Borderline Disorder

Here’s one difference between me and Paul Krugman: He enthusiastically supports President Obama’s new immigration policy, which he calls a matter of human decency. I grudgingly support President Obama’s new immigration policy, which I call a bit less indecent than the policy it replaces.

krugHere’s another difference between me and Paul Krugman: I believe it’s the job of an economics journalist to call attention to unpleasant tradeoffs and offer frameworks for resolving those tradeoffs. Krugman apparently believes it’s the job of an economics journalist to sweep all tradeoffs under the rug in the name of advancing your policy agenda — appealing, if you will, to the stupidity of the American op-ed reader.

Krugman, for example, tells us that he opposes deportations because they’re cruel, but also opposes open borders because they’d make it both economically and politically impossible to maintain the modern American welfare state.

In furtherance of which, he offers this kind of claptrap:

Second, there are large numbers of children who were born here … but whose parents came illegally, and are legally subject to being deported.

What should we do about these people and their families? There are some forces in our political life who want us to … deport the undocumented parents of American children and force those children either to go into exile or to fend for themselves.

But that isn’t going to happen, partly because, as a nation, we aren’t really that cruel

Dammit, I hate this stuff. Krugman says (and I agree with him) that it’s cruel to deport people. He ignores the fact that it’s also cruel to keep other people out. Krugman says (and I agree with him) that letting more people in would put pressure on the welfare system. He ignores the fact that allowing people to stay also puts pressure on the welfare system. Why should we prioritize kindness to those who are already here over kindness to those who are clamoring to get here?

There might be a really good answer to that question, but you’d never know it from reading Krugman. In fact, the takeaway from Krugman’s column is that the cruelty of deportations is unacceptable only because Krugman says so, and the cruelty of closed borders is a necessary evil only because Krugman says that too. So the next time you want to know whether some other policy is unacceptably cruel or not, the only way to find out is to ask Paul Krugman.

And then there’s more:

The truth is that sheer self-interest says that we should do the humane thing. Today’s immigrant children are tomorrow’s workers, taxpayers and neighbors.

Ummm…Paul? They are tomorrow’s workers, taxpayers and neighbors only if we let them stay. Do you know who else are potentially among tomorrow’s workers, taxpayers and neighbors? The ones we’re not letting in.

Once again, there might be some reason why we benefit more from those who are already here than we’d benefit from those who have not yet arrived — but if Krugman knows that reason, he’s keeping it a secret. He makes absolutely no attempt to quantify his cost-benefit analysis, or even, for that matter, to be explicit about what he’s counting as a cost or a benefit. His arguments — both his moral arguments and his arguments from self-interest — apply equally well to current residents and to current non-residents. They are arguments either for mass deportations or for open borders, but not for the Obama policy.

If you want to make an honest case against open borders, you’ve got to start with this acknowledgement: Even if we grant for the sake of argument that the modern American welfare state is a good thing, and even if we grant for the sake of argument that open borders would fully undermine it, it does not follow that the enormous benefits of open borders would fail to offset that enormous cost. That requires an argument. Here’s what an argument would consist of:

1. Either a) some estimate of the benefits of open borders, a separate estimate of the costs, and a comparison between the two or b) some clever way of proving, without any actual measurement, that the costs must exceed the benefits, say by showing that each individual benefit comes packaged with a larger cost.

2. A clear statement of how much weight you’ve given to costs and benefits felt by Americans as opposed to the costs and benefits felt by Mexicans, preferably along with some justification for your weighting and a fair accounting of how your conclusions might change if you’d chosen different weights. This would, for example, lead to some arithmetic along the lines of what you see in Chapter 19 of The Big Questions. That arithmetic is surely not the last word on the matter, but that kind of arithmetic is precisely what economics can contribute to this debate.

Not only does Krugman offer no answers; he pretends the questions don’t exist. His agenda, for whatever reason, is to stop deportations without loosening up the borders. Rather than defend that agenda, he pretends that

a) It needs no defense.

b) And if you think otherwise, you’re a bad person. Sneer, sneer.

Look: The essence of Krugman’s position is that current non-residents should be treated more cruelly than current residents. That position is probably defensible. Economics teaches us that life is full of uncomfortable trade-offs, and that sometimes you’ve got to be cruel in one way to avoid being even crueler in another. But economics also teaches us that it’s important to face those trade-offs honestly, even to call attention to them, so that we don’t make our choices with blinders on.

That’s where Krugman becomes the anti-economist. As is his right, he supports the Obama policy. But he has far too much contempt for his readers to fashion an argument that might actually illuminate that policy. Instead he throws out a bunch of rhetoric that, when analyzed with an even slightly critical eye, offers exactly zero support for his position.

His arguments, after all, come down to this: “Deportations are cruel and for that reason alone must be bad policy”, or “Open borders are costly and for that reason alone must be bad policy”. But if those were valid arguments, then (as Krugman knows perfectly well), one could just as easily switch deportations with open borders and reach exactly the opposite conclusions. But Krugman doesn’t care about logic, because he’s too busy bashing the morals of anyone who dissents from his apparently random value judgments.

According to Krugman, if you support the cruelty of deportations, you’re an evil person, but if you support the cruelty of closed borders, you’re a pragmatic adult. Why? Because Paul Krugman said so. Might there be a subject — like, oh, say, economics — that can help us think more clearly and systematically about such issues? If so, you’d never learn about it by reading Krugman. He wouldn’t want to risk teaching his readers to think.

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29 Responses to “Borderline Disorder”


  1. 1 1 Biopolitical

    There are two separate questions here. First, we can ask how border, deportation, welfare state or any other policies affect human well-being. A good scientific model of human affairs makes successful predictions on how human well-being changes after a policy change. To create such a model we need to be clear about we mean by human well-being, about how to measure it, and about how to reach a decision on the success or failure of a prediction. Being emotional doesn’t help. Loving or hating models or facts doesn’t help. We must just use all facts as they are to add support to or take support from models. We can decry the world as it is or we can love it, but neither position will help us understand and improve it.

    Second, we can ask why Paul Krugman or anyone else say what they say. This matters because when we add up what everyone says we get poll results and the policies that derive from them and that affect human well-being. So we need a scientific model of Paul Krugman. A good one would predict how Krugman will react to world events. Neither love or hate of what Krugman says will help us build a good model of Krugman.

    The opinions of Krugman and similar types are not random. They care about a certain logic that is shared by their many fans. This logic is disastrous for human well-being. But we gain nothing by simply disliking it, just as we gain nothing by simply disliking the ebola virus. We gain by understanding it and then creating a good model to satisfy our scientific curiosity and maybe find a cure.

    I think I can close the circle. I think the logic of Krugman and his fans is based on and cultivates love and hate and not the clear, dispassionate analysis of facts. I don’t want to fall in the same trap.

  2. 2 2 DJ

    Steve, you had me until “He wouldn’t want to risk teaching his readers to think.” That’s unnecessary, and undermines your earlier criticism of Krugman’s attitude.

  3. 3 3 Josh

    Could it be that Krugman could be implying that those Mexicans who came here illegally (especially the ones who crossed the border..very dangerous) on average, came at great risk to themselves. So in a sense the ones who are already here are the ones who for them it was worth a lot, more than those who stayed behind in Mexico or wherever.

    So for the ones already here it may actually be more painful than the ones remaining in Mexico.

  4. 4 4 Steve Landsburg

    Josh: I believe one could make an argument along those lines. Or alternatively, one could make an argument that says the ones who made it across the border were the lucky ones, and we should be more solicitous of those with a history of bad luck than those with a history of good luck. I’d be fine with someone making either of those arguments. Krugman made neither.

  5. 5 5 Harold

    The assumption is that deportation is more cruel than prevention of migration. It does seem a reasonable position, even if the reasons are not elucidated. A person who does not move has not born any cost of moving, and does not suffer the hassle and upset of forced re-location. Maybe he thinks it so obvious that it does not need stating. It still leaves the problem of how much more cruel, so even if you accept it, it does not necessarily lead you to the conclusion he reached.

  6. 6 6 David Wallin

    rs 3 & 4 We could also argue that those who are here illegally are individuals with less of an inclination to obey laws. (I say this to offer another spin, not express a personal belief).

    I remember well Steve’s comment after one of the 2012 Presidential debates. Apparently both parties agree: we love immigrants, but we hate foreigners. It seems Krugman is in that camp.

  7. 7 7 dictum

    “Why should we prioritize kindness to those who are already here over kindness to those who are clamoring to get here?”

    What about endowment effects which would cause those already here to value being here more than others who aren’t? Or if we’re not being so keen on psychology, from a revealed preferences point of view, there’s a superb reason to think those who are here want to be here more than those not here — namely, because they actually made the effort to be here. This is especially true if people are escaping criminal organizations and oppressive states which credibly threaten them with death or imprisonment.

  8. 8 8 Manfred

    Steve – why do you get so worked up about Krugman? We know his op-eds are doltish, and that one learns nothing from them. Krugman threw away his Economics academic thinking long, long time ago.

  9. 9 9 Major.Freedom

    Steve,

    Would it be fair to say that “open borders” to you means “Any existing private property owner in US territory should be permitted to allow any consenting and willing ‘immigrant’ into their homes or places of business”?

    Thanks.

  10. 10 10 Steve Landsburg

    Major.Freedom: Roughly, yes.

  11. 11 11 Roger

    Krugman is a partisan political attack dog. What do you expect? He did not get that Bank of Sweden medal for his immigration opinions.

  12. 12 12 Tom

    One cost/benefit that you don’t touch on is the WAY that this policy is enacted. If Obama is blurring the separation of powers, then there is a general degradation of the rule of law. I know you are not a lawyer, but those considerations must be part of THIS debate (not the general immigration reform debate).

  13. 13 13 Chuck

    “The essence of Krugman’s position is that current non-residents should be treated more cruelly than current residents.” More accurately, Krugman’s position is that current non-resident aliens should be treated more cruelly than current resident illegal aliens. Cruelty is really only relevant if one is arguing morality. Any decision offering limited choice is often cruel. Legally deportation is the law; cruel or not there is no choice required. To suggest that the law be ignored because illegals worked so hard to get here and undoing their hard work is cruel depends on flawed assumptions. One could use the same logic to suggest that if prisoners escape it would be cruel to hunt them down and send them back to jail. Or that if I do all the hard work of pulling off a successful jewel heist it would be cruel not to let me benefit from that effort. The real difficulty in providing a rationale for the decision is that it is a political decision. In modern politics morality, legality and rationality are seldom driving forces. A political justification doesn’t need to be moral, legal or rational — it only has to be acceptable to a politically significant percentage of a target demographic.

  14. 14 14 khodge

    “Instead he throws out a bunch of rhetoric that, when analyzed with an even slightly critical eye, offers exactly zero support for his position.”

    Steve, you raise a question here that has been on my mind for some time…as a responder to posts I rarely flesh out my arguments partly because it is not my blog and I don’t feel justified in taking up multiple paragraphs of the blog owner’s blog and partly because the readers of the blog already are generally familiar with most of the arguments.

    but…

    To what extent do you feel the blog owner needs to spell out his positions when (1) he is not a Nobel Laureate for an internationally recognized newspaper? or (2) when he is a Nobel Laureate, given the fact that most of his readers seem to be sycophants?

  15. 15 15 GabbyD

    but dr. landsburg, why is the relevant choice/tradeoff here “deporting” vs “letting others in”?

    for the state, isnt the correct choice “to deport/not to deport”?

    here, you agree with krugman completely right?

    the business of policy reform is piecemeal change, especially if you don’t have congress’s ability to craft proper/longterm immigration law. right?

  16. 16 16 TK Texas

    I can’t really say it better than GabbyD. If it is a deportation issue, it is not easy to see the relevancy of extended comparison of the relative merits of the “inside the border now” immigrants versus the “outside the border now” immigrants. A somewhat random factor favoring those here now may be that they have had a chance to learn more English! There are a lot of references to “cruelty” here. I suppose in the Freakonomics era “cruelty” may have an economic meaning but I thought the critique of Krugman was his economics. Also, correction of the reasoning flaws in Krugman argued are not likely to be easily traversed by Krugman in a short op-ed column. A lot of specialist critiques of writing for a general audience come down to this.

  17. 17 17 Ken Arromdee

    If you want to increase how kind we are to human beings, you can do it without opening the borders. Just tax everyone at 90% and use the proceeds to buy food, sanitation, medicine, etc. for poor people overseas.

    Somehow, the support for this is a lot less than the support for open borders.

    The idea that we should care about all human beings in the world equally is bizarre and something nobody really believes in when taken to its logical conclusion.

  18. 18 18 Max

    Cruelty is a human concept. You wouldn’t understand.

    Seriously, there’s no equivalence between deporting people and controlled immigration. (It would be cruel to keep out refugees, but the U.S. doesn’t do that, or at least it’s not the official policy).

  19. 19 19 Daniel

    @Ken Arromdee 17,

    If by logical conclusion you mean ridiculous false equivalency.

    Some of us believe in the greatness of America and believe the most efficient way to improve people’s lives is to let them come here, so that they can contribute to our vastly superior system in terms of worker productivity as compared to the countries that they are coming from. Every first generation of immigrants starts out as poor huddled masses and within one to two generations transforms into the next generation of entrepreneurs, programmers, and engineers. It would be a vastly inefficient waste to transfer our money to places that have abysmally corrupt legal, contractual, and political systems, when we could bring the people we want to help here, and let them contribute as well as share in our prosperity. Not all wealth transfers are created equally my friend.

  20. 20 20 ConnGator

    @Max,

    There is certainly an equivalence between deporting people and denying them entry.

    Both are desperate to be in the United States, both want to work here, both want to improve their lives (relative to being in their home countries, both would suffer if they were not allowed to be here.

    One group just happens to be on the other side of a line right now.

  21. 21 21 Advo

    I believe Krugman argues from the implicit assumption that getting deported is a far worse fate than being denied entry.
    I think it is fairly self-evident that this is true, both in purely economic terms as well as in squishy “human” terms many economists like to ignore because they are difficult to quantify and squeeze into neat mathematical models.
    Any person staying in the US illegally for a certain time has invested in his stay. He has rented an apartment, maybe purchased furniture, a car etc. and he has invested time, effort and money into getting to know the business and social environment of the US. He has “networked”. He has established a reputation as a good worker. He has accumulated job experience. Deport him, and these investments lose value or become worthless. The used furniture will sell for a fraction of its price, and perhaps so will the car. His network of contacts, reputation and job experience become irrelevant.
    These are all real assets which the immigrant has invested in, and now they’re gone. Someone who stays in Mexico and is never admitted to the US will not suffer this loss.

    So much for the economic losses – but there’s also the human issues.
    The immigrant (and his kids) lose their friends. That is painful. And they suffer a decline in living standards. Someone who doesn’t get to go to the US in the first place doesn’t suffer a decline in living standards and doesn’t lose his friends. Psychologically and emotionally, losing something is worse than not getting something (as a practical example for this I’d like to point to wage stickiness and inflationary/deflationary adjustment of labor costs).

    I think the reason why Krugman didn’t explain all this in his article is because this is all perfectly obvious to most non-economists.

  22. 22 22 Advo

    I’m also very skeptical as to Landesburg’s rather unsupported assertion as to the “enormous benefits”. I just bought the book just to see what they are, and I found the reasoning lacking. Landsburg gives the example that when one immigrant crosses the border he goes from $2 an hour to $9 an hour, while existing Americans collectively lose $3. A net gain.
    Unfortunately, that’s not how open borders would work. The impoverished masses of the world would pour into the US by the hundreds of millions until this gap is largely arbitraged away so that the immigrant will earn $1 an hour instead of $0.20 as in Congo or Myanmar or wherever. The enormous wealth gap opening up would also make crime a VERY attractive proposition for the new 300 million strong underclass. This would be expected to cause large costs, potentially far in excess of whatever gains can be achieved.
    In order to preserve US living standards overall and in order to prevent the US from becoming a third-world country itself, this population influx would require massive investments in all kinds of US infrastructure and social services, in particular the education sector as well as policing. Unfortunately, any effort to preserve the general public sphere in the US in regard to education, safety, security as well as aesthetics in the US at a level above what you have in Kongo will only serve to attract more immigrants. The tax receipts from the immigrants will not cover these investments/expenditures, due to how little they earn.
    Given the essentially unlimited pool of uneducated and impoverished immigrants (billions), immigration would go on until life in the US for the underclass has become so sh1tty that it’s not worth moving from Congo to the US. The erstwhile Mexican immigrants will have fled back to Mexico long before that happens.

  23. 23 23 iceman

    Advo – “Someone who stays in Mexico and is never admitted to the US will not suffer this loss…this is all perfectly obvious to most non-economists.”

    I think at least in terms of the economics you’re missing some double-entry here. Another way to characterize it is the person who makes it here gets to enjoy a higher standard of living (nicer space, furnishings, car, even opportunities for skill development and more new friendships) for whatever period of time they are here. Not even sure the reputational stuff need be wasted either. You seem to be saying it’s worse to experience this temporarily than not at all.
    I think that’s a perspective economics is helpful in providing (e.g. in the manner in which it’s presented on this blog)

    BTW I say this while agreeing we are neither obligated nor can afford to provide welfare to the whole world. But having more people to voluntarily transact with should make us better off pretty much by definition.

  24. 24 24 Advo

    Iceman, I don’t think the question is whether a temporary stay is worse than never getting in. The question is whether it is more cruel to deport someone who is already here or to refuse entry to someone who isn’t. The former suffers a bigger loss.

  25. 25 25 iceman

    OK purely psychological then. Logically hard to see how letting someone borrow a nice car, apartment etc. for a while is more cruel than never letting them use the stuff at all — especially when they’re well aware the whole arrangement is illegal and subject to unraveling at any moment.

  26. 26 26 Advo

    No, Iceman.
    The question is this:

    We have one person living illegally in the US and one person living in Mexico.
    Is it more cruel to

    A) Deport the first person and let the second person in
    or
    B) Is it more cruel to leave the first person there and keep the second person out

    A) is more cruel because the first person has already made the aforementioned investments and will suffer accordingly.

  27. 27 27 iceman

    Understand the question, my point is these are “investments” people are dying (sometimes literally) to make, and largely made out of the excess earnings they are “awarded”. Yours is certainly a very non-egalitarian position, not unlike saying we should confer welfare only to some via lottery. It would seem “fairness” would suggest rather than give the car to one person for life we should let others get turns driving it.

  28. 28 28 Advo

    Iceman,
    that, however, is not the policy question at hand.
    The policy question is “We want to reduce illegal immigration. Do we do that by I) closing down the border and deporting everyone or II) closing down the border and leaving most who are already here in place?

    This is what spawned the original post. Nobody’s talking about letting anyone in at all.

  29. 29 29 iceman

    1) The post was about contrasting deportation with open borders
    2) In 26A (most recent example) you frame the issue as “deport the first person and let the second person in”
    3) IMHO the policy issue is driven not so much by a desire to reduce immigration per se, but to have more control over who is coming in and why i.e. to produce and assimilate. The solvency of our entitlement programs probably depends on it.

  1. 1 Landsburg Agrees That Paul Krugman (Often) Is an Anti-Economist
  2. 2 Landsburg Agrees That Paul Krugman (Often) Is an Anti-Economist | The Liberty Herald
  3. 3 Assorted links
  4. 4 Assorted links | Homines Economici

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