except I
value racial solidarity rather than patriotic solidarity." What would you
say to change his mind? Would you consider him evil if he didn't?

Many countries have an
ethno-racial basis for their nationhood, like Japan or Swaziland or Denmark.
They are, literally, extended biological families. American nationhood is more
like a family that grows through adoption, and thus is not limited to people of
a particular ethnic background.

The problem with white
nationalists, black nationalists, and Chicano nationalists, as well as with the
cosmopolitan who sees himself as a citizen of the world, is that they are all post-Americans. They may be evil as
people or not, but what matters politically is that they reject American
nationality. They are free, of course, to think what they want. But if they,
like their predecessors 150 years ago, act on their conception of post-American
nationality, then they should be punished by the duly constituted authorities.

Mark's answer, in short, seems to be: If white nationalism were our established national tradition, there would be nothing wrong with it.  But we have a different established nation tradition, and it would be wrong to change it.  Even the last clause, though, seems iffy for Mark.  Suppose Americans amended the Constitution to strip non-whites of their citizenship.  Would that be wrong? 

Suppose you can either
save one American or x foreigners. How big does x have to be before
you save the foreigners?

Another meaningless
hypothetical.

Hardly.  The hypothetical is designed to measure the intensity of Mark's preference for American strangers over foreign strangers.  I fear he doesn't want to answer because (a) a big x makes him seem bigoted but (b) a small answer is inconsistent with his policy views.

If you could save either your child or x number of strangers, how
big does the x have to be before you save the strangers instead of your child?

For my child, x>all the strangers in the world.  I would not however murder one stranger to save my child's life.  See, hypotheticals are revealing.

In what sense is
letting an American employer hire a foreigner is an act of charity?

I'm not sure I get the
question. It's not so much that admitting foreigners to the United States is an
act of charity, though it might be. Rather, our basic disagreement is over
whether the American people, through their elected representatives have the right to limit access to the U.S. by
foreigners. I answer "yes," you answer "no".

The underlying premise is that people have a right to limit their charity to strangers, but don't have a right to stop strangers from trading with each other.  Legalities aside, immigration laws look like the latter, not the former.

Suppose the U.S.
decided to increase patriotic solidarity by refusing to admit Americans'
foreign spouses: "Americans should marry other Americans." Would that be
wrong?

No.
I would certainly be against such a policy, because the family unit is the
basic component of society, the first of the "little platoons," and I
think we should delegate to each other the right to bring in a spouse from
abroad. But if Congress passed such a measure (which will never happen, since
spouses of citizens were admitted without numerical limitation even after the
1921/24 acts, as they are now), and it were signed by the president (ditto), it
would be legitimate, so long as it applied prospectively.

Interesting.  I was expecting Mark to say something like, "Such a law would be morally wrong, but we would still be morally bound to obey it."

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