Tuesday, June 10th, 2008...3:29 pm
Even Friedmans Get Confused
Bryan Caplan digs up that much-deployed, ill-considered, VDare-riffic Milton Friedman immigration quotation: “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.” As it turns out, the quotation is even worse in context. When Friedman is offered the alternative of a status for immigrants that specifically excludes them from eligibility for welfare, he says:
I haven’t really ever thought of that system. It’s a new question. I very rarely get a new question, but I must admit that’s a new question for me. And I haven’t really thought about it a great deal, but my initial reaction is that it’s a very undesirable proposal.
Caplan, appalled, notes how odd it is that the 87-year old policy virtuoso had never once considered the relationship between mobility rights and welfare eligibility. It shows: The most obvious problem with Phyllis Schlafly’s favorite Friedman soundbite is that it is false. Residency and work rights are entirely logically and practically separable from citizenship and eligibility for subsidies or transfer payments.The interviewer knows this, and immediately offers Friedman a scenario in which immigrants would have access to labor markets but not unemployment checks.
Welfare eligibility is already limited by a set of criteria; it is possible to add citizenship to the list, while extending residency and work rights indefinitely. Whether this is desirable is up for debate; whether it is possible is not. Somehow, the 1996 welfare reform bill disqualified undocumented workers from nearly all means-tested government programs. But they continued to live and work here in the millions.
After having his prior comment decisively negated by the possbility raised in the follow-up, Friedman retreats to a nebulous invocation of nation-level equality. It’s odd to see Friedman opting for increased equality within a particular nation state over mobility rights and global equality. As Caplan writes, this is totally out of character: “Normally, Friedman was eager to embrace any marginal measure in the direction of liberty. But on immigration, he bizarrely turned his wish for a “free society” into an argument against a compelling libertarian improvement over the status quo.”
Friedman made a mistake, but it’s not nearly as important a mistake as restrictionists might like. Schlafly wants the quote to mean that we cannot have any more immigration than we already have. But Friedman’s slip-up neither says nor implies that you cannot have a greater rate of immigration and a welfare state. The United States does not have an especially high rate of immigrants as a percentage of our population; it’s barely ahead of Sweden and Germany and considerably behind Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Switzerland. All the countries with more impressive rates of immigration, I’m guessing, are more generous in terms of welfare payments than is the United States. And they’re all extremely successful economies. It’s clearly possible to have a larger welfare state, a considerably higher rate of immigration, and a healthy economic climate.
On the other hand, we have little reason to believe that immigration itself encourages the growth of redistribution schemes. Quite the opposite; a number of recent studies support the idea that ethnic heterogeneity somewhat undermines support for transfers. In this very different sense, Milton Friedman might have been on to something: If you want to decrease the size of transfer payments, you should take Friedman to heart — and support much, much higher rates of permanent immigration.
And here is David Friedman exploring that very argument.
4 Comments
June 10th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
I don’t think it’s fair to even jokingly call Friedman’s argument “VDARE-riffic” consider the pseudo (or not so) racialist rhetoric associated with that Web site. I agree with you that Friedman’s argument is wrong, but it certainly wasn’t motivated by the same kind of racial/cultural animus that lies at the heart of the VDARE movement.
June 11th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
For what it’s worth, Friedman did briefly address a form of that question in the discussion following Part 8 of the “Free to Choose” video series (”Who Protects the Worker?”). He and Walter Williams seemed to agree that it’s better for immigrants to remain illegal, insofar as that status prohibits them from receiving welfare.
Friedman said, “The situation of immigration restrictions really has to do with the question of a welfare state. As I say in the film, I would favor completely free immigration in a society which does not have a welfare system. With a welfare system of the kind we have, you have the problem that people immigrate in order to get welfare, not in order to get employment. You know, it’s a very interesting thing, if you would ask anybody before 1914 the U.S. had no immigration restrictions whatsoever, I’m exaggerating a little bit, there were some immigration restrictions on orientals, but it was essentially, mainly free. If you ask anybody, any American economic historian was that a good thing for America, everybody will say yes it was a wonderful thing for America that we had free immigration. If you ask anybody today, should we have free immigration today, everybody will __ almost everybody will say no. What’s the difference? I think there’s only one difference and that is that when we had free immigration it was immigration of jobs in which everybody benefited. The people who were already here benefited because they got complementary workers, workers who could work with them, make their productivity better, enable them to develop and use the resources of the country better, but today, if you have a system under which you have essentially a governmental guarantee of relief in case of distress, you have a very, very real problem.”
Later, Williams said, “[immigrants] are not the problem, and our nation benefits to the extent that these people come here and work. And to that extent __ to that extent__ so it’s kind of good for them to remain illegal aliens as opposed to being legal aliens where they’re subject to our welfare programs, so that we don’t want them to come here to __”
And after a brief conversation among others about the plight of undocumented workers living outside the law, Friedman added:
“…the tragedy of the situation, as what Walter Williams point out, that as long as they are undocumented and illegal they are a clear net gain, the nation benefits and they benefit. They wouldn’t be here if they didn’t. The tragedy is that we’ve adopted all these other policies so that if we convert them into legal residents it’s no longer clear that we benefit. They may benefit, but it’s no longer clear that we do.”
I found the transcript (which I’m pretty sure is faithful to the original) at: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1684832/posts
June 14th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
“we have little reason to believe that immigration itself encourages the growth of redistribution schemes.”
Of course we do. Hispanics and poor people both vote statist. Anti-statist natives may grow in numbers as the transfer payments creep up, but they’re outnumbered now as it is.
That people initially respond by moving away just means the statist voters take over whole states, which affects the federal government, which has all the real power anyway.
Besides transfer payments include things like public education. No one’s ever going to deny immigrants or their children a tax-funded education.
July 2nd, 2008 at 4:58 am
It seems a bit dishonest to assess Friedmans quote to mean only transfer payments when he is apparently referring to welfare states in their entirety, including roads, education, emergency room care, etc.
Of course, his quote is still wrong…
There is nothing economically unsound about open borders, rather the problem comes with open borders and democracy. When demographic changes can have profound political changes then immigrants can theoretically diminish or enhance economic liberty and economic growth.
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