Best of Immigration News and More

Election week – November 4, 2024.

John Papola, the filmmaker behind the brilliant Keynes-Hayek rap videos, released Battle of the Borders – a rap battle and wrestling match between a muscley George Borjas and a dexterous Bryan Caplan. Garett Jones appears, but Bryan still holds his own against his two adversaries. Oh, Stephen Miller and I are biased commentators. As a side note, my character overstates the terrorism risk and the labor demand curve should have been more elastic. You don’t see many YouTube videos with high production values like this anymore, as there's a bias toward authenticity (re: low quality), so it's nice to see producers who care about production quality.

The content is high quality as well. The writers did their homework and understood the scholarly issues and disagreements, but there was a subtle bias. Many of the specific numbers and lines come from Cato's research, like “build your wall around the welfare state,” relative immigrant welfare use, illegal immigrant crime, and more. Most of the specific facts support the pro-immigration side and they counter more vague concerns from the anti-immigrationists, with some exceptions. The producers give both sides a fair shake, but reality is biased in my favor.

Speaking of the facts we produce at Cato, I testified last September before the House Committee on Homeland Security, Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Law Enforcement, and Intelligence for the hearing “Beyond the Border: Terrorism and Homeland Security Consequences of Illegal Immigration.” My written testimony is here. I agreed with Marjorie Taylor Greene on the importance of wringing data out of DHS (15:14), but my exchange with Congressman Morgan Luttrell (R-TX) shows a real chasm in perspective. Congressman Luttrell emphasized the need to prevent even one death in a terrorist attack (22:40). From our exchange:

Me: I’m not saying do nothing, all I’m saying is don’t do everything. You have lots of different security threats, you have to allocate scarce resources to save the greatest number of lives.

Congressman Luttrell: If we don’t do everything, that one thing we don’t do is going to get us killed.

Me: I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you can’t do everything. Do you want to spend 100 percent of US GDP on counterterrorism?

I should have said, "We shouldn't ban guns or have extended covid lockdowns even if they saved one life. Those policies are too expensive.” The counter would probably have been, "Those policies didn't save lives." I'd have said, "Now you're speaking my language, we need to evaluate the costs and benefits of these policies and more efficiently allocate scarce resources. Time to do that with counterterrorism spending." All in all, this is the best exchange I've publicly had with a policymaker about the risk of illegal immigrant terrorism.

Pew’s polling shows that Trump supporters think immigrants make our lives worse, while the relatively pro-immigration Harris side thinks immigrants don’t affect the lives of Americans. More evidence that nativists are more energized on this issue.

Harris and Trump supporters think legal immigrants are better than illegal immigrants on economic, fiscal, science, culture, and crime issues. Pew shows that they produce excellent polls by asking meaningful questions, even if we can't know how real the results are.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump administration is planning to restrict legal immigration again. The piece goes over familiar territory like the public charge rule, the so-called Muslim ban, and restricting refugee admissions, but it’s still too optimistic and focused on past actions while ignoring how many options the president now has to close the borders. The president essentially has unlimited unilateral control over legal immigrant admissions, so he or she could restrict them in any way by uttering some magic words. The next president could shut down the legal immigration system for those abroad and restrict it for those already here who are seeking to adjust their status. Except for seasonal farm workers on the H-2A visa, every visa category is conceivably in the cross hairs under a Trump administration. He did it before. After all, the president has a lot more control over the legal system than he does over the illegal black market, and he's not going to sit back idly if there's any border chaos. The only stable long-term pro-immigration political equilibrium is a really boring immigration system without chaos, which requires liberalization.

Here's a subtle, nuanced, and accurate Wall Street Journal opinion piece on immigration. You don’t see many in this style anymore. An excerpt:

The Biden administration’s decision to use legal parole to accept 30,000 migrants a month from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua is a common-sense and humane approach to managing migration. Applicants file with Homeland Security, not the State Department, for lawful U.S. entry from their home countries and if approved can live in the U.S. for two years. They must have a U.S. sponsor who can show adequate assets and income to support them. Contrary to nativist claims, those accepted pay their own airfare. Ukrainians also qualify for parole.

The New York Times reports that China is turning its massive state population control apparatus from the goal of reducing births to trying to encourage them. It’s much cheaper for state policy to reduce birthrates than it is to raise them, as Catherine Pakaluk notes. The Chinese government started by harassing women, boosting natalist state propaganda, trying to influence the culture, and annoyingly inserting itself more into the personal family decisions of Chinese women. Several regions of China already subsidize childbirth, but more and bigger subsidies are coming. Subsidies and other pro-fertility policies affect fertility, but they're expensive, and the effects are modest where they exist – perhaps the Chinese government there will scale them in the hope that the elasticities of the supply and demand for children are constant. The Chinese government will become more desperate as their birthrate drops further, so I fear it’s just a matter of time before they embrace a version of Romania’s fertility policy from the Cold War.

In late 1966, Romanian communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu issued Decree 770 to restrict legal access to contraception and outlaw abortion with few exceptions. Combined with other policies like small subsidies for parents and, eventually, invasive state monitoring of pregnancies, the intent was to increase birth rates. The immediate effect was tremendous and lasted until the end of the regime, with less success over time. Below is a synthetic control model of Real Romanian TFR compared to Synthetic Romania constructed from several variables that predict fertility in Eastern European and communist countries. Decree 770 doubled TFR in Romania relative to those other countries, which eventually fell but was higher throughout the entire communist period.

Chinese people are richer and freer than they were many decades ago (although less free than more recently), so they may not tolerate such an invasive policy nowadays. On the other hand, the Chinese communist government is quite brutal and extreme. If they see falling TFR as an existential threat and the aging population there begins to agree, there’s a good chance they’ll embrace some portions of Decree 770 or at least go somewhat in that direction.

Tom Homan, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Trump policy advisor, says that he wants to deport families together on 60 Minutes. That includes deporting the 4.4 million American citizen children who live in households with other illegal immigrants. Removing this many illegal immigrants is bad enough, but there's another lesson here: Don't believe nationalists when they say they care about the utility of American citizens.

Ryan Girdusky was booted off CNN for making a Twitter joke on television. This is a further reminder that Twitter jokes and commentary don't translate off platform. I'm no fan of Ryan, and the panel did treat him unfairly. I spend too much time on Twitter, so maybe I'm more sympathetic because of my allocation of time.

The New Yorker published an informative piece on why some crimes committed by illegal immigrants earn media attention and others don't. It depends on the victims. Illegal immigrants kill few Americans and even fewer native-born American women – but they get most of the attention as victims largely because it’s so uncommon and the victims are so sympathetic. None of this diminishes the tragedy of these crimes, and the media decisions make sense, but it’s also rare to see a reporter dive so thoroughly into why his own profession is so fascinated by such an infrequent type of crime when the victims are of a very specific type. Rolling Stone also has an emotional piece about what happens when a family suffers from a crime that gains national political prominence.

The best argument against liberalized immigration is that immigrants and their descendants could undermine American institutions and kill the goose that lays the golden eggs of economic growth and liberty. The results from a random control trial experiment find that migrants in the Person Gulf became more classically liberal, cosmopolitan, and tolerant after migrating.

Immigration has been shown to drive ethnocentrism and anti-globalization attitudes in native-born populations. Yet understanding how global integration shapes intercultural relations also necessitates clear evidence on how migration affects the attitudes of migrants. We argue that migration can foster tolerance, cosmopolitan identities, and support for international cooperation among migrants who experience sustained contact with other cultural groups. We evaluate this theory with the first randomized controlled trial resulting in overseas migration, which connected individuals in India with job opportunities in the Persian Gulf region's hospitality sector. Two years after the program began, individuals in the treatment group were significantly more accepting of ethnic, cultural, and national out-groups. Migration also bolstered support for international cooperation and cultivated cosmopolitan identities. Qualitative and quantitative evidence links these changes to intercultural contact overseas. By focusing on migrants rather than native-born individuals, our study illustrates how cross-border mobility can facilitate rather than undermine global integration.

Destination countries change immigrants far more than the immigrants change destination countries.