9 ms·

Open borders will, at first, cause downward pressure on wages, as the labor pool of workers able and willing to perform work for a lower price grows. The magnit

Open borders will, at first, cause downward pressure on wages, as the labor pool of workers able and willing to perform work for a lower price grows. The magnitude would be more pronounced than with what we've been currently able to observe with controlled borders, because the article proposes a scenario where welfare and public assistance would readily apply to newcomers too. In fact, there would be a growth in the lucrative industry of coyotes who offer transportation and relocation assistance, because their line of work would now be legitimate. Increased demand for housing will cause costs to spike, which means that those most willing and able to pay larger amounts will live where they wish, and everyone else will be relegated to far outskirts, including nonimmigrants whose incomes fall further behind cost of living. In this scheme, generous profits will be made by landowners of high-demand locations, and shareholders of corporations who can take advantage of the influx of labor and the expanded customer base. It's not too different from our world's current direction, except within a particular state, the absolute numbers of the wage class and the underclass would be much larger.

cheez 8y ago
Correct, the ones getting richer won't be the plebs.
- Matticus_Rex 8y ago
  That's inconsistent with the data, considering economic immigrants nearly always end up better off. Did you mean that the native plebs wouldn't be getting richer? That's at least arguable, but carries some interesting connotations.
intopieces 8y ago
>Because the article proposes a scenario where welfare and public assistance would readily apply to newcomers too. FTA: “If the worry is that future migrants might not pay their way, why not charge them more for visas, or make them pay extra taxes, or restrict their access to welfare benefits? Such levies could also be used to regulate the flow of migrants, thus avoiding big, sudden surges.”
- smsm42 8y ago
  > why not charge them more for visas, Because illegal immigrants do not use visas. So you would be hurting law-abiding people and encouraging circumventing the law - if you can't afford the visa anyway, the question of "should I just through the hoops to get legal visa or try illegal immigration" becomes moot. > make them pay extra taxes Why would they pay those taxes? They'd just work on black market and report zero income and apply for welfare. High tax burdens reliably breeds avoidance and lack of compliance, especially in population that is kinda on the sidelines of the law as it is, as it often happens with migrants. And of course it would also sell awfully in the press - imagine an article of how a migrant from Guatemala pays a higher tax rate taxes than a billionaire born in New Jersey - how that would look in next congressional debate? > restrict their access to welfare benefits You can do it, but then you'd get exactly what welfare benefits are created to remove - a large population of people who do not have access to basic services, and thus have high level of disease, crime, misery and human suffering. If you accept the idea that welfare benefits are necessary because we should not have too many people like that in our society, then denying people in the country these benefits because they were born in wrong place contradicts this idea. Gating the access to this system on immigration status contradicts the whole premise of having the welfare system. I don't think there's a logically consistent model of welfare state with open borders at all - unless we somehow postulate that welfare spending has a reasonably low upper bound, which I haven't seen proven anywhere. > Such levies could also be used to regulate the flow of migrants, Of course you could, but why charging lots of money for visa would be more effective in solving problems we have now than any other method that's been used? > thus avoiding big, sudden surges.” Big, sudden surges usually happen due to wars, famines, economic collapses and other such events, in which case I seriously doubt visa prices are going to change anything.
  - gremlinsinc 8y ago
    Easy solution to all this. End income taxes. Make consumption tax + national id system. With id you pay 4%, without you pay 15-20%. Make the consumption tax be on everything : Wages, Rent, Mortgage, Food, etc... if you spend money on something it's taxed at the point of payment. - By wages - I mean the company pays the tax. If a person or company pays money or exchanges money it's taxed. Shareholder dividends, CEO bonuses, all taxed. You could then fund a guaranteed basic income (for citizens only), and just adjust the sales/tax yearly to balance the budget-- everyone pays taxes, no deductions are given, but GBI would guarantee people wouldn't live in poverty at all. It'd be easier to manage technically so we could dismantle welfare and handout programs as well as the IRS.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Eridrus 8y ago
I've been thinking a bit about this lately, and I think you could achieve this slowly in the US with an expansion of the visa lottery process.
- jonnrb 8y ago
  My thoughts too, and the article sort of says this at the end. If the worry is that future migrants might not pay their way, why not charge them more for visas, or make them pay extra taxes, or restrict their access to welfare benefits? Such levies could also be used to regulate the flow of migrants, thus avoiding big, sudden surges. This is what the US does right now through the lottery system but it's just so restricted that no one in their right mind could call the US borders "open".
  - int_19h 8y ago
    What do you mean? The lottery just gives you a green card. Once you have it, you can apply for naturalization in 5 years. Once you get your citizenship, you have pretty much all the rights and benefits as any other citizen, except you can't get elected president.
    - jonnrb 8y ago
      I was more referring to the big sudden surges part in that there is in fact a lottery acting to regulate the flow of migrants. I'd even go so far as to say that under many circumstances, a green card gets you many of the important rights and benefits as any US citizen (other than voting of course).
joefranklinsr 8y ago
If this was true, then US being the biggest immigrant-friendly country in the world, would do so in a heartbeat. But neither the government nor corporations are advocating this. America currently has the biggest economy in the world, an average of $58,000 income, a low 3.9% unemployment rate while enjoying GDP growth rate of close to 5% in Q2, as well as close to 220,000 new jobs every month, and growth in wage increases. In some areas (like silicon valley), employees are offered 200k-300k salaries. It got to here by having a strong republic/democracy and rules and laws, support technologies in public and private sectors, limit immigration to skill-based, and recently choosing to lower corporate tax rate and reduce corporation regulations.
- gloriousduke 8y ago
  How does the rosiness of this assessment jive with the UN’s report that 40 million Americans live in poverty? Perhaps they are an ancillary component of such a Republic?
  - joefranklinsr 8y ago
    if we look at this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentage_of_population_living_in_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentag... it would appear US is in similar leagues with Canada, Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, etc, of having close to 0-1% in poverty. Check out the other countries in Asia or Africa if you really think America has it bad.
    - setr 8y ago
      Theres only ~300 million people in the us, so the gp's source is claiming something like 10% poverty Something's clearly misaligned with the definition of poverty between your sources; you're differing by an order of magnitude
      - schoen 8y ago
        That's a huge difference. I assume different sources did use quite different measures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty#Measuring_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty#Measuring_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_threshold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_threshold
mbesto 8y ago
This is all very interesting and some of this makes sense, but like most economics practice, it's utterly impossible to predict the moves and motives of every party involved when change economic policy. In other words - this all sounds good, but people are irrational and it's hard to predict that irrationality on a global scale. Source - Every economists research that either does or does not come true from proposed changes in economic policy.
rory096 8y ago
>In fact, there would be a growth in the lucrative industry of coyotes who offer transportation and relocation assistance, because their line of work would now be legitimate. This is true if you define 'coyote' as anyone who transports an immigrant to their destination country. Most people would just call them 'airlines', just as immigrants used to arrive on 'ocean liners'. >Increased demand for housing will cause costs to spike This is only true in the presence of severe restrictions on supply. These exist in some, but not all, areas of the United States with high immigrant populations. http://www.nber.org/papers/w13071.pdf http://www.nber.org/papers/w13071.pdf >It's not too different from our world's current direction, except within a particular state, the absolute numbers of the wage class and the underclass would be much larger. For a thought-provoking modest proposal to realize these potential gains and ensure they are captured by current working-class Americans, see the Posner-Weyl Sponsor an Immigrant plan. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/13/immigration-visas-economics-216968 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/13/immigrati...

cheez 8y ago

Correct, the ones getting richer won't be the plebs.

Matticus_Rex 8y ago
That's inconsistent with the data, considering economic immigrants nearly always end up better off. Did you mean that the native plebs wouldn't be getting richer? That's at least arguable, but carries some interesting connotations.

intopieces 8y ago

>Because the article proposes a scenario where welfare and public assistance would readily apply to newcomers too. FTA: “If the worry is that future migrants might not pay their way, why not charge them more for visas, or make them pay extra taxes, or restrict their access to welfare benefits? Such levies could also be used to regulate the flow of migrants, thus avoiding big, sudden surges.”

smsm42 8y ago
> why not charge them more for visas, Because illegal immigrants do not use visas. So you would be hurting law-abiding people and encouraging circumventing the law - if you can't afford the visa anyway, the question of "should I just through the hoops to get legal visa or try illegal immigration" becomes moot. > make them pay extra taxes Why would they pay those taxes? They'd just work on black market and report zero income and apply for welfare. High tax burdens reliably breeds avoidance and lack of compliance, especially in population that is kinda on the sidelines of the law as it is, as it often happens with migrants. And of course it would also sell awfully in the press - imagine an article of how a migrant from Guatemala pays a higher tax rate taxes than a billionaire born in New Jersey - how that would look in next congressional debate? > restrict their access to welfare benefits You can do it, but then you'd get exactly what welfare benefits are created to remove - a large population of people who do not have access to basic services, and thus have high level of disease, crime, misery and human suffering. If you accept the idea that welfare benefits are necessary because we should not have too many people like that in our society, then denying people in the country these benefits because they were born in wrong place contradicts this idea. Gating the access to this system on immigration status contradicts the whole premise of having the welfare system. I don't think there's a logically consistent model of welfare state with open borders at all - unless we somehow postulate that welfare spending has a reasonably low upper bound, which I haven't seen proven anywhere. > Such levies could also be used to regulate the flow of migrants, Of course you could, but why charging lots of money for visa would be more effective in solving problems we have now than any other method that's been used? > thus avoiding big, sudden surges.” Big, sudden surges usually happen due to wars, famines, economic collapses and other such events, in which case I seriously doubt visa prices are going to change anything.
- gremlinsinc 8y ago
  Easy solution to all this. End income taxes. Make consumption tax + national id system. With id you pay 4%, without you pay 15-20%. Make the consumption tax be on everything : Wages, Rent, Mortgage, Food, etc... if you spend money on something it's taxed at the point of payment. - By wages - I mean the company pays the tax. If a person or company pays money or exchanges money it's taxed. Shareholder dividends, CEO bonuses, all taxed. You could then fund a guaranteed basic income (for citizens only), and just adjust the sales/tax yearly to balance the budget-- everyone pays taxes, no deductions are given, but GBI would guarantee people wouldn't live in poverty at all. It'd be easier to manage technically so we could dismantle welfare and handout programs as well as the IRS.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Eridrus 8y ago

I've been thinking a bit about this lately, and I think you could achieve this slowly in the US with an expansion of the visa lottery process.

jonnrb 8y ago
My thoughts too, and the article sort of says this at the end. If the worry is that future migrants might not pay their way, why not charge them more for visas, or make them pay extra taxes, or restrict their access to welfare benefits? Such levies could also be used to regulate the flow of migrants, thus avoiding big, sudden surges. This is what the US does right now through the lottery system but it's just so restricted that no one in their right mind could call the US borders "open".
- int_19h 8y ago
  What do you mean? The lottery just gives you a green card. Once you have it, you can apply for naturalization in 5 years. Once you get your citizenship, you have pretty much all the rights and benefits as any other citizen, except you can't get elected president.
  - jonnrb 8y ago
    I was more referring to the big sudden surges part in that there is in fact a lottery acting to regulate the flow of migrants. I'd even go so far as to say that under many circumstances, a green card gets you many of the important rights and benefits as any US citizen (other than voting of course).

joefranklinsr 8y ago

If this was true, then US being the biggest immigrant-friendly country in the world, would do so in a heartbeat. But neither the government nor corporations are advocating this. America currently has the biggest economy in the world, an average of $58,000 income, a low 3.9% unemployment rate while enjoying GDP growth rate of close to 5% in Q2, as well as close to 220,000 new jobs every month, and growth in wage increases. In some areas (like silicon valley), employees are offered 200k-300k salaries. It got to here by having a strong republic/democracy and rules and laws, support technologies in public and private sectors, limit immigration to skill-based, and recently choosing to lower corporate tax rate and reduce corporation regulations.

gloriousduke 8y ago
How does the rosiness of this assessment jive with the UN’s report that 40 million Americans live in poverty? Perhaps they are an ancillary component of such a Republic?
- joefranklinsr 8y ago
  if we look at this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentage_of_population_living_in_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentag... it would appear US is in similar leagues with Canada, Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, etc, of having close to 0-1% in poverty. Check out the other countries in Asia or Africa if you really think America has it bad.
  - setr 8y ago
    Theres only ~300 million people in the us, so the gp's source is claiming something like 10% poverty Something's clearly misaligned with the definition of poverty between your sources; you're differing by an order of magnitude
    - schoen 8y ago
      That's a huge difference. I assume different sources did use quite different measures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty#Measuring_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty#Measuring_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_threshold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_threshold

mbesto 8y ago

This is all very interesting and some of this makes sense, but like most economics practice, it's utterly impossible to predict the moves and motives of every party involved when change economic policy. In other words - this all sounds good, but people are irrational and it's hard to predict that irrationality on a global scale. Source - Every economists research that either does or does not come true from proposed changes in economic policy.

rory096 8y ago

>In fact, there would be a growth in the lucrative industry of coyotes who offer transportation and relocation assistance, because their line of work would now be legitimate. This is true if you define 'coyote' as anyone who transports an immigrant to their destination country. Most people would just call them 'airlines', just as immigrants used to arrive on 'ocean liners'. >Increased demand for housing will cause costs to spike This is only true in the presence of severe restrictions on supply. These exist in some, but not all, areas of the United States with high immigrant populations. http://www.nber.org/papers/w13071.pdf http://www.nber.org/papers/w13071.pdf >It's not too different from our world's current direction, except within a particular state, the absolute numbers of the wage class and the underclass would be much larger. For a thought-provoking modest proposal to realize these potential gains and ensure they are captured by current working-class Americans, see the Posner-Weyl Sponsor an Immigrant plan. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/13/immigration-visas-economics-216968 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/13/immigrati...