The Morality of Immigration Restrictions
March 8th 2010 16:38
More genius from Matt Yglesias on immigration policy (my emphasis added):
These are moral issues of immigration that I have touched on here before, but this paragraph perfectly captures the argument. Preventing the global poor to migrate to the United States where their standard of living will drastically improve due to ungrounded fear of a (minuscule) negative effect on low-skilled American workers, who are among the global wealthy, is morally wrong. While I do not favor a strong "spread the wealth around" policy, it would be preferable to use taxes on rich Americans to aid the poor, as opposed to what essentially amount to large taxes on the most destitute people in the world. Obviously, these are not the only two possible combinations, but if I was asked the question, "Which of these policies is, in general, more immoral?" and the options were "taxes on the rich" or "immigration restrictions", I am choosing immigration restrictions in a heartbeat.
Follow me on Twitter: @AGoldenDoor
If you’re thinking about ways to boost the prospects of poor Americans, doing it by punishing even poorer Mexicans seems like a uniquely illogical and unappealing way to get the job done. Why not help poor Americans by targeting rich Americans and spreading the wealth around? Or by increasing the number of high-skill immigrants who we let in to offset the distributive impact of low-skill immigration? That leaves everyone better off than they would be in a no-immigration scenario. Flip the script around and imagine a country with no immigrants and no immigration. Now imagine me proposing to help the working class by rounding-up some disfavored 10 percent of the working-class population and deport them to a nearby corrupt and impoverished nation. Would anyone consider that a remotely sensible way to behave?
Follow me on Twitter: @AGoldenDoor
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