Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Utopianism on the right: Walling in "the nation"

It is interesting to me that so much of right wing social visions today is about security and keeping us safe from things. It would seem that the world is a dangerous place (in spite of all the data showing that the world has become a much safer place over the last century) and that there is an urgent need to protect us. Much of that concern is focused on "securing the borders" from "illegal immigration" and to ensure that those who receive welfare "do not abuse the system". We hear that from politicians across the democratic world, particularly in relation to the ongoing refugee situation in Europe, during the Brexit debate and certainly during the American election campaign. It would seem that immigrants and poor people are dangerous.

The Fatalist Way: Management by mistrust

Key Values: Mistrust, suspicion, security, rule enforcement

The right wing narrative about the dangerous world is based on the assumptions that inform Fatalist management, which I often refer to as management by mistrust, namely that solidarity is impossible to achieve and that every system invites fraud, free-riding and opportunism. To counter that, governments need to take protective steps. Some of those are random controls, like the breath-tests used by traffic control law enforcement.

The management model is clearly top-down but there is also little coordinated action, because trust levels are so low. This is rational within this system. Since actors fear each other, they don't dare enter into partnerships, because if they do, their ideas might be stolen by others. Alternatively, they have to work a lot while others don't work at all, just free-riding on others' efforts. Anyone who's done group work in school will recognize it. For those who do the work, there's just too little benefit for the high cost involved.  Under such circumstances, people stop collaborating.

That becomes a substantive problem when it occurs throughout society. Democracy builds on trust. Almost 200 years ago, the French thinker Alexis DeToqueville described why American democracy worked: because people spontaneously came together, formed mutual aid groups and helped each other. Putnam later called this "social capital" and found, in a classic study, that Southern Italy's socioeconomic challenges could be tied to the lack of trust prevailing there. Citizens did not get organized and work together, because they did not trust each other. At a certain level, the lack of cooperation - the lack of social networks, social capital - becomes a problem and undermines democracy.

Keeping people in poverty: Workfare schemes

A very common Fatalist policy is the workfare program. It has been adopted for social welfare services across the democratic world in the last couple of decades and frames social welfare users as untrustworthy opportunists. To make sure recipients don't "abuse tax payer dollars", applicants are put through all sorts of rigorous tests, including drug use or literacy. Sometimes case officers force them to complete public work before giving them their welfare remuneration. The negative effects on the user have been well documented and they certainly don't do anything to get people off welfare or closer to self-sufficiency (Herd, Mitchell, & Lightman, 2005; Lightman et al., 2006; Lightman et al., 2006). In some cases, clients were unable to provide all the requested information and thus were disqualified (Herd, Mitchell, & Lightman, 2005). In one study, interviewed welfare recipients described how the system was “dominated by suspicion and a mentality of policing” (Herd et al., 2005, p. 13). Civil servants end up caught in the middle; they do not like having to treat clients this way. Senior managers complained that the system had been turned into an “eligibility machine” (Lightman et al., 2006, p. 137), which meant that they could not do what they wanted to, to support clients towards an improved life situation. The case demonstrates how destructive management by mistrust can be, particularly in social policy areas.

Walling in the nation to "keep it safe"

By now, it should be easy to spot the consistency between the values of the Fatalist Way and what conservatives in all democratic countries are saying about immigrants and refugees: "They are here to abuse our generous system and we have to keep our borders safe from free-riders and people who might be criminals". That sentiment clearly builds on mistrust and a treatment of these categories as potential free-riders and opportunists whose primary motivation is to abuse "our hospitality/system". While there is little new to say about him, Donald Trump's plan for immigration reform constitutes a good example of a Fatalist framing of immigration. The below identifies some typical Fatalist analysis in the plan.

Here is the free-rider frame: "Current immigration policy costs taxpayers $300 billion a year." Note how Trump ignores the contributions immigrants ("legal" or "illegal") are making to the US economy by adding their productivity to the overall workforce. They could make even greater contributions if they could work without fear of deportation, so their status as illegal is actually a drag on the American economy, but Trump ignores that possibility, too.

The crime-frame is referred in nine of ten bullets. Notably, most research shows that crime rates among immigrants in the US are lower than among the native born population, so this is incorrect, but it's essential to build the impression of a dangerous world that the Fatalist approach to governance thrives in. The point (no. 5 in Trump's list) about tripling the number of border control agents also supports that perspective, as does the now-famous proposal to build a wall. Trump wants to emphasize policing, rather than reform laws that are costly in both humanitarian and economic terms.


The consequences of applying Fatalist policy as widely as Trump (and many other nativist, nationalist politicians want to) would be a decline in trust and cooperation in society as a whole. When that happens, we see a decrease in the formation of voluntary organizations, and a lack of capacity to do things together. Withering away trust on such a wide level risks undermining the political culture needed to support democracy itself.

Monday, August 8, 2016

When Utopian dreams meet reality...

Politics has Utopians of many stripes; the radicals, the ones who want to stop "middling through" and change the whole system or just dump it and replace it with something else. Such attitudes can seem appealing, particularly for voters who think that most political parties are so similar that they are merely quibbling about technicalities, or just pretending to quibble about technicalities. Now, I do have some radical political ideas myself. For instance, I'm in favour of open borders. I am thus no alien to the appeal of radical solutions as such.

Radical ideas become problematic, however, when they are based on powerful wording, but little consideration of the practicalities of implementing the idea or its possible consequences. For a political vision to be meaningful, it has to be possible to do it, to put it in practice, too. That means having a notion for how it should be organized. Who should do what, when, with what mandate, and under what accountability? To answer those questions, we land right in the issue of public administration, which many consider to be the least sexy of all topics in politics (I know, I thought so once). However, the questions cannot be avoided for anyone who wants to do anything political.

It thus behooves those who want to change society to understand public administration and how it works. Those who don't will not be able to assess the potential consequences of moving a political vision from words to action.

Grid/Group Cultural Theory is very helpful for this type of work. It was developed to categorize different forms of bureaucracy based on their a) level of regulation and b) how socially coherent they are as a unit:

From Hood, Table 1.1(9) Four styles of public management organization: Cultural theory applied, in Hood, C (2000) The Art of The State: Culture, Rhetoric and Public Management, Oxford: Clarendon

Group (Social cohesion)

Grid (Rule-boundedness)

The Fatalist Way
Low-co-operation, rule-bound approaches to organization.
Example: Atomized societies sunk in rigid routines.
The Hierarchist Way
Socially cohesive, rule-bound approaches to organization.
Example: Stereotype [sic] military structure

The Individualist Way
Competitive approach stressing  negotiation and bargaining.
Example: Chicago-school doctrines of ‘government by the market’ and their antecedents.
The Egalitarian Way
High-participation structures in which every decision is ‘up for grabs’.
Example: ‘Dark green’ doctrines of alternatives to conventional bureaucracy.

The four types of administration are:

The Hierarchist Way

This is the classic bureaucracy. It is top-down organized, has clear ranks with senior managers, middle managers, and frontline clerks and case officers who are supposed to act on orders. In political science, it's known as Weberian bureaucracy. The military is the most clear example of it, but it has been so popular that it has been the go-to model for how to structure a government agency since World War II, if not longer.

It's good at decision-making and allocating responsibility. The buck stops in a clear location (the top) and the pyramid structure makes it easy to quickly take a decision and send an order down the ranks. It's bad at allowing for bottom-up impulses and flexibility for local needs. I.e. if the front-line case officers notice that the order makes little sense for conditions in their area, they have little recourse, and little chance of making their concerns heard in upper levels.

The Fatalist Way

This is the go-to model for catching cheaters. It's not necessarily as rigidly structured as Hierarchism, but builds on the assumption that the world is a hostile place and people are out to get you. For that reason, it introduces randomized controls to catch free-riders and rule-breakers and makes sure that the staff rotates so they can't form cliques that could undermine the top's control.

Those randomized controls does make it a decent model for catching cheaters, as evidenced by its prolific use in, for example, traffic controls or by revenue agencies. But like Hierarchism, it's bad for flexibility and also tends to systematically destroy trust among the people involved, so it quickly stifles innovation ("what's the point?") and undermines cooperation ("too much work and risk if the others will just rip me off"). It's generally incapable of responding to rapidly changing conditions.

The Egalitarian Way

This is the classic communitarian way of management, where the objective is to eliminate the difference between producer and user entirely. It has been seen in a range of experiments by "alternative" communities for the last century, including, of course, hippies and deep green environmentalists. We saw similar attempts when the Occupy Wall Street wanted to eliminate the leadership cast. In short, the organization should be as flat as possible. Unlike the Hierarchist and Fatalist Ways, which are both top-down, this model is bottom-up, decentralizing decision-making to provide grassroots with much more power. Likewise, accountability is exercised through peer pressure. Versions of this model has been practiced in mainstream politics as well, and includes collaborative models that see public agencies partner with community groups - for instance law enforcement collaborating with the neighbourhood watch, or parent-school councils and so on.

The strength of this model is that when decisions are made, they have strong buy-in or legitimacy from the membership. Among small groups of like-minded, it can thus work very well  However, if the group fails to reach consensus or if factionalism develops, it can very quickly grind to a complete halt because the discussion never ends. As such, if there is disagreement, it can be very hard to get a decision made at all, and that has often been the Achilles heel that made Utopian community experiments come crashing down.

The Individualist Way

This is the classic free-market solution. The most recent incarnation that made a big impression and triggered a global reform wave was New Public Management (the implementation of which is a whole can of worms in itself, requiring a separate blog post). The idea is to use the free market to make the public administration more cost-effective and less burdened by red tape. "Let managers manage" and "let users vote with their feet" were two typical slogans for this management type. Like the Egalitarian Way, it is designed to have considerable space bottom-up flexibility. Vouchers or procurement could be used where the public sector bought services from professional service deliverers, and users would then pick the provider they felt most comfortable with. Thus, users have power over service delivery.

It's good at presenting users with more than one type of service, and can work when there are plenty of service delivery producers who compete with each other for the user's favour. It doesn't work well when in-depth cooperation is needed, however, because the competitive nature of the model undermines stable networking.

What's the point of all this?

What, indeed, is the point of this theory? There are a couple of points, really. First, organizational theory scholars (the research field where this typology was developed) have shown that there is only a limited number of models that have been used to organize public agencies and what they do in history. There's just so many ways of doing things, in other words. Second, every organizational type has its strengths and weaknesses. There are good ways and bad ways of doing things, but there is no silver bullet, no magical formula, no one-size-fits-all solution. They are good at some things and bad at others, and the public management literature has a lot of material about when they succeed and fail. The difficulty, when implementing a policy, is to know which type of organization that actually can have a hope of delivering the desired outcome. Choosing a screw-driver when you need a hammer will set you up for failure. It's the same thing in politics. Unfortunately, very few pundits, activists or politicians seem to be aware of this - or at the very least they neglect to discuss how they want to achieve their goals.

In future posts, I will use these four types to evaluate political platforms on the left and the right in terms of what they imply about public administration and thus what effects they would have if carried out as actual politics.

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Sweden's government implements the most restrictive migration policy in ages

The social democratic and Green party government coalition in Sweden made a U-turn on migration policy last week, introducing the most restrictive such in at least my lifetime. As more and more countries in the EU moves towards closing their borders, Sweden's remained relatively open and more than 140 000 refugees have gone there to seek asylum this year. That is just under twice as many as last year. Municipalities and the National Migration Board have argued that they are overwhelmed by the numbers, with overworked staff. The government argues that the new policy is set in place to:

  • Reduce the number of claimants so that the administrations gain some breathing room,
  • Send a signal to other EU-countries that it's time for them to step up to the plate.
Let's assess that. The proposal is available here (in Swedish).

The proposed changes to migration policy

Temporary residency permits for every asylum seeker except quota refugees

This is a suggestion that will not necessarily impact the number of people seeking asylum in Sweden. However, it will make integration and settlement harder. The majority of asylum seekers will no longer be able to settle and build a future for themselves. To successfully settle, newcomers need to build economic, social and cultural capital in the new country. A person who loses residency will have to start that process all over again, destroying much of the assets built over the years. Moreover, the Migration Board will have to assess each asylum claimant twice, once to approve the temporary residence permit, and then a second time when it expires to see if the claimant can get permanent residency. That actually increases the administrative burden on the Migration Board over the long term.

Limit the right to family reunification for people with temporary residency

See above. It also means that newcomers have to apply as asylum seekers from scratch, which means that they will not be able to build on the economic, social and cultural capital that family members who arrived earlier might have created. Also, this will mean that people who could have been given expedient approval through family reunification will have to go through the asylum approval process, so this could potentially actually make processing times even longer.

Raised demands on families to support family class immigrants

Canada has demands like these already instituted. It is a barrier for immigrants, to be sure. Not sure how it will affect processing times, though. Also, this type of criterion does not necessarily mean decreasing the inflow of migrants. The result will depend greatly on community capacity.

A category of refugee grounds is replaced by a more restrictive one

This is where the Swedish government essentially says that Sweden will only accept quota refugees from now on. That is as close to closing the border that the Swedish government can push policy without violating important EU treaties and UN commitments.


In addition to the detrimental effects mentioned above, the police are now conducting ID checks to all travelers using collective means of travel (trains, buses, planes, ships) arriving in Sweden. Instead of having police devoted to pursuing suspects of crime that actually hurt Swedish citizens, they are patrolling the borders to check the IDs of travellers, meaning that they need more resources, not less, to fulfill their core tasks.


I don't think anything good can come of this. The impact on asylum seeker inflow is dubious. It is unlikely to encourage any other European countries to open their doors more. On the contrary, so far Denmark and Norway seem to be following suit. The measures will increase public expenditures, not lower them, and also make integration for those who do receive permanent residency much harder. It will also close one more possible safe haven for refugees, even as they continue to die in the Mediterranean because of the Fortress Europe border policy. Finally, it will impact Swedish domestic policies negatively. At the moment, there are only two parties opposing the measures outright, the increasingly libertarian Centre Party and the radical Left Party. It's a far cry from the political consensus of September, when just about all parties except the Sweden Democrats still spoke warmly about international solidarity and a generous refugee policy.

Just today, the Swedish news agencies are reporting that since the implementation of the new border restrictions, refugee smuggling is on the rise, and the first case of refugees crossing the Baltic in a rubber dingy has been reported. I am deeply concerned and fear that we might see a development where refugees risk their lives, and lose them, trying to reach Sweden. That is what often happens when a state restricts border crossing.

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Immigration myths: Cultural arguments for closed borders

This post deals with common culture-based arguments people use to defend the "we need to close our borders for immigration"-position. Much of the anxiety involved here, I believe, stems from a lack of understanding for how cultures work. That has been explored in-depth in both sociology and anthropology, but the findings have apparently not been disseminated successfully.

Culture arguments

"Refugees/immigrants are too different from 'our own' people, if they get to enter the country, our society will suffer from this difference."

First of all, research shows that migrants, regardless of "cultural distance" (whatever that means) can settle just fine in the host society. A conservative think tank has published the "assimilation index" (which seems to be really about integration, not assimilation) showing that migrants from countries like Vietnam and the Philippines do very well in terms of labour force participation, income levels and military service. This has not gone down with increased immigration, but rather the opposite. There is also this report that says roughly the same thing.

Second, the argument assumes that difference is bad. It thus builds on a long tradition of "us vs. them" that has been fueled by the idea that the "nation has to be ethnically homogeneous". That idea is a relatively recent one, emerging primarily in the 1800s. It argues that the state should be the vehicle for the self-determination of "the nation", and thus that borders should be created between nations, so that each nation gets its own state. See here an overview of nationalism as an ideology:

The problem is that nationalism idealizes the "magic line in the dirt", i.e. border-making. In reality, it's impossible to draw borders that creates homogeneous nation-states. Attempts to do so have led to disaster (see the ethnic cleansing during the wars after the collapse of Yugoslavia).

Also, a culture does not stop where the line on the map is drawn. I used to do an exercise where I challenged my students to name a country that was ethnically homogeneous. Just about any country that people usually think of as nation-states actually have a demographic reality that conflicts with the image of the ethnically homogeneous nation. A contemporary case in point is France, framed as a nation-state (some might say the original nation-state). Historically, the nation-state project was strong there, with heavy centralization from Paris. Just recently, the people in the Catalan region in Spain voted for separatist parties. Notably, the region with Catalan culture extends into France, but the way the borders have been drawn, the nationalist would expect that the Catalans of Southern France have more culturally in common with the Alsatians in Eastern France than they do with the Catalans in Northern Spain.

Japan also comes up often in this context, as it is a country many perceive as homogeneous, mostly because the Japanese government maintains this image to avoid acknowledging the ethnic minorities that do exist in the country. These include indigenous peoples in both the north and on Okinawa, as well as guest workers from China, Korea and the Philippines. Notably, the country's very restrictive border policies continues to block its economic development - the demographic challenge of an aging population that confronts all rich countries is most severe here, and as a consequence it experiences significant labour shortages. That could be solved if it opened up the borders to more immigration. So far, Japanese governments have refused, because of the strong pressure in the political culture to maintain the myth of nation-state homogeneity. Thus, the problem persists.

The most recent incarnation of the idea that difference is bad is Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations", which argues that the defining conflict in the post-Cold War era will be one between Western and other civilizations, particularly the Muslim world. This theoretical framework has been thoroughly picked apart. I even used to pick it apart together with my students to demonstrate the inconsistencies in Huntington's conceptualization of "civilization", but that's a subject for a blog post on its own. Suffice to say is that many politicians and pundits seem to have found Huntington to be deeply inspirational and keep using "Clash of Civilization"-style framing to argue that some cultures are "incompatible with others" and use that as a rationale to close borders.

Conflicts, instead, flare up when ethnic difference are politicized. That has happened in many places in the past, but in that case, bigotry is to blame, not ethnic difference in itself.  Consider the Chinese, Korean or Japanese communities in the US. I would say that racism from the mainstream population have been a bigger barrier in their settlement than their "cultural difference". Conflict on a societal scale only tends to emerge when political leaders work hard to make them happen by blaming an ethnic group for things that go wrong in society (i.e. scapegoating). We could see that in Rwanda, in Yugoslavia, and so on. In that sense, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, difference will lead to conflict when someone makes it a problem.

"They will destroy our culture/We have the right to preserve our national identity/values"

This argument is closely related to the previous one, but focuses more on the maintenance of "us as similar" rather than on "them as different". It is based on the idea that sameness is inherently good, which can be contested. Also, it assumes that culture is something static, and that it has always been there and somehow was more "pure" in the olden days, before we "mixed with others". This view is called primordealism and has problems. The idea that culture was "pure" once assumes that people didn't mix back in the day, but they did. People have always moved and cultures have always changed over time. This is most easily identifiable in how languages change: English today is not what it was 1 000 years ago, or 500 years ago or even a century ago.

Those governments that tried to stop cultural change have done poorly. Governments in both Imperial China and Japan tried to isolate those countries from the rest of the world precisely based on this idea - both felt that their own cultures were superior to all other cultures in the world. China implemented that policy in the early 1400s, at a time when China was the global superpower in just about every sense of the word - culturally, economically, technologically, militarily. 400 years later, the Chinese government discovered the consequences of the policy the hard way when it found how the Western European countries had passed it by entirely. Loss of innovation is the price of isolation. The Chinese population has paid a high price for that policy over the last couple of centuries and are only now, when the Chinese government has opened up the Chinese economy, starting to recover from it.

To take an opposite example, the United States accepted many migrants from diverse countries in the late 19th century. That did not destroy American culture, but rather contributed to the country's economic and cultural success in the 20th century.

Such examples call to mind research on group-think done on organizations. Such studies show how organizations that are too internally homogeneous lose the capacity to innovate, because there are too few perspectives, too few ways to challenging what is taken for granted. I don't think such experiences should be dismissed in this context.

Interestingly, when this "preserving our values"-argument comes up, it proves very difficult for its advocates to present a comprehensive overview of what those values are. Now, this is not to argue that ethnic identities do not exist, they do. A Swedish person does not have the same outlook on the world as someone from China or Brazil. Rather, cultures are diffuse, and also internally heterogeneous, and thus they resist attempts at codifying them for the purposes of legislation. For example, when the government of the UK tried to put together a document intended to demonstrate "British values"for immigrants, it ended up turning to the European Charter of Humans Rights. The European Charter of Human Rights is, of course, European, not specifically British. Also, Human Rights are not even specifically European, but much more universal. That's how it usually goes - the document becomes something very vague along the lines of democracy and human rights are important. They are, but they are not values that are unique for any particular nation-state, but rather shared by people globally.

"Their culture is primitive/backwards/heathen"

This is another argument inspired by a Huntingtonian worldview. Instead of saying "difference is bad" or "sameness is good", it says "we are better than those people in particular", which is a classic driver behind the racialization of ethnic groups. Notably, the hierarchy still is colour-coded. On top can always be found the "whitest" peoples, who are framed as "more civilized", and as we descend through the ranking, the peoples are increasingly coloured, where the bottom of the hierarchy is "the most primitive". Essentially, it creates a hierarchy of "good people" vs. "bad people", repeating the statements made by racial biologists a century ago, only, now it frames the ranking in terms of culture instead of race.

In Sweden, that ranking would have ethnic Swedes on top, as "the most enlightened, democratic, civilized and developed". After that come peoples from neighbouring areas, with Norwegians and Danes first, Finns and Sapmi last (they've always been at the bottom of the Nordic rankings). Then come other Western, Central Europeans and Anglo-Saxons, with Protestants higher and Catholics lower. Then comes the Mediterranean peoples and Eastern Europeans. After that come Latin Americans, followed by Asians and then Middle Eastern peoples. Africans come last, particularly Somalis. This hierarchy is  not just a matter of perception, but so entrenched that it is found in the labour market. Swedes have the highest employment numbers, Somalis the lowest.

"Immigrants may bring homophobia, sexism or other bigotry"

Yet another way of invoking Huntington's "Clash of Civilization"-argument. This is a spin of the former argument, and equally targeted at racialized immigrants (mostly Muslims). Only, in this case it has been reframed and dressed with key values that most people in democracies will find anathema. The irony is that many nationalist parties tend to be weak when it comes to protecting the rights of non-ethnic subaltern groups. Their track records when it comes to women's rights, the protection of sexual minorities or those of disabled people are not impressive. Another irony is that the person who argues this effectively stereotypes a whole group of people, which is bigotry itself. Like all other categories of people, immigrants are diverse. Many migrants are actually moving because they have been persecuted by bigots and because they are pro-democracy and human rights activists.

Furthermore, if we are to take values like freedom of thought and freedom of speech seriously, this argument is impossible to sustain. You can't have a border control based on political opinion for a country that says that all citizens have the right to hold whatever political opinions they want. Notably, some countries have tried adopting policies that would "educate" newcomers about "acceptable values" in the host  society, for instance the Netherlands and France. The data I've taken part indicates that integration outcomes for the Netherlands actually have taken a turn for the worse, so apparently the policy isn't working. That doesn't surprise me much, as the policy strongly signals that newcomers are not trusted. That is a poor way to welcome them.

"We should treat them like we would be treated in their country"

I've seen this one with some regularity. It is often invoked when talking about people moving from particularly oppressive authoritarian states. The strange part about this is that the speaker somehow is holding a person who is oppressed by a dictatorship (a government without any democratic legitimacy) partially responsible for what that government is doing. Listen, you can't hold the citizens of Saudi-Arabia responsible for the fact that their government is prohibiting women from driving cars. The people have no say in the matter - it's a dictatorship! Also: are you really suggesting that the government of [insert the democratic country you live in] should start acting like a dictatorship? Surely, we prefer democracies precisely because they do not act like dictatorships. Stop advocating dictatorship!

"They are radical and anti-democratic and will destroy our democracy and replace it with their totalitarian theocracy" 

This one is usually used about Muslims who get stereotyped as radical fundamentalists. I'll let this man respond:

Sunday, September 27, 2015

Immigration myths: Law and order arguments for closed borders

This post deals with common law and arguments people use to defend the "we need to close our borders for immigration"-position. As the overview will show, these arguments are difficult to sustain on closer scrutiny. An examination exposes their weak foundation.

Law and order arguments

"Refugees and/or immigrants are criminals/terrorists and should be kept out of the country lest social unrest results"

No. There is no research suggesting that crime rates are higher among immigrants than among the native born population that I am aware of. In fact, the opposite is often true. Now, consider what some are suggesting here: because a marginal fraction of immigrants might have committed criminal acts, everyone should be kept out. That's a form of collective punishment, seriously disproportionate to the problem at hand, and as such a severe infringement of human rights. A better approach would be to keep the borders open and then use regular law enforcement services to bring those who do commit crimes to justice - the way that is done with any native born.

New immigrants are expected to abide by the laws of the land, like everyone else. No one has argued that immigrants should be allowed to break the law. Designing a law that keeps people out because someone else has broken a law and "we think these people might break the law in the future" goes against some fundamental legal principles, like "presumed innocent until proven guilty".

"Allowing immigrants in undermines social cohesion"

People who argue this often refer to Robert Putnam's famous study E Pluribus Unum, which found that local trust levels tend to go down when new immigrants settle in a neighbourhood. They tend to read that piece selectively, however, because the piece then goes on to explain how that can be remedied by building networks between newcomers and long time residents. In short, when people get to know each other, they develop trust. He also cites a number of organizations that have done well with an ethnically diverse workforce.

Also, note how political leaders who speak of how "multiculturalism has failed" and how it challenges "social cohesion" (like David Cameron) never manage to define social cohesion. It's one of those words that sound important but has no real meaning. That makes it particularly useful for xenophobic groups.

"Immigrants bring disease"

During the Ebola outbreak in Western Africa, this argument was used by some who wanted to close the borders for people from the affected areas. This, again, would be a form of collective punishment that is completely disproportionate to the health risks involved. See this piece for an elaboration on how destructive a border closure would have been. If it can't be sustained for a pandemic of that level of seriousness, I can't see how it could be sustained for other matters of health either.

Some would say that the concern is that migrants will burden the health care system. If that is so, a better solution would be to keep the borders open but say that immigrants who are not citizens do not get access to health care. That way, the immigrants would have a few rough first years, but eventually, would become naturalized. If I have to choose between closing the borders and keeping the borders open while deny newcomers health care services, I would go with the latter. Personally, I think that solution is excessive.  There will there be some immigrants who need health services, but there will also be many who a) contribute with tax dollars to fund health services as they work and b) who either arrive with professional health care expertise and thus can work in the sector, or choose to become doctors or nurses after arrival.

"Illegal immigrants should be deported because they entered the country unlawfully"

It is technically true that people who enter the country outside the auspices of the official channels do so unlawfully. Notice, however, how the remedy to this, for those who raise "the issue of illegal immigration" is always to deport people and close down borders. A more straightforward solution would be to change what is, ultimately, an expensive and inhumane law for everyone.

Let us probe a good example: Prohibition. That law was formulated with the best of intentions: to save people from the evils of alcohol abuse. The method chosen, banning alcohol, probed incredibly costly and inhumane. Governments had to spend incredible resources enforcing the law, the alcohol that was produced was less safe precisely because it was done on the black market, with little to no accountability, and organized crime flourished. The sensible solution was to repeal prohibition.

Notice the many parallels to closed borders: smugglers can line their pockets, migrants have to constantly worry about government law enforcement (which gives scrupulous employers ample opportunity to exploit them) and risk injury and death as they travel across borders in dangerous and remote areas. Alan Kurdi's fate is a case in point; the migrants dying on the Mediterranean do so because European governments have put up fences and closed the borders where it is safe to travel.

If the borders were, instead, open, travel would be without risk. Exploiting smugglers or employers would no longer be able to threaten migrants without documents with deportation, so they could get proper jobs, with proper labour protection and thus be as productive as anyone else in society. The migrants could send their children to school without fear of government persecution. Governments could save all that money that is currently plowed into control measures that create more problems than they solve.

Next time a politician suggests building walls to "protect the border", some should ask why that is a good idea when it would be so much easier and more beneficial to everyone to just re-write the law an open the borders. Today, we consider the prohibition of coffee in Sweden enacted periodically during the 18th and 19th century) outlandish and absurd. The ban on movement across borders is much more destructive.

Saturday, September 26, 2015

Immigration myths: Economic arguments for closed borders

This post deals with common economic arguments people use to defend the "we need to close our borders for immigration"-position. I should say that economics is not my research focus, but the overview will show that there is not much evidence from findings in that discipline, as far as I know, that would substantiate an economic rationale for closing the borders. If politics was genuinely driven by an ambition to do what benefits the economy, borders would be opened up, not closed down.

Economic arguments

"Refugees don't need help, because they have cellphones so clearly they are well off"

Is that a reason to close the border? If they don't need our help, they won't use government services and can support themselves, so what is the problem with keeping the border open?

"We should take care of our own people before we let new people in"

This seems straight forward: "The pie in our country is limited. If more people get in, we all get a little less to get by." The problem with this line of thinking is that it doesn't take time into account. The pie actually grows over time. Most countries have experienced population growth over the past century, but in most cases, that did not result in lowered standards of living, but rather the opposite. Most of us are much better of today than our ancestors were a century ago. The number of jobs in modern democracies has increased together with population growth . It doesn't really matter if that growth is from fertility or immigration. As the population grows, so does the economy.

"We need to protect our jobs so that outsiders don't take them away from us"

This is related to the above argument and also frames the labour market as a zero-sum game, which means that it has the same weakness as the above. People who argue this apparently have such low confidence in the skills and productivity of your own compatriots that they want to use force to keep people out of the country. In fact, research shows that most immigrants a) do not compete for the same types of jobs as the native born do, because skill sets only partially match up and b) immigrants often create jobs over time that can end up employing the native born. See this overview, for example:

When South Africa was desegregated, a massive migration from remote areas to metropolitan centres started. If large numbers of migrants really do have negative effects on the economy, it should have happened. It didn't. Instead, average incomes rose by more than 50 %. White South Africans were not disadvantaged, their incomes rose by even more than average; 275 %.

Over time, immigrants contribute staggering numbers to the economy of their host countries, as well as to the public coffers. This has been consistently showed by the OECD and is a general consensus among economists, even economists who like closed borders.

"We need to stop poor countries from losing their best and brightest to brain drain, and should therefore close the borders to help them develop"

The brain drain issue arose as a concern in the 1980s and 90s and was given attention in the scholarship. It turns out that, over time, it wasn't much of an issue. Two things generally happened, sometimes both. 1) The migrants would send money to their relatives. This is known as remittances. These help the local economies in poor countries substantially, even more, some claim, than foreign aid.  2) The migrant gets professional expertise and education/training in the new country and then returns to the country of origin, bringing valuable experiences to benefit these economies. Closing the borders would hurt the economies of poor countries considerably.

It's quite cynical to say that armed guards should stop people from crossing the border "for their own good". One of the best policies any democratic government could adopt today to combat global poverty would be to open the borders for immigration to both refugees and others.

"There are too many refugees, the system can't handle them/it will cost too much to let them all in"

The problem with this assertion is that a) it is always made, regardless of how many refugees there actually are, and b) even when refugee streams peak, time is not taken into account (which seems like a theme for this category of concerns). Europe has confronted many periods when greater numbers of refugees emerged for one reason or another. One was in the aftermath of World War II, when millions of people were on the move, either going back home, or fleeing because they had been displaced by the changed borders. Another moment when refugee numbers rose was during the wars that developed as Yugoslavia collapsed.

Did these events create situations that were challenging to address for existing systems? Most likely. What happened over time? Answer: the refugees settled in, found work and became residents of those countries, many of them as naturalized citizens. It might have taken some months and sometimes even some years, but over time, problems dissipated. Twenty years later, nobody talks about Bosnian refugees as a problem group. The same thing happened to the Vietnamese refugees in the mid-70s, and the same will happen for the Syrians fleeing the war today if they are let in. They will form new communities, find work, start companies and settle in,

Also, refugee numbers have only limited effect on how well the post-migration situation develops. Instead, I propose paying more attention to the settlement bureaucracy. In my dissertation, I find that Sweden's poor integration outcomes are a result of a highly centralized bureaucracy that disempowers immigrants and pacifies them, effectively channeling them into permanent unemployment. But that is the system's fault, not the immigrants', and it is solved by less micro-management and by supporting decentralized services designed by immigrant communities, much as is being done in Canada and the United States. Thus, the greatest challenge for the successful integration of Syrian refugees, I would argue, will likely be government bureaucracies that make it difficult for them to settle.

Thus, most of the problems we are seeing now are created by the attempts of governments to close borders, not by people trying to move from one place to another. If the borders to Europe (and elsewhere) were open, people would be able to move and settle in new places without the tragic loss of life we currently see and with much lower economic costs to governments (those border policing and rescue efforts are not for free) and migrants. That lower cost would be translated into a quicker settlement and integration process. Everybody would win with less micro-management of borders.

"They are abusing the system and enriching themselves on arrival"

This is the "social tourism"-argument. "Immigrants", it says "are only out to become welfare moochers and come to live on the tax dollars of hard working native born people". Again, no. The argument has been used by politicians in many countries to close borders. When the EU expanded to include the Eastern European countries in 2005, the Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson wanted to close the Swedish borders to migrants from the new EU countries using this argument as a rationale. He was defeated by parliament. Did the "mass invasion of welfare moochers" materialize? No. One reason is that access to social welfare occurs through a fairly complex regulatory framework which can be difficult enough for the native born to learn if they don't have to use it themselves, and even harder for migrants to learn about before arrival. Another is, simply, that migrants come to work. When they don't work, it's because governments have put regulations in place that prevent them from working. The primary outcome of Persson's play was to damage the government's relation to the Polish and other Easter European governments, whose citizens had just been stereotyped as lazy moochers. Meanwhile, the Poles went to the U.K. and Ireland, where there was work.

"Accepting too many refugees/immigrants will destroy the welfare state"

This argument, like many above, also builds on the "the pie isn't big enough to open the borders"-argument. Unlike some of those above, this argument can be construed to have some support from Milton Friedman in the sense that he is on record saying that a state with a welfare state cannot have open borders. His argument is that the social entitlements and programs will become too costly when too many immigrants arrive. He concludes that new arrivals should not have access to social programs for an open border policy to work.

I believe Friedman is wrong in this case. Most immigrants are of a working age and in good health. They will thus work and pay taxes, and since they've already gone through education somewhere else, the host society has to pay lower costs for schooling the new arrivals than it has to for those who are native born.

That is, if they are allowed to work. Friedman does have an important point with his critique of the welfare state - the programs that are supposed to do good actually end up doing a lot of bad. A perfect case in point is social welfare, which locks people into poverty through humiliating means-testing. There's a comprehensive literature showing how paternalist and disempowering the programs are (but that topic deserves a separate blog post). If the bureaucratic systems channel immigrants to social welfare, then they will be blocked from the labour market. Like I mentioned above, my dissertation argues that this is a problem in Sweden. That problem, however, is one that is best remedied by reforming the welfare system for everyone, not by closing the borders for immigrants.

Friday, September 25, 2015

Immigration myths: introducing an overview of arguments for closed borders

By now, the ongoing refugee crisis has been making headlines for quite a while. Political leaders in both Europe and North America have to address it. It has affected the Canadian election campaign as the Harper government is being challenged on its response to the developing situation.

A lot of people, both political leaders, pundits and citizens in general, have opinions about this. Alas, a lot of those opinions seem deeply misinformed about how migration (refugee and otherwise) and immigrant integration actually works. I will address a (somewhat random) selection of common statements that I have seen across the Internet over the past few weeks in three coming blog posts. They will be based on theme, the economic, law and order, and cultural rationales that people often use to defend the "we need to close our borders for immigration"-position. I originally planned to deal with them in just one blog post, sort of grew a bit.

These "closed borders"-arguments are represented in just about all democracies. The most obvious such come from nationalist politicians, in Europe represented by parties like UKIP in the UK, Front National in France or the Sweden Democrats in Sweden, so the anti-immigration stance is often associated with the right-wing politics. However, it exists on the left, too. The US presents a good example of this, where Democrats want to close borders to "protect American jobs" and Republicans (the most glaring example being Trump) want to build a wall to Mexico "to keep the criminals out". The short reply to these politicians is that they are wrong. The scientific consensus is that immigration does not hurt the economy and that immigrants are not more criminal than the native born population.

Instead of thinking that the norm should be closed borders and asking how many immigrants can we accept, the norm should be to ask: What rights do governments have to set up barriers for the free movement of all humans?

Recommended sources

There is a quite an extensive body of scientific literature on this topic which I'm not going to cite here. The list would simply be too long (and some of the material is behind the pay walls of academic journals). The below are accessible reads/videos that succinctly summarizes the state of the art in research:

The Case for Open Borders
Myths about Immigration
Let the people go - a review of Paul Collier's argument for closing the borders

Oh, and: