Noble Lies and Fake News about Immigration
There are good arguments for open borders from people like Mike Huemer, Jason Brennan, Javier Hidalgo, and Chris Freiman. And there are good arguments for reasonable restrictions from people like Rishi Joshi, Kit Wellman, Caleb Yong, and Garett Jones.
But there is a new strategy for defending open borders, employed by mainstream media, that involves simply lying about the effects of immigration. The recent Central American Caravan would be an irrelevant footnote to the story of American immigration, since the numbers in the Caravan are about the same as the number of illegal migrants that cross the US/Mexico border every week. But the Caravan is a highly visible manifestation of illegal migration, so the media has focused on it.
According to the mainstream media, as this clip shows, here's what we know about the caravan:
there is no caravan.
if there is a caravan, it's mostly women and children.
if there is a caravan, it's unlikely to contain criminals.
if there is a caravan, and they cross the border, they won't be any more likely to collect welfare than those born in the United States.
if there is a caravan, they're just like other immigrants to the United States. People from India with PhDs in mechanical engineering and pregnant teenagers from Guatemala are best thought of as a single group called "immigrants" that have similar prospects in the United States.
What I like about philosophers who defend open borders is that they are willing to bite bullets. They concede that some migrants may be more likely than others to commit crime, collect welfare, or depress wages for native workers. But they think this is a reason to scale back the welfare state, or remind us that native born citizens have no moral right to a certain wage, and therefore no right to exclude migrants on these grounds. Of course, there may be good reason to doubt that low-skilled migrants will vote to scale back the welfare state. But ideally, libertarians think, the way to handle worries about mass migration that restrictionists express is to alter our political institutions in ways that make migrants internalize more of the costs and benefits they currently impose on others.
Why don't media pundits give these arguments? My suspicion is that many immigration activists, and their surrogates in the media, know that most people would reject these arguments. I'm not saying that most people's rejection of these arguments is rational, but I am suggesting as a hypothesis that many supporters of open borders believe that most people would reject their view if they knew certain facts. So, rather than review the facts, they tell noble lies and hope nobody will notice.
Meanwhile, the most significant arguments about immigration are ignored by almost everyone: immigrants affect institutions, not just now, but across generations. Garett Jones gives an elegant overview of the effects of immigration on institutions, and this is just scratching the surface. My hope is that eventually we will think about immigration in the way people like Jones and Huemer do: dispassionately, and with a willingness to face uncomfortable facts.