Mike Linksvayer

Tom Palmer points out new laws cracking down on immigrant employment in Russia with a post title comment “Lou Dobbsian Economics Put into Practice in Russia”.

Palmer’s post is accompanied with a picture of marching Russian neo-nazis — neo-communists? — skinheads in any case, with armbands that would be unambiguously nazi if not for a hammer and sickle where a swastika would be expected.

It’s probable that Russian politicians are balder in their anti-immigrant pronouncements and Russian police more brutal in their enforcement, but the laws don’t sound all that foreign.

BBC:

President Vladimir Putin spoke of the need to defend the interests of the native population.

Markets - often a source of employment for Russia’s army of immigrant workers - were singled out.

“Markets” means open air retail, I gather, but delicious nonetheless. Longer BBC article here.

Reuters:

Russia introduced new laws on Monday that experts say are intended to plug a hole in the country’s labor market while discouraging foreigners from settling there permanently.

The laws, passed by parliament last year, are designed to streamline the red tape foreigners have to go through to live and work in Russia legally but will also reduce their numbers.

One change will implement a gradual ban on foreigners working as traders in outdoor markets where immigrants dominate, causing friction with ethnic Russians.

‘We want to get rid of illegal immigration,’ said Denis Soldatikov, a spokesman for the Federal Migration Service.
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Television pictures on Monday showed rows of locked shops at a market in the Far Eastern city of Vladivostok heavily dependant on traders from neighbouring China.

‘The move was harmful because it will undermine trade,’ Vitkovskaya said. ‘I only hope no one is going to abide by it.’

But deputy Federal Migration Service head Vyacheslav Postavnin disagreed, saying the markets will adjust.

‘There are Russians to be hired,’ he told Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily. ‘Market owners will make sure that their business continues.’

Whenever you hear similar from those closer to home think of the skinheads and look in the mirror.

The January 13-19 Economist has a review of (and my first encounter with) Philippe Legrain’s book Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them. The title and the review make the book sound a bit wishy-washy, but a review in the Guardian, reprinted on Legrain’s site makes it sound much better.

The central thrust is that immigration is economically beneficial. Fluid migration is as dynamic as every other form of free trade. “If you believe that the world is an unequal place and that the rich should do more to help the poor,” he writes, “then freer international migration should be the next front in the battle for global economic justice.”

Ironically, the book appears to not yet be available in the U.S. Amazon Canada will have it January 30.

If a jurisdiction invades another, the invading jurisdiction must:

• Grant full invader citizenship to citizens of the invaded jurisdiction upon demand, with all rights of previous citizens the invader;
• If a supermajority in the invaded jurisdiciton desires annexation to the invader, the indvaded becomes a subjurisdiciton of the invader and all citizens of the invaded become citizens of the invader, equal to previous subjurisdictions and citizens of the invader.

A high standard? Disruptive of the politics of the invader jurisdiction? Justly so, considering the invader’s disruption of lives in the invaded jurisdiction.

A particularly savvy would-be invader may decide to skip the invasion step. Regarding Iraq, the U.S. jurisdiction is neither savvy nor responsible.

I never got around to commenting on responses to the 2006 Edge Annual Question — “What Is Your Dangerous Idea?” — as most were uninteresting, not dangerous, or simply lame.

It must’ve been the question, as this year’s responses — to “What Are You Optimistic About? Why?” — make for good reading. I’ll excerpt a few that resonate with themes I go on about.

Steven Pinker on The Decline of Violence:

Even the mass murders of the twentieth century in Europe, China, and the Soviet Union probably killed a smaller proportion of the population than a typical hunter-gatherer feud or biblical conquest. The world’s population has exploded, and wars and killings are scrutinized and documented, so we are more aware of violence, even when it may be statistically less extensive.
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My optimism lies in the hope that the decline of force over the centuries is a real phenomenon, that is the product of systematic forces that will continue to operate, and that we can identify those forces and perhaps concentrate and bottle them.

James O’Donnell says Scientific Discoveries Are Surprisingly Durable:

But the study of the past and its follies and failures reveals one surprising ground for optimism. In the long run, the idiots are overthrown or at least they die. On the other hand, creativity and achievement are unique, exciting, liberating—and abiding. The discoveries of scientists, the inventions of engineers, the advances in the civility of human behavior are surprisingly durable.

Clay Shirky on Evidence:

We will see a gradual spread of things like evidence-based politics and law — what is the evidence that this expenditure, or that proposed bill, will have the predicted result? The expectation that evidence can answer questions about the structure of society will discomfit every form of government that relies on sacrosanct beliefs. Theocracy and communism are different in many ways, but they share the same central bug — they are based on some set of assertions that must remain beyond question.

Jamshed Bharucha on The Globalization of Higher Education:

We are all better off when talent is realized to its fullest—even if it crosses borders.

I didn’t count, but I think the subject mentioned most often was climate change, with solar power as the thing most were optimistic about. My favorite take on climate change was Gregory Benford on Save The Arctic:

So: despair? Not at all. Certainly we should accept the possibility that anthropogenic carbon emissions could trigger a climactic tripping point, such as interruption of the gulf stream in the Atlantic. But rather than urging only an all out effort to shrink the human atmospheric-carbon footprint, my collaborators and I propose relatively low tech and low expense experiments at changing the climate on purpose instead of by mistake.

If we understand climate well enough to predict that global warming will be a problem, then we understand it well enough to address the problem by direct means.

There are also several good entries on health, life extension, and also networks-will-change-publishing — but my, isn’t the last relatively boring?

One last favorite, on human enhancement, Andy Clark on The End Of The ‘Natural’:

Second, the biological brain is itself populated by a vast number of hidden ‘zombie processes’ that underpin the skills and capacities upon which successful behavior depends. There are, for example, a plethora of such unconscious processes involved in activities from grasping an object all the way to the flashes of insight that characterize much daily skilful problem-solving. Technology and drug based enhancements add, to that standard mix, still more processes whose basic operating principles are not available for conscious inspection and control. The patient using a brain-computer interface to control a wheelchair will not typically know just how it all works, or be able to reconfigure the interface or software at will. But in this respect too, the new equipment is simply on a par with much of the old.
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In sum, I am optimistic that we will soon see the end of those over-used, and mostly ad hoc, appeals to the ‘natural’. May we all have a thoroughly unnatural New Year.

A highly agreeable toast.

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Many of the responses contain very rough predictions, reminding me of prediction registries, an idea Robin Hanson has said would obtain 80% of the benefits of prediction markets (I doubt the number is that high) and also promoted by David Brin. I think prediction markets and registries are almost entirely complementary.

I like Brin’s point that “One advantage of registries is that they can be involuntary.” A pundit can only avoid inclusion by effectively not making predictions (which may include being wishy-washy and imprecise). I conjecture that DiscourseDB (I mentioned previously) is a model of what a prediction registry would look like — just imagine cataloging “will” rather than “should” opinions, and add evaluation.

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I’m surprised that none of the responses (I could have missed one) took the (unintended?) bait offered by combining the 2006 and 2007 questions: Is optimisim dangerous?

That depends on the subject of optimism. I think people tend to be dangerously optimisic about the outcomes of authoritarian processes, including both obvious societywide authoritarianism and conscious decisions made by individuals, but dangerously pessimistic about decentralized processes, including listening to external advice at the individual level.

Via Boing Boing, Marginal Revolution, or EconLog, all of which appeared in one batch of feed updates.

It’s been mildly amusing watching reactions in the blogosphere to yesterday’s NYT article on calorie restrction that used me as an example.

A “beauty editor” says:

He’s practically emaciated (6 feet tall and 135 lbs) but he looks like he’s 16!

Both wild overstatements, though this reminds me — is there an age guessing site on the web, a la Hot or Not?

A “fitness journalist” writes:

“Holy shit! That guy looks like he’s about to drop over dead!” You might guess that he has some kind of muscle-wasting disease. I know the angle of the photo isn’t flattering to a tall, long-limbed man, but perhaps the fact he’s sitting is appropriate. Honestly, he doesn’t look strong enough to stand.

And others like this. Yes, I can stand up, and so much more!

I did not realize how many bloggers copy and paste entire articles and call it a post. There are lots of them, not counting obvious spam blogs.

On the other side, CR blogger Mary Robinson has a reasonable critique:

I did not like Linksayer’s meals as an example. They are nice enough, but reinforce the stereotype that CR food is weird food. The text made it sound like he does not eat the same thing at all as the pictured food - he seems to eat a pretty normal regimen. So why show fermented soy for breakfast? My Fiber One and vegetable juice would have been less weird. Some yogurt and an orange would have been even better. I would like to have seen some fish in there for one meal. Maybe chicken at the other.

With a little more forethought I might have tried to prepare more mainstream meals. In my little bubble world, natto is normal. Regarding yogurt, fish, and chicken, I don’t eat them. I emphasized to the reporter many times that most people attempting CR are not vegan. If I had anything re-impressed on me from this article, it is that only a tiny bit of information can be squeezed into a news article.

The most satisfying blog commentary comes from Karen DeCoster:

Here is a photo of the disgusting Mr. Linksvayer:

He’s more frail than blown glass, has a very stooped posture, and his body parts are not in proportion. In fact, upon seeing him, you immediately notice that he has taken on the physical appearance of one who suffers from mental retardation - which is typical for malnourished adults.
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2,100 calories? That average day does not even approach 2,100 calories - you can do the math. This man is eating between 500-900 calories per day, that is, on the days that he does not starve himself fast.

I can see where DeCoster might get those numbers from the pictures, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, they leave out dessert and multiple servings of lunch and dinner.

But more than enough about me. DeCoster’s main argument:

First, a restricted calorie diet eats up gobs of human muscle, reduces metabolism, kills energy, destroys hair and skin and nails, numbs brain function, and depletes necessary nutrition to dangerously low levels. Only these pro-starvation crackpots would possibly claim that people on these nutbag diets can still get adequate vitamins, minerals, and overall nutrition. They claim that breaking down your body is, in essence, really “building it up” for the long run. Then, of course, we come to the call for government intervention in the aging process:

There would be some truth to this if one were to sharply restrict calories on a standard amurrican diet, or worse. This is just malnutrition. There’s a reason “we” (people practicing CR) do CRAN (CR with Adequate Nutrition) and aim for CRON (with Optimal Nutrition). In fact CR people get far more vitamins and minerals than the average person. As for destruction of hair, nails, brain, etc., nothing could be further from the truth. Aging breaks down the body. CR doesn’t build anyting up, it slows down the destruction, not least by nearly eliminating risk for major killers and disabilities like cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and alzheimer’s.

My suggestion to DeCoster is to do a bit of research and to follow Fight Aging for awhile. She’ll even appreciate that blog’s general skepticism of the usefulness of government funding, for example:

While in general I’m all for raising public awareness of any plasticity of the human lifespan, we’ve all seen the objections to the Longevity Dividend; it is unambitious and slow, setting the bar so low that the target gains will probably happen anyway. It is the sort of lowest common denominator big tent approach that gets politicians to spend tax dollars on inefficient ways forward while ignoring the real possibilities of doing far better.

I am particularly amused that DeCoster wrote on LewRockwell.com. I used to have a love/hate relationship with this and its sister site, Mises.org. Trenchant and extreme anti-war and anti-government commentary, including against intellectual protectionism. But the occasional Christian apologia, pro-apartheid writers, and general nuts really put me off. Then there’s the despicable Hoppe. Fortunately I am able to no longer care. There are many substitutes on the topics those sites were good on, and I am mostly convinced by Bryan Caplan on Austrian economics that the school does not just appear to be an ignorable backwater, it is. Part of Caplan’s conclusion reminds me yet again of the perils of meta:

Neoclassical economists go too far by purging meta-economics almost entirely, but there is certainly a reason to be suspicious of scholars who talk about economics without ever doing it.

To bring this ramble to a close, doing CR is definitely not meta.

Update 20061102: Cool, Reason too, with attitude and not much information. Others, at least check out the wikipedia article on CR and learn how to use the NYT link generator before posting. You’ll look a bit less stupid.

Nick Gillespie interviews Chris Anderson:

Anderson laments that national politics has yet to become part of the Long Tail. “I wish the system would put forward politicians that I could vote for,” he says.

I wouldn’t expect it to. At a minimum you need something like approval voting or at the extreme delegable proxy voting. I’ve always found such reforms curious but distracting, as I don’t know what their impact on policy outcomes would be, and I suspect they’d be small. However given that voters are not outcome oriented I wonder if being able to make a closer to their ideal expression when oting would make voters happier, at least for time they are in the voting booth.

But the real long tail of politics isn’t about elections at all. Even if I can vote for my ideal candidate, or vote directly on every issue, at the end of the day I will still get policies approximating those of George W. Bush and John Kerry. That’s like being able to order any of millions of books at Amazon but always getting the current #1 best seller delivered regardless of your order.

The real long tail of politics is decentralization and arbitrage. Lots of people say “Bush isn’t my president.” Why can’t that be true? Declare yourself Venezuelan, Hugo Chavez is your president. It should be (almost) that easy. If that seems extreme and disruptive, at least executive power should be curtailed, for surely it is the antithesis of long tail politics. And being able to live and work in any jurisdiction should be a given.

Via Boing Boing.

Long overdue reply to a comment (nearly identical comment, even older) left here by Ronnie Horesh:

I see totally free trade in goods and services as a higher priority than unrestricted immigration. The west needs willing immigrants, not those compelled by poor prospects at home to leave their cultures and (in m any cases) families behind.

Sebastian Mallaby on Migrating to Modernity in today’s Washington Post (emphasis added):

In “Let Their People Come,” a new book published by the Center for Global Development, Lant Pritchett reports that if rich countries permitted extra immigration equivalent to 3 percent of their labor force, the citizens of poor countries would gain about $300 billion a year. That’s three times more than the direct gains from abolishing all remaining trade barriers, four times more than the foreign aid given by governments and 100 times more than the value of debt relief.

Mallaby says there is a downside to migration — poor countries suffer a brain drain. Over the long term I’d bet brains are not zero sum — a brain drain really just means increased returns to education. Mobility means more people in the developing world will pursue higher education. Add to that increased flow of knowledge and capital to the developing world from migrants and concern over “brain drain” sounds very much like yet another disingenuous excuse for keeping the current system of inter-jurisdiction apartheid in place.

As for “reluctant” immigration, who is to judge whether those moving from Mexico to California are more or less reluctant than those moving from West Virginia to California, and why should jurisdictions make a paternalistic decision for either?

Via Arnold Kling.

Art Hutchinson quoting a subscriber-only WSJ article:

In 2000, nine of every 10 dollars raised by non-U.S. companies outside their domestic markets was through U.S. exchanges… By last year, only one in 10 such dollars was raised in New York.

Hutchinson:

As the WSJ notes, that’s a truly radical change. Some of it is no doubt driven by exchange rates, but only some. Another major factor has been increased regulatory oversight in the U.S., (e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley), providing a sobering lesson in the unintended consequences of well-meaning legislation in a fluid, free-market global economy.

I’d strike “well-meaning” from the above, but another beautiful example nonetheless.

People should have the same freedom to respond to stupid policymakers by deserting the policymakers’ jurisdiction.

Brad Templeton has an excellent immigration rant. Following an anecdote about immigrant entrepreneurialism:

Being anti-immigrant reminds me of racism, to use an inflamatory term. Racism is the belief that the broad circumstances of a person’s ancestry affect their worth as a person, and should affect their rights in society. Anti-immigrant nationalism is actually stronger. I was born 20 miles from the U.S. border, to parents also born there (though they were born to immigrant parents from Europe.) What moral code says that those like me deserve less of such fundamental rights as the ability to work, freedom to travel, freedom to live on my land, or to vote for those that will govern us? How can a few miles difference in birthplace morally command such a difference?

Indeed!

Bryan Caplan has some interesting evidence that “[d]irect observation of immigrants leads to more reasonable beliefs about the effects of immigration” — people in states with more immigrants view immigration more positively, even under the assumption that all immigrants view immigration positively.

Richard Posner compares immigrant amnesty to tax amesty. His excellent point is that amnesty is a conventional policy tool and should not be despised.

However, Posner is not nearly cynical enough about the motives of thosse who complain that amnesty “rewards criminals.”

The Americans who for one reason or another are most concerned about illegal immigration are not much or maybe at all concerned about legal immigration, and so converting illegal to legal immigrants should be regarded by them as a highly beneficial step.

Hardly. Today’s most “concerned” are just as fond of citing IQ studies and “national culture” as the racialists who shut down legal immigration a century ago. They are the ones in need of amnesty.

Posner’s final paragraph is also excellent:

The solution is for Mexico and the other poor countries from which illegal immigrants come to become rich. As soon as per capita income in a country reaches about a third of the American level, immigration from that country dries up. Emigration is very costly emotionally as well as financially, given language and other barriers to a smooth transition to a new country, and so is frequent only when there are enormous wealth disparities between one’s homeland and a rich country like the United States. The more one worries about illegal immigrants, the more one should favor policies designed to bring about greater global income equality.

I agree with Alex Tabarrok’s pragmatic Open Letter on Immigration and hope it gains wide support — as it appears it already has amongst the top econobloggers.

My thoughts match those of Michael Giberson:

We should find a policy solution that readily accomodates the personal pursuit of freedom and opportunity, and which does not restricts the ability of persons to pursue freedom and opportunity based upon where on this planet they happened to have been born. Lucky for me, the consensus view of economists is that what I think of as the right thing to do for moral reasons is also likely to be, on net, a benefit to society overall. Actually, lucky for us that the right thing to do is the good thing. Lucky for all of us.

I’ll go further and suggest the letter that people ought to be signing on with is the Manifesto for the Abolition of International Apartheid.

I’ve been meaning to write about the recent larger than expected (very pleasant surprise) anti-anti-immigration rallies and in particular yesterday’s idiotic column from Paul Krugman (which I won’t link to as it is behind NYT’s shortsighted “select” service), but I’ve been very busy and Bryan Caplan has better said what I think in fewer words than I would have used in Half Million Rally Against Anti-Foreign Bias, With Critics of Immigration Like This, Who Needs Advocates? and Are Low-Skilled Americans the Master Race?

The comments on these posts are full of idiots, but the estimable Chris Rasch works in one of my favorite links — the Manifesto for the Abolition of International Apartheid.

However, I cannot restrain myself from picking on Krugman’s “Unconfortable facts about immigration” column. Krugman, with emphasis added:

First, the net benefits to the U.S. economy from immigration, aside from the large gains to the immigrants themselves, are small

This from someone who professes to be concerned about inequality. What better way to decrease inequality than to allow very poor people to drastically increase their incomes, merely by living and working across a river or entirely imaginary border? Why shouldn’t someone born in Mexico have the opportunity to earn the same wages as someone born in the United States with identical skills?

If we substitute “born in [jurisdiction]” to “born with [race or gender]” the answer is obvious.

Basic decency requires that we provide immigrants, once they’re here, with essential health care, education for their children, and more.

Here Krugman lets it slip: on one side of an imaginary border, one is human and must be treated with basic decency, whatever one thinks that entails. On the other side of a border, one is subhuman.

Anyone who professes to care about inequality and does not call for complete freedom to move, live and work across jurisdiction borders is deluded by the fog of jurisdicitonism.

As I was writing this Matt McIntosh posted an excellent followup to Caplan, Privileged By Birthright?:

It’s long past time for cosmopolitans everywhere to mount a serious offense against the premise that location of birth is a morally relevant category.

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I realized a while ago that one way to tell a true liberal (in the broad philosophical sense, not the narrow North American political sense) from a poseur is whether their moral circle extends to include as much moral consideration to those beyond their border as to those within it.

Indeed!

Tyler Cowen asks “What is your most absurd view?” and gets an absurd number of comments.

Yes your comment should be crazy but serious too. It should refer to a view which you actually hold, but many other smart people consider untenable and bizarre.

Four of mine:

Sex and its pursuit is the cause of most personal troubles and most people would be happier with zero sex drive. Watch nearly any movie. If the characters weren’t horny they wouldn’t be in any trouble!

Through most of human history the most rational act for most individuals at any point in time was immediate suicide, given the suffering they should have expected to endure.

With respect to movement, residence and employment all humans should be as free to disregard international jurisdiction borders as they are to disregard intranational (e.g., U.S. state) borders and anything less is morally the same as South African Apartheid.

Nearly every user interface and product from Apple has been aesthetically and functionally ugly, from the orginal MacOS to iTunes. I don’t think I can blame Steve Jobs, as NextStep was wonderful. (Yes, I know OS X is derived from NextStep. They ruined it.)

Note that to the extent readiness to host certain beliefs is under evolutionary pressure my first two beliefs and perhaps the third would be strongly selected against.

Mostly I am an absurd hypocrite: I have a sex drive (but I gather it is less out of control than the average person’s), I have no intention of committing suicide, immediately or otherwise (but I think it is not absurd to expect relatively little suffering in wealthy parts of the 21st century), I live in the national jurisdiction I was born in (do I get any credit for 2000 miles away?), but I have never owned an Apple product.

Dev Purkayastha, riffing on two of my recent posts, writes:

[Close-the-borders-protect-the-jawbs] is clearly winning out over intellectualized arguments by economists. I’ve mulling a strong counter-message that has more of an intuitive and emotional base. I’d love some feedback.

Why immigration? Because we need to make more Americans. America has influence around the world, but it’s identity has been suffering as of late. You could say that the “American Brand” has been grossly mismanaged, seen as how the political stock of Hamas and other pro-fundamentalist apparatchiks has grown in the post-Iraq world.

I would say that our openness to new immigrants and new ideas is a great tool to improve America’s reputation in the world. By helping hard-working immigrants find prosperity in America, we can be making the equivalent of “brand evangelists” for America. When they visit home and communicate with their loved ones, they’ll have some first-hand experience that America is more than the one-sided stories their politicians give them.

I agree that the “brand” of the U.S. and more significantly of capitalism has been horribly mismanaged. (On a distantly related note, branding the market is the trump card in a debate in the current issue of Reason magazine.)

I don’t find Dev’s “make more Amurricans/improve Amurrica’s reputation” pro-immigration framing particularly compelling and don’t imagine it would hold much water with the “protect the jawbs” crowd, though it may do something for the “national greatness” crowd.

Another very workable argument for minor reform is that the U.S. requires foreign students to maintain technological competitiveness.

If you want an emotional, intuitive, or as Dev says “social justice” framing, try apartheid.

Three cheers for Arnold Kling:

“Where would you prefer that people be poor?” That is, do we want to insist that poor Hispanics should remain in their native countries, because we want to make our own national statistics on health insurance coverage and poverty look better?
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In my view, economists have to be relatively favorable toward immigration, just as we have to be relatively favorable to free trade in general. It’s our job to lean against xenophobia.

But does Kling realize that immigration will destroy the market system (not)?

Comments on a depressing must-read Katrina aftermath account went far afield, including a suggestion to leave the U.S., which among others prompted Anna Feruglio Dal Dan to comment:

Moving is not easy in this wonderful globalized society where barriers and stuff like that have to be taken out for the sake of the Market. The system depends on not letting people move around freely across borders.

I wonder about such things, so I had to ask:

How do you figure the market system depends on not letting people move? If people were free to move across borders would you expect the market system to crumble? Why?

Anna responded:

Because it would mean that a whole bunch of people who are paid a pittance in Rumania to make cheap bras would move to the UK to make them there for a helluva lot of more money. End of cheap labor. Collapse of affluent societies under the strain of immigration. Nobody left to buy the bras.

So I gather the argument is roughly as follows:

1. Markets and/or affluence requires “cheap” labor (remember cheapness is always relative)
2. By virtue of moving to affluent countries labor that was cheap will be expensive
3. No more cheap goods due to lack of cheap labor
4. Affluent societies collapse

I see one non-sequitur after another. However, if I thought affluence primarily results from exploitation of the non-affluent (as I suspect Anna does) rather than from high productivity (as I do) the argument would more or less make sense.

People moving from poor areas to wealthy areas would earn more, but probably not nearly as much as the typical already-weathy resident, largely because (e.g.) Rumanians aren’t as productive as Britons (due to poorer skills, not genetic inferiority; their descendents will be equally productive). Rumanians-in-the-U.K. will still be relatively cheap labor. (Wage controls could decrease their cheapness, but that will either result in lots of unemployed Rumanians-in-the-U.K. or not so many moving.)

We also have examples of lots of poor people being integrated into affluent economies, e.g., largely unrestricted European immigration into the U.S. around a century ago and (unfortunately) restricted but still large immigration into the U.S. from Mexico and elsewhere now. Two recent studies show that current immigration is having little effect on “native” wages–the already affluent can still afford to buy bras. American society didn’t and hasn’t collapsed.

A more interesting example may be post-apartheid South Africa. In some ways this may be a better model for what would happen in an open immigration world than U.S. immigration, as immigrants have never been a majority in the U.S., while (relatively poor) Africans are the majority in South Africa, as the relatively poor are the majority in the world (in other ways the proximity of relatively poor and wealthy societies in South Africa makes it a bad model–many Rumanians just aren’t going to move across a contient regardless of wage differentials).

I haven’t looked for post-apartheid wage data before (I plan to now), but a paper on Education and Racial Inequality in Post-Apartheid South Africa from last year seems to indicate that there is a decreased but still very large earnings differential between blacks and whites. Apparently there is still relatively cheap labor available to make bras, and South Africa hasn’t collapsed.

Anyhow, I find it amusing that both the marxist-influenced and the bigoted agree that open immigration would cause the collapse of American society, they just don’t agree on whether that would be a good thing!

I don’t think open immigration would destroy capitalism or end affluence (the opposite in both cases), but reagardless for moral reaons I think restrictions on movement and employment must be ended, roughly the same reasons South African Apartheid had to go.

Randolph Fritz also responded:

Mike, there is free movement of capital, but not of labor. Somehow I doubt that this is good for wages.

Not good for wages, but not as bad as both being restricted would be.

Both labor and capital should be free to seek their highest returns anywhere on earth. If they aren’t, they won’t obtain their highest returns, which is bad for wages.

deleteTheBorder.org, “towards a global network of movements against borders”, is promoting an anti-Minute man protest in San Diego. There’s a benefit for the protest in San Francisco on September 8 that I may attend.

Yes, these folks reject capitalism, whatever that means these days, but their other ideas are good, and if they think eliminating borders is going to sweep away capitalism, well … please continue to work on eliminating borders! I like this:

Migration controls hurt everyone’s freedom and privacy. Some of us are more directly targeted and affected by these policies, but all of our lives are being reshaped by them. We are in this struggle not only to reject and stop these racist attacks, but to move towards a world without borders, a world of liberation for all people.

And add the excellent Manifesto for the Abolition of International Apartheid to your network.

September 21 Peter Laufer, author of Wetback Nation: The Case for Opening the Mexican-American Border (I have not read it), and economist Benjamin Powell are speaking at the Independent Institute near the Oakland airport on Immigration Wars: Open or Closed Borders for America? I doubt I’ll be able to attend, but I expect it to be an informative event.

I claim that legal restrictions on the ability of people to travel, work and live across national borders is equivalent to apartheid, so naturally I’m intrigued by Randy McDonald’s Towards A Typology of Apartheid in response to a query from Jonathan Edelstein. McDonald lists six characteristics of an apartheid regime. Let’s see how the international version stacks up (read McDonald’s post for descriptions, I only reproduce openings below):

The group favouring apartheid is either a minority population or about to become a minority population.

In the case of the U.S. anti-immigration activists see an imminent threat anglo culture being swamped and ruined by hispanics and harbor fears that Mexican “elites” plan with the help of Mexicans living in the U.S. to reconquer the southwestern U.S., lost by Mexico in the war of 1848.

The group favouring apartheid believes itself to be indigenous.

In spades.

The group favouring apartheid believes that it must act immediately.

Anti-immigration activists want a “temporary” moratorium on all immigration and immediate “sealing” of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Under apartheid, each group must develop separately.

Check. They should fix their own country instead of coming here and stealing our jawbs and living off welfare, natch.

The group behind the apartheid system must establish as complete a monopoly over power as possible.

This may be a stretch, but consider the extent to which U.S. relations with and interventions in Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, and others are aimed at assuring that “they” don’t come “here” in masses.

Defending the apartheid system requires constant vigilance.

Of course. This feels like a throwaway, but I’ll note that anti-immigration activists often claim that “we” face an invasion. What but vigilance could be required?

I think McDonald may have missed two characteristics:

The apartheid system is natural. The regime only gives the force of law to the natural ordering of things. People naturally live and work in their homelands and are most comfortable in their own culture.

The apartheid system is moral. People who are not born into a culture cannot really buy into a culture and introducing these people leads to moral rot and cultural decline.

I apologize for the U.S.-centric nature of the above. Similar could be written concerning anywhere non-open borders exist, particularly where freedom and economic opportunities available to individuals differ greatly across borders.

Credit (and blame) where due: Kudos to Bill Gates for clearly saying that H-1B caps should be scrapped. Yes, and so should all other restrictions on travel and work across borders.

Gates and others have warned that American companies need foreign engineering talent to stay competitive. I believe that is the case for most businesses, but if there was an exception it should be Microsoft. There should be no advantage to being close to the customer in developing shrink-wrap software, as the customer is everywhere. Why should a shrink-wrap developer care about where engineering talent is located? Why not, e.g., move all Microsoft Office development to Hyderabad? Inertia I suppose. It may be hard to relocate Office development anywhere outside the Seattle area. Surely any wholly new shrink-wrap development teams ought to be located outside the U.S, barring H-1B liberalization.

Via Techdirt.

Today I discovered and now wholly endorse the Manifesto for the Abolition of International Apartheid written in 1997 by Yves Bonnardel and David Olivier. A plain copy without intrusive Lycos France ads is here. Read it.

More forthcoming and previous in my apartheid category.