Thoughts and other stubborn things

Immigration is quite a thorny subject. The direction you approach agreement or disagreement about immigration from (and the tact with which you do it) can leave you appearing as something you’re not (or maybe you are and just don’t know?). I leave here as a case in point: a recent blog post from Bryan Caplan and a response to it by Gene Callahan. I personally think Callahan has the more proper view on this (although I don’t agree with all of his points), but you decide for yourself.

Tell Me the Difference Between Jim Crow and Immigration Restrictions

Bryan Caplan

Under the Jim Crow laws, discrimination was not merely legal. It was mandatory. It was illegal for blacks to live, work, and shop in certain places. Virtually everyone today regards this as an enormous injustice. So do I. But I question the claim that modern American policy is vastly morally superior. The American government continues to mandate discrimination against an unpopular minority: illegal immigrants. And this mandatory discrimination is far harsher than anything under Jim Crow.

Most obviously:

1. Under Jim Crow, there were many places in America where blacks were not legally allowed to live. Under current immigration laws, there is nowhere in America where illegal immigrants are legally allowed to live.
2. Under Jim Crow, there were many jobs in America that blacks were not legally allowed to perform. Under current immigration laws, there are no jobs in America that illegal immigrants are legally allowed to perform.

Admittedly, immigration restrictions are not worse than Jim Crow in every possible way. Most notably:

1. Illegal immigrants face fewer restrictions on travel. De facto, though not de jure, illegal immigrants are free to use any form of transportation that doesn’t require identification; they can ride trains but not planes. Under the Jim Crow laws, blacks were unable to use many forms of transportation either de jure or de facto.
2. The children of illegal immigrants face fewer restrictions on attending public school.
3. The Tuskegee Institute estimated that 3,446 blacks were lynched between 1882 and 1968 – about 40 per year. The FBI reported 681 hate crimes against Hispanics in 2010, but only one of these was a murder. Lest we feel too superior, note that according to conservative estimates, several hundred immigrants die crossing the border every year.

The Jim Crow laws were awful. Still, if you had to suffer under Jim Crow or modern immigration laws, Jim Crow seems like the lesser evil.

You could object that our moral obligations to citizens are far higher than our moral obligations to foreigners. But that’s hardly satisfactory. After all, the essence of the segregationist position was the American blacks were not fully-fledged American citizens. Imagine that instead of abolishing Jim Crow laws, the American public had resolved its cognitive dissonance by simultaneously (a) stripping blacks of their citizenship, and (b) declaring that “All citizens are entitled to equal treatment.” Would that have made the Jim Crow laws any less reprehensible?

Another possibility: You could say that the treatment illegal immigrants receive is an appropriate punishment for their law-breaking. This position would be plausible if legal immigration were easy. But for the typical low-skilled immigrant, legal immigration is virtually impossible. The U.S. makes it illegal for most foreigners to live and work here no matter what they do. So how does the treatment they receive in any way fit their “crime”?

But perhaps I’m overlooking some crucial distinction. So tell me: What is the moral difference between Jim Crow and immigration restrictions?

I Can’t Tell a Stop Sign…

Gene Callahan

I can’t tell a stop sign from a gun, and I can’t tell a green card from a “No Negroes Wanted” sign.

Or so says Bryan Caplan. Bryan asks, “What is the moral difference between Jim Crow and immigration restrictions?” He doubts that anyone can point to anything of substance.

Well, try this out for starters, Bryan: Let’s say I have a house. My family lives in it, as well as a couple of invited guests. If I declared that the one guy who lived with us who happened to be black had to do all of the crap jobs in the house just because he is black, I think we can all agree that would be pretty bogus. Similarly, if I tell him that he is the only person who can’t go in the living room, just because he is black, my bad!

But now ten people show up, uninvited, and slip into the house. I find them in the living room having a party. I tell them they not only can’t be in the living room, but they can’t, in fact, be in the house at all. This is most decidedly not bogus. You see, the thing is, these people are not members of my household. They are uninvited trespassers. I am not discriminating against them based on some fact about themselves that they can’t control, but because they busted in uninvited, something they certainly could control.

But Bryan has an answer: “Another possibility: You could say that the treatment illegal immigrants receive is an appropriate punishment for their law-breaking. This position would be plausible if legal immigration were easy. But for the typical low-skilled immigrant, legal immigration is virtually impossible.”

Ah, now I see where Bryan is going! Let’s imagine the possibility of the average Princeton-graduating, GMU econ professor sleeping with Angelina Jolie by invitation. That ain’t just virtually impossible: it’s like dividing by zero or something of the sort. Therefore, there should be no problem with such a person sleeping with her without an invitation, since his chances otherwise are nil.

Or, since Jolie is not a group, let us consider the New York Knicks. I’d really like to go have a shoot-around with them. You know, I’d be happy to do it by invitation, but getting drafted by the Knicks ain’t easy. Therefore, it’s perfectly OK for me to sneak into their practice and challenge Jeremy Lin to a little one-on-one… and if they kick me out? Well, that would be just like… no, even worse, than… making blacks sit on the back of buses in the pre-1960 South.

The fact of the matter is, if you’re going to have a group, there must be some criteria for who gets in and who is kept out. If the Knicks simply let anyone who wanted to do so wander out on the court at any moment and join in the fun, there would simply be no New York Knicks, but merely an on-court free-for-all. If GMU let anyone who chose to do so simply show up on campus, walk into any classroom at any time, and begin lecturing, there would no longer be any GMU.

And that, I suspect, is what Caplan is actually after: as an anarchist, he doesn’t believe there should be any entity such as the United States, and, as such, he wishes to wipe out any boundaries between being an American and not being an American. And that is an interesting (although I believe flawed) position. But then, Caplan should be more upfront here: we should have no immigration laws because he would like to see the United States cease to exist as a definable group. But that position, obviously, has nothing to do with equating Jim Crow laws with immigration restrictions.

Footnote: I am quite sympathetic to arguments saying that we currently have immigration laws that are perverse and/or too restrictive. And I am quite sympathetic to treating illegal immigrants gently. But Caplan’s argument is not a case for moderation, but for the complete elimination of any distinction between legal and illegal immigrants: a case for nullifying the ability of the United States to make laws within its own jurisdiction, and, as such, a plea for the dissolution of the US as a political entity.

It’s not a bad thing to hold out hope that a more mainstream libertarian website can have an impact, and Cato’s Libertarianism.org is one site that has all of that potential. They put up a wealth of information about different libertarians of historical significance, including introductions and videos, and they make the philosophy very inviting. But the current crop of Koch libertarians is not capable of achieving anything of historical significance, and indeed it was only a matter of time before one of them would have to tackle a thorny issue of history and butcher it in the name of political correctness. This piece of skullduggery is just such an example. It’s a convenient history of the worst kind, and in the big picture such pieces kill the very intellectual foundation they claim to uphold.

The author’s follow-up blog post reflects his complete obliviousness to his own ignorance, or to paraphrase a Kirzner-ism, he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. Unfortunately this is the lackadaisical scholarship we may have to suffer for the “mainstream”.

One of the things that has always irked me about the libertarian/anarcho-capitalist ethic surrounding this site is that, despite being able to put economics into more plain, explainable terms than virtually any other theory of economics, it still presumes to be talking over the head of John Q. Public at ground zero. Relating the terms behind Austrian economics is just as important as mastering them, and it seems that the LvMI cause hasn’t quite succeeded to that end (but in all fairness, at least they’re trying).

I had two watershed moments early in my journey of learning about economics. The first moment was in my freshman year in college, a random suggestion from a friend to read Henry Hazlitt’s ‘Economics In One Lesson’. No less than 8 chapters in and everything I thought I knew about the world around me was completely blown, and I loved it. I’ve given away (and paid for) more copies of the book than I care to count anymore.

The second (and this is the pertinent one) was in my junior year of college, when I had been hanging out with some of the basketball players who were from the Caribbean. One day I dropped by the dorm room of one of the guys and several of the players were fully invested in something on TV…that didn’t involve game controllers! I figured it must be a comedy show, but was I ever wrong.

They were instead watching an old series devised by Walter Williams titled “The State Against Blacks”. Here was economics, where the good intentions of economic policy met with the absolute worst of its consequences, and it was framed in terms of (and for) the man on the street. I was completely enthralled, and even managed to get a copy of his book of the same name through interlibrary loan (the book is out of print, and although Williams recommends his latest book Race and Economics as a worthwhile substitute, it certainly doesn’t replace the original).

Through the wonders of the internet I was able to come across this series again on YouTube, and I would highly recommend it to others here:

The State Against Blacks – Part 1
The State Against Blacks – Part 2
The State Against Blacks – Part 3
The State Against Blacks – Part 4
The State Against Blacks – Part 5
The State Against Blacks – Part 6

I really wish I understood the extreme nature of Gene Callahan’s acrimony toward Lew Rockwell and LvMI. I respect many of his opinions and his book has been an invaluable resource in my understanding of Austrian economics, but it’s blog posts like these that just make me shake my head.

Does he have some valid criticisms of the lines of Austrian thought? As far as my readings have taken me in Austrian literature, yes. Does he have some valid criticisms of the “poetic license” with which writers at LewRockwell.com/LvMI (and their followers) partake? Sure. But you would think that, somewhere between the point at which mouse moved to post button and the point at which he clicked it for this post (and the many that have come before it), he would’ve thought better of it. One’s words on the internet have a level of durability that most people by now have a keen appreciation of, but when it comes to his good friends at LewRockwell.com/LvMI, Gene casts such silly sensibilities to the wind.

I don’t know the situation, and I don’t know Gene’s feelings are about the time he spent writing for LewRockwell.com/LvMI, but when acting like a common internet troll is the best you can do to satisfy your need for revenge/vindication/retribution/[your interwebz justice seeking word here], don’t you think it’s time to consider where your skills could be put to better use?

But of course, here I am taking my time to write about it. And so the world goes on…

This blog post by Nick Rowe was downright prescient with consideration to the later arrival of the discoveries(?) of David Graeber. He makes the important distinction between an “equilibrium experiment” and a “stability experiment”:

A stability experiment asks what keeps us on that time path, by exploring what would happen in the counterfactual case that we were off it. But if the theorist is correct in his diagnosis of the forces that keep us on the equilibrium time-path, then we never will observe us being off it.

And then he goes straight in for the kill:

In other words, failing to find historical evidence of a Mengerian barter economy…does not count as evidence against Menger…It counts as evidence for (Menger)…

Even when I disagree with him, I have yet to find someone more enjoyable to disagree with.