Tag: open borders

The Immigration Tariff in 500 Words

Immigration liberalization is one of the policies this blog has described as highest impact. It could have massive benefits to both immigrants and native born citizens in the United States and other developed countries. Immigration bypasses the need to solve the extremely difficult problem of “building good institutions” which is a mercurial and sparsely solved goal in development. By moving people directly to societies where good institutions already exist, we don’t have to make them. OpenBorders.info also suggests free movement of people could double world GDP, with smaller migration seeing proportionally smaller but still substantial growth.

The United States is uniquely positioned to absorb immigration. It is the largest developed country by both population and GDP by significant margins (developed country referring to either OECD member or country with HDI > 0.8). By nominal GDP the US economy remains the largest in the world, and by PPP it is second only to China. Unlike China, the US is the only large country with a large foreign born population, and indeed the US has the largest foreign born population in the world at over 46 million. The US also has a long history of immigration contributing to its excellent position as an immigration destination.

Given this blogs inclination towards the benefits of markets, self determination, and individual rights, our default position should be in support of more liberalized immigration. Current immigration policy is geared towards family connections despite much of the potential benefits of immigration stemming from economics. The U.S. also takes in less immigrants as a percentage of its population than other developed nations, despite the previously mentioned advantages the U.S. has in absorbing immigration.

Originating from economist Gary Becker, an immigration tariff would allow prospective immigrants to pay a tax or fee to enter the country and work. We have a somewhat similar although highly limited current system with H-1B visas which are sponsored by companies for employees. Expanding this and accounting for age and level of education, Congress could create a tariff schedule for various immigrants based on potential costs and tax revenue from these immigrants. They could also simply sell off additional green cards after the current legal green card approaches were filled in the current year. The Cato paper linked goes into more detail.

The benefits of any such system would be to guarantee that immigrants with the skills and ability to work productively in the United States would be able to do so, with additional monetary compensation provided up front to the U.S. to avoid any potential risk of those immigrants becoming a net cost on society. This would see benefits in terms of additional labor, entrepreneurship, and economic growth.

The issue with this approach is that immigration is a highly divisive political issue. Republicans would be unlikely to embrace this proposal due to their base’s opposition to apparently all immigration. Democrats may be more interested, but may balk at the notion of people “buying” their way to the front of the line.

Further Reading

For more on why immigration is generally a positive policy:

Efficient Advocacy

It’s incredible how simple and yet revolutionary the principles are behind effective altruism as well as the ideas behind GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project; if you want to help people, don’t just donate to a charity that is looking to cure a rare disease, donate in a way that can do the maximum amount of “good” per dollar.  That often means donating to a problem that affects many people, that has known, measurable, positive solutions, and that has lots of room for additional resources to combat the problem.   If you don’t know about those organizations, you should definitely check them out.

Of course, there is an obvious elephant in the room when it comes to effective altruism: politics is complex, unscientific, and unpopular. In fact, GiveWell largely sidesteps the political sphere, ignoring a big swath of human activity which has tremendous impacts on society.  Of course, they have good reason to do this; it allows them to focus on doing good things without harming anyone’s tribal identities or alienating their donor base. Moreover, it’s hard to get good unbiased data on what political policies would actually provide benefits; if there was, politics wouldn’t be so divisive.

However, I don’t have a donor base, and I have slightly different feelings on which policies would be most effective than the average American or even the average effective altruist.  I wanted to see what would happen if we could assume away some of the unknowns about political policy.  Let’s assume that the postlibertarian philosophy this blog espouses is correct: markets are pretty good at allocating resources efficiently, government policy can help address some economic areas where markets might not work (inequality, externalities), giving the state power is generally a bad thing and must be justified, and individuals should have robust protections from their government. We aren’t assuming away the current political landscape of the US, we’re just assuming we’re right.

So what would a libertarian trying to maximize efficiency in advocacy do? Do you try and emulate the Koch brothers and create or fund political organizations that change policy outcomes? Do you focus on viable candidates? How much do you accept the political process as given? Do you focus on political reforms (proportional representation), education (IHS, Economics of Library and Liberty), or do you try to work on making your own rules (crypto, seasteading, space exploration)? Let’s leave those hard questions for another time, and focus on perhaps the most mainstream approach to politics: how should you prioritize the importance of various political issues? People usually have specific issues they care about that determine which candidate they’d like to back, and the Open Philanthropy Project even has a U.S. policies page.   But which issues are actually the most important? Continue reading Efficient Advocacy