read Bryan Caplan on how amazing UAE is for the welfare of immigrants. www.betonit.ai/p/reflection... what do you think? circumstances can be better than the circumstances people come from, but still be far from admirable. 1/

if the US had evolved into a contemporary UAE, with us non-Mayflower descendants segmented into low remuneration services and construction, would that be fine? 2/

“the whole era was miserable” is caricature. people live, smile, suffer in every era and circumstance. but we do judge. the Gilded Age was… not good, even if it was better than how things were where our ancestors came from. 3/

what makes the American story we grew up with so appealing is it had a happy (we thought) ending, a middle-class society into which substantially everyone (except descendants of slaves) could assimilate and prosper. 4/

if we had never had that triumphalist moment, that doesn’t mean every era of America would have been the World’s Worst Hellhole. we had a lot of land and resources per capita! lots of people did well! 5/

but there really was a whole lot of immiseration, and absent the New Deal and GI Bill etc, a risk of pretty permanently entrenched classes. (we now face this risk again.) 6/

the contemporary UAE is not the worst hellhole in the world even for its guest workers. they voluntarily go. but i don’t think we’d judge a permanent UAE a success by the standards to which we hold America (unless you are my friend Bryan Caplan!) /fin

no. it didn’t. your premise is wrong. in hindsight, generations hence, it seems to have worked better. we grew up on happy melting pot stories. 1/

but the backlash to immigration in the 10s and 20s didn’t come from nothing. this was also the era of Pinkertons and burning union halls. the New Deal redeemed in retrospect what would otherwise be miserable history. 2/

going forward, we need to synchronize a new deal with what can otherwise be immiserating, if we want (and we do want!) a welcoming immigration regime. /fin

I think it is possible to get the good parts without the bad parts. Segment the labor market, share the rents from exploitation with natives broadly, rather than let capital hoover them up, and you can have popular immigration. 1a/

Make the “dues paying” period of exploitation relative to native norms time limited so that immigrants now as then pretty soon assimilate as full coequal citizens. 2a/

“Win/Win” immigration even over the short term is arrangeable. But we actually have to arrange it! And we can’t let capital extract all the rents from exploitation. They have to be shared. www.interfluidity.com/v2/9548.html /fina

It worked back then because before the 1920s, the US simply did not control its borders. The only immigration restriction was the Chinese Exclusion Act, a special case. 1/

During the 1910s and 1920s, a nativist backlash — arguably to precisely these effects though of course nativism always takes on ugly racial/cultural overtones — basically froze immigration at a very low level. 2/

That wasn’t undone until 1965, which gave us our current immigration regime. Restrictionists want to go back to the mid-20th-Century regime, detest the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. 3/

The history you extol just happened before we invented the tools, developed the capacity, to make management of immigration a subject of policy. We’re unlikely to uninvent those tools. We are living now through a period analogous to the 1910s/1920s backlash. /fin

What are you asking, really? Can immigration be a positive sum game over time, even if it arranged in ways that harm the native working class in the short-term and contribute to inequality? Sure. 1/

But if that native working class has the political power to block such immigration and punish politicians who arrange it on those terms, won’t they? 2/

Will they be persuaded by a very uncertain whiggish liberal story that it will contribute to their grandchildren’s prosperity? Should they? 3/

(Note the “everybody better off” part of 20th C history also depended on transitioning from the Gilded Age to the New Deal. The inequality might have persisted, widened, in which case the history would not even generations hence be so whiggish and happy.) 4/

In any case, even if you are sure the long-term effect of unsegmented exploitative immigration is positive sum and good for everyone, you still are proposing something that creates profound short and medium term costs for many natives, who in the ling-term will be dead. 5/

How do you get these positive long-term results only if the working class you propose to place in competition with exploited immigrants — arguably a very large bloc! — is democratically enfranchised? 6/

My piece is about the politics of immigration. You can make immigration from poor countries popular if you exploit, segment, and broadly share the rents among natives. Whatever its long term virtues or demerits, exploitative immigration that competes with natives will not be politically popular. 7/

If you want positive sum immigration from poor countries to rich under conditions in which the native working class is enfranchised, you have to respect constraints that render the immigration beneficial or at least not costly to that native working class in the short term. 8/

Have there been times when immigration against the short-term interests of incumbent natives happened anyway, to their short-term detriment but our long-term benefit? Sure. History is full of peculiarities, borders used to be very weak, politics is complicated. 9/

Is it a good plan to just do that again? I’d say no, given the plain awareness by a potent plurality of the public that they may face important short-term costs from unsegmented exploitative immigration. /fin

it’s one thing to reject. okay, whatever. but this person, that wasn’t enough. he took it upon himself to persuade her that she was a fraud and a liar, self evidently, surely she had to acknowledge. 1/

if he prejudged her, okay. he could have just gently said it’s his job to be certain a person won’t overstay and she seems very nice but he just can’t quite be certain, i’m so sorry. 2/

instead he berated and humiliated her. the rejection was hard. but there was no reason to be unkind, much, much worse than unkind. /fin

i unfortunately have first hand experience of that. tried to help a Romanian friend do an ESL course. her intentions were in fact pure. i asked to sit in on the interview. they permitted it, but i was not to speak or intervene. it was one of the first times i was ashamed to be an American. 1/

the consular officer (at the US embassy in Bucharest) had clearly prejudged her intentions to be impure. he adopted a prosecutorial tone, humiliated her, used the fact that her bartending English skills were good enough for her to participate in the interview to assert she was a fraud. 2/

it was miserable and unfair and to this day i regret keeping my promise of shutting up, though i doubt the outcome would have changed had i spoken up. /fin