Andrew left this comment last week:
On what grounds would I be opposed to such a migration?
It would dramatically change what life is like in this country, and not for the better. Demand and prices for many finite resources would climb dramatically, including for energy and real estate. The balance between resource conservation and consumption would dramatically change, in favor of the latter. That’s just for starters.
While liberty to travel, and free market principles, can be terrific, there are limits. If you own a house and a few acres, you probably would not be enthusiastic if the government decided to enforce trespass laws only if the trespasser has a health problem or intends to injure you.
There are some countries on this planet that have become over-populated, and one advantage of limiting migration is that the costs are internalized. For example, suppose that Canada’s population explodes to a billion people due to bad policies. The consequences of those bad policies will be felt by Canada if the U.S. continues to limit immigration from Canada (and therefore the bad policies are likely to be reformed), whereas the consequences will not be felt as keenly by Canada if everyone can simply move elsewhere.
Dalmia argues that health and security should be the only limitations on immigration to this country. If that were to really happen, then there would be hundreds of millions of people immediately moving here. Why? One big motivator is simply that this country is not currently overpopulated (at least not as much as some other countries). That appealing feature of this country would immediately be destroyed. I think the American people are entitled to have immigration laws that favor having a more sparsely populated country than, say, India or China.
This is rather convenient as I have been wanting to do a post getting into the population density argument.
In my experience, the population density argument against immigration breaks down into two forms.
First there is the scarcity argument. It’s one everyone learns back in Econ 101: If the supply of a good remains constant while the number of people demanding it increases, the price will go up. This is correct, but only in a highly limited fashion. Specifically, it only holds insofar as demand is highly inelastic and there are no alternative means of satisfying the demand besides the given good.
In the case of goods that have an elastic demand and/or a variety of possible alternatives we find a very different dynamic, the perfect example of this being the bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich. As increasing demand puts upward pressure on the price of a given good, that increased price in turn creates stronger incentives for human innovation to develop alternative ways of satisfying the same demand at lower cost. The end result of this progression has been, time and again, that we end up paying less for the same effect than we would have with the old alternative.
I see no reason that the same mechanics will not continue to hold for energy, food, and the vast majority of other goods. With that being the case, an increasing population in the United States is not a bad thing and in fact is probably actually a good thing.
Second is the overpopulation argument. While it spins out into various different directions, just about every other increasing population concern with regards to immigration boils down to “the world is overpopulated and if we have open borders/don’t reduce legal immigration levels/don’t shut down the border entirely then the United States will be overpopulated and everything will be terrible.” Andrew didn’t get into that kind of alarmism, but the source of his concern appears to be the same.
I think a good starting point for exploring this argument is to look at the United States. Most people concerned about population density seem to be worried that the United States is in danger of becoming overpopulated. I’m not exactly sure what the source of it is, but I would wager it has something to do with most people tend to live in population centers, so they see themselves surrounded by people and extrapolate from their lived experience that most of the U.S. is that way.
However, since the United States ranks 178 out of 239 on population density I think this fear is ultimately a bit unfounded. Allow me to offer a little more perspective on population density and the United States:
- Currently the United States has a density of just about 83 people per square mile.
- That’s 3,794,101 million square miles of land holding a population of about 309,053,985 people.
- As of April 12, 2010 the world’s total population is estimated to be 6,814,200,000 people.
- Assuming every single person in the entire earth were to emigrate to the United States the population density increase to 1,796 people per square mile.
- That would still put the United States behind 7 countries and 6 de facto countries in terms of population density.
I think this is a useful thing to know and one people should be thinking about. But it is probably still too abstract to really appreciate. To that end, let’s take the data above but use cities as the frame for comparison.
- As stated, the United States would have a population density of 1796/square mile if every person alive today resided here.
- That is equivalent to the current population density of Corpus Christi, TX.
- In contrast, New York City has a population density of 27,440/square mile – if the entirety of the United States had this population the density would be about 15 times the Earth’s current population.
- And if we look at the world’s densest city, Manila, the capital of the Philippines, it has a density of 111,575/square mile – filling the U.S. to the same density would require 62 times the Earth’s current population.
Now, I’ll concede that we probably don’t want to see the U.S. become a single continent-covering metropolis. Luckily, we’ll probably never get anywhere near that, even if we have open borders.
First, people are likely to settle around and in current population centers. While there will be some reduction of open land, I think it is much more probable that we will see significant increases in the population density of cities, moderate increases in suburbs, filling in of areas between suburbs and cities, and mild expansion in rural areas. An expansion on our current land use realities rather than a drastic re-ordering of them.
Then there’s the economics driving immigration. For the most part illegal immigrants are coming to work, not to collect welfare benefits. If they were coming to collect welfare, then the size of the population should show a relatively steady growth since welfare benefits are always available. But that’s not what the population did. It shrank – with the economy – in 2009.
Since illegal immigrants appear to be largely coming in search of employment and have demonstrated sensitivity to market conditions, there is no reason to think the same is not true of immigrants in general (as I have argued previously, all immigrants are driven by the same incentives, they channel into legal and illegal based off of the relative disincentives to each). If that is the case then while immigrants do grow the economy overall, it should be expected that eventually there will be a point, due to competition in the respective nations’ labor markets, where the gains of becoming a participant in the U.S. labor market are outweighed by the gains of participating in the local economy of the home country. This ought to be a significant natural deterrent to continual free-flowing immigration into the United States.
But if you would prefer not to trust to market processes as a guard against overpopulation from excessive immigration you still don’t need to worry.
Here’s why:
That’s the world population growth rate from 1960 to 2008. As you can see, the trend has been one of steady decline since the early 60′s. While it’s not a guarantee, it certainly suggests that the trend will continue and the human race will continue to expand at a slower and slower pace.
This is the previous graph with the addition of the shifts in U.S. population growth over the same time span. Once again, the trend is one of continually slowing growth. Notable however is that the United States is growing at a quarter percent slower rate than the world overall, even with the legal immigrants it accepts each year and the large influx of illegal immigrants.
And here we have the top 12 contributors of immigrants to the United States. As can be clearly seen, all of these nations have declining populations, many in significant declines. With the United States, its top immigrant donor nations, and the world in general all experiencing consistent trends of slowing population growth the chances seem pretty minimal that an increase in the in-flow of immigrants is going to lead some catastrophic result.
So to wrap-up, we don’t need to worry about immigration increasing population density because:
- Human ingenuity has consistently driven technological innovation that has rendered Malthusian arguments about resource scarcity moot.
- The United States has more than enough land to absorb the entirety of the world’s current population, several times over, with minimal negative impacts.
- The market should naturally discourage continual large-scale immigration beyond what can be supported as employment opportunities in home nations versus the United States approach equilibrium.
- The world population, the U.S. population, and the populations of the top contributors of immigrants to the U.S. are all experiencing declines in their population growth, have been doing so for some time, and can be expected to continue with this trend for the foreseeable future.
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Thank you..really informative!!
Increasing the US population suddenly and dramatically is a gamble that I don’t think we should take. It’s questionable whether even the current population is irreversibly damaging the planet, if you believe that the global warming scenario might turn out to be correct. And technology hasn’t prevented water crises in this country; for example, the Colorado River is totally dry by the time it gets to Mexico. Sure, the United States has a lot of empty land, but a lot of that is protected for national forests and national parks, both of which are already over-used given the current population.
Many people want to come to the U.S. because their countries suck, and I would much rather that we try harder to improve their countries, instead of alleviating pressure on those countries to improve by allowing all of the disgruntled and dissatisfied to come here.
If Kevin Waterman wants to go live in a densely populated country that doesn’t limit immigration, I say: go ahead.
But other people would like not have to do that. Why can’t our people continue to have that choice and that freedom?
Extinctions of species are more common in countries with denser populations. Pollution is more common. Poverty is more common. Lots of things are more common. You can hope that technology would develop to alleviate all of these things, but that hasn’t worked out in a lot of countries. If this country’s population suddenly triples, then very roughly speaking that means three times the pavement, three times the garbage, three times the thirst, three times the pesticides, three times the demand for real estate, three times less voting power each citizen has to elect public officials like congressmen, et cetera.
The population growth rates in the world are slowing down. That’s a good thing. Part of it is because the population growth in many countries is internalized by emigration restrictions, and opening all the borders would jeopardize that trend. Another part of the slowing of population growth is due to draconian measures in countries like China, and I do not want to bring the day closer when such measures are used in this country.
Generally speaking, overpopulation places greater burdens on the environment, and makes wars more likely as people fight over scarce resources. Saying that overpopulation is not a legitimate concern of government is like saying that environmental protection and peace are not legitimate concerns of government, IMHO.
Andrew,
Thanks for taking the time to leave such a coherent and well-thought out response, I can’t say the same for some of the other commenters I’ve had on other immigration posts.
I’m going to address your points in sequence of which I find most compelling rather than the order you made them, hope that’s alright.
First and foremost for me are the economic arguments. I probably should have foreseen some of them and addressed them in the post, but then again, it was probably a bit too long as it was.
Simply put, while the concerns of elevating poverty and increasing scarcity as a result of increasing population density are intuitively appealing, but I think the existence of Singapore robs them of a great deal of their force.
Singapore has a population that is 219 times as dense as that of the United States. And not only is its population highly dense, 36% are foreigners. In spite of that, it enjoys per capita GDP at Purchasing Power Parity is higher than that of the U.S. and had an unemployment rate of 3% in 2009.
I think that is clear evidence that there is no causal relationship, or at least no guaranteed one, between high population density and poor economic outcomes.
In fact, what I suspect is more likely is that the observed correlation between poor economic outcomes and population density is the product of the fact that poorer people consistently have more children than wealthier people. That explains why more densely populated countries are generally poorer but still explains Singapore (since its high population density is in large part a product of immigration).
Equally importantly, it also explains why worldwide population has been steadily declining for the past 40-50 years as just about everyone on the planet today is materially better off than their counterparts of even 20 years ago (and just imagine what it is compared to 100 or 500 years ago).
That I think is the true cause of the worldwide slowing of population growth and not immigration restrictions or the forced birth control policies of a few nations, and as such an opening of borders would do little or nothing to reverse the trend.
This brings me to the next point, improving conditions in other countries to reduce their emigration pressures. One of the key reasons people are driven to leave their home nations is that the markets in these regions are underdeveloped. There are several reasons for this problem, but a large one is limited access to capital.
Since the problem is lack of access to capital, the answer then, if we want to reduce immigration pressures in the long run, is to have more immigration now. It seems incredibly counter-intuitive, so let me explain.
While some people are interested in coming to America to stay, many are coming with the intent of working for a while, saving up money, and then returning home and using the money they earned in America to open up a business at home. And even the ones who stay usually send money back to their relatives at home.
This is a fantastic way to fix the lack of capital. And by fixing that problem (which I don’t think can easily be fixed in many other ways, and certainly in no way by the U.S. government) the people of immigrant donor nations will be able to help build their own markets up and increase demand at home, thus reducing the pressures of emigration. I think it is a far better way of improving other nations than the current approach of foreign aid money being sent out from the U.S. government to the governments of these other nations, where large sums end up in the pockets of corrupt officials and more gets wasted in the inefficient travel of funds from the top down to the levels it needs to be at.
That pretty much leaves the environment.
I’m still with Julian Simon when it comes to that. I think that What environmental dangers do exist are generally overstated, both in the scope of the danger and its immediacy. While they are sometimes (and perhaps even often) real threats, I believe in most cases the markets system of price signaling will serve to spur the innovation necessary to either correct or adapt to the problem. And therefore, I don’t see any of the dangers listed as sufficient to justify limiting individual freedom by implementing and enforcing restrictive immigration policies.
Looking beyond that, I also think that some of the problems you’ve listed, such as water, are not in fact problems of supply, but problems of distribution. This of course makes them much easier to solve and likely to be solved more rapidly as price increases create increased demand for innovation. This in turn accordingly reduces the significance they should hold in our thinking.
Finally there’s war. I’m not exactly sure what you’re basing your claim about war on. The earth’s population is higher than it has ever been in history. And yet, at this point in human history, we are observing more peace and less war than has ever existed.
Thanks again for the comment, it’s particularly enjoyable debating immigration with you since you are thoughtful and insightful, and most importantly are willing to debate the issues on the basis of rationality not emotion.
I think the present dearth of wars is more a consequence of deterrence by nuclear weaponry, and the enforcement of borders by international organizations and major powers, than anything else. The fact remains that when resources get scarce, fighting becomes more likely. It happens with most species, not just humans.
http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=%22fight+for+scarce+resources%22+war&btnG=Search&um=1&ned=us&hl=en&scoring=a
Regarding Singapore, I’m not sure that it is such a shining example of a high-population-density society:
http://yoursdp.org/index.php/truth-about/poverty-in-singapore
“For all the hype claiming that Singapore is a near-paradise, 20 percent of its citizens indicated that they want to leave the country, predominantly because of the stressful lifestyle and high cost of living. These would-be émigrés are mainly from the strata of younger, higher-income professionals.”
Sorry for the delay in responding, work has kept me busy.
The threat of nuclear deterrence can do at least some of the work in explaining why those nations with nukes aren’t getting into fights. But it doesn’t really account for why there are significantly fewer wars being fought between those without nuclear weapons.
While I don’t disagree that resource pressures drive conflict, I would argue it is the broad liberalization of trade that has brought about the great reduction in war since the gains from trade far outweigh the gains from war for most countries. Further liberalizing trade, including trade in labor, ought to continue this trend.
As for Singapore, there might be some problems, but what place is perfect? All in all 20% isn’t that big – and the fact that they aren’t leaving and are mostly young, well-educated, higher-income professionals (the most desirable sort of immigrants according to just about everyone) seems to suggest that it:
1) Isn’t that strong a preference.
2) As much as they might like it, the costs of leaving outweigh the benefits of remaining.
On a somewhat related note, there’s an interesting multi-post exploration of Neo-Malthusian thought and the problems with it being done here. Seems pretty interesting.
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