Kerry Howley

Glen Whitman:

Kerry and Megan would both ideally like to see expanded legal immigration, but since that’s a political dead letter, they are consulting their second preferences. Their second preferences differ, because Megan thinks the negative consequences of a guest-worker program are bad enough to make it worse than the status quo.

That’s probably a fair assessment of the preference ordering I’ve put forth so far, but I’d like to emphasize that my ultimate goal is not simply to mete out more citizenships like Oprah handing out free cars. The intent is not to make everyone American, but to make being American matter less because labor market access ceases to entail any particular nationality. I’d like to afford Guatemalans the chance to cooperate with Americans as Guatemalans.

Expanding legal immigration to the U.S. is a more modest goal, and a totally distinct one. It’s clearly good and I support increases in every kind of Visa, from J-1s to H-1Bs, enthusiastically. But unless we’re going to Americanize huge swaths of the world, I’m not sure where it leads in the long run. In contrast, check out this chart, which I have liberated from Lant Pritchett’s book, comparing the good to be had from remaining trade liberalization and full labor liberalization.

You don’t get up there in the gazillion range by handing out a few hundred thousand citizenships; you get there by creating a common labor market as with the E.U., and a North American labor market is a fantastic place to start. If this all sounds like futuristic babble—and we’re so bogged down in dated frameworks, so limited in our imaginative capacity by an arbitrary ordering of states, that it probably will—please note that Ronald Reagan proposed this during his presidential candidacy in 1979. As Tim Cavanaugh writes, a free flow of people was an implied outcome of NAFTA, which wasn’t exactly cooked up by a bunch of drug-addled libertarian dreamers.

Another Tim, the estimable Tim Lee, shares this goal, but thinks we’re better off waiting it out until the immigration situation becomes so untenable that something gives than creating a guest worker program. How, though, will such a crisis promote the specific cause of integration? When we get to that transition point that Tim suggests we wait for, the probable response will be: Legalize the immigrants who are here. That will do us all a great service, but it won’t do anything to move us toward a global labor market.

Finally, guest worker blogging is totally 2007. It’s time to move on to the next feature, which I hope will annoy an entirely different set of people. I’m completely thrilled that the Singapore piece has generated as much conversation as it has, so thanks to everyone (especially Megan) who pushed it to such blogospheric heights.