Equality and immigration

As usual, Blimpish has made a challenging point. Commenting on my earlier post, he says:

High immigration undermines public support for doing anything about inequality (people are happier to redistribute to people like themselves - hence, no meaningful global redistribution is ever mooted). So maybe those who “favour” wage inequality should support immigration and those who are against it should be opposed.

This reminds me of John Roemer’s paper, “Racism and redistribution: a solution to the problem of American exceptionalism.” Here's a bit of the abstract:

We identify two mechanisms through which racism among American voters decreases the degree of redistribution that would otherwise obtain. Many authors have suggested that voter racism decreases the degree of redistribution due to an anti-solidarity effect: that (some) voters oppose government transfer payments to minorities whom they view as undeserving. We point to a second effect as well: that some voters who desire redistribution nevertheless vote for the anti-redistributive party (the Republicans) because that party’s position on the race issue is more consonant with their own, and this, too, decreases the degree of redistribution…We numerically compute that during [1976-92] voter racism reduced the income tax rate by 11-18 percentage points.

That’s a huge effect.

Does this mean egalitarians (like me) should oppose immigration? I don’t think so.

For one thing, equality is not the only ideal. Limiting immigration entails a loss of individual freedom, not only to the immigrant but also to the native population; we are prevented from employing some people or selling our houses to them. Methodological individualists in particular will be unhappy to do this in order to gain some putative non-individualist benefit such as better community spirit.

Secondly, it’s a pretty puny sort of egalitarianism that is undermined by ethnic differences. If egalitarians cannot successfully combat racism and near-racism, and present a forceful case for redistribution, they don’t deserve to succeed. I don’t want an equality among boneheads.

And another thing. I should have mentioned Bob Rowthorn’s sceptical take on the economic consequences of immigration. David Green at Civitas has a link.

Comments

[s]

Fascinating topic and great post.

Don't forget the literature inspired by Easterly and Levine's 1997 paper that suggested ethnic fractionalization reduces the government's incentive to provide public goods (whether income redistribution is a public good is of course debatable).

There is a review of the literature here:

http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/alesina/papers/jelrevsionsnov21.pdf

This paper shows a negative correlation between ethnic fractionalization and social spending and welfare policies.

http://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/papers/423__0332-Alesina11.pdf

I'm working on a post of my own.

[Blimpish]

Hmmm.... some more hopefully as-challenging points:

1. In effect, you're granting the point about the political problems of open borders and redistribution, so that for you the libertarian good (open borders) is more important than the egalitarian good (redistribution). Equality is something to strive for, but... but...

2. Ethnic enmity might well be part of the problem, and that's hardly a good prospect - but I think there's also cultural tension to contend with. This is especially so in today's liberal societies, which have difficulties with notions of integrating migrants within a common culture. This is where that community spirit comes in - methodological individualists might dislike its intangible nature, but then quite a few of them might not be to keen on State redistribution for the same reason!

3. Re that 'community spirit' - the problem with methodological individualism and with a lot of contemporary liberal thought (esp since Rawls) is that assumes as given what all classic and early modern political theory thought the most problematic: how to hold a society together, avoiding the Hobbesian war - let alone building liberal tolerance or egalitarian solidarity.

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