The Free Thinker

Here's a somewhat more serious blog post about immigration (from 2007). The title is "Does Christianity Demand Open Borders?" (Answer: yes, the 20th-century social-engineering experiment of segregating humanity by place of birth, and still more so the separation of families that is necessary to enforce it, violates the letter and spirit of the Bible and of Christian ethics.) "Vanishing American" writes:

These days, in all the debate and rancor over mass immigration and ethnic division, Christians are getting battered from both sides: I have heard many people who are opposing multiculturalism and the breakdown of nations condemn Christianity as the cause of the West's self-immolation. And then the Open Borders fanatics and the multicultists have pummeled Christians with our Bible, telling us that God wants us to open wide our gates and welcome the immigrant, illegal or legal. Michael Gerson's article in the Washington Post, (H/T Lawrence Auster at VFR), excoriates Christians who are 'nativists' for their 'national chauvinism' and 'rage.'

Rhetoric watch: "fanatics" "multicultists" "self-immolation." To call people like me and Gerson who don't want to use violence against peaceful immigrants is plausible (if it is plausible) only because our views are different from the American majority, as opponents of slavery were. The connection between open borders and multiculturalism (whatever that means) is quite spurious.

Those of us who are Christians, with a traditional perspective sometimes find it difficult to give Biblical answers to the liberals like Gerson, who are brazenly Bible-thumping in support of their political agenda. I think they believe they can shame us out of our 'nativism,' and sadly, maybe their tactics succeed with many Christians who tend to go along with social trends. And believing in a soppy egalitarianism and universalism is popular these days, especially for many ostensibly conservative Christians who have fallen in with the 'emergent church' movement.

"Soppy." Hmm. As for "egalitarianism and universalism," well, there can be no question that Christianity is a universalizing religion. Egalitarian-- well, I won't go there, since Christianity is certainly egalitarian in some ways (Jesus died for all) while open borders isn't all that egalitarian ("equality before the law" is the most that it says). Much confusion here. However, here's something more like an argument.

But here is one Christian perspective on the Bible and immigration. Rev. Childress talks about the religious activists' support for illegal immigrants based on their interpretation of the world 'sojourner'. For example, there are Biblical passages which God enjoins the people of Israel to welcome the sojourner:

The Bible is full of stories of sojourners, strangers without homes, whom God called people to protect. The Israelites "God's chosen people" were themselves sojourners for 40 years after the exodus from Egypt as they entered the promised land. God did not let the Israelites forget that they had been without a homeland for such a long time; the ethic of welcoming the sojourner was woven into the very fabric of the Israelite confederacy. It was more than an ethic, it was a command of God. 'Do not mistreat or oppress a stranger; you know how it feels to be a stranger, because you were sojourners in the land of Egypt' (Exodus 23:9)." p. 1

As these excerpts point out, the Bible in a great many places uses "sojourner" to refer to those who are in a location which is not their original homeland. However, it is clear that while a sojourner shares some characteristics with an immigrant, the two are in very different pursuits.

Using the term sojourner as a kind of proof-text for political statements about immigration clouds the issue because many people of faith find it hard to "argue against the Bible." Paul W. Lewis, an author on Christian engagement of social issues and a former missionary, admits "I have been greatly bothered by the way some people have used the term 'sojourner' to back up their own idea about immigrants. It was a totally different situation back then. We could also use the word 'traveler' today."

Childress says that the class of people called 'sojourners' were mainly temporary guests or travelers, in some cases refugees who were fleeing some troubles in their homelands. These sojourners who would be more like today's 'refugees' were not expected to stay permanently.

Nope, sorry, that's not going to work. Exodus 23:9 says "Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt." The Israelites were in Egypt for 400 years. So the logic of the divine command clearly includes the possibility of very long stays. Also, it was possible for immigrants to join the Jewish people, as is explained in the Book of Ruth. And that's in the Old Testament, where the universality of God's plan was far less explicit and where more concession seems to be made to the violent ways of man in the world.

In fact, even in our country, refugees were at one time in our history considered only temporary guests until they could be repatriated to their homelands. It's odd how even in my lifetime the attitude has changed; it used to be a given that most people, given a choice, would prefer the land of their birth. It was just assumed that a people would be happiest and most suited to their homelands, among others of their own people. At what point did we discard that most basic human assumption? Don't we all feel, deep down, that home is the preferred place to be? We have so many proverbs and folk-sayings which indicate our attachment to 'home.'

What is he talking about? A refugee, of course, is almost by definition someone who wanted to stay home and presumably might like to return. But they might not be able to or might change their minds. And of course, millions came to America who never wanted to return. "Don't we all feel, deep down, that home is the preferred place to be?" No. Some of do maybe. Some don't. America was created by people who didn't. That is far from being a "basic human assumption," but that's not to say that it's not a perfectly good and admirable and desirable situation when someone does love their home and prefer it to anyone else. Why on earth would we impose that choice on the whole human race by violence? Also, there is a lot of internal mobility in America, which is a vast country, so that internal migration often involves longer-distance travel and provides access to as much opportunity as international migration would for others and elsewhere in the world.

Be it ever so humble... and 'East or West, home is best.' And in the past it was implicit that home meant not just the house we live in, which may not be a permanent address, but our homeland, and for many of us our home state, our hometown, where our attachments are. What happened to that regard we once had for the natural ties which bind us to our people and our homeland? Now, everybody, regardless of political leanings, seems to accept this liberal notion that people are innately nomadic, searching for the cushiest and easiest conditions. Home and kin are now regarded as trivial; what matters is, apparently, A Better Life, which it seems can only be found in our country. How did we come to this? We Americans are in the unfortunate position of living in a country which is seen as the world's cornucopia, the dispenser of goodies and Better Lives for the whole world. There is no longer any need or desire, apparently, for anybody in the less prosperous countries to better themselves there, or to improve their homeland; far better to get an airline ticket to America, or pay a human smuggler a bundle of money to bring them to the Promised Land. This situation is not what the Bible is talking about in those passages about 'sojourners.'

So many confusions here. People in less prosperous countries will very often not have the opportunity to better themselves there-- just as many bright Americans don't have the opportunity to pursue the careers they want in the small towns where they might have grown up. Americans are certainly not "unfortunate" that our country is such a cornucopia of opportunities; indeed the ingratitude of that remark is a bit shocking. People may not be seeking the "cushiest and easiest conditions": they often come here to work very hard and found companies, make scientific discoveries, acquire knowledge, practice their religion, reunite with their relatives, marry, or satisfy the basic needs of their families. It is the nativists for whom "home and kin are trivial": they want to expel by force people whose children live here, or who, though born abroad, have lived here almost all their lives and know no other home. VA goes on:

Our country is THE destination of choice for most of the world's covetous have-nots. And the last time I looked, the Bible forbids us to covet our neighbor's goods. Poor people don't get a pass on that; coveting is not justified by being less fortunate, and stealing and defrauding are also sins. Yet we excuse the coveting, stealing, and bearing false witness and defrauding of the illegals because they are poor. This is not Biblical; we don't have two sets of commandments, one for the wealthier and one for the poorer people. Wrong is wrong, and there is no respect of persons. And before somebody brings up the issue of charity, Americans can and do give a great deal of money not only by foreign aid, but via private charitable groups. We do our share for all the poor countries, and it is not our fault that their leaders often steal the aid or misuse it. It is not justice to demand that we take in all the world's peoples who are less well off than we are.

The Bible's commandment about covetousness is neither here nor there. America is no one's private property. Particular parts of America are the private property of particular individuals. No one is excusing illegal immigrants who steal, that is, who steal property; to call being on US soil without US government permission "stealing" is nativist newspeak. It may not be our fault if leaders of poor countries steal foreign aid, but it is our fault if we try to force people to stay in countries where corrupt governments or other conditions have created situations of desperate poverty. It is not justice to force out a person who has come here asking nothing but the chance to earn a living by contracts mutually agreed with private citizens and is willing to pay taxes if given any kind of legal status.

However, the open-borders zealots, religious and secular, always seem to imply, as I've said here before on this blog, that America has some kind of monopoly on 'democracy' and 'freedom' and 'a better life', and that it is our responsibility to spend our substance and our young people's blood to make other people free, regardless of their capability for it. And it is our obligation, so they imply, to essentially hand our country over to the masses of immigrants because we alone have the keys to the 'better life' and the 'American dream'. And it would be greedy and selfish to want to keep all freedom and prosperity to ourselves.

No, America doesn't have a monopoly on 'democracy' and 'freedom' and 'a better life'-- why is that relevant? There are many other places where immigrants many poor and oppressive countries could do better than at home. They should let them in, and so should we. Advocates of the liberation of Iraq, or Libya, are more or less calling on to "spend our substance and our young people's blood" (though of course, only the blood of soldiers who signed up for what is known to be a risky profession) "to make other people free," but advocates of open borders are demanding nothing of the kind. Nor are we asking Americans to "hand over" the country.  The country is-- this must always be insisted on, it's what makes us different from pharaonic Egypt-- not "ours" in anything like the same sense in which a car or a piece of land is someone's private property.  But the sense in which it is justly ours-- there is a sort of social contract among us which is in force throughout a certain territory, and we have administered law and order and protected natural rights well enough that others could not make a plausible prudential case that establishment of a hostile state on this territory would be conducive to justice-- is not diminished by accepting our lack of right to prevent others from coming here, as long as their intentions are clearly peaceful.  No one is asking Americans to give that up, only not to do violence to foreign-born people who come to live peacefully among us.  Vanishing American goes on:

Yet another Christian commentator, Steve Marr approaches the illegal immigration question from a justice perspective. After all, although Marr does not say this, the Bible tells Christians to obey the laws of the land. If our illegal invaders are such devout, religious Christians as their apologists claim they are, they are disobeying God's command to follow the laws of the land. And if some leftist Christians aid and abet the illegals, and encourage 'civil disobedience', they are disobedient to God's laws too.

Actually, the Bible is full of examples of people disobeying the law of the land, with God's approval. St. Peter escaped from prison: not legal. Daniel refused to bow to the idol of Nebuchadnezzar: not legal, either. The early Christian martyrs broke the law by refusing to practice the imperial cult. The Hebrew midwives in Egypt disobeyed the law by refusing to kill the new-born babies of the Hebrews. Moses's mother disobeyed the law by hiding her infant son, whom the Egyptians would have killed. The Bible and the history of the Church are full of civil disobedience. One ought to obey the law when it is just. And sometimes when it is unjust, too. But that's far from being the only consideration. I don't think illegal immigration is entirely morally unproblematic, but immigration restrictions are by far the greater sin.

When considering this issue, from a Christian perspective, I ask the same question I ask on most issues: are we wiser than our forefathers? My answer is almost always NO. How is it that today's Christians can see things in the Bible which our ancestors for the last 2000 years never saw? Did previous generations of Christians ever imagine that God wanted us to surrender our countries to any and all invaders in the name of kindness or charity? Did any past generations imagine that the Bible tells us to lay down our arms and passively let ourselves be conquered? Did our forefathers believe that God wanted to erase borders and create a single world system in which all peoples mingled willy-nilly together? If all these things are found in the Bible, why did our ancestors fail to realize that and abolish borders and nations 2000 years ago? Are we wiser than our forefathers?

This appeal to tradition very much misfires. Again, when Ruth migrated into ancient Israel, she did not apply for a visa. When St. Patrick went to Ireland to preach the Gospel, he did not ask permission of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. It is not the advocates of open borders who are the innovators here. It is those who seek to enforce the global apartheid regime that was developed in the heyday of fascism and socialism in the early 20th century. No, the Bible did not tell people to lay down their arms and passively let themselves be conquered, and advocates of open borders are not saying that, either. The Bible presupposes that the sojourner can come, and commands that he be well-treated (though he is not automatically a full member of the community) and this is exactly what open borders advocates today say.

Here's another thought on the Bible and nations: God seemed to have divided us into nations, after the Tower of Babel incident in Genesis 11, as a way of keeping people from uniting in rebellion. Nations are a kind of system of 'checks and balances' to keep flawed human beings from excessive concentration of power. Most conservatives, religious or not, sense that the greater the concentration of power in the fewer hands, the greater potential for tyranny and evil.

Well, that's an Old Testament view, and the prophets and the New Testament are full of the promise that that sad separation will be undone. Be that as it may, nations have always historically lived side by side, mixed up together in the same towns and cities. The nation-state is a very modern invention. And it's a bit absurd to advocate the massive social engineering that is migration control in the name of avoiding "concentration of power in... fewer hands." 

This writer is not as much of a clown as the "Castillo Chronicles" blogger, but I am struck again by how confused the arguments of the nativists are. It is easy to knock them down one by one, but it is so hard to get any clarity amidst all the misconceptions and misdefined terms, the side-effects of an ignorance which results from the simple fact that these people are never on the receiving end of immigration laws, never had to apply for a US visa, and so haven't been compelled by experience to think clearly about it.

It is a bit like battling with dwarves in a swamp.

A remarkably silly response to my article from a blog called the Castillo Chronicle. The writer calls my article "a mish-mash of girlie-man thinking" and posts a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger in a dress with pig-tails and ribbons in his hair. Amusing picture, albeit quite irrelevant. His only verbal response is "Oh brother. Can you imagine the reaction of these long-suffering folks to this la-di-da way of thinking?" The link is to a news story about a fire on the Arizona border which is "suspected to have been started by illegal immigrants." Suspected.

Obviously if the fire was deliberately or negligently by illegal immigrants we should seek to find and prosecute the individuals concerned. We should not punish the millions of illegal immigrants in this country who were not involved. We should not punish anyone on the basis of mere "suspicions." A vast purge of millions of people from the country as a response to a fire in a border town, even if (some!) illegal immigrants were culpable, would be both disproportionate and ineffectual. Of course I'm stating the obvious here, but what is one to do? We have the misfortunate of sharing a country with people like Robert Faith del Castillo, who make arguments as unserious as this (unserious in everything except the harm they do when listened to) and then accuse me of a "la-di-da way of thinking." Contempt is an unpleasant business, but perhaps, someday, it will provoke people like this into using the faculty of reason. Or conscience.

Thoughts on Macroeconomics

One of the things that distinguishes the Keynesian left in macroeconomics-- Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, etc.-- from the more skeptical, and diverse, right, is the weird cocksureness of the Keynesians. Hardly anyone predicted this crisis. The exceptions, like Nouriel Roubini, are few enough that luck rather than insight seems the likeliest explanation. Just because macroeconomists didn't see it coming doesn't mean they don't have some idea of how to fix it. But you would expect some self-doubt, some "Hmm... it seems we didn't understand the economy as well as we thought, maybe we should question our old models." Which seems to be the reaction of the right. The Keynesian left, by contrast, is sure they know the answers, and the only problem is a lack of political will, and irresponsible free-thinking by some economists that weakens the profession's unified voice, and the resistance of the public to somewhat counter-intuitive arguments.

Moreover, there seems to be little recognition that Keynesianism has already been tried on a huge scale. What were the Bush tax cuts, and their renewal, and the major upswing in spending in the past decade, and ARRA, and the Federal Reserve's flooding the economy with money, but a lot of Keynesian stimulus. We've been deficit-spending some 10% of GDP for the past three years. Yet unemployment is still 9%. You can spin counter-factuals about how unemployment would be 16% without the Keynesian measures taken. But how do we know? If the economics profession, or even just the Keynesian left wing of it, had unanimously predicted disaster in the run-up to 2008, they might have some credibility in making these counter-factual predictions. As it is, the public is entitled to conclude that when Keynesian stimulus has been pursued on such a massive scale and the economy is still in such bad shape, it probably isn't working.

That's not to say there's no merit in the Keynesian story, however, and I should mention here that this post is inspired by listening to the first few lectures from Brad DeLong's Econ 1 course at Berkeley, published at iTunes U. DeLong argues (channeling Malthus, Keynes, and others) that Say's Law does not hold, and a general glut is possible, because there can be excess demand for financial assets. If everyone wants to reduce present consumption in favor of future consumption, resources just end up unemployed, and government has to step in to provide the financial assets. He says there might be excessive demand for different kinds of financial assets: cash, government bonds, high-quality private bonds, etc. In 2008, the market learned that mortgage-backed securities, which had been deemed safe, were not. They lost faith in those and all sorts of other private-sector assets, and turned to government bonds.

So far, this story makes sense.  But it's a bit incomplete.  First, why does demand for financial assets suddenly surge?  DeLong has a story.  It's basically that there was a certain financial innovation-- mortgage-backed securities-- that seemed smart, but didn't work out in the end.  But that seems like a supply-side story-- there was a technological shock to the efficiency of financial intermediation-- which is dressed up as a demand-side story and thereby becomes ad hoc. 

Second, it doesn't deal explicitly with investment.  After all, if you want to consume less today and more tomorrow, there's an alternative to buying financial assets.  Make stuff.  Build machines, build houses and offices and infrastructure, invest in R&D.  Stuff that costs you today and pays off tomorrow.  Now, admittedly it takes a little while to mobilize investment.  The people who are in a position to make the plans are probably not the people with the money to lend.  It takes time for them to find each other and to design suitable contracts.  If in the meantime deflation takes hold, that makes such calculations far more difficult.  So it might make sense for the Federal Reserve to flood the economy with cash in the immediate aftermath of a financial crisis, to keep prices stable for the convenience of those planning new investments.  But Keynesian stimulus should be an affair of months rather than years.

Third, since the Federal Reserve did flood the economy with cash, DeLong argues that cash wasn't (or not for long) the kind of asset for which there was excess demand.  Rather, the economy wanted safe long-term bonds.  That doesn't make much sense.  Cash should be a very good substitute for safe long-term bonds.  It's safe, it just pays a zero interest rate.  So to satisfy the market's demand for safe long-term bonds can only mean giving safety-seeking investors a better interest rate.  But that's exactly what you don't want to do.  If there's excess demand for safety, you should raise the price of future consumption relative to present consumption as much as possible.  You should force investors to settle for cash, or else to put their money into physical capital investments that will earn a return by being productive.  Ideally, you would want to drive real interest rates on safe assets below zero if there are still unemployed resources at a zero interest rate. 

My hunch is that the real secret of prolonged economic downturns is that it's all about political risk.  Political risk is hard to observe.  But suppose that the odds that a long-term investor in illiquid physical capital will face confiscatory taxes have risen 20% in the past five years.  That could induce a steep fall in investment indeed!  Money that would have been invested instead seeks safety, so demand for safe financial assets surges.  And it's not hard to see why political risk has risen, given the surge in soak-the-rich rhetoric, the election of a president who wants to raise taxes on the rich, Obamacare, the surging deficit that will have to be paid for somehow, the defeat of immigration reform that would have increased the number of people around to pay it, etc.  People want to transfer income from the present to the future, but they are afraid to invest it, so it's hard to find things to do with all the resources in the economy.

What if Justice Demands Open Borders (The American):

Obama described America as “a nation of laws,” but what is law? The American form of government emerged from a tradition of moral and political thought of which two of the most eminent representatives are Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) and John Locke (1632-1704) (but which has roots going back to the High Middle Ages, to scholars of canon law like Gratian, scribbling in cold monastic scriptoria

In this tradition, certain basic imperatives of conscience and common sense (do not kill, steal, etc.) are distilled into the idea of natural rights, or natural law (ius naturale). Ethics informs politics, and in time it came to be seen that “to secure [natural] rights” is the only valid reason that “governments are instituted among men,” and that they “derive their just powers [only] from the consent of the governed,” as the Declaration of Independence states. It follows that a government cannot justly make any law it wants. Positive law must conform to natural law.

While the tradition of Locke and Jefferson can adapt to new times, and can critique itself and make discoveries, both philosophers were right to affirm the primacy of natural rights, to believe that the task of governments is to protect them, and to found the legitimacy of government on the consent of the governed in the form of a social contract.

The social contract is more than a mere myth, yet it is not quite a fact. The consensual roots of the governments of the English-speaking world go back to medieval feudalism, with its vertical bonds between suzerains and vassals established by ceremonies and oaths; and even further back, to the deference which the last Roman emperors, and many subsequent secular rulers, paid to that great voluntary institution, the Christian church.

Yet few, if any, alive today have ever signed a social contract. Nor should consent be identified too closely with democracy, because democratic governments can violate human rights, too, and they are not justified in doing so just because they have majority support.

If “government by the consent of the governed” is an unattainable ideal, however, that does not make it irrelevant. It is a standard of justice, to which some policies, and some regimes, are closer than others.

One lesson to take from the Lockean tradition is the imperative for freedom of migration. A country must not prevent peaceful migration by force, because migrants are not violating natural law. They are violating no one’s natural rights. They have committed no violence against persons or property. They are pursuing happiness, without threatening the lives or liberties of others. Coercion against them has no justification if governments are instituted among men to secure inalienable natural rights.

In the 19th century, before the liberal tradition of Locke and Jefferson was partially eclipsed by relatively illiberal political philosophies, the open borders policy implied by these basic ethical facts was actually practiced, for the most part, in the United States and Western Europe. As historian Harold James recalls:

Above all, people moved. They did not need passports. There were hardly any debates about citizenship. In a search for freedom, security, and prosperity… the peoples of Europe and Asia left their homes and took often uncomfortable journeys by rail and by ship, often as part of gigantic human treks. Between 1871 and 1915, 36 million people left Europe.¹

World War I and the age of fascism and communism put an end to 19th-century freedom of mobility, but the way politicians talk about immigration, and the way a decent society treats illegal immigrants, show that we still know right from wrong. We don’t want our politicians to tell us that most human beings born into this world are permanently excluded from our country.

Most Americans seem to have more qualms about reporting illegal immigrants to the police, especially those with families or who came here as children, than about doing business or making friends with them. Our immigration laws are like the Prohibition laws of the 1920s. They are a scandal, not only because they are widely disobeyed, but because they are widely disobeyed by normal, decent people. And that is because they have no basis in natural law.

Advocates of immigration restrictions tacitly borrow from another political tradition, from the 17th-century English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, spokesman for arbitrary and absolute power. Hobbes, long dead, is still with us in disguise. He has taken the form of a word, sovereignty, the uses of which encapsulates his philosophy and sustains his influence. Hobbes and the contemporary proponents of sovereignty relegate natural law to the background, or simply ignore or deny it.

The Hobbesian tradition tells people to obey sovereign governments, no matter what. By contrast, the Lockean tradition affirms that sometimes governments ought to be resisted. As one representative of the Lockean tradition, Martin Luther King Jr., argued:

One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality… Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court [desegregating the schools], for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

We have treated King in the usual manner of prophets, honoring him after he is killed, but often ignoring what he said. Yet his words are directly applicable to immigration. Laws against migration, unlike laws against murder or theft, are not rooted in eternal and natural law, and they do not uplift personality.

The one thing I would have liked to have in is something specific about those who were brought here as children. That's the case where the right and the wrong of the matter is just inescapably clear. As Obama said:

And as I gave that commencement at Miami Dade, it broke my heart knowing that a number of those promising, bright students -- young people who worked so hard and who speak about what’s best in America -- are at risk of facing the agony of deportation.  These are kids who grew up in this country.  They love this country.  They know no other place to call home.  The idea that we’d punish them is cruel.  It makes no sense.  We’re a better nation than that.  (Applause.) 

It's a bit galling to borrow words from Obama, after his administration has been guilty of an unprecedently large number of deportations and he wasted political capital on Obamacare and now seems to be just trying to get votes in exchange for nothing. Still, he's right. What we're doing to illegal immigrants who grew up here is the disgrace of immigration restrictions concentrated to laser intensity.