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I agree that it's important to understand this distinction as it exists in people's minds, but think that once you factor in incentives, most of the distinction is mental/bias/illusion and trying to be pro-stock but anti-flow is largely pointless and hypocritical. That is, I agree with your assessment that most normal people are pro-stock anti-flow while most politicians are either pro-both or anti-both, but I consider the normal position to be the fallacious one.
People respond to incentives. Millions of illegals flock to our shores because they expect a better life here. They expect a better life here because they we have implemented policies which will enable them to have a better life here even if they cross illegally. Every dollar of welfare, every dollar earned under the table at a job, every anchor baby, every forgiven crime, is another reason to come. If people who spent months making their way to the border, taking risks and spending their last money to sneak across it, were met with immediate detection and expulsion, they would not come. If people who managed to avoid detection had to spend their entire lives living in fear because the instant anyone found out about them they and their entire families, including children would be immediately deported back to their home country even decades later when they had no property or connections there anymore, they would not come. I admit that doing this to actual families would carry with it a high cost, so does dropping nukes on someone. But once you do that and people see you do that, they wise up and do whatever it takes for that not to happen to them. It's status quo bias to look at all the illegal immigrants and imagine us being ruthless to everyone like this forever, but the long term outcome of anti-illegal immigration policies is that we will almost never have to do it because people will stop crossing illegally in the first place. We don't have to punish anyone for crimes they don't commit, but it requires punishment when they do, and more importantly it requires consistency. We can't have half the presidents being harsh on illegals and half being lenient, they have to all actually enforce the law.
It is not economically feasible for us to perfect police the border with no leaking. We have to stem the tide at its source: the incentives. You cannot meaningfully be anti-flow while dangling the carrot of American Citizenship to anyone who thwarts you, even if it feels bad to take the carrot away after they've stolen it. Suck it up and do the right thing, and stop letting superficial proximity biases distort good policy.
I think we can start from here and expand on what it means to have a regime of "pro-stock and anti-flow", and also examining the 2nd and 3rd order effects of certain policies. As I delve into this topic and reading other discussion here, I'm also seeing that we need to differentiate inflow and outflow because with "anti-flow" what I think most really mean is "anti-inflow and pro-outflow". I'm also seeing a need to differentiate "pro-stock" is not to mean growing the stock, but rather as in develop and pathway to legalization so that they don't remain "stock".
Take this paper published in 2016 which tackles the effect of border enforcement:
Here is an interview, bolded mine:
Reading that, what I get are:
Other things that I thought about:
I think this is a good exercise to think about regarding any immigration policy.
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I think you're right about the median illegal immigrant, and maybe about the 90th percentile, but:
The trouble with this is that people tend to be stupid and stubborn, so "surely people won't be stupid and stubborn enough to bring massive consequences down on themselves for no benefit" just isn't going to be universally true, and prospective illegal immigrants probably are not sufficiently better than average in measures of genius and intellectual humility, so we'll still have to metaphorically nuke the most stupid and/or stubborn exceptions.
Look at your analogy non-metaphorically, even: you'd think that literally dropping nukes on someone would have indeed led to immediate surrender, which would have been uniformly preferable (even game-theoretically in this case, though that's an additional complication) to waiting for more nukes and then surrendering, but when we actually tested that theory it took a second nuke and we were all lucky it didn't take a third.
This is an interesting point; not sure I agree with it.
A while back I read a post elsewhere (somewhere with dramatically lower average post quality) suggesting laying razor wire along the border. Another poster decried that proposal as evil. Razor wire inflicts terrible injuries; does merely attempting to cross the border justify such horrific punishment? ... But razor wire isn't invisible. I don't even think it's plausible that anyone, however stupid or poorly educated, could fail to understand what running into razor wire would do, given a chance to inspect it. (Animals, on the other hand, might be that stupid; not saying this is a good idea.) Realistically, how many potential migrants would actually injure themselves on the wire? A few, maybe, doing a poor job cutting their way through. Approximately zero just charging into it. What if instead it were just a wall? Would that proposal be similarly evil due to the head trauma potential migrants might experience if they chose to ram into it head first? Surely even that poster wouldn't have the temerity to suggest as much.
But at the same time, I do agree people can be stupid and stubborn, especially if only a small number need to for disastrous consequences to follow. I think the relevant distinction might be whether there's another person in the loop? Charging a machine gun nest might feel like a better bet than charging razor wire, because the gunner might decide not to fire for any number of reasons but the wire can't decide anything. And social reasoning is comparatively, so even if the gunner is in fact very likely to fire, maybe it's more likely for stubborn/stupid people to make the wrong call?
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Indeed, to go with the carrot/stick analogy, pro-stock anti-flow is being pro carrot and pro stick... for the same behavior. At best, you're being confusing, at worst needlessly cruel.
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Is anti-stock, pro-flow a coherent position? It seems like many countries (Singapore, UAE) manage a stable equilibrium with something that could maybe be described as that. The anti-stock makes the pro-flow more manageable.
It's the old Berchtold Brecht "dissolve the people and elect another" position.
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So after reading the various discussion. I realize that if we go further in the definition of flow as "those who want to come or are coming and stay", we can further separate policies as "pro/anti-inflow" and "pro/anti-outflow".
The example of Singapore, UAE can therefore be classified as "anti-inflow, pro-outflow".
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That doesn’t fit Anglo culture. Anglo cultures openness to work with others, view towards freedom, and sense of fairness would never allow an anti-stock pro flow policy. They would end up wanting to let “good ones in the flow” get citizenship etc. Saudis never think about giving their Indian slaves a share of their princes oil inheritance.
The anti-tribalness of Anglo culture is a huge problem when travel became cheap and fast.
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You will notice that these countries are non-democracies.
I suspect that this is the sort of technocratically correct policy which democracies cannot implement due to the words of a soft spoken MemriTv guest- democracy is government of the people, by the people, and for the people. But the people, are retarded.
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It seems coherent enough on its face, at least as coherent as the inverse. Anti-stock, pro-flow would look something like: accommodate transient immigrants to contribute to the economy, but do nothing to assimilate them to the local culture and disregard most requests for permanent residency. I think that would work well for smaller economies (especially those defined by a primate city where the immigrants could be siloed), though I don't know if a country as large as the US could write sensible policy with this in mind.
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I agree with both @lollol and @MathWizard - the median voter in the Anglosphere wants a secure border and minimal in-country enforcement (apart from the expeditious deportation of foreign criminals), and this doesn't work very well in practice. As well as the incentives point, illegal immigrants can arrive by overstaying tourist visas, not just by jumping the border - and before the current wave of "refugee" arrivals most did.
But I don't think this means you should be "pro-stock and pro-flow" or "anti-stock and anti-flow". Once we understand that you can't make sane immigration policy by pandering to the median voter, I think you should try to make policy in the national interest, and that means distinguishing between wanted and unwanted immigrants. The Canadian and Australian experience is that if you are visibly trying to do this (by which I mean actually trying, not pretending to try) the public will tolerate a reasonable number of mistakes. Trump, of course, is not doing this - almost nobody thinks that deporting military spouses over paperwork issues is a good idea, but the administration (and its noisiest very online supporters) want to do it as a show of commitment to "deport them all". What is going on here - if we assume the administration is at least marginally competent, the answer is obvious - Trump's mass deportation policy is about putting on a show for his base, not about appealing to the median voter.
As a separate issue, effective in-country immigration enforcement requires a citizen register including biometric data. (And once you have that, you effectively have ID cards even if you don't require people to routinely carry the card). The US basically has this, but it is split between various databases (particularly the SSA and State DMVs) in a way which makes using it for immigration enforcement ineffective. The UK doesn't, which is why we had the Windrush scandal when we tried to do serious in-country enforcement. I think the MAGA base would now support ID cards, but a noisy minority of Republicans profoundly wouldn't. But in any case, ID cards are less unpopular than either open borders or mass deportations of well-behaved settled illegals.
I broadly agree, with the exception that I consider illegal entry/overstaying to be sufficient criteria for "unwanted" on its own. If someone attempted to follow the law and filed their paperwork wrong, then I am willing to be forgiving and fix those issues without deporting them. But if someone literally crossed without permission, on purpose, knowing they did not have permission, I want them gone. No statute of limitations for them, maybe like 50 years for their children or something so we aren't pulling up ancient archives and deporting extended families. But illegal entry to the country IS a crime, they are a criminal, they have demonstrated themselves to be the type of person who is willing to break the law for selfish reasons if the benefit to themselves is great enough. An illegal immigrant who appears to be a well-behaved member of society is simply one who has not yet been caught, or not yet faced a second opportunity where they find the cost/benefit ratio appealing enough to break the law again. But clearly they have a criminal mentality or they physically wouldn't be here.
Well yes, that's the current law for illegal entry (because it's a crime). Illegal entry immediately triggers ban from re-entering, staying for more than 1 year ban 10 years from re-entering, and this stays on their record forever on any re-entry/visa application. Overstaying is not a crime, it's a civil violation. This means many things, the government doesn't have to prove "beyond reasonable doubt" of criminal intent and provide a court-appointed lawyer for the overstay-er.
And as always, the edge case trips us up if we want overstay to be classified as criminal. Aside from the costs above, what about the baby that was carried across the border and grew up in the US (at what age should a person have the sense to self-deport?)(I would rather argue the US should accept a person who has the integrity to self-deport). What about people who have medical emergencies and yes didn't file their paperwork (did they forget or were they willful?).
And ok, let's take the mother who 20 years ago left Mexico while pregnant, bore her kid in the US, she worked under the table for 20 years as a nanny for various families in her neighborhood and also as a kitchen staffer. Criminal entry for sure, but at this point, you might want to deport her because you don't know her, but her community do know her and probably doesn't like that she's deported, that's exactly the "ethics of proximity" in action. (Same reason why approval rating of Congress is always all time low but approval rating of congressional districts of their own congress member is always 50%+1 by voting time)
In that case, you make the rules generous enough to cover possible edge cases. And then you ignore edge cases that became edge cases only because of the new rule.
I agree, there are always tradeoffs and at some point the callousness of life happens.
But yes, I think many people have different ideas of what they want changed about the immigration regime. What I'm advocating for is a better thing that comes out of two different presidencies approach to immigration.
The worst is that it swings back and forth in different extremes instead of finding a stable point.
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I'm not in principle against accepting a tiny fraction of unusually virtuous and sympathetic people on the furthest edges of the edge cases. Similarly, I would be willing to befriend a murderer, even one who had never been caught and punished, if they were unusually virtuous, repentant, it had happened a long time ago, and they were in every other way an upstanding member of society.
But in most cases I think allowing or even entertaining edge cases just muddies the waters of incentives. If you tell people they can get a better life here if they manage to stay hidden for five years, they will sneak over the border and try to stay hidden for five years. If you tell people they can get a better life here if they manage to have enough children first because deporting the children would look bad, they will sneak over the border and have children.
I suppose, in the furthest cases, if you tell someone they can get a better life here if they manage to live here for 20 years, work under the table for 20 years as a nanny for various families and as a kitchen staffer, then if we get people sneaking over the border to do that it won't be so bad. But we could just allow people to do that legally, in limited numbers that are economically viable. Whatever type of people we want, in the numbers we want, we should issue exactly that many legal papers to the right kind of people. If we need cheap labor to pick the fruits, we should issue visas that let people in to pick the fruits as cheap labor.
And to the extent that our legal visa screenings aren't that good and can't always perfectly detect the right people, I don't trust whatever shaky edge case deportation system to do any better. There is an effectively finite amount of space for limited and sustainable immigration that allows and encourages foreigners to integrate into our society and become American (or whatever other country, since this is not a uniquely American issue). A soft cap after which the marginal costs in lost cohesion and economic effects outweigh the marginal benefits. Every illegal immigrant effectively steals one of these slots from a legal immigrant, in that we are forced to lower the legal quota to compensate for them. I wouldn't even be strongly opposed to a program which deports illegals and trades them for legal immigrants on a one for one basis. "Ethics of proximity" strikes me similar to a lot of "medical ethics", in that it's a huge pile of anti-utilitarian biases and virtue signalling wrapped in a thin veneer of genuine ethics. People should do the right thing, not the thing that sounds good on paper.
I agree. I want congress/government to aim for the efficiency of Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (not just in immigration but all things):
Unfortunately I couldn't find a clip so I just have to describe it for you twice.
yeap, exactly, this is exactly the anti-inflow and pro-outflow measures that should be re-thought and re-examined with an aim to expand on the good bits and curtail the bad bits.
Well legislation and government is about finding what the right thing is and putting it on paper as a collective. And that's my point about the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. I think that now the US electorate has suffered through the uncontrolled incompetent immigration regime of the Biden era and the furious callousness regime of the Trump era, then they are primed to find another path forward.
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I feel like you could atleast make the argument for why “being mean and doing cruel things” is an optimal policy.
When the gap between the right and left is gigantic on immigration then being cruel to the stock of foreigners the last administration let into the country is a viable threat for when you are out of power.
When Dems will offer Asylum plus American money when in power then many will come. Being cruel and doing things like throwing a German military wife into gitmo for a year accomplishes a viable counterweight to Dems open borders and free stuff in a way that “maybe we will catch you when in power and put you on a Delta flight to your home country does not”.
Also don’t think we’ve put a German wife in Gitmo but we’ve done some cruel things and works fine as a proposal and we probably should do that.
This is all magnified by the fact that America is ran by executive orders and laws don’t mean anything so our government effectively hinges on the electoral college. It’s an all or nothing election.
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I think Trump is definitely attempting to put on a show for the base rather than doing things that might be effective.
This seems like the worst option of all policy worlds, because it's basically creating a selection effect for the worst types of immigrants.
It will scare off risk averse immigrants, and any immigrants that want a stable/predictable legal situation.
The easiest to find immigrants are ones that are trying to work within our legal system. They leave a paper trail. That paper trail might be from jobs, taxes, school enrollment, etc.
The hardest to find immigrants operate entirely in the black market.
How are we defining "effective" in this context?
One of MAGA's stated goals is to reduce illegal immigration. If "putting on a show for the base" results in illegal border crossings hitting a 50 year low, they may reasonably conclude that doing so is an effective means of achieving said goal. Refer also to my prior posts on "picking up Tuna Cans".
As for your concern about "selection effects", the argument pattern matches to a common form of rhetorical bait-and-switch where legal immigration is conflated with illegal immigration. I imagine that risk averse immigrants who sincerely want a stable/predictable legal situation would apply for legal status without having to be prompted or threatened.
There is a spectrum of illegality. At one extreme are the fully illegals. They crossed illegally, they operate in the black market selling illegal things, or only do cash jobs. At the other extreme are the people who scrupulously followed the process every step of the way.
In the middle are people with lapses. Student visas that expired while they were looking for a job out of grad school. Green card delays that meant they were supposed to leave the country for a month or two while things got worked out. H1-Bs between jobs. Kids brought here by parents that messed up the process.
Our immigration system is not simple enough that you can just easily categorize everyone into either extreme of legality.
Far stricter immigration enforcement is targeting those people in the middle. And even if you have scrupulously followed all the rules up to this point it doesn't mean something might happen in the future that causes a lapse. So risk averse people still don't want that harsh enforcement on the people in the middle.
I've never gotten in trouble for paying my taxes wrong, but I'm not in favor of making tax payment mistakes more harshly penalized. Taxes and income can get messy enough that I could screw up one day. There are tax dodgers and their non payment is making my taxes higher so I'm not happy about them and its fine to punish them. Same situation for immigrants.
So there is a spectrum, what of it? I do not find the existence of edge cases to be a convincing argument against enforcement.
You also haven't answered my question about how we are defining "effective"?
I would define effective as accomplishing policy goals. I did not know border crossings were so low. But I'm not sure which Trump policy accomplished that. I'm tempted to think that the most impactful policy they've done there is just not doing what the Biden Admin did which was actively screw with CBP, and actively stopping Texas from doing effective enforcement.
If we are gonna use the silly tuna can metaphor, we have a fence, one of the room-mates has been tearing holes in the fence.
The spectrum matters because of what kind of immigrants you want over here. If you want zero immigrants while still being able to say you allow immigrants, then sure maximum enforcement and maximum Kafkaesque rule sets are the way to go. Is that the goal? I didn't think it was.
Ok, if we are defining "effectiveness" in terms of policy goals, what evidence do you have to show that the Trump administration has failed to reduce illegal immigration?
On a more foundational level would you agree with the statement that "incentives matter".
If we are going to continue using the silly tuna can metaphor the way i see it is this. The MAGA roomate is saying that we ought to build a fence (ie secure the border) and pick up all these cans (ie reduce the incentives to enter illegally or overstay) to do something about the feral cat problem. The moderate democrat and never-Trump republican reply that the tuna cans/incentives don't matter if you build the fence high enough so picking them up is a waste of time. Meanwhile the progressive roommate is saying "i don't understand the problem" while using the moderate democrat's credit card to order more tuna and a set of bolt cutters to cut the fence.
As for the spectrum, i don't believe it matters because at the end of the day you either have to draw a line somewhere or give up on enforcing the law entirely.
I heavily agree that incentives matter. Its where I'd start.
A problem with the tunacat metaphor is that we still generally want some immigrants, whereas no one really wants feral cats eating in their yard. Its why I asked about the zero immigrants thing.
I am admittedly closer to the open borders side of things. I like lots of immigration. Heavy indoctrination into our ethics and morals. Restrictive voting and restrictive welfare benefits for immigrants.
If you want zero immigrants I'd like to know. It turns this discussion from something potentially productive to totally pointless. The zero immigrants position being a totally pointless discussion from my perspective. I'm not saying its an invalid position, just that the distance from my position is so far that it makes things pointless to discuss.
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From a technical perspective, you could do an "ID lite" without biometric data. Give out "federal payroll tax numbers" (call it what you want) that come on a credit card sized NFC enabled card with private and public keys. Expand E-Verify and make it mandatory for every single form of income, and force employers to tap the NFC card to a phone when they sign up an employee. Force them to tap in freelancers. Have the system report nothing back but success or failure to enroll. Then soft-roll-out over a period of time (you'll have a few percent of citizens having trouble proofing their status, but you'll always have that) and slowly take SSN out back and shoot it. Make the cards easily revocable and replaceable when stolen or lost.
Then nail everybody not complying for tax evasion.
I have to ask if you are in gun rights spaces at all, because this is very reminiscent of a more moderate (but still pro-gun) suggestion on private sales: Give NICS access (i.e. the federal background check system for firearms purchases) to everyone, with it returning nothing but "yes" or "no", and then require it for all sales, including private. No official record needed (serial numbers, etc.), but at least allow law abiding citizens to sell guns at any time with peace of mind that they're not selling to a felon. And if they do, and they didn't use NICS, proponents argue legal action against the seller is a minimally intrusive and maximally effective way of curbing illegal sales.
Much in the same way, this is a way to verify workers in a minimally intrusive and maximally effective way. And just like NICS access (and voter ID), I doubt anyone with political weight is going to advocate for it.
I think e-Verify is already supposed to do this. As far as I can see, neither side of the fence thinks that it is fit for purpose.
And of course a system without biometrics cannot catch the case of an illegal immigrant using a valid name and SSN that were issued to someone else. (Remember that the photo on an ID card counts as a biometric, although it isn't the most reliable one).
I feel like credit reporting companies (the panopticon) could be used for good here. They have such a good database that they could send courtesy messages to people asking "hey did you get a job in a completely different state that you have no connection to?" This rules out willing participants but could tamp down on identity theft, which should be their job anyway.
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Canada essentially did this by mistake with their licensing/registration scheme -- online private sales exploded, because you suddenly had a fairly transparent way of checking that somebody in (say) Newfoundland was who he said he was -- and some sort of recourse if he failed to ship your gun to the Yukon or whatever.
To this day this is an area in which Canada is a lot freer than the US for gun-buyers -- the lack of the whole FFL/interstate commerce thing helps of course, but even if that were repealed I'd think that Americans would find transacting with BamaBoy666 on reddit a bit fraught...
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Caveat: if you've been in the US illegally for several years, get married, and then immediately try to move onto a military base without adjusting your immigration status first... well, I can see how some people might describe that as a "paperwork issue", but I don't think it's an unfair result. And if it isn't a "paperwork issue" in your estimation, sadly, it'll be conflated with those cases that are by people trying to gin up negative publicity, and so I have to eye every story with suspicion that there's more going on behind the scenes than a sob story.
Yeah, I think this is FAFO dumbassery biting them in the rear. Being married to a US citizen, with the aid of a competent immigration lawyer(which military personnel have access to) is pretty much a shoe in for residency.
Yeah, I was thinking of one case in particular:
I saw a lot of people referring to it as a paperwork issue or ICE targeting servicemember spouses, but this case seemed... well, what did anyone expect? The timing of the husband's ship was such that the marriage must have taken place only a few weeks prior to this event, at most. All I can think of is that either the husband didn't know her status (and maybe she didn't, either, somehow, despite having lived and presumably worked in the US illegally for nearly a decade?), or that they assumed (erroneously) that marriage would automatically resolve any status issues. In which case... well, I can forgive her for not knowing the law, but a USCG man should presumably at least think to speak to base counsel or his CO prior to marrying any foreign national, let alone one who has immigration status issues?
I actually think this is a very American attitude. Very much in line with the apocryphal quote:
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