Comments on: Hierarchies of Rights

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 00:54:00 +0000

The Reason article was good- not perfect but one of the best journalistic pieces I’ve seen on immigration. For those who want a more academic view I can’t recommend highly enough Howard Chang’s article here:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=310114

Some of his other articles available on SSRN are also relevant but this one most directly. I don’t completely agree with his position, but it’s vastly better then the poorly articulated (at best) garbage that one usually finds even from fairly to very smart folks like Matt Y and Mark Kleiman

By: fishbane

fishbane — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 20:50:40 +0000

If I may abuse Camus for a moment

I didn’t know you were so kinky.

By: Blech

Blech — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 09:04:03 +0000

Thanks for saying en passant. In passing would’ve been confusing.

By: southpaw

southpaw — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 04:37:15 +0000

A foreign worker’s moral claim to peacefully cooperate with a willing American employer is prima facie far stronger than that worker’s claim to American healthcare resources of other perquisites of citizenship.

Change that ‘peacefully’ to ‘lawfully’ and you get to the heart of the problem. Presently, the cooperation under discussion is in violation of the law. In the proposed system, a new class of people lawfully working in this country (but not citizens) would be created in order to ratify and legalize the current unlawful cooperation. What people object to (rightly, I think) is the idea of enshrining that second class existence into law. A better solution, one that Yglesias posited this morning, would be to get control of the situation so that the vast majority employment relationships are conducted as allowed by the current legal regime, and then increase legal immigration if necessary.

By: Joseph

Joseph — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 02:37:47 +0000

But this ignores the salient fact that we care about our neighbors a lot more then a stranger (remember mirror neurons?). If geographic borders mean anything in a globalized world, they still mean that a group of people who live together have obligations to one another and derive privileges by living near one another that someone who does not live near us do not, at least as a right, enjoy .

Once a guest worker enters into our land, the logic of nearness places an overwhelming pressure on us to provide them with the benefits that we all enjoy. We aren’t, or I at least wouldn’t, prevent a guest worker dying from cancer receiving medical aid from the American health care system. But if that’s the case we go down a slippery slope, one Mccardle succinctly summed up.

McCardle made the excellent point that there are cultural costs to allowing a massive transient population into American without any expectation of assimilation. That’s the major concern Yglesias offered, too.

And yet it seems like pro and anti guest worker factions are talking past one another. Some liberals and libertarians are arguing that,” Look at all the benefits that accrue to guest workers. If you are concerned about their welfare, than you should embrace guest worker programs.”

But what Yglesias and McCardle are arguing isn’t about relative improvement in the migrant’s life but the relative cost to our society. So to respond to an argument that there are costs to us associated with a guest worker program by pointing to the benefits that the guest worker receives is really beside the point.