The pro-con list reads weird to me: The pros seem clear and unambiguous, but the cons are much more vague (and much higher variance).
In general, it feels suboptimal to me to put "random" pressures on immigrants (like coming to Mexico, getting through Mexico, getting through the US border and finding a way to stay in the US), but any "legible" system is probably easier to game (and "open borders" seems like too risky of an experiment to me).
This is great, I've been wanting to see the data on this, but haven't put in the work. A couple interesting things I noticed:
- Remain in Mexico was instituted in January 2019, but encounters continued to rise for a few months. I can think of a few reasons for the lag, like time for policy to become common knowledge, travel time of people who have already started their journey, and not knowing how serious the policy would be until enforcement started.
- Since Mexico only accepted back immigrants from Mexico and the Northern Triangle during the Trump administration, but almost no people from other countries were not expelled during that time, that must mean we bought plane tickets for everyone from other countries, right? Given the higher rate of crossings now that would probably cost tens of millions of dollars per month to reintroduce but would probably only have to be done at those rates for a short period if response to incentives is rapid enough. If reimplemented, it would probably make sense to signal the change a bit in advance to decrease the rate of inflow from those countries beforehand.
- I assume people claiming asylum make up a large portion of the encounters during the Biden administration, do we have data on that proportion?
Good work, Maxim. Always important to remind people of incentives, because emotions run high on this issue, particularly this year. As a libertarian, I find myself disagreeing with Caplan and Nowrasteh, although the latter seems to have more concrete arguments--but using assumptions based on past immigration outcomes. It's not hard to see all the benefits that have accrued to American culture as a magnet for immigrants historically. It's not hard to see how much xenophobia of the past turned out to be ridiculous, and shameful. But as good economists know, expecting the future to resemble the past can be a dangerous bet; just ask Lehman Bros or Long Term Capital Management. It's likely we are framing the issue carelessly on both sides of the popular debate. Entirely lost in the noise is the fact that the border brouhaha undermines public support for easing the process of legal immigration, with the result of discouraging huge numbers of valuable potential citizens who have other options. There are many people in the world with excellent educations, valuable skills, and foreign capital to contribute to our economy, who don't need to subject themselves to the gauntlet we have created for the most economically desirable prospects. They have many other options, as we might expect.
It is also worth looking at what has been happening to western Europe and Scandinavia for many years already, while even their centrist politicians gaslight everyone who can't help noticing the extreme negative effects. Speaking of incentives, it's also clear from Mexico's long history that they used to ACTIVELY discourage immigrants who were perceived as likely to get stuck in Mexico, rather than being expected to successfully make it into the US, as they do now. It's quite apparent from old Amnesty International bulletins that Mexicans are far less tolerant of immigration than Americans; is that racism or merely economic self-interest?
The video in this tweet shows a sobering international agenda that Americans and Europeans don't seem to be well aware of yet, promulgated by the UN. Perhaps it's time to stop viewing the UN as the star chamber of wise global stewardship we learned to associate with the future because many of us grew up with watching Star Trek, and start noticing how they dropped the mask after the war in Gaza started. Who is ultimately behind this global migration push? I'd answer that question by noting that the fastest-rising demographic of migrants entering the US is Chinese--and I'll bet that's even more true on our northern border. Since the CCP is not generally known for allowing its citizens to move around freely, and are also known for punishing family members of defectors who remain in China, what do you suppose might explain their tacit approval of this surging outbound wave? Is it possible that they are not only cool with it, but encouraging certain people to emigrate for certain reasons?
And is it merely coincidental that Biden has made a huge issue of expanding voting access during his term, suggesting ominously that requiring people to produce identification to vote is racist? Since I see ethnic minorities driving cars and flying on airplanes, I assume most of them have figured out how to obtain ID by now. Perhaps it's racist to assume they are too dumb to procure documents that are required in every modern civilization on earth. Or perhaps there's a different agenda, meant to exploit white guilt. Perhaps Democrats are upset that they are losing ground with demographics that they thought belonged to them, because they no longer understand those people. Is it possible that more and more legal immigrants, or immigrant families who have been here long enough to become Americanized, are losing empathy for illegal border crossers? If I were working here as an immigrant with legal status, or a visiting worker visa, I would be extremely unhappy about this competition from people with much less skin in the game. Should we ask Americans of Latino heritage how they feel about undocumented waves of Haitians and Africans? I think we can guess how they feel, based on how many Cubans like Trump. As Biden famously said, if you ain't voting for him, you ain't black. But the Dems are also losing black voters in droves, so I guess if they're not interested in taking the time to learn what their actual voters actually think [I used to be one myself until 2020], they need to make up their sagging numbers somewhere else. I wonder how they intend to do that?
Here's an amusing Quora anecdote about when virtue-signaling backfires; hopefully the country will awake to this unsavory possible future before it's too late, as it may be for much of Europe already...
Like Bukele in El Salvador, the entire situation could be solved with simple willpower.
Imagine that the US government brought men with assault rifles to the border and on a particular day just mowed down all migrants. I imagine illegal immigration would cease immediately. At most a second day would be necessary, like Nagasaki.
Eisenhower managed it in the 1950s during Operation Wetback with even less extreme measures.
Illegal immigration is a choice. Just like crime is a choice. It only takes a concrete example to end it.
> Countering that: Mexico is right around the world average in terms of income, and while its crime rate is above average, many regions of the country are safer than US cities.
This seems like a biased line. It's irrelevant to the subject of the article, kinda looks like you just wanted to dunk on Biden. And it doesn't even make sense? Mexico having an above-average income for people working there doesn't mean that someone who recently travelled there will be able to find a decently-paying job immediately after being turned back by the US border.
And the crime rate claim seems almost intentionally misleading; any two countries that vary in some metric will almost always have some sub-areas that are higher than some sub-areas of the other country in that metric. This is a basic consequence of combinatorial explosions and how random variance works. (Biden's quote doesn't even mention crime.)
Thanks for the insightful analysis!
The pro-con list reads weird to me: The pros seem clear and unambiguous, but the cons are much more vague (and much higher variance).
In general, it feels suboptimal to me to put "random" pressures on immigrants (like coming to Mexico, getting through Mexico, getting through the US border and finding a way to stay in the US), but any "legible" system is probably easier to game (and "open borders" seems like too risky of an experiment to me).
Very informative article!
This is great, I've been wanting to see the data on this, but haven't put in the work. A couple interesting things I noticed:
- Remain in Mexico was instituted in January 2019, but encounters continued to rise for a few months. I can think of a few reasons for the lag, like time for policy to become common knowledge, travel time of people who have already started their journey, and not knowing how serious the policy would be until enforcement started.
- Since Mexico only accepted back immigrants from Mexico and the Northern Triangle during the Trump administration, but almost no people from other countries were not expelled during that time, that must mean we bought plane tickets for everyone from other countries, right? Given the higher rate of crossings now that would probably cost tens of millions of dollars per month to reintroduce but would probably only have to be done at those rates for a short period if response to incentives is rapid enough. If reimplemented, it would probably make sense to signal the change a bit in advance to decrease the rate of inflow from those countries beforehand.
- I assume people claiming asylum make up a large portion of the encounters during the Biden administration, do we have data on that proportion?
Good work, Maxim. Always important to remind people of incentives, because emotions run high on this issue, particularly this year. As a libertarian, I find myself disagreeing with Caplan and Nowrasteh, although the latter seems to have more concrete arguments--but using assumptions based on past immigration outcomes. It's not hard to see all the benefits that have accrued to American culture as a magnet for immigrants historically. It's not hard to see how much xenophobia of the past turned out to be ridiculous, and shameful. But as good economists know, expecting the future to resemble the past can be a dangerous bet; just ask Lehman Bros or Long Term Capital Management. It's likely we are framing the issue carelessly on both sides of the popular debate. Entirely lost in the noise is the fact that the border brouhaha undermines public support for easing the process of legal immigration, with the result of discouraging huge numbers of valuable potential citizens who have other options. There are many people in the world with excellent educations, valuable skills, and foreign capital to contribute to our economy, who don't need to subject themselves to the gauntlet we have created for the most economically desirable prospects. They have many other options, as we might expect.
It is also worth looking at what has been happening to western Europe and Scandinavia for many years already, while even their centrist politicians gaslight everyone who can't help noticing the extreme negative effects. Speaking of incentives, it's also clear from Mexico's long history that they used to ACTIVELY discourage immigrants who were perceived as likely to get stuck in Mexico, rather than being expected to successfully make it into the US, as they do now. It's quite apparent from old Amnesty International bulletins that Mexicans are far less tolerant of immigration than Americans; is that racism or merely economic self-interest?
https://twitter.com/atensnut/status/1756714346590204408
The video in this tweet shows a sobering international agenda that Americans and Europeans don't seem to be well aware of yet, promulgated by the UN. Perhaps it's time to stop viewing the UN as the star chamber of wise global stewardship we learned to associate with the future because many of us grew up with watching Star Trek, and start noticing how they dropped the mask after the war in Gaza started. Who is ultimately behind this global migration push? I'd answer that question by noting that the fastest-rising demographic of migrants entering the US is Chinese--and I'll bet that's even more true on our northern border. Since the CCP is not generally known for allowing its citizens to move around freely, and are also known for punishing family members of defectors who remain in China, what do you suppose might explain their tacit approval of this surging outbound wave? Is it possible that they are not only cool with it, but encouraging certain people to emigrate for certain reasons?
And is it merely coincidental that Biden has made a huge issue of expanding voting access during his term, suggesting ominously that requiring people to produce identification to vote is racist? Since I see ethnic minorities driving cars and flying on airplanes, I assume most of them have figured out how to obtain ID by now. Perhaps it's racist to assume they are too dumb to procure documents that are required in every modern civilization on earth. Or perhaps there's a different agenda, meant to exploit white guilt. Perhaps Democrats are upset that they are losing ground with demographics that they thought belonged to them, because they no longer understand those people. Is it possible that more and more legal immigrants, or immigrant families who have been here long enough to become Americanized, are losing empathy for illegal border crossers? If I were working here as an immigrant with legal status, or a visiting worker visa, I would be extremely unhappy about this competition from people with much less skin in the game. Should we ask Americans of Latino heritage how they feel about undocumented waves of Haitians and Africans? I think we can guess how they feel, based on how many Cubans like Trump. As Biden famously said, if you ain't voting for him, you ain't black. But the Dems are also losing black voters in droves, so I guess if they're not interested in taking the time to learn what their actual voters actually think [I used to be one myself until 2020], they need to make up their sagging numbers somewhere else. I wonder how they intend to do that?
Here's an amusing Quora anecdote about when virtue-signaling backfires; hopefully the country will awake to this unsavory possible future before it's too late, as it may be for much of Europe already...
https://qr.ae/pK0jkM
Like Bukele in El Salvador, the entire situation could be solved with simple willpower.
Imagine that the US government brought men with assault rifles to the border and on a particular day just mowed down all migrants. I imagine illegal immigration would cease immediately. At most a second day would be necessary, like Nagasaki.
Eisenhower managed it in the 1950s during Operation Wetback with even less extreme measures.
Illegal immigration is a choice. Just like crime is a choice. It only takes a concrete example to end it.
> Countering that: Mexico is right around the world average in terms of income, and while its crime rate is above average, many regions of the country are safer than US cities.
This seems like a biased line. It's irrelevant to the subject of the article, kinda looks like you just wanted to dunk on Biden. And it doesn't even make sense? Mexico having an above-average income for people working there doesn't mean that someone who recently travelled there will be able to find a decently-paying job immediately after being turned back by the US border.
And the crime rate claim seems almost intentionally misleading; any two countries that vary in some metric will almost always have some sub-areas that are higher than some sub-areas of the other country in that metric. This is a basic consequence of combinatorial explosions and how random variance works. (Biden's quote doesn't even mention crime.)
What's the giant spike in 2019? i'm confused why the text of the article seems to ignore it.