Links - Moral Values and Immigration
Defending the good against the misguided
The news cycle is dominated by tariff helter skelter, and that pushes down the stack the other significant Trump administration priority—immigration. It is rising in prominence, though. And I’ll predict by mid summer tariffs will no longer be a top ten topic and that immigration will continue to be salient.
Regardless of where immigration policy ranks by then, thoughtful observers are ruminating on it.
My thinking on any topic follows this structure:
First, what are the moral/ethical/principled arguments?
Second, what are the practical/economical/utilitarian arguments?
If there is conflict, can the second overcome the first with an appropriate level of primacy given to the first? Often the weight of the first is very significant such that the pragmatic considerations cannot overrule the ethical ones.
Fortunately when it comes to immigration, there is no conflict despite what your instincts might tell you. Today I will focus on the seemingly more difficult aspect of the debate—illegal immigration.
Let’s begin with the ethical. Michael Huemer gives a succinct defense of illegal immigration. Do realize that if illegal immigration can be defended, then legal immigration is almost certainly defensible. (If you find it puzzling that we would even need to consider defending legal immigration, you haven’t been paying attention to the political zeitgeist.)
In other words, my claim is that even if the state has authority, and even if the immigration laws are entirely justified, there is still no moral reason at all for potential immigrants to respect the immigration laws.
How can that be? Briefly, (1) even if the state has authority, that authority only extends to its own citizens; and (2) even if there are good reasons for the state to adopt immigration restrictions, those reasons are not reasons that the migrants themselves have. (You might have a reason to try to prevent me from doing something, even while I have no reason not to do it.)
Huemer clearly refutes the common arguments offered as to why illegal immigrants are acting wrongly by immigrating. Even if we assume the state has an interest or right in refusing, rejecting, and prohibiting illegal immigration (a worse than dubious claim he leaves for another day), the immigrants themselves have no obligation to comply with such. And this would extend to citizens themselves refusing to go along with the efforts to prohibit illegal immigration.
Now on to the practical as I would suspect that is the natural quick jump opponents will attempt based on many past experiences arguing about immigration.
There are many paths I could follow (e.g., illegal immigrants have lower crime rates, aren’t invading with disease, and don’t pose a meaningful terrorism risk) that all lead to the same conclusion. I will today focus on just one of them: welfare use.
Alex Nowrasteh and Jerome Famularo demonstrate using the study year 2022 that all immigrants and illegal immigrants in particular used less welfare.
The biggest myth in the debate over immigrant welfare use is that noncitizens—which includes illegal immigrants and those lawfully present on various temporary visas and green cards—disproportionately consume welfare. That is not the case. Noncitizen immigrants consumed 54 percent less welfare than native-born Americans. Noncitizens were 7.3 percent of the population and consumed just 3.5 percent of all welfare and entitlement benefits. In total, noncitizens consumed $109.4 billion in benefits in 2022.
One cannot take a position that immigration (illegal or otherwise) is the problem by simply arguing from a standpoint of “we should eliminate this $109 billion spent on noncitizens” without ending that with either “because it should be available for citizens” or “because this spending is problematic”. Considering the implications of those possible endings: The first is silent on immigration’s desirability and the second is a direct attack on welfare not immigration.
This speaks directly to the point I was making in my post “What Are You Really Mad About?”. People’s anger isn’t with immigration despite their own belief that it is but rather some combination of frustration with the welfare state and a zero-sum mentality regarding worries about protecting the welfare state.
It should be obvious that there are some strong tensions here as you can’t have it both ways. At the limit either welfare is a positive or it is a negative to society. It is not enough to say there are two, separate constituencies: one against welfare period and one against immigrants especially illegal immigrants getting access to the limited funds for legitimate welfare recipients. The reason why is THESE ARE THE SAME PEOPLE. The welfare state has at its cornerstone Social Security and Medicare. Everyone over the age of 65 is on one or both of these programs, and they are therefore all on welfare.
Relying on welfare use concerns to argue against immigration is perhaps a little too revealing of the underlying motives even before we see how immigrants’ usage is lower than native citizens. There are certainly some who genuinely believe that immigration is a net negative, but when they rely on arguing from a position of welfare use they inevitably tie themselves in logical knots opening themselves up to the easiest of keyhole solutions—build a wall around the welfare state not the country.
For the rest of those agitating about immigration and sympathetic to this line of reasoning, it seems obvious they aren’t worried about immigration per se. They are worried about the welfare state and/or fiscal sustainability. Again for them building a wall around welfare would be a solution, and one they could more easily embrace than the former group since they aren’t masking a distaste for immigration with a veiled argument. They are expressing a genuine concern with a misdirected solution.
At this point opponents whose minds are still closed will go in one of two directions: denial of my premises (disputing the facts presented) or attempt to transition to a meta claim like “I understand your ideals, but we simply cannot treat everyone the same”.1
Considering the meta claim, there is a bit of a paradox here that circles back to moral arguments. And I admit that saying we should exclude some people (immigrants or illegal immigrants) from welfare seems to conflict with my higher, moral claim that illegal (and legal) immigrants have every right to pursue immigration.2
Scott Sumner has thoughts to offer.
I’ve recently seen a great deal of commentary on the question of values. Is everyone in the world equally important? Or should we favor those close to us?
The answer to both questions is yes. To better understand this debate, we need to disentangle three separate issues:
Is everyone’s welfare equally important?
Are people naturally selfish?
What is the best way to organize society?
Throughout history, the greatest philosophers have understood that the welfare of all people is equally valuable, in an absolute sense. This is so obvious that I hope I don’t need to explain the concept to anyone. We may not care about someone living on the other side of the world, but they have family and friends that care about them just as much as we care about our family and friends.
This sort of universalism does not imply we must devote equal resources to each person. We should devote more resources to saving the life of a baby than saving the life of a 90-year old man. That’s why I say everyone’s “welfare” is equally important, not everyone’s life. The baby has more potential welfare. In my view, the best world is the one that maximizes aggregate welfare. But even if you reject my utilitarianism, there is no defensible value system that says the people I know are more important than the people I don’t know. That’s just dumb.
Obviously Sumner’s use of “welfare” is in the general sense of the term and not reference to any particular policy or program. That distinction gets to the solution to the paradox: that your welfare matters as much as anyone else’s <does not equal> you are entitled to being in the welfare program just as they are.
But while natural selfishness makes the implementation of universal values to be an impossible ideal, at least we can try to develop a moral framework that clarifies the issues. To summarize:
Universal values are ideal.
Local social groups are useful, even essential for global welfare.
Some local favoritism is useful for promoting the solidarity required to maintain cohesive social units.
Don’t make support for those local social units an end in itself—they are instrumental in promoting universal values.
One final point. This post is focused on how to think about public policy issues. I certainly don’t expect people to engage in such cold rational thinking when buying birthday presents for a child. That would be inhuman. Evolution gave us emotions like love so that we’d do a certain amount of this social cohesion almost instinctively.
I think Sumner solves the paradox of the need and natural desire to care more for those close to us but at the same time maintain the universality of values. It is a foundation of universal values that argues in favor of people making their own choices in life as long as those choices do not harm others. “Harm” is a subtle word here. It does not simply mean impact. It is stronger than that. It means impede—to use force without justification.
The immigrant who out competes me for a job, does not do me harm. Me preventing the immigrant (and my employer, say) from attaining the job does do him harm (as well as my employer). To argue otherwise is to take a position of entitlement asking for the immigrant, the employer, and customers to bear the burden of paying for my welfare.
This second direction is itself a denial of the moral argument where Huemer argues specifically can/should treat everyone the same as well as a denial of my explicit solution of building a wall around the welfare state which obviously does not treat everyone the same.
I would argue that it does not conflict—this is a logical illusion confusing negative and positive rights.