There are good arguments for open borders in the equilibrium. But it's very hard to argue that they're good for the people who's jobs are lost. This is the classic median/mean reasoning error. Open borders are good for the arithmetic mean person. They are not necessarily good for the median person.

For instance, the outsourcing of american manufacturing to China has seriously heart middle America. There is no real way around that. It has arguably been good on net for the world, but it has been quite bad for those specific communities. It's important that we fully recognize those tradeoffs, and not imply that unfettered immigration is a universal good.

It is almost certainly good for 'the economy'. But it can be quite bad for most of the individuals in that economy, and it's very important to disambiguate those things. On balance I think I come down in favor of more immigration, particularly high skilled, but I think it's important that we not pretend like people aren't seriously harmed by it, too.

I am not so sure, without cheap manufacturing the midwest could never afford their trucks, their tractors, their ATVs and their AC units.

Look at the difference between middle America and middle Portugal.

> There are good arguments for open borders in the equilibrium. But it's very hard to argue that they're good for the people who's jobs are lost.

That seems like a too general argument, as it also applies to technology.

It does apply to technology. My point isn't "some people get hurt, therefore open borders are bad". Some people are hurt by technology, but the net benefits are so great that it's generally worthwhile. I think the tradeoff is a little closer to even for open borders.

Thinking about it some more, it seems there are three main effects:

1) High skill effect. If you invite someone who has higher productivity than average for your country, that has basically the same effect as technology. This is a strong argument for skilled immigration.

2) Low wage effect. If you invite someone who's willing to work for a lower wage (being from a poor country), you are better off, but only until they learn to ask the same wage as natives. This is why I think Caplan's main argument for unskilled immigration is weak.

3) Poor proximity effect. Most natives don't want to live among poor people, so natives become worse off when you invite poor immigrants. This is a strong argument against unskilled immigration.

I think there might be a form of the horseshoe theory here at play where the left-"feel good" side meets with the right-"more people/cheaper services" side

Europe experienced some unchecked (outside of EU) immigration in the past couple of years and it hasn't worked well for the average person on most aspects to be honest (though yes, there are unfairly negative views as well). And yes, I'm aware some numbers look good on paper and some jobs were filled.

But the truth is that during the big immigration waves of the XX/XIX (and earlier) centuries the limitation was technology. And that limitation is mostly gone now (ok not right now, but you get the point).

Sure unlimited immigration and then what? House them where? Let them work where? What are you going to do with the people that have limited reading/writing skills (and no English skills)?

Boeing, were the leader in their industry until they decided to pay $9 per hour. Obviously they went extremely cheap and outsourced the development and that is how they achieved $9/h. They could have bring the same developers in Seattle on H1B and pay them $40 per hour. The result was going to be the same. Importing cheap labor is not beneficial, importing talents is the thing which brings benefits. However, talents are not cheap.

Caplan utterly overlooks culture and politics, and his analysis ends up extremely shallow as a result: https://www.vox.com/2014/9/13/6135905/open-borders-bryan-cap...

> Not necessarily. "Low-skilled" is actually kind of a misleading term here. Even American high school dropouts have at least one key skill that immigrants generally don't: the ability to speak English. That makes it possible for immigrants to complement the labor of low-skilled, native-born workers, rather than replacing it. "Low-skilled Americans who are fluent in English in a place like New York City wind up supervising the low-skilled immigrants," Caplan says. "They wind up being the bridge, or the people who train immigrants in jobs that they wouldn’t even know about from their home countries."

The problem with this hypothetical is that Caplan overlooks that libertarians wouldn’t have any political clout in this new world order. Reimagine all of Caplan’s hypotheticals, except the Squad is in charge of everything. How long do you think they would stand for English language skills being a determinant of whether someone was entitled to a supervisory role?