Fixed Slices

 Well, Hungary's ever-repulsive prime minister Viktor Orbán was back in the news this week for the worst possible reasons—this time for making a public statement so scorchingly blatant in its racist ideology that even one of his political allies condemned the remark as "Nazi" rhetoric. One might be tempted to dismiss his comments as the irrelevant prattling of a tinpot tyrant—except that Orbán enjoys a terrifying and growing amount of international clout, including in this country. 

This year's CPAC—the annual event that sets the agenda each year for allegedly "mainstream" movement conservatism in the United States is—lest we forget—scheduled to host Orbán next month as a featured speaker. That is, one of the dominant fora in the U.S. Republican Party and conservative movement is going to provide a star platform to a man who rants about "race-mixing"—a further step in the GOP's increasingly open, no-holds-barred endorsement of outright white nationalist ideology. 

What strikes me in these moments is not only the immense ugliness of this kind of licensed hate and its increasingly prominent and undisguised role in one of our country's two major political parties—it's also the fundamental perversity of this intense anti-migrant sentiment rearing its head at this precise moment in history. Orbán's racist rhetoric and the anti-immigrant policies that flow from it are not only cruel, that is to say; they are also elaborate and utterly gratuitous exercises in self-harm, on the part of the countries that choose to impose them. 

In times of labor scarcity and inflation, after all, when government budgets are bloated, prices are high, and workers are in short supply, a rational government policy would not be seeking to deter migration of working-age adults of the sort whom Orbán or his U.S. confrères defame as "invaders." To the contrary, it would be asking itself how it could incentivize more people to come. Faced with the arrival of asylum-seekers and refugees at its borders, it would prostrate itself before them as the national saviors—come to preserve the country's way of life in its hour of need. 

The reason they are not is the eternal demagogic potential to be exploited in the scapegoating of racial outsiders. Faced with a time of economic dearth or uncertainty, what politician—so long as they be unencumbered by a soul or conscience—can resist the temptation to deflect blame from their own leadership onto vulnerable newcomers with the least amount of social capital to defend themselves? 

Such scapegoating strategies wouldn't work so easily, however, if they weren't assisted by certain prevalent delusions—fueled by understandable but false mental heuristics on the part of the public. One is the notion that financial stress in advanced economies is caused by absolute scarcity of resources—that economic prosperity is a fixed sum and that any additional people arriving into the country will only further subdivide the pie, leaving less for each individual. 

Supposedly well-informed and highly literate people—the intelligentsia, in short—persist in buying into this mistaken zero-sum thinking as commonly as the populace at large, further bearing out Hawthorne's dictum, recorded in his House of the Seven Gables, that: "the influential classes, and those who take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob."

A case in point: allegedly-clever Continental philosopher Peter Sloterdijk is quoted in The New Yorker as opining: "The Americans gave us this idea of multiculturalism that suited their society fine, but which, as software, is not compatible with our German hardware of the welfare state." The idea appears to be that the German state, in order to continue to meet its payment obligations under the generous welfare provisions it promises its citizens, must limit the number of people in the country to a fixed amount. Here is the old zero-sum delusion rearing its head. 

After all, what Sloterdijk should have said, if he were being reasonable, is that refugees and immigrants provide the only possible hope of salvation to the German welfare state. The one thing that is certain to drive it into bankruptcy, by contrast, is to restrict the population to the aging native-born workforce. Whereas hundreds of thousands of working-age adults who are asking for nothing more than to be allowed to come in, work for decades, pay taxes into the system, all without having access to most public benefits for many years to come, are the last people a country with a welfare state should be trying to ban. They are the only ones who can keep it solvent.

Sloterdijk—like so many people in this country and throughout the rich West—chooses to get things exactly wrong. For another example, let us take current U.S. economic policy. 

Our country is at the moment in the process of driving itself into a recession as a deliberate policy choice. Let it not be forgotten that this recession is willful. Nearly all economic indicators agreed that, prior to recent Federal Reserve rate hikes, the fundamentals of the economy were strong. Demand for labor was high to the point of shortage; markets had soared. The problem was simply that inflation had begun to spiral out of control, reflecting an imbalance between this record-high demand and the economy's ability to match it with sufficient supply. 

Now, admittedly, some of the relevant supply shocks involved here were due to forces beyond U.S. policymakers' control—the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, their impacts on global supply chains, etc. But one of the most significant ones—the only one, as I've noted before on this blog, that was cited in interviews by Fed Chair Jerome Powell when he was asked to account for inflation—was the lack of labor supply in the country. 

Meanwhile, there were thousands of people stranded at the southern border by a pandemic-era U.S. asylum ban, implemented by Trump, and retained by Biden (originally by his own choice, now by court order). They, like the refugees in Germany whom Sloterdijk had in mind, were asking only to come in, work, pay taxes, all without having access to most social services (even permanent residents, under U.S. law, are excluded from most public benefits due to mean-spirited laws passed in the 1990s—in the style of the times). Was ever so much owed by so many to so few? 

And what did we do, in the face of these benefactors? Did we say: "Oh, thank God you came! Thank you, thank you! You've saved us from having to drive our economy into recession in order to artificially lower demand!"? No. Instead, one half of our political spectrum embraced outright white nationalism and the increasingly splenetic racist rhetoric that goes with it, and the other half—while distancing itself rhetorically from such views—has retained most of the same anti-immigrant and anti-asylum policies in practice (through a combination of their own inaction and reluctance to touch the issue, and interventions from right-wing states in court to try to force their hand). 

Since we utterly refused to expand our own labor supply to meet demand, the Federal Reserve was forced to tackle the problem from the other direction: raise interest rates, drive the economy into a recession, and thereby lower aggregate demand so that it reaches a level with supply. This is indeed one way to lower prices. But it is the most brutal way, because it will result in increased unemployment and the impoverishment of many. 

It didn't have to be this way. We could have had a growing economy and adequate labor supply to accommodate the increasing demand, and we wouldn't even have to elaborately incentivize or recruit immigration—we could just allow in the people already at our borders, who are simply requesting lawful entry at ports under the asylum laws that are already on the books and theoretically binding on the U.S. government. But we decided not to. We preferred to have a smaller cake for ourselves rather than a bigger one that we might have to share with others. 

It is the illegality, the inhumanity, the gratuitous cruelty of these anti-asylum policies that I spent most of my time pointing out and denouncing, when I was still working fulltime for a human rights agency. All of those things are still true. But it's time to acknowledge as well the utterly self-defeating nature of these policies. It is not only morally wrong, but also bizarrely self-harming and irrational to willfully restrict immigration and asylum-seeking at the precise moment when it is what the host society most needs. As John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about migration all the way back in 1979: "What is the perversity in the human soul that causes people so to resist so obvious a good?" 

Galbraith's comment appears in his The Nature of Mass Poverty—a short book of lectures whose weighty-sounding title is at odds with the feather-light tone the author maintains throughout. I picked up the book today for unrelated reasons—and I was surprised, as I read, by how much space Galbraith devotes in his analysis to the importance of migration, and how precisely relevant his more than forty-year-old analysis is to our present era. 

To be sure, there is much in Galbraith's account of mass poverty that wouldn't hold up today. His treatment of poverty as the endemic default condition of most of humankind—to be alleviated rather than exacerbated by "development"—surely underestimates the role played by displacement, dispossession, exploitation, and proletarianization in the creation of poverty. Surely, the process of development creates pauperization in the very act of alleviating it elsewhere, and this is one of the paradoxes of capitalist growth that must be contended with in order to  develop sound policy that weighs all relevant human factors. 

As for Galbraith's contention that much of mass poverty is attributable to cultural "accommodation" to poverty, it is likely to strike most people today as at best inadequate, at worst offensive. In fairness, Galbraith anticipated these objections. He emphasizes many times over that accommodation is not an aberrant or objectionable behavior; it is actually a rational response under conditions that will not reward further effort. What is needed to break out of the poverty trap, therefore—he argues—is not only an intervention to end "accommodation," but also outlets of genuine escape, so that people who choose not to accommodate themselves to a once-rational toleration of intergenerational poverty will actually be rewarded for their efforts. 

Having completed the book, I'm still not sure if Galbraith's theory is any less circular than some of the other accounts of mass poverty he criticizes. After all, his explanation for why people adopt practices of cultural "accommodation" to mass poverty is that it is the only rational response to a situation—which he dubs the "poverty equilibrium"—in which any temporary escape from economic pressures will be defeated by rising population pressures that quickly restore the same prior level of subsistence. But, he maintains, in order to escape the equilibrium, it is necessary to break habits of accommodation so that people aspire to release from the equilibrium. But wasn't it precisely the impossibility of escape, and the defeat of such aspirations, that led to the habit of accommodation in the first place? 

If nothing else, Galbraith's quasi-Malthusian account seems so deterministic that it requires the intervention of an almost supernatural outside force to break the cycle. It needs a prime mover, some external divine spark, to explain how any aspiration was originally able to break through the accommodation without simply causing new population pressures, restoring the equilibrium, defeating the aspiration, and justifying the habits of accommodation all over again. How, on Galbraith's theory, was any society ever able to escape from mass poverty? 

However this may be, Galbraith's account of the need for escape from the existing equilibrium leads him to a discussion of migration that still rings true. His argument here is that, of all the available escape valves for the aspirations of those members of a given community who reject accommodation, few are as mutually-beneficial for all involved as international migration. It truly is a win-win, if not a win-win-win. 

How so? Galbraith points out: it relieves population pressures on the community left behind, who are able to accumulate a surplus for investment without it being immediately consumed; it enables people who reject accommodation to find a field for their aspirations where they will not be defeated; and, by the simple process of self-selection, it ensures that host countries receive large numbers of migrants who are intrinsically motivated to "aspire" and add to the collective prosperity of the society they are entering. 

It is this "self-selecting" quality of migration that—in Galbraith's view—most fully underlines the perversity of host countries trying to block and restrict migration. "On few matters in our time," he writes, "are we determinedly so obtuse as on the way, in the rich countries, we look with misgiving on developments [namely, migration] that select for us the people best designed to advance affluence." 

What is particularly strange, he goes on to point out, is that migration is a godsend and public boon that governments in the rich countries need expend no resources trying to seek out. All they have to do is not spend resources trying to actively prevent it. Immigration, Galbraith writes, "has only rarely required any active effort on the part of governments. More often it has needed only their acquiescence and, most often, in recent times, only their non-vigilance." 

Galbraith's account, however incomplete, sheds some key explanatory light on multiple features of the human experience: for instance, on the remarkable economic success of diaspora communities around the world. Palestinian Christians remain, oddly, some of the most prosperous families in Central America today—constituting most of the elite of Honduras. Countries or economic zones that are composed almost entirely of people who "originally" came from somewhere else—Singapore, Hong Kong, etc.—are among the world's most prosperous. 

This success of diasporas often occurs even when conditions in their home countries are dire. Icelanders in the nineteenth century found success in the United States and Canada while their home island was being depopulated by an epochal ecological collapse. Galbraith would say this all makes sense: the traumatic events in Iceland rendered the old "accommodation" impossible, by making the prior "equilibrium" unsustainable, and spurred migration abroad as an escape for those inhabitants with the highest degree of motivation. The result was that Iceland a century later was a rich country, and Icelanders in the United States and Canada had contributed mightily to the prosperity of their new host countries as well. 

Seen in this light, Galbraith emphasizes, the goal of public policy in every advanced economy should be to encourage more not less migration. This is all the more true in times of labor shortage and inflation. Galbraith cites the experience of Germany in the latter half of the twentieth century, and describes a situation remarkably similar to our own at present: despite fears of potential negative repercussions of mass migration and elaborate legal structures designed to foreclose the permanent resettlement of nationals from other countries in Germany, the native-born German workforce actually benefited from the arrival of large numbers of immigrants to the country during that era. 

How so? Precisely for the reasons that confront us today: "foreign workers have helped to maintain both stable prices and the relatively full employment of native-born workers [in Germany]," Galbraith writes, "[...] because the employment of the latter can be pressed to the limit, and the foreign workers used to fill out the areas of shortage—shortage that would otherwise result in inflationary bidding up for labor."

By contrast, we have seen in the United States in the past year what happens when demand for labor is "pressed to the limit" without this safety valve of an influx of additional labor supply from foreign workers. The result is exactly what Galbraith's model predicts: inflation, which prompts deflationary measures from the government and central bank to try to drive down demand, which ultimately result in recession and unemployment, making conditions worse off for the native-born workers as well as everyone else. That is the option we have chosen in the United States, to repeat, in preference to retaining full employment and relieving inflationary pressures by allowing in more immigration.  

Some disruption to the ordinary processing of immigration visas would have been inevitable, of course, in the wake of the pandemic. A partial decline in immigration levels in 2020 and into 2021 would have been as unavoidable as so many other of the supply shocks that came alongside the COVID-19 crisis. But our government's treatment of the many thousands of people who are already here, at the southern border, just asking to be let in and given permission to work lawfully, is a scandal of our own deliberate choosing. We don't need to shrink the pie. We are choosing to do so so that we can cling to our diminishing slice and not have to share it with others.