Thursday, December 13, 2007 :::
Two months ago Mark Krikorian put forth his ideal quantities of immigration, and I've been meaning to comment about it ever since.
The main comment I want to make is that I'm more sympathetic than he is toward admitting the "B+ student from Hyderabad Community College", provided that whatever that is translates into, say, $70,000 a year. The idea of an income test is in part a crass calculation that he'll pay in more in taxes than he consumes in social resources, but it's also indicative of my main concern with open borders, which is the idea of importing a large social underclass that creates a long-term threat to the institutions that undergird our prosperity. Admitting high-wage types reduces, rather than increasing, intranational economic equality, and they're also disproportionately likely to be amenable to the preservation of those institutions (property rights, a decentralized society, etc.)
I didn't remember that Krikorian made accommodations for a certain number of asylum-seekers, and I had planned to complain about that, too; I don't know enough about it to say whether 50,000 is a good number, but it might be. We might want to break it down by category at some point; a certain number of German parents trying to home-school their children, a certain number of Danes under oppressive taxation (though they may be likely to fit in under the other criterion I gave), a certain number of defendants in English libel cases, a certain number of people having their human rights trampled by the thus-named "human-rights commissions" in Canada, etc.
::: posted by dWj at 8:19 PM
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