Clemens surveys the small (four studies; I think I’d only heard of one of them) literature that has estimated the gains from removing all barriers to international migration. The estimates range from 67% to 147% of global product! Compare with summing high and low estimates for removing all barriers to international trade and investment: between 0.4% and 5.8% of global product. Yet the amount of attention given to these topics by economists is the inverse, and mostly from the immigration, rather than emigration side of the coin. At best a case of chasing easy precision over oomph (Clemens speculates lack of study could be due to obviousness, mercantilist/nationalist tradition, and lack of data).

I was happy to see mention of historical examples:

Of course, these elasticities could be different at much higher levels of emigration. The literature gives no clear support for such a pattern, however, even under greatly increased migration. In historical cases of large reductions in barriers to labor mobility between high-income and low-income populations or regions, those with high wages have not experienced a large decline. For example, wages of whites in South Africa have not shown important declines since the end of the apartheid regime (Leibbrandt and Levinsohn, 2011), despite the total removal of very large barriers to the physical movement and occupational choice of a poor population that outnumbered the rich population six to one. The recent advent of unlimited labor mobility between some Eastern European countries and Great Britain, though accompanied by large and sudden migration flows, has not caused important declines in British wages (Blanchflower and Shadforth, 2009).

“Brain drain” used an excuse for apartheid (it’s good for them!) makes me sad, but gladly the literature does not offer support for the effect, as I suspected. There’s a passing mention in the paper, and a bit more in the interview, concerning emigration from Sweden — Clemens says 1/3rd of the population left. The two citations in the linked Wikipedia article claim 20% and 33%, but probably cover different time periods. I’d like to see a comparison of annual emigration rates for various geographies at various times. Clemens also says that one can read anti-immigrant statements in U.S. newspapers a 100+ years ago that mirror those of today.

A couple other quotes from the paper:

economists should be open to the possibility that dramatic changes in what is practical can happen over several decades. After all, changes in geographic labor mobility that were unthinkable only a few decades ago have come to pass. Through the 1980s, a Polish national attempting to emigrate to West Germany could be shot by soldiers sealing the Inner German border from the east. Today, Polish jobseekers may move freely throughout Germany. The world has summarily discarded vast systems of restrictions on the labor mobility of medieval serfs, slaves, women, South African blacks, indigenous Australians, and a long list of others.

[...]

These initial results accord well with an entirely separate macroeconomic literature (for example, Hall and Jones 1999) which finds that most of the productivity gap between rich and poor countries is accounted for by place-specific total factor productivity, not by productivity differences inherent to workers. Large differences in location-specific total factor productivity mean that free movement of goods and capital cannot by themselves achieve the global equalization of wages, as they can in the most abstract trade models (O’Rourke and Sinott, 2004; Freeman, 2006, Kremer, 2006).

Place-specific total factor productivity can increase, and people in all places should strive to do so (best autonomously) — that’s approximately what “development” is about — results are very, very mixed. I wonder if various “open” things can’t help more than they do now, and will write about such eventually, but it’d be on the margin. And international apartheid is an abomination that should be eliminated immediately regardless of the long-term substitutability of development and migration.

The economics profession of the 20th century has taken a pass on migration, as they have on IP, with even more tragic results. Please change that! As his interviewer says, Clemens’ paper sketches a research program good for many Ph.D. theses.

I repeat Evan as a reminder and apology. I’ve blogged many times about copyright licenses in the past, and will have a few detailed posts on the subject soon in preparation for a short talk at FOSDEM.

Given current malgovernance of the intellectual commons, public copyright licenses are important for freedom. They’re probably also important trials for post-copyright regulation (meant in the broadest sense, including at least “market” and “government” regulatory mechanisms), eg of ability to inspect and modify complete and corresponding source.

At the same time, the totemic and contentious role copyright licenses (and sometimes assignment or contributor agreements, and sometimes covering related wrongs and patents) play in free/libre/open works, projects, and communities often seems an unfortunate misdirection of energy at best, and probably looks utterly ridiculous to casual observers. I suspect copyright also takes at least some deserved limelight, and perhaps much more, from other aspects of governance, plain old getting things done, and activism around other issues (regarding the first, some good recent writings includes those by Simon Phipps and Bradley Kuhn, but the prominence of copyright arrangements therein reinforces my point). But this all amounts to an additional reason it is important to get the details of public copyright licenses right, in particular compatibility between them where it can be achieved — so as to minimize the amount of time and energy projects put into considering and arguing about the options.

Obviously the energy put into public licenses is utterly insignificant against that spent on other copyright/patent/trademark complex activities. But I’m not going to write about that in the near future, so it isn’t part of my apology and rationalization.

Someday I hope that knowing the ins and outs of both Internal Passports of the mind and international passports will be like knowing the rules of internal passports in Communist East Germany (presumably intricate; I did not look for details, but hopefully they exist not many hops from a Wikipedia article on Eastern Bloc emigration and defection).

I’ll post more about the book’s contents, the sprint, and the Booki software later (but I can’t help noting now that I’m sad about not getting to a chapter on WikiNature). For now no new observations other than that Adam Hyde of FLOSS Manuals put together a really good group of people for the sprint. I enjoyed working with all of them tremendously and hope to do so again in some form. And thanks to Transmediale for hosting. And sad that I couldn’t stay in Berlin longer for Transmediale proper, in particular the Charlemagne Palestine concerts.

Check out Mushon Zer-Aviv’s great sprint finish writeup.

Solidarity

British troops are dying in Afghanistan because the government deems the Taliban such a terrible threat.

Yet those who flee the Taliban and the war are denied asylum in this country.

This is an outrage.

The outrage applies to the U.S. with some multiplier (also in Iraq). The least an occupier could do is to offer speedy asylum. However, I don’t think asylum is enough — invader/occupier jurisdiction citizenship, granted on demand, should be the baseline.

Google hires employees based on skills and qualifications, not on nationality.

Great, Google doesn’t have an apartheid hiring policy. They aren’t actively doing evil. So they’re in a similar camp with South African businesses who didn’t want to hire based on race, but failed to stop Apartheid. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t mind pandering to neanderthals who think Amurricans deserve some kind of advantage:

Other commenters suggested that Google should fund education for underprivileged American students, to better prepare American students to fill technical jobs. We agree

Underprivileged Americans (by which they certainly and unfortunately mean U.S. citizens)? Please.

Google also says the cap on H-1B visas is “artificially low.” More pandering. Any cap at all is “artificial”, as is any limit at all on the legal ability of any human from working anywhere they’d like to for a willing employer.

Global mobility with no artificial restraints — abolish international apartheid. Surely Google can take a stronger stand than mine owners in South Africa did a century ago.

Presently, whites are well less than half the Cailfornian population. Hispanics make up just more than a third. Asians at 12 percent are nearly double the black population. I’d guess it won’t be long before Hispanics pass whites to become a plurality.

Now, if my fearful commenters aren’t simply making things up in their paranoid dreams, wouldn’t California be a complete disaster already? Of course, we all know that, were it a country, California would be the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world. The median household income in California, $54,385, ranks 11th in the U.S., and would put California right near the top of the world rankings.

More data: California population born in a non-U.S. jurisdiction: 26.9%, entire U.S.: 11.8% (excluding California should be about 9.8% for the proper comparison).

Some people do think California is a giant burning parking lot, but that isn’t remotely true, even relatively. There are things to dislike about California (e.g., San Francisco is a pathetic parochial town instead of Sanhattan, Scientologists in LA), but approximately none of them have anything to do with the presence of non-U.S. citizens. I’ll take California over Oklahoma (4.2%) any day.

“You really have to work hard at it to destroy our state’s economy, but we found a way,” said state Sen. Harry Coates, the only Republican in the state Legislature to vote against the immigration law. “We ran off the workforce.”

No, they didn’t run off the workforce, they kept the American citizen race pure:

Carol Helm, director of Immigration Reform for Oklahoma Now, says the Oklahoma law was necessary to stop a burgeoning population of illegal immigrants from “multiplying faster than the American citizen race” and overwhelming the state’s social services.

I’d like to offer Helm amnesty.

According to the article, HB 1804 does the following:

• Makes it a felony to harbor, transport, conceal or shelter unauthorized immigrants
• Restricts access to driver’s licenses and identification cards
• Terminates several forms of public assistance
• Expands authority of local law-enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration law
• Requires verification of employment eligibility using a federal database

Official reaction to the day’s events ranged from dismay to embarrassment to outright anger.

…

For ordinary Gazans, it was a day of joy and plenty.

…

“Freedom is good. We need no border after today,” said Mohammed Abu Ghazal, a 29-year-old out-of-work Gazan.

Of course the Gaza border is atypical in many ways and at least initially this breach will satisfy pent up demand for goods and travel rather than provide opportunity for labor, but the release of this demand paints the ongoing massive cost of borders in vivid fashion (if there were no cost the opening of a border would result in no border crossings).

First, Paul’s supporters wildly overestimate the chances of the campaign’s success, whether that be election, nomination, or even just effectively growing the constituency for freedom. He never had any chance of winning and I’m happy for the demonstration that merely speaking the truth on national TV doesn’t change anything. Of course many libertarians will ignore that truth and continue throwing money at false hopes.

And while there were bright spots, Paul was an extremely problematic messenger for freedom. He’s a marginal kook, he attracts hardcore kooks, and the fundamental basis of his argument — the U.S. constitution as holy writ — is about the least interesting and least convincing argument possible. In other words, Paul is an embarrassment. (Of course almost every politicianhuman spouts nonsense almost continuously, but more or less conventional nonsense that is not accorded the kookiness factor richly deserved.)

However, I had no idea how problematic and embarrassing Paul would be. While it is conceivable that Paul is not a racist and did not write any of the racist items in his newsletter and did not authorize or know about any of those items, I assign these probabilities ranging from medium to almost nil. Paul’s response is evasive and painful to watch, despite his attempt to redeem himself by focusing on the drug war.

If you really need to read more go here. I urge anyone who has supported Paul in public or private to reverse that support, immediately.

True, Ron Paul‘s more radical foreign (and general) policy is mostly closer to my preferences than Richardson’s. However, in spirit and delivery, Richardson’s foreign policy is a viable and positive alternative to interventionism, approximately the Wright thing, in contrast to Dr. No’s.

And Richardson is in theory electable, while Paul is not. Traders are probably correct in giving Richardson essentially zero chance of winning the Democratic nomination at this point, but they are certifiably insane to give Paul even a smidgen of a chance of winning the GOP nomination (currently about 7%), let alone the dictatorship (4%).

I also think that to the extent the Paul campaign gives some libertarians (entirely false) hope of revolutionary change for the better through electoral politics, the campaign and whatever success it has is a bad thing. It makes me sad to see libertarians impoverish themselves by sending a “moneybomb” to a hopeless electoral campaign.

However, I probably would not have bothered to tack on this anti-endorsement of Paul had I not seen this excrement from his campaign.

Paul is also a religious kook (but then so is every candidate, of one sort or another). At least Barack Obama admits doubt, which I’d challenge any other candidate to do. As Richardson doesn’t have any chance of nomination, this post is effectively an Obama endorsement.

Via Freedom Democrats and Sheldon Richman.