A Leftist Criticizes the Left on Immigration

I'm grateful to Socialist Action (SA) for turning me on to an intriguing article by Amanda Nagle, an author with whom I was previously unfamiliar. SA's critique by Ivan Dolphy is headlined Angela Nagle’s shoddy remedies for the ‘migrant crisis.’ Ms. Nagle's contribution, published in American Affairs, is titled The Left Case against Open Borders.

Mr. Dolphy's post suffers from the disease common to my Trotskyist friends, namely an inability to treat their interlocutors respectfully. Everything descends into ad hominem attacks, accusing others of moral turpitude or laziness. The word 'shoddy' in the title sets the tone. Ms. Nagle pens a 'diatribe', she fakes a 'leftist tinge', and she's accused of purposely taking Marx out of context (I think she's not guilty).

The closing line of Mr. Dolphy's piece sums up Ms. Nagle's supposed moral failings--pejorative terms and arguably untrue accusations included.

Given that Nagle is now officially on the payroll of a rag that changed its name from The Journal of American Greatness, it poses the question of who the useful idiot to big business might be.

It's not really a serious critique.

Ms. Nagle's key point is that open borders and free immigration are really a causes for the libertarian Right, and not the Left.

She writes,

The transformation of open borders into a “Left” position is a very new phenomenon and runs counter to the history of the organized Left in fundamental ways. Open borders has long been a rallying cry of the business and free market Right. Drawing from neoclassical economists, these groups have advocated for liberalizing migration on the grounds of market rationality and economic freedom. They oppose limits on migration for the same reasons that they oppose restrictions on the movement of capital.

She could have cited Michael Clemens' 2011 article entitled Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk? The thesis is that, if the world's people could just move freely to the location where they'd earn the most money, it would immediately add trillions of dollars to global GDP.

Ms. Nagle suggests that the Leftist impulse to be kind to migrants is conflicting with what should be their loyalty to the indigenous labor movement. After all, it's hard to build a union when a whole lot of cheap, scab labor is being imported from Honduras.

In Ms. Nagle's view, the only true beneficiaries of unfettered immigration are the bosses, who get more labor at cheap prices. The fact that the migrants clearly earn more than they would in their home countries is apparently not important to her. The primary effect of immigration, claims Ms. Nagle, is to lower the wages of domestic workers. And domestic workers do suffer, no doubt.

Though Mr. Dolphy disputes her leftism, like a true Marxist Ms. Nagle sees everything as zero-sum, and ignores the primary beneficiaries of immigration--consumers. Joe Six-Pack can get his lawn mowed for $20 instead of $100, which definitely raises his standard of living. The libertarian view depends on precisely this point: a rise in GDP means that more goods and services are consumed, which is good for everybody. A trillion dollars is no small increase in consumption.

However good immigration is for the economy, completely open borders is politically impossible. The arguments against it are non-economic, and concern culture, history, demographics, and governance. For example, countries that are in serious demographic decline (e.g., Hungary, Sweden, Japan) are the least tolerant of migrants--they're afraid of being swamped. That is a factor in America's opposition to immigration as well.

Further, there is the trilemma--no less true for being old. Among the three goods--democracy, a functioning welfare state, and high rates of immigration--pick any two. Ethnic homogeneity is a precondition for democratic support for a welfare state. Lots of immigrants will be tolerated only as long as few social welfare benefits are extended to them. Or, as happens in the EU, high rates of immigration require undemocratic, dictatorial methods by the Brussels bureaucrats.

The libertarian choice is to accommodate immigration by zeroing out welfare benefits. Trump's alternative is to maintain the welfare state, but accordingly to minimize immigration. The progressive Left (including SA) defend both a generous welfare state and high immigration, but are happy to rule dictatorially (through the administrative state, or via much more totalitarian methods).

Ms. Nagle takes issue with her progressive comrades and seems to side more with Trump--at least in this context. I'm not sure she realizes that.

Ms. Nagle makes some arguments against immigration that I think are completely fallacious. For example,

According to Foreign Policy magazine, “There are more Ethiopian physicians practicing in Chicago today than in all of Ethiopia, a country of 80 million.” It is not difficult to see why the political and economic elites of the world’s richest countries would want the world to “send their best,” regardless of the consequences for the rest of the world. But why is the moralizing, pro–open borders Left providing a humanitarian face for this naked self-interest?

In other words, for the sake of Ethiopia we should prevent the immigration of Ethiopian doctors. But this makes no sense. There is no market for high-end medical care in Ethiopia, so the doctors earn a lot more money in Chicago.

Health problems in Ethiopia probably don't have much to do with doctors, but instead revolve much more about access to clean water, safe food, and appropriate sewage disposal. No doctors are required for that. What is necessary is money--and indeed, the Chicago doctors probably send more money back home than they could ever hope to earn in Addis Ababa. Also needed is good governance, which is in very short supply in Ethiopia, but has nothing to do with doctors.

Ms. Nagle asserts that NAFTA has been bad for Mexico.

Nafta forced Mexican farmers to compete with U.S. agriculture, with disastrous consequences for Mexico. Mexican imports doubled, and Mexico lost thousands of pig farms and corn growers to U.S. competition. ... By 2002, Mexican wages had dropped by 22 percent, even though worker productivity increased by 45 percent. In regions like Oaxaca, emigration devastated local economies and communities, as men emigrated to work in America’s farm labor force and slaughterhouses, leaving behind women, children, and the elderly.

She is correct that working in the US was much more lucrative for Mexican peasants than subsistence farming. I'm astonished that Leftists (including that true Luddite, Barry Sheppard) think unmechanized, backbreaking farm work represents a good future for Mexicans. In support of the "22 percent" statistic, she cites an article in People's World, a paper of the US Communist Party. That paper culls the number from a similarly dubious source.

It is certainly not true that Mexican living standards are declining. Since 2009 net migration between the US and Mexico has favored Mexico. And for good reason--the Mexican economy has been growing like gangbusters.

This past August my wife and I spent a vacation week in Mexico City. I was astonished at how rich the city was--at least as wealthy as any in Southern Europe. The notion that Mexico is being gutted by NAFTA is absurd.

The only substantive criticism that Mr. Dolphy levels against Ms. Nagle is her proposed solution to the immigration problem: a greatly strengthened e-verify. He writes,

Nagle goes on to implore the left to embrace E-verify, a policy that would place the onus on employers to verify the immigration status of all of their workers, and would punish businesses for noncompliance. Proponents of this policy claim that it’s a humane way to encourage the self-deportation of undocumented people. Basically, their reasoning is that by creating more barriers between undocumented immigrants and jobs or services it would softly encourage them to leave or not migrate in the first place.

I actually agree with him. Beyond serious privacy issues, E-verify imposes a hardship on legal workers, especially legal immigrants. Further, while illegals shouldn't be here in the first place, it's much better if they're employed than unemployed.

Here are my suggestions for an immigration policy:

1. A generous legal immigration system (the wide front door) that preferences skilled workers who can contribute to America's economy. We need to admit people "who love us."
2. Abolition of the H1-B visa that turns immigrants into indentured servants.
3. A strong border that allows our country to control who moves here. Illegal immigration has to be greatly reduced. Trump's policies, while not the answer, are at least addressing the right question.
4. We should not admit large numbers of semi-literate, unskilled people from countries like Honduras. They will not thrive in our economy and will almost inevitably end up on welfare.

Further Reading:

• The Militant Visits Manila
• Solidarity on Trump & Trade
• The "Bureau" on Immigration
• Immigration? Si!