Kerry Howley

Commentary blogger and China Hawk Arthur Waldron writes:

I had a strong sense of trouble lurking beneath the surface when a Singaporean colleague recently wrote me about the growing numbers of Chinese from the People’s Republic who are coming to Singapore. The reason: to fill jobs left vacant as native born Singaporeans continue to emigrate at what is perhaps the second highest rate in the world (an estimated 26.11 per thousand, second only to East Timor.)

This seems like a good time to revisit the United Nations fallacy–the idea that two or more political jurisdictions may be usefully compared along any dimension simply because those jurisdictions are each recognized as sovereign states. Singapore does, in fact, have a high emigration rate. Singapore is also the size of Chicago. Would it shock you to know that San Marino has a higher out-migration rate than Brazil?

And yet the comparison of utterly incomparable jurisdictions is not the silliest thing about this paragraph. PRC immigrants are not coming to “fill jobs” left vacant by footloose, disloyal Singaporeans. Singapore is a strong economy. It thus has the magical power to create new jobs, especially at the very top (engineers) and very bottom (domestic workers) of the spectrum. Singaporeans are becoming increasingly wealthy, the structure of consumer demand is changing, and native willingness to accept low-status jobs is steadily decreasing. Meanwhile, Singaporeans realize that the best universities in the world are outside the city-state, so they send their kids to schools abroad, where they often settle. The country has both a high emigration rate and one of the highest net migration rates in the world.

After relating a story about badly behaving Chinese immigrants in Singapore (which is itself over 70 percent Chinese, but is especially prejudiced against recent PRC immigrants), Waldron continues:

A looming internal problem would be solved, and a potential external disaster avoided, if that government would begin to democratize, and to allow its people to develop their talents–in Singapore, not abroad.

Let Singapore democratize, by all means, but it’s completely bizarre to claim that the Singaporean government, which presides over one of the wealthiest societies in Asia, is preventing citizens from “developing their talents.” Singapore is a cosmopolitan, educated society. Cosmopolitan, educated people are unlikely to cling to a single tiny plot of land for the entirety of their lives. If you have a quarrel with mobility, you have a quarrel with prosperity.

Hat Tip: Matt Zeitlin.

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.

Matt Yglesias and a mysterious Economist blogger (who is not my partner) agree: A temporary worker program isn’t any more likely to fly with conservatives than an increase in legal immigration quotas.

The question, then, is whether there’s reason to think that greater reliance on a guest-worker program (or, to be more precise, on a large expansion of current law’s very modest guest-worker allowances) would defuse some of the opposition.

None of the things that bother people about immigration would be substantially less bothersome in a guest worker scheme than under a more liberal immigration regime. If anything, you’d see the reverse.

This is worth considering, but I’m going to cling to the conventional wisdom here. The argument posits a uniformity and consistency in anti-immigrant sentiment that just isn’t there. Guest worker programs poll well; increasing legal immigration quotas polls dismally. In this Time poll, “79 percent say they favor a guest worker program that would allow illegal immigrants to remain in the U.S. for a fixed period of time.” A CBS poll finds 66 percent supporting guest workers; but that same poll finds that only 20 percent support more legal immigration. Senator Phil Gramm, who is pro- guest worker, here argues that a plan legalizing illegal workers would pass “over my cold, dead political body.” UPenn Law Professor Howard F. Chang discusses the appeal of guest workers in terms of political feasibility in this study, helpfully titled “Liberal Ideals and Political Feasibility.”

The point to keep in mind here is that we are debating unskilled immigration; we’re talking about poor people, and the anti-immigrant right has been extremely successful in portraying poor foreigners as people who want to sponge off haplessly generous Americans. Ask an Iowan about undocumented workers, and count the seconds until emergency rooms come up. As Time reports: “Americans’ biggest concerns about illegal immigration appear to be economic: 61% of those polled say they are very concerned about the cost of providing health care and education to illegal immigrants.”

It’s not just that they’re brown; it’s that they’re brown and want to use your stuff. Let more people in, the argument goes, and they’ll end up on welfare, their kids crowding your schools, their parents crowding your hospitals. You could argue that the economic concerns are just masking mass racism, but that doesn’t explain why guest worker programs–which preclude the possibility of their beneficiaries ending up on the dole–poll so well. Committed xenophobes should be more consistent in their distaste for mixing with the Other.

Because we do not live in a country of consistent xenophobes, we will see expanded skilled immigration both on a temporary and permanent basis. We’re going to see more H-1Bs, and we might move from a family-based to a point-based system with more slots provided to engineers and the like. The latter will likely only cement the idea that skilled workers are safe and unskilled workers are fiscally threatening.

Megan McArdle responds to my response:

I am of the opinion that the positive externalities outweigh the negative ones, particularly when we consider, as I believe we should, the benefits to the migrants. But there are ways to amplify the negative externalities, and setting up a program that explicitly prevents assimilation seems like a big one. So does setting up a program which, in order to actually make it work as promised, would require massive changes to American institutions such as gender discrimination laws.

So Megan is of the opinion that there are ways to amplify the negative externalities associated with guest worker programs, and not allowing a path to citizenship is one of them. But the question is not “Is a guest worker program better than vastly increased legal immigration with a path to citizenship?” Obviously not. The question is “Is the only politically viable way to increase legal immigration worthy of our support?” The answer will depend on how you weigh the value of an immigrant’s tenfold increase in her wages against the perceived negative externalities.

And about those externalities–and the “massive changes to American institutions.” It’s not at all obvious that a guest worker program would be as disruptive as this implies. We have guest worker programs. They’re not great, but they’re functional, and they’re not associated with pockets of permanence or high crime rates. You don’t need to massively change American institutions, it turns out, to get guest workers to go home. Here’s James Surowiecki:

Guest workers are also, paradoxically, less likely than illegal immigrants to become permanent residents. The U.S. already has a number of smaller—and less well-designed—temporary-worker programs, and there’s no evidence that workers in those plans routinely overstay their visas. Mexican workers, contrary to popular belief, do not, generally, intend to live their entire lives in the U.S. Instead, as the sociologists Douglas Massey and Jorge Durand concluded after a comprehensive study of immigrant attitudes and behavior, most want to work “for short periods to generate an alternative source of household income . . . or to accumulate savings for a specific purpose,” like buying a house in Mexico. This is harder to do as an illegal immigrant than as a guest worker, both because illegal workers are paid less and because when an illegal goes home he runs the risk of getting caught. One remarkable study found that after border enforcement was stepped up in 1993 the chances of an illegal immigrant returning to Mexico to stay fell by a third.

Permanence is not a given. Now for the other complaint: impermanence. Megan assumes a certain corrosion in a culture of transience, but chances are that your neighbor’s au pair–a guest worker–does not treat America like a rental car. I have been transient in every city I have ever lived in, but I didn’t find myself littering the streets of London, Los Angeles, or Rangoon. As a tourist in Mandalay and Hong Kong–places where I have even less buy-in– I rarely felt a need to trash hotel rooms. Mostly, in Singapore, I detected extreme gratefulness from people given the chance to feed their children and send their brothers and sisters to school. Where is the evidence that immigrants, given the chance to work, will reciprocate by mistreating their neighbors?

Megan McArdle is still against a guest worker program:

What will we do with pregnant guest workers? For three to six months, at least, they won’t be working. They’ll need health care; who will provide it? Will we force companies to provide their guest workers health care, which will make them uneconomical compared to other low-skilled labor, or will the taxpayer foot the bill? Do we ship them home? Do we rewrite our constitution to exclude their babies from citizenship.

That’s one troubling question. Here’s another: do we let the guest workers date and marry American citizens, as they will? Because if we do, we’ll find a lot of our guests have become permanent members of the household.

These are hard questions, so I’m going to avoid them. Economist Lant Pritchett answers them better than I can in an interview in the February issue of reason, but he also recognizes that the details of any such plan don’t matter nearly as much as most of us think they do.

Here’s why: Citizenships are club memberships you happen to be born with. Some clubs, like the Norway club, have truly awesome benefits. Others, like the Malawi club, offer next to none. Membership in each club is kept limited by club members, who understandably worry about the drain on resources that new members might represent. Wishing the U.S. would extend more memberships in 2008 isn’t going to get you very far.

Conceptually, for whatever reason, most of us are in a place where we think labor market access and citizenships ought to be bundled. A Malawian can’t come work here, we think, without the promise of a club membership, which is nearly impossible to get. This is an incredibly damaging assumption for two reasons: (1) memberships are essentially fixed in wealthy democratic societies (2) uneven labor market access is a major cause of global inequality. Decoupling the two leads to massive gains, as we see in Singapore, without the need to up memberships.

Here’s another way to think about it: Clubs have positive duties toward their members, including those of the welfare state. But the negative duty not to harm outsiders exists prior to clubs, and denying people the ability to cooperate with one another violates their rights in a very basic way. Our current policy is one of coercively preventing cooperation. In saying “we can’t let people into this country unless we confer upon them all the rights and duties of citizenship,” you are saying that we need to violate their right to move freely and cooperate unless we can give them welfare benefits. But that’s backwards.

This is why humanitarian economists can be enthusiastic about even a tiny guest worker program; the bundling of labor market access and citizenship is an obvious obstacle to global prosperity. Establishing the two as distinct matters.

So will we send home pregnant guest workers? I hope not, but maybe. Will we force companies to provide health insurance for young, healthy people who come here wanting to work? Probably. Will we allow guest workers to marry Americans? I don’t see why not. But none of these concerns comes close to justifying a system that locks people into poverty and out of our labor markets based on conditions of birth.

Matthew Yglesias kindly comments on “Guests in the Machine”:

I’d definitely recommend that you give Kerry Howley’s Reason article on guest workers in Singapore a read. It’s a very thorough and balanced discussion of the way it works. That said, given that the crux of the opposition to such programs for the United States is “it’s repugnant and un-American, violating everything this country stands for” to say in reply but look at how well it works in a small, regimented, highly inegalitarian Asian dictatorship doesn’t seem very persuasive.

The experience of a more similar society, Germany, is not something that many Americans look at and would desire to replicate. Meanwhile, I have no desire to see the United States become more like Singapore. We are, however, in the midst of a burgeoning libertarians against democracy moment (a return to classical liberalism’s traditional anti-democratic sentiments) of sorts, so maybe we’ll start seeing more and more aspects of Singapore and Hong Kong recommended to us as models.

This gets at the article’s core themes and then somehow misses the point completely. Is Singapore a more totalitarian country than the United States? Absolutely. But who has the more illiberal immigration policy? In 2006 the U.S. government allowed something like .3 percent of the current population to immigrate legally. Insofar as uneven access to wealthy labor markets reinforces global inequality, numbers like that strike me as “repugnant and un-American,” as well as pathetic and cruel.

No, we don’t want to be more like Singapore overall. We want to be more like Singapore in the ways that Singapore is more liberal than we are. I think we can reasonably expect a U.S. guest worker program to be more compassionate and less disturbingly efficient than a Singaporean one. If the system is bettering lives over there, it would surely do so in a country less excited about, say, executing people for marijuana possession.

That such a system would be more difficult to stomach in an egalitarian society like the United States is obviously true, and that’s the point of this paragraph:

The moral calculus, then, is to be weighed between the welfare of potential workers and the preservation of an idealized American narrative. Does it reflect better on the American character to lock poor people out than to permit them entry on limited terms? Guest worker programs do clash with deeply held mythologies about our relationship to the global poor. We live in a state of relative political equality nested awkwardly within a deeply unequal world, and it can seem better, kinder, to keep the inequality outside, walling it off and keeping our hands clean.

Hundreds of thousands of people in Southeast Asia would be worse off if Singaporeans thought they had to endow every immigrant with the legal status of citizenship–a legal status that plenty of those people wouldn’t even want. That’s something that needs to be grappled with honestly, preferably without recourse to “but that’s not what America stands for.” If your conception of “what America stands for” is one that leaves people worse off, maybe it’s time to rework your definition of Americanism.

I’m happy to cede that we’re in a “libertarians against democracy moment,” but this article does not belong in that ideological space. My libertarian dictatorship would be one of wide open borders; a guest worker program is the compromise libertarianism makes with democracy. It’s a messy, ugly compromise, to be sure. The pure humanitarian, pure libertarian position is not one that is currently politically feasible in any nation worth immigrating to. I think we’ll get there eventually, but meanwhile we need to measure proposed policies against the current situation.

If you’ve gotten this far, I recommend checking out James Poulos’ thoughtful response to the article, which is an honest expression of the conservative mentality that finds open borders-ism totally horrifying.