Matt writes:
My bottom line is that I’m not particularly interested in purely hypothetical compromises. If immigration restrictionists really feel so strongly about the injustice and immorality of granting citizenship to the US-born children of undocumented migrants that’s they’re willing to make concessions on other fronts, that’s definitely something I would encourage members of congress to explore. But as best I can tell, they’re not even coming close to offering anything like that. So what are we even talking about? There are a lot of different moving pieces to the immigration debate, but it’s impossible to move any of them forward as long as such a large political bloc is basically against anything other than wall-building and deportation. What’s more, since modifying the 14th Amendment would require a constitutional amendment, it’s always going to be one of the least politically viable potential points of compromise.
Matt is making a reasonable point. While I do think reforming birthright citizenship would contribute to a better immigration debate, I don’t think it would necessarily lead to the kind of immigration policy I believe Matt and Will Wilkinson favor, namely a policy that that facilitates the influx of less-skilled Mexican workers into the U.S. labor market. We should support reforming birthright citizenship if we support reforming birthright citizenship on its own terms.
I’ll briefly note that I disagree with this view. Addressing Robert Rector’s arguments about how the influx of less-skilled workers increases poverty levels in the United States, Matt writes:
Rector seems to think the upshot of this is that we should kick all these people out, so they can be even poorer in developing countries, and then make our poverty statistics look better. That’s nuts. The real upshot of this is that things aren’t as bad as they sometimes seem—that many of the worst-off people in America are in fact engaged in upward mobility relative to where they started in life. That doesn’t mean we should be complacent about the education, health care, nutrition, and infrastructure needs of poor people.
I don’t think this is about making our poverty statistics look better. Rather, it is rooted in what Will Wilkinson has called “solidaristic nationalism.” As I’ve argued in this space, it’s not obvious that we should care more about somewhat poor people from Mexico rather than desperately poor people from the Central African Republic or Mali or Laos. If we care about them more because they had the moxie or the means to cross the border into the United States illegally or to overstay their visas, well, we’re creating a slightly quirky set of incentives.
But Matt’s argument reminds me of the case for a carbon pricing regime in the United States. My understanding is that advocates of a domestic carbon pricing regime believe that it will prompt other states, including China, India, and other high-growth, carbon-intensive economies, to embrace a similar regime, thus leading to the international coordination we’d need to reduce carbon emissions.
Another possibility, of course, is that carbon-intensive manufacturing and other activities would leave the United States, a process that’s been happening for years. All evidence suggests that China and India will continue building coal-fired plants at a furious pace, regardless of what the United States does. And as Randall Parker observed earlier this year, China and India are also displacing oil consumption in the OECD economies. Parker also includes a fascinating quote from Gregor McDonald:
Those who would propose a successful energy transition over the next 20 years have failed, on a number of fronts, to produce a holistic model that pays respect to both the history of previous energy transtions, and to all (not just some) of the hurdles that lay before us. For example, one group of transitionists will lay out the technical feasibility of running the world exclusively on clean power. But they ignore the construction phase, or the energy required to fund it. Other transitionists will appear to address the construction phase, but instead will elide over crucial engineering details by invoking historical examples of national will–like the space program, or the retooling of Detroit during WW II. Most neglected however is the history of previous energy transitions. And here we find the largest hurdle of all. For, in humanity’s last two transitions, from wood to coal and then coal to oil, the trajectory each time was to a higher power density energy source. Energy transition is disruptive enough, but much less so when you are gaining energy density. And how do you suppose transition will be this time, going in the opposite direction, to lower density sources?
The deal that carbon pricing advocates are proposing is highly implausible at best. The barriers to a transition to clean power are extremely high, which is why, in my view, we should focus on funding basic research into cheaper-than-coal technologies and supporting win-win concepts like biochar.