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If people could migrate freely around the world to seek work, economists crudely estimate that world GDP would roughly double, and that most of this enormous wi

If people could migrate freely around the world to seek work, economists crudely estimate that world GDP would roughly double, and that most of this enormous windfall would go to the poorest people on Earth. There is literally a hundred trillion dollar bill on the sidewalk for bringing together third-world labor and first-world legal systems, capital, and service demand. Instead the first world does its best to wall itself off from economic migrants, because the right fears that migration will threaten their culture and the left fears that migration will threaten the welfare state. As with any prohibition, the economic opportunity gets colonized by criminals. People seeking a better life will be taken advantage of and some of them will even wind up worse off than they started. But the root problem isn't the criminals, and it isn't customers who want cheap electronics. It's the prohibition of migration.

yasp 8y ago
See "We Wanted Workers" by economist George Borjas for a more skeptical treatment of this "hundred trillion dollar bill" lying on the sidewalk.
- voidmain 8y ago
  I haven't read his book. But Borjas, who is to be clear a bit of an outlier among economists who have studied the problem, has in the papers I've looked at estimated that immigration is (slightly) a net economic negative for the very least skilled workers in the first world. This is nowhere close to saying that the net economic effect of immigration, including the benefits to the immigrants, is negative.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - yasp 8y ago
    It's a short and well written book, I'd recommend it if you're interested. One point that Borjas makes repeatedly is that he believes there is a suppression of reporting on the negative impacts of immigration liberalization. He also notes how on several occasions colleagues expressed surprise and dismay that he chose to publish findings that "went against the narrative", out of fear that they could embholden enemies of liberalized migration. Therefore, I would be cautious of drawing much from consensus or deviation therefrom.
  - creato 8y ago
    > has in the papers I've looked at estimated that immigration is (slightly) a net economic negative for the very least skilled workers in the first world. How can you possibly recognize this and still decide that your proposal makes sense, in light of events like the presidency of Donald Trump and Brexit? What we have now is a drop in the bucket compared to unrestricted migration, and it's already quite possibly indirectly causing massive political upheaval that threatens to destabilize the first world.
CJefferson 8y ago
While I'd love that to be true, economist's predictions don't have a good track record. Is there any good examples we can use to give evidence of thus massive claim?
- throwawaymath 8y ago
  Why do you believe economists' predictions don't have a good track record?
  - ionised 8y ago
    Maybe because of their track record?
    - throwawaymath 8y ago
      Can you share any examples?
      - CJefferson 8y ago
        Well, the inability to predict recessions, or the general moves of the economy for a start.
        throwawaymath 8y ago
        That seems a little shortsighted. Do you also think climatologists and meteorologists are charlatans because they can't predict hurricanes or blizzards more than weeks in advance? You'll have to do better than that, because the majority of economic literature does not attempt to forecast movements, it attempts to model them and understand them. The "track record" you speak of is not actually the track record of economics, it's just a meme armchair economists like to repeat (generally without a non-snarky defense of their point).
- voidmain 8y ago
  It's not exactly hard to find anecdotal evidence. For example, Haitian households living in the US had a 2015 median income of $47,200. I don't know exactly how to translate this into per capita terms, but Haiti has a per capita GDP of something like $730. I'm sure that these groups of people are not perfectly comparable in every way, but it's certainly suggestive that people can make a better life for themselves here than in Haiti. How do you think you would fare in Haiti? If you want a more rigorous extrapolation, which tries to account for confounding factors and isn't limited to one pair of countries... you are going to have to look at the research (of economists).
fvdessen 8y ago
A large part of what makes the first world so productive is its culture and welfare system. When new people come in they need to be trained to understand this culture and system. This training takes work and time and that puts a limit on the number of yearly newcomers. I do not find it irrational to want to keep this working in a sustainable way.
- grad_ml 8y ago
  "economic migrants" need almost zero training. However, I do agree that this will put pressure on already complacent welfare system, or group of people and may cause new economic, social regrouping, wealth distribution etc. To provide services, one would be incentivized to integrate.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >To provide services, one would be incentivized to integrate. Only as long as one doesn't have a sizeable presence in the host country.
    - grad_ml 8y ago
      I disagree. Incentive to get recurring business mandates integration. Also, if the presence is not sizable enough, they would largely go unnoticed, so, integrate or not, it doesn't matter.
  - fvdessen 8y ago
    > On can't/rarely provide services and choose not to be aware of local customs/traditions. [...] To provide services, one would be incentivized to integrate. It is completely possible to provide services without integration in insular communities, which tend to appear when newcomers come faster than they can integrate.
    - grad_ml 8y ago
      it's absolutely possible to spend whole winter in a thin cotton shirt, but most of us prefer not to do.
raverbashing 8y ago
This is a naive, or maybe even a Pollyannistic view on migration. The right and the left (as quoted) are not wrong. Though this doesn't mean countries should isolate themselves, but there seems to be an intrinsic human limitation on how many people it can trust and relate at one time.
walshemj 8y ago
But their living costs will rise immensely and that's not assuming they are not take advantage of like the "polish" gamemasters who took advantage of their own country men. Telling them oh all those benefits they aren't for polish workers - not quite slavery but not far off.
mindslight 8y ago
Your proposal relies on said economists being entirely correct, not having reasoned with broken models and metrics. Yet widespread distrust caused by the results of their overarching prescriptions is exactly the crossroads we're at. Opening up a closed system can only work if the assumptions of that closed system are compatible with openness! Under the present monetary policy of an inflationary treadmill, wages are generally consumed by rent rather than able to be saved into distributed wealth. This undermines the natural feedback whereby workers would build individual bargaining power. Increasing the competition would (of course) immediately benefit the poorest labor, but would further undermine labor's overall bargaining position thus exacerbating the modern winner-take-all trend. We at least need to figure out how we can get developed societies' equilibrium for "full time employment" down to around where it should be from technological progress and women having entered the workforce (say 15 hours per week) before we go stoking the pyre with even more workers, lest we all end up as forced labor.
- jrs95 8y ago
  I wouldn’t be surprised if the underlying motivation to this is essentially to make us all into forced labor. That probably would be great for global GDP, if that’s your only metric for success.
coldtea 8y ago
>Instead the first world does its best to wall itself off from economic migrants, because the right fears that migration will threaten their culture and the left fears that migration will threaten the welfare state. Well, unless you also propose the dissolvement of the world's countries as sovereign states, having a country means protecting its culture, way of life, and assets for its inhabitants. How would the freedom for "everyone in the world" to move there, for example, would work for Switzerland, for example, a cosy country of 8 million people? Would it be totally find if e.g. 9 million people from another culture come in, change the cultural climate in the place, and vote their politicians into power? "If people could migrate freely around the world" what would stop that from happening? Or why not just bring in 350 million Chinese into the US (they'd have more than a billion more to spare), and have them rule the place?
- jabgrabdthrow 8y ago
  Let me stop you right there, lest you propose any form socialism limited to just your nation, national socialism
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  > "If people could migrate freely around the world" what would stop that from happening? Most people wouldn't want to move. The EU has freedom of movement, and there's plenty of migration, but it's not like everyone from Romania up and moves to Germany.
  - vetinari 8y ago
    Romanians cannot just move to Germany, because they are not in Schengen zone. The other East European countries also couldn't, they had 7 years long limitation on movement (they could enter, but not work in the bordering countries). Nowadays, they can work there, but they still have no right to request social security or other social services. You can not have both free social services and totally open borders without ruining your economy. Pick one or another.
    - arcticbull 8y ago
ktta 8y ago
https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2017/07/13/a-world-of-free-movement-would-be-78-trillion-richer https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2017/07/13/a-world-of...
pjdemers 8y ago
What would the rent be for an apartment in San Francisco or New York or London if anyone in the world could move there? I think the real windfall would go to property owners in the most desirable places to live.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  Probably about the same. I'm presuming that the people able to pay the current high prices already have pretty high freedom of movement.
  - obscurantist 8y ago
    People in other parts of the Bay Area still don't move to San Francisco or have any desire to, even if they have the means.
rvern 8y ago
Open borders are truly one of our civilization’s best low-hanging fruits. https://openborders.info/double-world-gdp/ https://openborders.info/double-world-gdp/
xb1111 8y ago
Who is this new voting brigade that is pushing ideological crap to the top during the first hour of a submission?
jrs95 8y ago
Yeah, I don’t particularly care if economists think it will boost global GDP by 10x, I’m never going to be on board with that. Abolishing borders is essentially the same as abolishing nations, and in that case who has the power then? Certainly not me, or anyone that has anything in common with me. Our “democracy” sucks enough as it is, why the hell would I want to sell out national sovereignty to global capitalist interests? Honestly, I’d rather make a change in the opposite direction and have governments that actually represent their people at the cost of halving global GDP, if that’s what it takes. There are many more important things than money.
- jpatokal 8y ago
  Assuming you're writing this from the US, your county and state authorities already have a lot of power even though they don't control immigration.
WalterBright 8y ago
Another way is to bring economic freedom to poor countries.
rblion 8y ago
This is a great summary of many world problems
crooked-v 8y ago
While broadly I agree with this comment, I'm annoyed by the smug South Park centricism of "the left and the right are both wrong", when in the current political climate of the US the left generally want less restrictions on immigration while the right are literally taking babies away from mothers to try and scare away future asylum-seekers.
- gedy 8y ago
  > the left generally want less restrictions on immigration Frankly though, many do to "import the proletarians" and use them as a permanent underclass to point at, and to further their political agenda. That's not necessarily "right" either.
rayiner 8y ago
Except it doesn’t work like that. I’m from Bangladesh. What would happen if 100 million Bangladeshis moved to the US? Would we continue to have a first world legal system, etc? The answer is no. Instead, we would be tearing down the statue of liberty: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/world/asia/bangladesh-statue-justice-supreme-court-islam.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/world/asia/bangladesh-... We know this will happen. Bangladesh was in fact a grand experiment in this regard. After independence in the 1970s, an intellectual elite gave the country a western style constitution, with principles of secularity and freedom. What did the Bangladeshis do with it? They quickly repealed those provisions, made Islam the official religion, etc. It is a popular mental dysfunction in the west to deny that culture matters. To believe that the west’s material wealth is the result of random chance, rather than what people believe, how they act, and what they do.
- wu-ikkyu 8y ago
  >What would happen if 100 million Bangladeshis moved to the US? Would we continue to have a first world legal system, etc? The answer is no It's ironic that people in the US who have such great fear of immigrants worry about being overrun by criminals, when the US itself already has by far the highest amount of criminals locked in prison in the world. >Instead, we would be tearing down the statue of liberty Quite silly to point to mere symbolism (whether or not a statue exists) while ignoring the physical reality of human suffering behind bars.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    Who said anything about criminals? Bangladeshis are by and large law abiding. But more than 1/3 believe that people who leave Islam should be put to death. The problem isn’t crime.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - wu-ikkyu 8y ago
      Is country X's incarceration rate not related to the quality of it's legal system and institutions?
api 8y ago
A deeper problem for the rich countries is that the entire economic system is built for perpetual inflation. Everything has to always go up. Free migration is deflationary. Wide nominal wage declines would cause cascading default across the entire economy.
tiatia123 8y ago
My professor always said, ideas are like hemorrhoids, every asshole sooner or later gets some. "If people could migrate freely around the world to seek work, economists crudely estimate that world GDP would roughly double, and that most of this enormous windfall would go to the poorest people on Earth. There is literally a hundred trillion dollar bill on the sidewalk for bringing together third-world labor and first-world legal systems, capital, and service demand." You realize that many, if not most third world countries are third world countries because of the mentality, religion (won't mention it, no worries) and tribal thinking? This is exactly the problem we have in Europe. I don't mind immigrants, not at all. But they come here and bring their beliefs, values (about women, violence etc.) and tribal thinking and create here exactly the problems they have in their home country. They see our apples and they want to have apples too. But they don't get the idea that the apples could have anything to do with the tree they are growing on.
- forapurpose 8y ago
  > My professor always said, ideas are like hemorrhoids, every asshole sooner or later gets some. What does that contribute? That could apply to your idea too, or mine. > they come here and bring their beliefs, values (about women, violence etc.) and tribal thinking and create here exactly the problems they have in their home country. They see our apples and they want to have apples too. But they don't get the idea that the apples could have anything to do with the tree they are growing on. This is really an incredibly broad stereotype to paint on hundreds of millions of individuals. Perhaps like you, they should be judged on their individual actions and have the right to believe what they like. And who is the parent to judge others and take away their rights? I don't like the parent's beliefs (which I find especially based on "tribal" ideas)' should they be ejected from my country if they are my neighbor? (No, absolutely not.)
  - tiatia123 8y ago
    > What does that contribute? That could apply to your idea too, or mine. It is intellectual over-engineering of cultures. It looks tremendously good on paper. > This is really an incredibly broad stereotype to paint on hundreds of millions of individuals. No, it really isn't since Europe is not flooded with Chinese, Americans or Australians but with people with a very low skill set, very different attitude towards violence and women, from tribal societies and with a religion they feel is far superior. > And who is the parent to judge others and take away their rights? I am not judging them. I don't even say that their culture is inferior. If an industrialized society breaks down (think Mad Max if you want) they are in a far superior position. The question is: If women should have no rights, if you have the best religion, if you want to bury gay people alive, why not stay in your home country? By the way, I am just visiting Romania. Romania is willing to take refuges but refuges are not willing to take Romania. Why? No living on welfare...
ng12 8y ago
> Instead the first world does its best to wall itself off from economic migrants Wouldn't free economic migration lower the standard of living in the wealthiest of countries?
naveen99 8y ago
It’s starting to happen already. The rich can migrate freely today. And their are more rich everyday in poor countries. We used to send money back to our relatives in india. Now they could be sending us money as their land investments have been very profitable. Once google translate is a little more flawless and real-time from audio to audio, we will see real movement. Already with Uber and internet it’s much easier to travel without being scammed.
forapurpose 8y ago
> the right fears that migration will threaten their culture and the left fears that migration will threaten the welfare state Perhaps the parent is trying to be even-handed, but I don't see the left opposing immigration; they seem to support it. It also matches the philosophy of the center - the Clinton democrats and internationalist business people of the GOP. Here are some surveys I quickly found; both say immigration is supported by the left: https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/americans-views-immigration-policy https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/americans-views-immig... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/01/22/americans-broadly-embrace-the-democratic-immigration-position-but-are-divided-on-trumps-crackdown/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/01/22/a...
profalseidol 8y ago
> and the left fears that migration will threaten the welfare state. to my scale, these are neo-nazis, not left at all.
djrobstep 8y ago
The left fears no such thing. There are no serious anti-immigration voices on the left.
- voidmain 8y ago
  To give an example, in a 2016 interview Sanders referred to open borders as a "right-wing" "Koch brothers proposal". Trump is worse, is that what you want to hear? I'm not trying to draw a moral equivalence. But I think the barriers to immigration raised over the last century and more everywhere in the first world are something that can't be blamed on any single party or political movement.
- DrScump 8y ago
  When the Democratic Party had full control of Congress and the Presidency, they were (collectively) very much against illegal immigration[0]. This is why they passed no "reform" legislation whatsoever. [0] now-Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=728SW65tlU0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=728SW65tlU0
  - djrobstep 8y ago
    The Democrats are a party of liberalism, not leftism. Try again.
nine_k 8y ago
The problem is that it's not the third world's population should go to first-world countries. It's first-world's legal and economic (and associated societal) technology should extend to the third world. Third world's elites fear it because it will render most of them irrelevant (and it will). Third world's nationalists and leftists fear it because it will change the local culture to look like the fat bourgeois western culture (and it will). The previous foray into this was tried at the times of colonialism; the results are ... mixed even by the most favorable account.
toomanybeersies 8y ago
I'm conflicted on this issue. First off, I'm an economic migrant. I also had the privilege of being able to move without a skilled work visa. I'm all for freedom of movement, I think that borders are an artificial construct that cause more harm than good. But we need to balance that with the fact that unchecked migration can cause excessive strain on infrastructure, cause cultural clashes, and potentially cause lowered quality of life for residents of the country being emigrated to, caused by residents being priced out of the market by workers willing to work for near-nothing because it's still better than the wages back at home. New Zealand has suffered a lot of these problems. Auckland in particular suffering from the strain of high levels of immigration on its infrastructure. There simply isn't enough housing for all the people. You end up with people sharing rooms and packing out apartments like a slum. I've heard of people fitting 4 people to a room using bunk beds. So you've got 12 people in a 3 bedroom apartment. The apartments aren't designed for this kind of population density, and it pushes out people who want a decent quality of life and a room to themselves, as they're priced out by people willing to share 4 to a room. High immigration with a low barrier has also caused deflation of wages. Some Indian workers come to NZ and work for under minimum wage, either by employers requiring repayment of wages or underpaying wages (which is illegal), or by working for gig-economy services like Uber (which is legal). For a lot of immigrants, working for $5 an hour and sharing an apartment with 10 other people is still a better quality of life than back home, but it drags down the quality of life for other Kiwis. I think part of the problem is that it's possible for people to move anywhere in the world within 30 hours. Instead of migrating to a neighbouring country that has a slightly better economy to yours, if the world had total freedom of movement, everyone would flock to the most prosperous nations, causing the middle nations to miss out completely. How many undocumented migrants to Europe want to stay in Italy or Greece? They all want to get to Germany, France, or the UK. I think that maybe the best solution for the world would be freedom of movement between bordering nations. Most bordering nations will have similar economies, running as a continuum across the globe, and will also have similar cultures (as I said, borders are an artificial construct that cut through ethnic and cultural lines). The USA-Mexico border is an exception here, with a massive economic disparity between the two countries. I think that it's wrong that just because you were born on one side of a line you're condemned to a lower quality of life than your neighbours, earning a fraction of the same income for the same work.

yasp 8y ago

See "We Wanted Workers" by economist George Borjas for a more skeptical treatment of this "hundred trillion dollar bill" lying on the sidewalk.

voidmain 8y ago
I haven't read his book. But Borjas, who is to be clear a bit of an outlier among economists who have studied the problem, has in the papers I've looked at estimated that immigration is (slightly) a net economic negative for the very least skilled workers in the first world. This is nowhere close to saying that the net economic effect of immigration, including the benefits to the immigrants, is negative.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- yasp 8y ago
  It's a short and well written book, I'd recommend it if you're interested. One point that Borjas makes repeatedly is that he believes there is a suppression of reporting on the negative impacts of immigration liberalization. He also notes how on several occasions colleagues expressed surprise and dismay that he chose to publish findings that "went against the narrative", out of fear that they could embholden enemies of liberalized migration. Therefore, I would be cautious of drawing much from consensus or deviation therefrom.
- creato 8y ago
  > has in the papers I've looked at estimated that immigration is (slightly) a net economic negative for the very least skilled workers in the first world. How can you possibly recognize this and still decide that your proposal makes sense, in light of events like the presidency of Donald Trump and Brexit? What we have now is a drop in the bucket compared to unrestricted migration, and it's already quite possibly indirectly causing massive political upheaval that threatens to destabilize the first world.

CJefferson 8y ago

While I'd love that to be true, economist's predictions don't have a good track record. Is there any good examples we can use to give evidence of thus massive claim?

throwawaymath 8y ago
Why do you believe economists' predictions don't have a good track record?
- ionised 8y ago
  Maybe because of their track record?
  - throwawaymath 8y ago
    Can you share any examples?
    - CJefferson 8y ago
      Well, the inability to predict recessions, or the general moves of the economy for a start.
      - throwawaymath 8y ago
        That seems a little shortsighted. Do you also think climatologists and meteorologists are charlatans because they can't predict hurricanes or blizzards more than weeks in advance? You'll have to do better than that, because the majority of economic literature does not attempt to forecast movements, it attempts to model them and understand them. The "track record" you speak of is not actually the track record of economics, it's just a meme armchair economists like to repeat (generally without a non-snarky defense of their point).
voidmain 8y ago
It's not exactly hard to find anecdotal evidence. For example, Haitian households living in the US had a 2015 median income of $47,200. I don't know exactly how to translate this into per capita terms, but Haiti has a per capita GDP of something like $730. I'm sure that these groups of people are not perfectly comparable in every way, but it's certainly suggestive that people can make a better life for themselves here than in Haiti. How do you think you would fare in Haiti? If you want a more rigorous extrapolation, which tries to account for confounding factors and isn't limited to one pair of countries... you are going to have to look at the research (of economists).

fvdessen 8y ago

A large part of what makes the first world so productive is its culture and welfare system. When new people come in they need to be trained to understand this culture and system. This training takes work and time and that puts a limit on the number of yearly newcomers. I do not find it irrational to want to keep this working in a sustainable way.

grad_ml 8y ago
"economic migrants" need almost zero training. However, I do agree that this will put pressure on already complacent welfare system, or group of people and may cause new economic, social regrouping, wealth distribution etc. To provide services, one would be incentivized to integrate.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >To provide services, one would be incentivized to integrate. Only as long as one doesn't have a sizeable presence in the host country.
  - grad_ml 8y ago
    I disagree. Incentive to get recurring business mandates integration. Also, if the presence is not sizable enough, they would largely go unnoticed, so, integrate or not, it doesn't matter.
- fvdessen 8y ago
  > On can't/rarely provide services and choose not to be aware of local customs/traditions. [...] To provide services, one would be incentivized to integrate. It is completely possible to provide services without integration in insular communities, which tend to appear when newcomers come faster than they can integrate.
  - grad_ml 8y ago
    it's absolutely possible to spend whole winter in a thin cotton shirt, but most of us prefer not to do.

raverbashing 8y ago

This is a naive, or maybe even a Pollyannistic view on migration. The right and the left (as quoted) are not wrong. Though this doesn't mean countries should isolate themselves, but there seems to be an intrinsic human limitation on how many people it can trust and relate at one time.

walshemj 8y ago

But their living costs will rise immensely and that's not assuming they are not take advantage of like the "polish" gamemasters who took advantage of their own country men. Telling them oh all those benefits they aren't for polish workers - not quite slavery but not far off.

mindslight 8y ago

Your proposal relies on said economists being entirely correct, not having reasoned with broken models and metrics. Yet widespread distrust caused by the results of their overarching prescriptions is exactly the crossroads we're at. Opening up a closed system can only work if the assumptions of that closed system are compatible with openness! Under the present monetary policy of an inflationary treadmill, wages are generally consumed by rent rather than able to be saved into distributed wealth. This undermines the natural feedback whereby workers would build individual bargaining power. Increasing the competition would (of course) immediately benefit the poorest labor, but would further undermine labor's overall bargaining position thus exacerbating the modern winner-take-all trend. We at least need to figure out how we can get developed societies' equilibrium for "full time employment" down to around where it should be from technological progress and women having entered the workforce (say 15 hours per week) before we go stoking the pyre with even more workers, lest we all end up as forced labor.

jrs95 8y ago
I wouldn’t be surprised if the underlying motivation to this is essentially to make us all into forced labor. That probably would be great for global GDP, if that’s your only metric for success.

coldtea 8y ago

>Instead the first world does its best to wall itself off from economic migrants, because the right fears that migration will threaten their culture and the left fears that migration will threaten the welfare state. Well, unless you also propose the dissolvement of the world's countries as sovereign states, having a country means protecting its culture, way of life, and assets for its inhabitants. How would the freedom for "everyone in the world" to move there, for example, would work for Switzerland, for example, a cosy country of 8 million people? Would it be totally find if e.g. 9 million people from another culture come in, change the cultural climate in the place, and vote their politicians into power? "If people could migrate freely around the world" what would stop that from happening? Or why not just bring in 350 million Chinese into the US (they'd have more than a billion more to spare), and have them rule the place?

jabgrabdthrow 8y ago
Let me stop you right there, lest you propose any form socialism limited to just your nation, national socialism
ForHackernews 8y ago
> "If people could migrate freely around the world" what would stop that from happening? Most people wouldn't want to move. The EU has freedom of movement, and there's plenty of migration, but it's not like everyone from Romania up and moves to Germany.
- vetinari 8y ago
  Romanians cannot just move to Germany, because they are not in Schengen zone. The other East European countries also couldn't, they had 7 years long limitation on movement (they could enter, but not work in the bordering countries). Nowadays, they can work there, but they still have no right to request social security or other social services. You can not have both free social services and totally open borders without ruining your economy. Pick one or another.
  - arcticbull 8y ago

ktta 8y ago

https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2017/07/13/a-world-of-free-movement-would-be-78-trillion-richer https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2017/07/13/a-world-of...

pjdemers 8y ago

What would the rent be for an apartment in San Francisco or New York or London if anyone in the world could move there? I think the real windfall would go to property owners in the most desirable places to live.

maxerickson 8y ago
Probably about the same. I'm presuming that the people able to pay the current high prices already have pretty high freedom of movement.
- obscurantist 8y ago
  People in other parts of the Bay Area still don't move to San Francisco or have any desire to, even if they have the means.

rvern 8y ago

Open borders are truly one of our civilization’s best low-hanging fruits. https://openborders.info/double-world-gdp/ https://openborders.info/double-world-gdp/

xb1111 8y ago

Who is this new voting brigade that is pushing ideological crap to the top during the first hour of a submission?

jrs95 8y ago

Yeah, I don’t particularly care if economists think it will boost global GDP by 10x, I’m never going to be on board with that. Abolishing borders is essentially the same as abolishing nations, and in that case who has the power then? Certainly not me, or anyone that has anything in common with me. Our “democracy” sucks enough as it is, why the hell would I want to sell out national sovereignty to global capitalist interests? Honestly, I’d rather make a change in the opposite direction and have governments that actually represent their people at the cost of halving global GDP, if that’s what it takes. There are many more important things than money.

jpatokal 8y ago
Assuming you're writing this from the US, your county and state authorities already have a lot of power even though they don't control immigration.

WalterBright 8y ago

Another way is to bring economic freedom to poor countries.

rblion 8y ago

This is a great summary of many world problems

crooked-v 8y ago

While broadly I agree with this comment, I'm annoyed by the smug South Park centricism of "the left and the right are both wrong", when in the current political climate of the US the left generally want less restrictions on immigration while the right are literally taking babies away from mothers to try and scare away future asylum-seekers.

gedy 8y ago
> the left generally want less restrictions on immigration Frankly though, many do to "import the proletarians" and use them as a permanent underclass to point at, and to further their political agenda. That's not necessarily "right" either.

rayiner 8y ago

Except it doesn’t work like that. I’m from Bangladesh. What would happen if 100 million Bangladeshis moved to the US? Would we continue to have a first world legal system, etc? The answer is no. Instead, we would be tearing down the statue of liberty: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/world/asia/bangladesh-statue-justice-supreme-court-islam.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/world/asia/bangladesh-... We know this will happen. Bangladesh was in fact a grand experiment in this regard. After independence in the 1970s, an intellectual elite gave the country a western style constitution, with principles of secularity and freedom. What did the Bangladeshis do with it? They quickly repealed those provisions, made Islam the official religion, etc. It is a popular mental dysfunction in the west to deny that culture matters. To believe that the west’s material wealth is the result of random chance, rather than what people believe, how they act, and what they do.

wu-ikkyu 8y ago
>What would happen if 100 million Bangladeshis moved to the US? Would we continue to have a first world legal system, etc? The answer is no It's ironic that people in the US who have such great fear of immigrants worry about being overrun by criminals, when the US itself already has by far the highest amount of criminals locked in prison in the world. >Instead, we would be tearing down the statue of liberty Quite silly to point to mere symbolism (whether or not a statue exists) while ignoring the physical reality of human suffering behind bars.
- rayiner 8y ago
  Who said anything about criminals? Bangladeshis are by and large law abiding. But more than 1/3 believe that people who leave Islam should be put to death. The problem isn’t crime.
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - wu-ikkyu 8y ago
    Is country X's incarceration rate not related to the quality of it's legal system and institutions?

api 8y ago

A deeper problem for the rich countries is that the entire economic system is built for perpetual inflation. Everything has to always go up. Free migration is deflationary. Wide nominal wage declines would cause cascading default across the entire economy.

tiatia123 8y ago

My professor always said, ideas are like hemorrhoids, every asshole sooner or later gets some. "If people could migrate freely around the world to seek work, economists crudely estimate that world GDP would roughly double, and that most of this enormous windfall would go to the poorest people on Earth. There is literally a hundred trillion dollar bill on the sidewalk for bringing together third-world labor and first-world legal systems, capital, and service demand." You realize that many, if not most third world countries are third world countries because of the mentality, religion (won't mention it, no worries) and tribal thinking? This is exactly the problem we have in Europe. I don't mind immigrants, not at all. But they come here and bring their beliefs, values (about women, violence etc.) and tribal thinking and create here exactly the problems they have in their home country. They see our apples and they want to have apples too. But they don't get the idea that the apples could have anything to do with the tree they are growing on.

forapurpose 8y ago
> My professor always said, ideas are like hemorrhoids, every asshole sooner or later gets some. What does that contribute? That could apply to your idea too, or mine. > they come here and bring their beliefs, values (about women, violence etc.) and tribal thinking and create here exactly the problems they have in their home country. They see our apples and they want to have apples too. But they don't get the idea that the apples could have anything to do with the tree they are growing on. This is really an incredibly broad stereotype to paint on hundreds of millions of individuals. Perhaps like you, they should be judged on their individual actions and have the right to believe what they like. And who is the parent to judge others and take away their rights? I don't like the parent's beliefs (which I find especially based on "tribal" ideas)' should they be ejected from my country if they are my neighbor? (No, absolutely not.)
- tiatia123 8y ago
  > What does that contribute? That could apply to your idea too, or mine. It is intellectual over-engineering of cultures. It looks tremendously good on paper. > This is really an incredibly broad stereotype to paint on hundreds of millions of individuals. No, it really isn't since Europe is not flooded with Chinese, Americans or Australians but with people with a very low skill set, very different attitude towards violence and women, from tribal societies and with a religion they feel is far superior. > And who is the parent to judge others and take away their rights? I am not judging them. I don't even say that their culture is inferior. If an industrialized society breaks down (think Mad Max if you want) they are in a far superior position. The question is: If women should have no rights, if you have the best religion, if you want to bury gay people alive, why not stay in your home country? By the way, I am just visiting Romania. Romania is willing to take refuges but refuges are not willing to take Romania. Why? No living on welfare...

ng12 8y ago

> Instead the first world does its best to wall itself off from economic migrants Wouldn't free economic migration lower the standard of living in the wealthiest of countries?

naveen99 8y ago

It’s starting to happen already. The rich can migrate freely today. And their are more rich everyday in poor countries. We used to send money back to our relatives in india. Now they could be sending us money as their land investments have been very profitable. Once google translate is a little more flawless and real-time from audio to audio, we will see real movement. Already with Uber and internet it’s much easier to travel without being scammed.

forapurpose 8y ago

> the right fears that migration will threaten their culture and the left fears that migration will threaten the welfare state Perhaps the parent is trying to be even-handed, but I don't see the left opposing immigration; they seem to support it. It also matches the philosophy of the center - the Clinton democrats and internationalist business people of the GOP. Here are some surveys I quickly found; both say immigration is supported by the left: https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/americans-views-immigration-policy https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/americans-views-immig... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/01/22/americans-broadly-embrace-the-democratic-immigration-position-but-are-divided-on-trumps-crackdown/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/01/22/a...

profalseidol 8y ago

> and the left fears that migration will threaten the welfare state. to my scale, these are neo-nazis, not left at all.

djrobstep 8y ago

The left fears no such thing. There are no serious anti-immigration voices on the left.

voidmain 8y ago
To give an example, in a 2016 interview Sanders referred to open borders as a "right-wing" "Koch brothers proposal". Trump is worse, is that what you want to hear? I'm not trying to draw a moral equivalence. But I think the barriers to immigration raised over the last century and more everywhere in the first world are something that can't be blamed on any single party or political movement.
DrScump 8y ago
When the Democratic Party had full control of Congress and the Presidency, they were (collectively) very much against illegal immigration[0]. This is why they passed no "reform" legislation whatsoever. [0] now-Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=728SW65tlU0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=728SW65tlU0
- djrobstep 8y ago
  The Democrats are a party of liberalism, not leftism. Try again.

nine_k 8y ago

The problem is that it's not the third world's population should go to first-world countries. It's first-world's legal and economic (and associated societal) technology should extend to the third world. Third world's elites fear it because it will render most of them irrelevant (and it will). Third world's nationalists and leftists fear it because it will change the local culture to look like the fat bourgeois western culture (and it will). The previous foray into this was tried at the times of colonialism; the results are ... mixed even by the most favorable account.

toomanybeersies 8y ago

I'm conflicted on this issue. First off, I'm an economic migrant. I also had the privilege of being able to move without a skilled work visa. I'm all for freedom of movement, I think that borders are an artificial construct that cause more harm than good. But we need to balance that with the fact that unchecked migration can cause excessive strain on infrastructure, cause cultural clashes, and potentially cause lowered quality of life for residents of the country being emigrated to, caused by residents being priced out of the market by workers willing to work for near-nothing because it's still better than the wages back at home. New Zealand has suffered a lot of these problems. Auckland in particular suffering from the strain of high levels of immigration on its infrastructure. There simply isn't enough housing for all the people. You end up with people sharing rooms and packing out apartments like a slum. I've heard of people fitting 4 people to a room using bunk beds. So you've got 12 people in a 3 bedroom apartment. The apartments aren't designed for this kind of population density, and it pushes out people who want a decent quality of life and a room to themselves, as they're priced out by people willing to share 4 to a room. High immigration with a low barrier has also caused deflation of wages. Some Indian workers come to NZ and work for under minimum wage, either by employers requiring repayment of wages or underpaying wages (which is illegal), or by working for gig-economy services like Uber (which is legal). For a lot of immigrants, working for $5 an hour and sharing an apartment with 10 other people is still a better quality of life than back home, but it drags down the quality of life for other Kiwis. I think part of the problem is that it's possible for people to move anywhere in the world within 30 hours. Instead of migrating to a neighbouring country that has a slightly better economy to yours, if the world had total freedom of movement, everyone would flock to the most prosperous nations, causing the middle nations to miss out completely. How many undocumented migrants to Europe want to stay in Italy or Greece? They all want to get to Germany, France, or the UK. I think that maybe the best solution for the world would be freedom of movement between bordering nations. Most bordering nations will have similar economies, running as a continuum across the globe, and will also have similar cultures (as I said, borders are an artificial construct that cut through ethnic and cultural lines). The USA-Mexico border is an exception here, with a massive economic disparity between the two countries. I think that it's wrong that just because you were born on one side of a line you're condemned to a lower quality of life than your neighbours, earning a fraction of the same income for the same work.