Mass Immigration for Thee, but not for Me

That is, if you are a highly paid, middle class professional in the West, as Dean Baker notes:

“The trade agreements that the United States has negotiated over the last three decades have been about getting low cost auto workers, steel workers, and textile workers. In addition, immigration policy has been designed to ensure that custodians, farmworkers, and dishwashers all work for low wages. These policies have been successful in pushing down wages for large segments of the work force, not only those who were directly displaced by trade or immigrant workers, but also those who face heightened competition from workers who were displaced by trade or immigration.

But trade does not have to depress the wages of less-skilled workers. Trade agreements can also be structured to get us low cost doctors, lawyers, accountants, economists, reporters, and editorial writers. There are tens of millions of smart and energetic people in the developing world who could do these jobs better than most of the people who currently hold these positions in the United States. And they would be willing to do these jobs for a fraction of the wage. Real free traders would be jumping at this opportunity to increase economic growth and aid consumers in the United States, while at the same time increasing prosperity in developing countries.

But the economists, editorialists, and political pundits are not likely to raise the call for eliminating the barriers that prevent competition from professionals in the developing world. The truth is that the ‘free traders’ don’t want free trade – they want cheap nannies – but ‘free trade’ sounds much more noble.” (Baker 2006: 26–27).

Of course, even some of these people are starting to feel the effects of mass immigration on their employment prospects too, but Dean Baker’s general point still stands.

Logically, free movement of people and open borders are the natural corollary of free trade, as Ha-Joon Chang has noted here. But your average idiot neoclassical economist has nothing to say about this. The small fringe of hard libertarians and anarcho-capitalists love open borders, not least of all because they see (correctly) that it would destroy the welfare state.

Unlike Baker, however, who does seem at one point to endorse mass immigration of some Third World professionals to the West (Baker 2006: 103) to lower costs and increase supply, I don’t think this can be a sensible solution. The long-term solution is: educating more people in the West to overcome any supply issues with, say, doctors or health care professionals.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baker, Dean. 2006. The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer. Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, DC.
http://deanbaker.net/images/stories/documents/cnswebbook.pdf

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The Hypocrisy of Marxists and Left Libertarians on Mass Immigration

One of the most laughable aspects of modern Marxism and left anarchism is their endless bloviating talk about how they allegedly speak for the working class.

First of all, there is the reality that Marxist or communist parties are virtually dead in the Western world (here, here, and here). There are no doubt more working class people voting for conservatives in the West than for far left Marxists (e.g., for the UK’s recent general election see here), and that won’t change any time soon.

Secondly, there is the blatant reality that Marxists and far left anarchists are badly out of touch with the working class on two important issues: open borders and mass immigration.

Far left anarchists these days seem to be militantly in favour of total open borders, an utterly insane policy, and even Marxists seem to be militantly in favour of unending mass immigration too.

Unfortunately, these things aren’t very popular amongst the working class (see here, here, here, and here).

The only apparent response from Marxists to this is to live in a fantasy world and pretend that these working class opinions don’t exist or working class people have been “duped.” That is not the case, however, and open borders impose severe economic, social and cultural problems.

Even worse, most mainstream left-wing labour parties and Social democratic parties – taken over by middle class cosmopolitans obsessed with neoliberalism and cultural leftism – are in favour of unending mass immigration too, and so working class voters with concerns about the economic, social and cultural impact of mass immigration have to go to the conservative side of politics to get any traction for their views.

This is a major reason for the rise of Donald Trump, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Sweden Democrats, the Danish People’s Party, the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV), the Freedom Party in Austria, the French National Front, and UKIP.

One of the most stark realities of the populist right parties is this: they have substantial working class support (see Evans and Mellon 2015: 3, 5). In Britain, the working class support for the neoliberal New Labour party imploded in the 1990s and 2000s, and many working class voters went to the conservatives, and then to UKIP (Evans and Mellon 2015: 4), not to the far left.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Evans, Geoffrey and Jon Mellon. 2015. “Working Class Votes and Conservative Losses: Solving the UKIP Puzzle,” Parliamentary Affairs
http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/04/16/pa.gsv005.full