This paper looks at Public Choice Economics, specifically in the
context of how using Public Choice can shed more light on the immigration
issue. To do so, it will cover the basics of Public Choice. Then it will
explore the history of immigration in the United States, and from there the
current attitude on immigration. The final section will look at the
implications of using a Public Choice frame to look at immigration and the
built-in assumptions to shine a light on Public Choice.
Introduction
Immigration has become a contentious issue politically but came to
a head when Donald Trump rode down his escalator and announced his candidacy
for presidency in 2015. In that speech he said “When Mexico sends its people,
they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending
you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing
those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re
rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”1 A key aspect of his
appeal was his readiness to demonize others who were not of his race or social
class, and limiting immigration was a huge part of his stump speeches. What
does Trump’s embrace of an anti-immigration platform and his election say about
the United States? The reader will see that with a Public Choice framework the
limiting of immigration is a logical conclusion.
The Basics of Public Choice
Public choice, also known as social choice, is an attempt to use
the methods of utilitarian economics and apply those theories to the theory and
practice of politics and government. Some of the things focused on include
profit and loss, price, and efficiency. The focus is that people in the
political sphere are just that – people. As people they have the same issue
with bias in their dealings. Political actors, just like economic actors, act
alone even if they are in groups and importantly they are self-interested.2
What this means is that in the theory, there can be a parallel
failure of government just as there can be market failure, and thus the
solution for market failure is not necessarily government intervention, but
perhaps a look at how the market is designed.3
Further, the public choice theorist looks at public decisions as
being part of a decision made between interest groups of varying power. This
has numerous consequences within the theory. One of these is that in a
political theory based on one axis of choice, the only way to receive the
winning vote based on a simple majority is to appeal to the median voter, or
the group in the middle.4 This means that the parties will cluster
their choices in the middle. There are other consequences as well. For example,
there is in the theory a concern over self-interested government officials. It
is in their self-interest as bureaucrats to consolidate power in their offices
in the form of growing budgets and reports in a way that heightens their own
esteem and financial rewards in terms of pay and promotion.5
Public choice theory traces its roots to several thinkers in the
eighteenth century. Adam Smith, writing in 1776 criticized the relationship
between the state and businesses as well as worried about monopolies. Other
thinkers worried about the best way to chose in a group amongst a variety of
choices. The Marquis de Condorcet in 1785 looked at the problem of cycling. In
cycling there is no one preferred choice amongst the group. An example would be
to try and pick one overall winner in a competition between rock, paper, and
scissors in the classic game of skill and chance. There is no one preferred
choice between the three. Finally, Jean-Charles de Borda in 1781 examined that
in elections that varying intensity of feeling amongst choices would create
issues. To combat these varied enthusiasm, he proposed a ranked-choice system
so that each competing choice would be ordered by overall preference.6
The school really came into its own in the twentieth century.
Thinkers such as Duncan black looked backwards and rediscovered the work of
Condorcet and his contemporaries to expand the work.7 Aside from
notable contributions like Black’s’ discovery of the median voter theorem were
breakthroughs like Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem which claims that
there is in fact no possible democratic system that can guarantee the best
choice based on group preference outside of a dictatorship – all other systems have inherent flaws. For
his work on this and other economic achievements, Arrow was the youngest
economic Nobelist at the time of his award.8 Coming right on the
heels of Arrow was Anthony Downs who in 1957 posited Rational Choice Theory,
where parties want to meet their objectives of money, prestige, and power
rather than any specific policy. Downs is most renown, though, for his idea of
rational ignorance. With rational ignorance you look at the time it takes to
learn about a policy a candidate supports and then you balance it against the
chance that your own vote would be the one that would tip the election, the
most rational choice is in fact not voting at all. Downs says the question is
not why it is that, so few people turn out to vote, but why it is that, so many
do.9
The true founders of the school are James Buchanan and Gordon
Tullock. These two economists took the groundwork laid buy these previous
thinkers and synthesized Public Choice into a concrete theory of its own. Their
1962 book The Calculus of Consent looked at the stage in which voting rules
were chosen, point out that the act of choosing how to chose being as important
as the choosing itself.10 The Public Choice School of Buchannan and
Tullock is also known as the Virginia School of political economics based on
Buchanan’s work at several university in the OId Dominion State. It is closely
related to the Rochester School and the Chicago School, all noted for the
conservative political leanings.11
Historical and Contemporary Policy
Debate
The United States has been a nation of immigrants before it was a
country. From Jamestown in 1609 on, waves of people have come to settle on the
land. The native population was subdued, murdered, and displaced to make way
for successive groups coming to the land to escape the land they lived on for fear
of religious persecution like the puritan pilgrims who settled the
Massachusetts Bay area in the seventeenth century to the Irish coming over in
the nineteenth century to avoid famine.12 Traditionally, there had
been plenty of land out west as the frontier was pushed further out and the
railroads came, and people could settle the land. Many newcomers still settled
in the city in nationalized enclaves, but the expectation was that eventually
they would lose their former nationality identity and instead take on a new
identity as an American as the national ideal of the “Melting Pot” took hold.
The idea was that though the people on the shores between the Atlantic and the
Pacific came from many places originally, they were to become Americans over
time
The ideal has not always been the historical actuality. Mainly
welcoming of the right sorts of Europeans based on who held economic power,
successive panics led to the implementation of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act
to keep out the Chinese, particularly on the west coast in the name of
protecting workers who were already American.13 This is not to
mention that those workers deserving protection came in under various laws
which were dictated by the states because there was no federal immigration
station until the opening of Ellis Island in 1892. This led to the welcoming of
generations of eastern Europeans as the quota system privileged those from
Europe over immigrants over those from other areas on the globe.14
Currently, according to the left-leaning Center for American
Progress, “Approximately 43.3 million foreign-born people live in the United
States.”15 This is a quadrupling of the foreign-born population
since the relaxation of the immigration quotas, but it also includes
naturalized citizens’, lawful permanent residents, those on temporary visas, as
well as unauthorized migrants. Though these numbers represent all-time peaks,
as a percentage of the population it is below the total of foreign born right
around the time of the opening of Ellis island in 1890, when 14.8 percent of
the US population was foreign born.16
The most recent presidential election shone a spotlight on
immigration, with the presidential Candidate Donald Trump making illegal
immigration a centerpiece of his campaign. One of his central promises was to
build a wall on the entirety of the southern border with between the US and
Mexico, and to make Mexico pay for the construction of the wall. As we close in
on one full year of now-President Trump’s first term, little actual progress on
the building of the wall or foreign finance.17 The issue of
immigration has been conflated with illegal immigration despite several
important facts. The first is that of all unauthorized people in the country,
it is only a quarter of all foreign-born individuals. The second is that after
the crash in 2008, in-migration from Mexico turned negative. More people were
returning to Mexico than were entering the United States Illegally. Finally, in
percentage terms the greatest growth comes not from the Latin American
population, but from Asian in-migration. From 2010 to 2015, there was a 17
percent increase in the number of Asian American or Pacific Islanders in the
US.18 These facts have not quieted the most vocal of those opposing
immigration, as the white “native” population was strongly drawn to the Trump
campaigns’ economic nationalism covering both trade and immigration policies.
Once the wall was in place, there would be less competition for low-wage jobs
at the bottom of the wage ladder, and the return of American manufacturing
would open America and allow it to return to its former greatness. And this
narrative discounts the coded and uncoded racism against the foreign born
presented in the national discourse by Trump and his surrogates.
However, even with the subject in the news, the overall desire of
Americans to further limit immigration has been trending down. Gallup, in
reporting a poll this year, notes “Though preventing illegal immigration was
one of the president's key campaign promises, the general desire to decrease
immigration is near its historic low in Gallup's trend over more than half a
century.”19 The current number of people polled who want to see less
immigration is at 35%. This is lower than the number who are happy with the
current level, 38% but more than the number of people who want to see more
immigration at 24%, though this later number has been growing over time. The
graph below shows the trends where after hitting a peak in the late 90s and
then spiking directly after 9/11, the story of America’s feelings about
immigration has been one of more permissiveness.20
Figure
121
Potential Position of School in Policy
Ultimately it seems that with the policy of open immigration a
unanimous constitution would ideally have a vote for everyone in the voting
unit to ask if a member should be allowed to become a member of the group. One
thing that is holding back potential immigrants is that we use the constitution
as the final arbiter of the exact meaning of the law – and that is divined
through the Supreme Court.
There is no phrasing in the original document about who specifically
can be brought in. Article I speaks of “Representatives and direct Taxes shall
be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this
Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by
adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service
for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other
Persons.” In section 2 and then prohibits Congress from making rules against
immigration of free or slave people until 1808.22 The original
document was more favoring a federalist form of government structure where more
power was devolved to the states. This form held strong for the first eighty
years until the contradiction between the free north and the slave-holding
south could no longer be tolerated in a single state. The constitutional
amendments that came after the war could be a citizen of the south as an imposition.
These amendments, specifically section one of the fourteenth amendment was
drawn broadly to include all members of the once enslaved peoples: “All persons
born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction
thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they
reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the
privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State
deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the
laws.”23
The United States’ constitution is the one we have inherited, and
as such, as a naturalized or born citizen it is the choice structure that we have,
based on representative democracy. Within a Public Choice context, it does meet
the goals of being limiting and lasting,24 but where it fails is
that the individual citizens have inherited it without choosing it. As a
structure it has changed and evolved over time. Very few would vote to accept
the constitution and its amendments as given. In fact, the only people who do
actively make a positive choice to be governed by the rules of the constitution
are those who make the choice to be immigrate to the United States. So, with a
broad public choice lens the group that is doing the choosing did not assent to
the laws governing the structure, but the status quo is to not grow the members
of that group.
What we can see now with the framework of public choice economics
is that the design of the choosing method ties the hands of the majority.
Looking at the stats in the previous section, we can see that a great majority
of the participants in the poll wanted to see immigration growth in total to be
the same or the current level than we now have it (the polling did not specify
the composition of the preferential kind of immigrants). With the electoral
college and the de facto first past the post constitutional system, the parties
are beholden to the loudest groups within it, and in this case one of the key
planks was to forcibly limit immigration in the guise of making in-migration
from the southern border more difficult, as well as punishing those brought
here at a young age and changing the visa laws for other immigrants. This means
that the wide, dispersed group whose preferences are the status quo or greater
will have their voices drowned out by the loudest of the minority – true
tyranny, that.
The Public Choice framework can show us how there is a delicate
balance between the way things are and how we make choices is structured by the
choosing mechanism. America has two parties with a strong executive in terms of
driving the party agenda. There are many issues that get grouped up under the
party banner. Many times, there are conflicting interest groups in the parties.
In the issue of immigration, the republican party has both economic nationalists
and free marketers, but they stick together because of their collective priorities
at this juncture are more important than what they see the collective priorities
of the other party, which is itself a bundle of contradictions. Were each issue
to be voted on in a preference poll with a single axis or limited group of
choices like the Gallup poll in immigration above, then there would be no
reason to join parties. Alas, politics, just like economics, is about making
the most of limited resources and weighing the costs over the benefits in an
infinite round of trade-offs.
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