End World Apartheid

Free People Movement is the Way to Global Prosperity (Online Opinion, Australia, 7/16/2007) (hat tip: Brothers Judd)

Free people movement, not increases in aid, is the only realistic way to put an end to the dispiriting reality of 30,000 people dying daily of hunger in developing countries.

The recent G8 summit in Germany has been heavily criticised by anti-poverty crusaders Bob Geldof and Bono for not keeping the promises made at the G8 Gleneagles summit in 2005, which was supposed to make poverty history...

Rather than trying to enhance net global flourishing by sending resources to impoverished nations, we should directly pursue this aim by freeing up the flow of people so that they can travel to where the goods are located.

It is only once this occurs that we will effectively deal with the dispiriting irony of thousands of Africans dying daily from hunger and poverty, while much of the first world gorges itself to ill-health. The on-going starvation crisis has nothing to do with a food shortage. The problem is simply one of distribution. There is enough grain alone produced on earth to make every person fat.

The best way to ameliorate third world poverty is by massively increasing migration to the west. Left to their own devices many people would gravitate to life sustaining resources, leading to a rough equilibrium between the world’s resources and its population.

That’s not to suggest that Africa would empty overnight into the western world. Some of its citizens are too destitute to hobble to a more plentiful border. Some will not want to come, in any event. But huge numbers will follow the yellow brick road to prosperity in the west.

There is one fundamental obstacle to western nations relaxing border controls: racism. Discrimination on the basis of race is the lynchpin of the whole of western migration policy...

Nationhood and the practice of excluding others from our shores is so embedded in our psyche that many readers will find it jarring to contemplate that this practice is morally objectionable. No doubt our forefathers would also have found disconcerting the suggestion that precluding aboriginals from voting and taking their children from them was founded on a racist ideology.

While most of the western world has made remarkable strides in recent decades by eliminating most forms of discrimination and ensuring that most people enjoy something approaching adequate (if not equal) access to the resources of the nation, there is a fundamental failing with this enlightenment: the benefits are limited to people within the borders of the nation.

For most of human history there have been few migration limits. Now we are moving to an age of “anti-migration”. In 1976 only about 7 per cent of UN members had restrictive immigration policies. This rose to 40 per cent in the early part of the 21st century. Advanced (western) economies are at the forefront of this regrettable trend.

We must accept that restrictive immigration policies are racist unless there is a morally relevant basis for tightly limiting the number of people we permit to join our privileged society.

A relevant reason cannot be a person’s birth place. This is merely a happy or unhappy accident. Much of what is important to a person’s flourishing should not turn on so little - morality requires that to the maximum extent possible luck is taken out of the benefits and burdens equation...

Is this likely to happen in the foreseeable future? No. Patriotism and materialism are such powerful forces that no amount of moral persuasion is likely to quickly reverse existing western migration policies. We must at least start seriously debating the notion of the free movement of people, otherwise we are forever forced to confront the racist within us.

Racism is part of the problem but not the whole thing.  There's still quite a bit of racism in Europe I think, but I don't think I've met more than one or two openly racist (white) people in America.  (You do hear it sometimes from blacks.)  There may be some vestigial, half-conscious racism shaping people's attitudes on immigration, but I don't think it's a major factor.  Nor does "patriotism" have anything to do with it: patriotism is love of country, and if one loves something, one wants as many people as possible to have a chance to appreciate it.  Of course, in America's case patriotism and immigration restrictions are directly contradictory since the Statue of Liberty and our nation's tradition as a haven for the oppressed and a land of opportunity is a central part of our patriotic legend; the Pat Buchanans and Know-Nothings are Americans turn their backs on the patriotic legend and are Americans only in a legal, not a moral sense.  "Materialism" also can't account for it, because most Americans benefit from complementarities with immigrants, and even those who don't could simply lobby for adjustments in the tax-and-transfer system that would assure they would be.

So why the resistance to immigration.  I think the biggest reason is socialism: we've become habituated to thinking the state should provide a social safety net, and since any social safety net in America would be higher than the standard of living of most people in this world, we have to exclude people to make a social safety net feasible.  Related to this is the fear of crime.  In fact, immigrants don't commit much crime, much less than natives.  But we fear that if we opened the borders, the income disparities would open so wide that it would spur a rise in crime.  And that might be true.

My sister just returned from her honeymoon in South Africa.  South Africa is an interesting country because about 15 years ago it was a microcosm of the world.  Like the world, it was about 15% white, the rest African and Asian.  Like the world, the whites were segregated from the non-whites by law (of course the West does have some blacks and Asians, but it segregates the vast majority of them).  The whites lived in prosperity, the blacks in poverty, their opportunities severely restricted by laws that were supposed to shut them up in "sovereign" native states, against their will.

South African apartheid has been abolished; world apartheid remains.  But the end of South African apartheid has caused a surge in crime.  So it's a legitimate concern.

Comments

[Thomas]

The legal status of an immigrant seems to me to be of the utmost importance to opponents of immigration. It's a sad fact that there are so many people who blindly believe in following laws without ever thinking about whether or not those laws are just and should even exist. Whenever I get into an argument with someone about immigration, they're always quick to point out that they're only against illegal immigration and not immigration in general. Even when I enumerate all the ways in which the current immigration laws are unjust, they still stubbornly see it as a black-and-white issue of breaking the law. I think your points about socialism and crime also fit into the anti-immigration mindset somewhere, but that is not the crux of the anti-immigration position, as far as I can tell.

[Taylor]

The big problem with communicating with anti-"illegal" immigration zealots is that they never separate the ethics from the legality.

Murder is unethical because it is taking a human life, not because it is illegal.

Speeding is unethical (theoretically) because you endanger another driver on the road, not because it is illegal.

Rape is unethical because you deny another person the ability to forego sexual activity, not because it is illegal.

Illegal immigration is unethical because you don't pay taxes for the federal/state/city protection of goods and services, not because it is illegal.

If illegal immigrants are willing to pay off their debt to society in back taxes, they should be able to stay. If not, their wages should be garnished until they do.

Likewise, any and all individuals who are willing to come to work and pay taxes should be able to come.

[Val Larsen]

The South Africa Apartheid = World Apartheid analogy is illuminating and rhetorically effective, though the point about socialism being the main motive for the apartheid
undercuts the analogy since South Africa wasn't notable for
its socialism.

[Val Larsen]

Most of the illegals I know (and I know a lot of them in our area) do pay taxes. They work with false Social Security numbers. These people almost never work off the books when they can work on them (with false documents) because pay and benefits are much better when one is employed by larger companies that could never get away with paying employees off the books. New arrivals without false documents are forced to work off the books in restaurants or small businesses and are sometimes cheated with no recourse by their employers. The employers get most of the untaxed benefit--by paying wages that are below legal minimums.

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