Synopsis: Arguments for Free Migration

In the background, I have another book project with an argument for free migration. I have put it on the backburner for the time being because I want to concentrate on my book on Thomas Malthus’ “An Essay on the Principle of Population.” You can find a synopsis of my ongoing series of posts here. Still, I think free migration is also a very important topic. That’s why I will blog about it, too. This is an overview of my posts so far with short summaries that I will keep updated:

• Also: Free Migration: A short introduction to the argument I will develop.
• Three Ways to Boost Liberty in the World: There are two ways that many people think of how people can have more liberty: They liberate themselves or they are liberated from the outside. But there is also a third way that is often overlooked: People have the opportunity to move to where there is already liberty. Actually, this has been extremely successful in the past. And maybe the survival of liberty depends on it becoming as successful again. (Note also my further remarks in the comments that clarify a few points.)
• Melting Pot? Salad Bowl? Neither.: There are two metaphors for how people think about the effect of immigration on the existing culture of a country. If you imagine it as a “melting pot,” all the cultures are fused into an alloy with the respective shares. If you imagine it as a “salad bowl,” the different cultures are also mixed, but remain separate. In this post, I explain why both metaphors are off. Immigrants under current conditions land in an overwhelmingly native culture. This exerts a strong pull that works out over generations. The end-result is that the native culture practically wins by default. The impact of the cultures of immigrants is very small, so it is neither an alloy nor a salad.
• Can Immigration Swamp Your Culture?: A common fear is that immigration can lead to situations where the process that I have explained in the previous post can go the other way: Natives are “swamped” by another culture that they have to assimilate to. There are such examples that immigration restrictionists are very fond of. As I show here, these only work with strong assumptions that are not relevant for immigration to developed countries under current conditions, even with much more immigration than now. It is actually very hard to construct examples where it could happen, so hard that it is almost impossible. If you are afraid of “swamping,” at most a much higher limit on annual immigration would be necessary and maybe a rule that ensures diversity.
• Weak and Strong Arguments for Free Migration: A common mistake on both sides of the debate is to argue that immigration at current levels or even higher levels will lead to dramatic results for a receiving country in the developed world. Immigration restrictionists paint a bleak picture of a catastrophe, and proponents of more immigration tend to respond with miraculous predictions. Either you view immigrants as inherently worse than natives or as inherently better. My suggestion here is to anchor your expectations elsewhere: Immigration will not have a major effect either way. A reasonable first stab should be: the outcome will be more or less neutral, and immigrants are perhaps roughly on a par with natives. I demonstrate why this approach is superior with examples from both sides: the effect of immigration on the welfare state and the pensions system.
• Why No Wall Between US States?: A nice reductio ad absurdum can follow if you take arguments to their logical conclusion. A general argument why migration should be restricted on the national level works also on the subnational level, and so someone who argues for the former argues also for the latter. This may be rejected as absurd because it is. I show with historical examples from Switzerland and Germany that it can be done: You can have also immigration restrictions within a country, even down to the level of municipalities. Sorry to inform you that that was not only stupid, but also cruel.
• Change in Immigrant Stock is NOT the Same as Net Migration: A point I wanted to write up as a reference because I see so many people get this wrong. Basically, it is that someone looks at changes for the stock of immigrants in a country and then mistakes it was net migration. So if the stock goes down, but you obviously have further immigration, the conclusion is that there must be even more emigration. But that is wrong because people can and do also leave the stock of immigrants in other ways, before all when they die.

Somewhat related with the main line of argument is this post why insisting on a “pure culture” is nonsense:

• No People Has a “Pure Culture”: I show how languages like English and German have massively profited from immigration by foreign words, to an extent that trying to purify them would lead to their destruction. I build on arguments here from the German Liberal Ludwig Bamberger and the German anarchist Rudolf Rocker.

More posts to come that I will add to this list …