I live in Hong Kong. When I moved here in 1989, I thought it was a disgrace that so few Chinese were sympathetic to the Vietnamese boat people. More than 55,000 Vietnamese were penned up in concentration camps, and more were arriving each week. "The average Hongkonger," I wrote, "would shove them all back out to sea if he had anything to say about it" (Liberty, March 1990).
From time to time some U.S. congressman comes here and says the same thing. The Vietnamese are running from communism. So are the 60,000 Hong Kong Chinese who emigrate each year, fearing China's domination after 1997. How can the Hong Kong people expect any sympathy if they show none toward people, however poor, who are their moral equivalents?
The Hong Kong people I knew didn't look at it that way – and I don't either, after living here three years. The Hong Kong people are emigrants, not refugees. They have money. They have professional qualifications. They speak English. And they have played by the American rules. They have filled out pages of forms. They have answered all sorts of questions the U.S. government never asks its own citizens, such as the name of every social, political or community organization they have ever joined. They have certified that they have never been convicted of a felony. They have disclosed their income and assets, their heart rate and blood pressure, and whether they have ever had AIDS or hepatitis B. And they have waited patiently to get their turn under the hugely oversubscribed quota. The line for Hong Kong brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens is about nine years long.
Refugees are different. They are emergency cases, exceptions to the rules. U.S. policy is to accept only those screened as political – people who can prove they have a "well-founded fear of persecution" if they go home. Most cannot prove this. More than 90% of the Vietnamese boat people are routinely screened out as "economic migrants." The U.S. will not accept them, nor will any other country.
To the Hong Kong Chinese, the Americans have every right to shut their own door on such gate-crashers. When George Bush sends Coast Guard cutters to shove the Haitians back into the arms of the tontons macoutes, he's doing just what Malaysia or the Philippines or Japan does. Shouldn't the U.S. be polite enough not to lecture other countries?
Some of my readers, I suspect, will argue that America should let them all in: immigrants, refugees, everybody. This is pretty much the view among libertarians. Every political question is to be decided by reference to first principles. According to libertarian axioms, immigration restrictions are as difficult to justify as apartheid, or an import quota on men's shirts.
But free immigration is difficult to argue for in today's world. No rich country allows it. States that have given up quotas on goods retain them on new residents. True, the European Community is on the verge of allowing the free movement of labor. Portuguese and Greeks will be allowed to work in England and Denmark – something not certain to be welcomed by the English and Danes. The proposal does not apply to non-EC peoples such as the Turks, Algerians or Poles. The U.S. and Canada have agreed to free most trade over a 10-year period. They did not free labor, residence or citizenship. In the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement, they are not even discussing doing these things with Mexico. 1
It's a similar tale with refugees. The Germans, who take as immigrants only those of German blood, are bound by their constitution to take all refugees. It's an unusual offer for a rich country to make, and thousands of Vietnamese, Romanians and Gypsies have taken them up on it. One result has been widespread resentment and roving gangs of neo-Nazi "skinheads." Germany's open door for refugees is about to slam shut. 2
When the subject of immigrants and refugees comes up with libertarians, it's usually in an argument with someone who wants to shut the door on them. With gusto, libertarians cite studies that show that immigrants and refugees have been a benefit to America. They argue that America ought to "keep the door open." But the door is not open. It is half-open, with entry controlled by the government.
The real question of immigration is not about principles; it's about numbers. U.S. law allows 700,000 immigrants a year. That's less than three-tenths of 1% of a 252-million population. Some of these slots go to the affluent and educated. They can read the rules, hire the lawyers, fill out the paperwork. Some come over as students and figure out a way to stay on. Some, like a former South African colleague of mine, go through a long rigamarole. He had to find an employer to swear he had skills not available in the United States. He had to move across country and change careers to get his green card. An uneducated man could never have done it.
But of the 700,000, 74% are being admitted simply because they have a relative in the United States. One man gets in and petitions for his wife and kids, brothers and sisters, and their kids. Only 20% of slots are for people with needed job skills. Canada and Australia are more open than the U.S. in this regard; America could follow their lead and let more people in as investor-immigrants. It could let in only those with money, skills or PhDs.
The flow of refugees has been about 30,000 most years – a small fraction of the immigrants. How refugees fare in the U.S. depends mainly on the kind of life they had before. Some, like the middle-class Cubans, have been successful. Others, like the Hmongs, a 16th-century people from Indochina, haven't. In early 1988, of the 20,000 Hmongs in the Fresno, California, area, 70% were on welfare. Despite their high-school valedictorians, a higher percentage of Vietnamese are on welfare than of blacks.
Millions of people around the world whose governments criticize the U.S. still dream of emigrating there. The Philippine Senate had just voted to kick the U.S. Navy out of Subic Bay when my Filipino maid said, "Sir, is it true that the U.S. could take back the Philippines as a state?" She had heard this proposed on a Philippine radio call-in show. Lots of people had called in to support it. The educated, elite Filipinos I worked with in Hong Kong (the kind who were running the Philippines) would be outraged at such an idea. But this provincial girl was for it. She was a bit hurt when I told her the Americans wouldn't want her country back; it was too poor.
She would love to emigrate. She had a cousin in California who worked at a gas station, and had bought a car. His own car! Think of it! Maybe she could land one of those high-paying gas-station jobs! But the only easy way for a 23-year-old Filipina to get in was to marry an American. She would have done it except that she was already married, and in her country, divorce was forbidden. She had an unmarried friend, also working in Hong Kong, who had almost married a South Carolina man by mail-order.
The maids' presence in Hong Kong also tells a story. There are about 70,000 here. They are subject to Hong Kong's only minimum wage: $413 a month plus room and board. By comparison, a live-in maid makes $31 a month in Manila, $30 in Jakarta, $21 in Bombay. Many of the maids here have college degrees; the second one we hired gave up a job as a pediatric nurse at $120 a month to be a "domestic helper" for us. If Filipinas were allowed to work in America for – for what? $500 a month? $750? $1,000? – you could have them by the millions. Day care? Who needs day care? Babysitters? Never heard of 'em. A dishwashing machine? No need. Get a maid, and she'll cook your dinner and do the dishes, too.
You can hire a Filipino maid in Vancouver for $583 a month. The only reason you can't have one in the U.S. is the immigration law. If that law were changed, every middle-class American could have a domestic servant. Think of the social revolution that would entail. And that falls far short of open immigration. There is no open immigration to Hong Kong, only a contract-labor system for domestics.
Under free immigration there would be no contract-labor plans, and no distinction between immigrants and refugees. Anybody who gets in, stays in. What would that be like in a world of mass communications and Boeing 747s? Who knows? Back in the pre-World War I days, the United States was a long, hazardous, expensive trip away. There were only so many Irish, Italians and Norwegians who dared try it. People know more now. They are bolder. Tens of millions could raise the money to buy the ticket. And the Mexicans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans could just take a bus.
Just imagine it. Shiploads of Haitians, Dominicans, Jamaicans, Javans, Punjabis, Pathans, Yorubas. You could have people camped out on school playgrounds, in city parks, along the streets and in shantytowns, speaking strange languages. People who believed in executing blasphemers and circumcising women. Men who pissed against walls on public avenues. You'd have people selling candy door-to-door – not to help the Camp Fire Girls, but to feed their families. And not Camp Fire mints, either, but strange, gooey stuff concocted over real campfires.
The minimum wage would be swept away, welfare swamped, food stamps shredded. Upper-middle-class salaries wouldn't be affected much, but the going rate for people to dig ditches, mow lawns and deliver newspapers would collapse. White teenagers would vanish from behind the counter at McDonald's. The garment industry would make a comeback, as would leatherwork and toys. Many people would benefit, to be sure – but most of them would be foreigners. Americans at the low end of the wage scale would be hit hard. The "homeless" would go out of business. No one would give 'em a dime.
A big American city would become more like Jakarta or Mexico City – a middle-class world of education, cars and microwave ovens surrounded by struggling people in cardboard shacks.
Great, you say. Survival of the fittest! End this apartheid of international frontiers! End this labor protectionism! Let every man compete free and equal – all five billion! No doubt the economists could prove with marginal-cost curves that the gain in utility would be greater than the loss. They'd probably be right. Especially for all those Bengalis and Vietnamese now living on 65 cents a day.
Well, it does fit your principles. But I'm not sure you'd want to live in that world. In America today, even a lousy job pays $4.25 an hour. Even poor people have TVs and cars. I know libertarians who live in, or have lived in, that world. With free immigration, kiss it goodbye.
Me, I don't want to live in Jakarta. I live in Hong Kong, which is already close enough. Every day I see grown men in the streets selling wind-up panda bears, babies' T-shirts and boiled squid on toothpicks. The television reminds me that less then 10 miles from my home, 55,000 Vietnamese boat people are penned behind barbed wire. There's lots more where they came from: Vietnam is only about as far from here as southern Oregon is from Seattle. Open the gates on the camp, and another 55,000 would be here quicker'n you could say, "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh."
Hong Kong won't take them. It's a Chinese city, and the Vietnamese are foreigners. Americans get all indignant about this, but it's the same attitude as taken by the Thais, the Malaysians, the Filipinos, the Indonesians, and, of course, the Japanese. Nobody here in Asia wants to be somebody else's melting pot.
This little city-state can't entertain such a thought. It is the most densely populated place in the world. It doesn't even allow citizens of China to live here, except for an elite handful. I've heard arguments that it ought to allow more, but never that it ought to let them all in. Immigration control is supported by Beijing, by London and by the Hong Kong people. They can agree on little else, but they don't quarrel about that. There is no other way – because China's GNP per head is $325, and ours is $14,100. (America's is $21,500.)
The Vietnamese knew that they would be put in camps. The camps have been here for years, and have been publicized in Vietnam. They came here anyway, just for the chance that someone would take them. But nobody will.
Three years ago, they had my sympathy. Now I, too, grow tired of them and their demonstrations. I begin to think of them as the unwanted cousin who camps out on my doorstep and demands a seat at my dinner table. These people have to go home. They have to be forced to go home so the other 69 million Vietnamese won't come here. Like the Hong Kong Chinese, I begin to get disgusted with the namby-pamby British government, which talks about "mandatory repatriation" but is too genteel to drag screaming refugees onto airplanes.
In the world of the 21st century, America is going to have to do the same thing. You won't have to shut the door on everybody. You're a big country and a rich country, and what's more, a melting pot. You can let in your 700,000 immigrants a year. You can probably let in more, especially if you pick them more carefully. You can let in a few refugees, and pat yourself on the back for being so humanitarian. But don't kid yourself that you have an "open door." Nobody does.
NAFTA was ratified later that year, with no provisions for immigration.
It did, soon after this was written.
This article is reprinted with permission from the February 1993 issue of Liberty. Send editorial comments to [email protected]. All letters to the editor are assumed to be for publication unless otherwise indicated.
September 18, 2006
