Believe it or not, there is a group of free market economists arguing for open borders — no restrictions on immigration to the United States at all (or nothing beyond public health restrictions, like those enforced on Ellis Island). Their idea is that the only way to reduce global economic inequality is to allow people to migrate in unlimited numbers to countries with more advanced economies. Of course that would reduce economic inequality globally. But what would it do to the United States?
Answers of an unsettling sort come from Open Borders advocate Nathan Smith, an assistant professor of economics at Fresno Pacific University. He says that such large immigration would result in “certain American ideals” dying — equality of opportunity, the social safety net, one-person-one-vote and bans on discrimination in employment. Non-immigrant Americans would limit voting so they’d remain a majority and could “vote themselves increasing handouts from a burgeoning Treasury.” People would increasingly segregate themselves in gated communities and ethnic ghettoes. “We would see some modern latifundia, worked not by slaves this time [as in the Roman Empire] but by voluntary immigrants, working for pay rates that would strike native-born Americans as a form of slave labor.”
There would be good news as well: lots of economic growth and rises in land values. “Live-in nannies would become abundant and cheap.” Doctors and teachers would be in high demand. But on balance this looks more like a dystopia than a utopia. Yet Smith still “can contemplate with very little distress” the immigration of a billion people to the United States.
The picture he paints looks like an exaggerated version of California, with its high levels of economic inequality and poverty, its cultural segregation of affluent non-immigrants and low-skill immigrants, its lavish public pensions and its aggressive economic regulation in disregard of economic cost. For details, see the writings of California-based Joel Kotkin on his New Geography blog.
How did California get into this condition? A combination of big government policies plus a wave of low-skill immigration, legal and illegal, far greater than contemplated by the 1965 and 1986 immigration acts. Since Arnold Schwarzenegger allowed his ballot propositions to be defeated by an avalanche of public employee union money in 2005, the chances of reining in big state and local government in California has been hopeless. But low-skill immigration from Mexico and Latin America has fallen sharply since 2007 and the federal government could change immigration law to provide fewer places for low-skill immigrants and freer entry for high-skill immigrants — reform that I have backed for some time but which seems to have little institutional or lobby support.
