The Immigrant Who Cannot Win

Listen carefully to the case against immigration and you will meet a truly remarkable creature. If the immigrant works, he takes our jobs. If he does not work, he lives off us. If he accepts a low wage, he undercuts Australians. If he earns a high wage, he takes the good jobs. If he arrives poor, he is a burden. If he arrives rich, he buys our houses. He produces too much and threatens Australian businesses. He consumes too much and causes shortages. His labour pushes prices down. His consumption pushes prices up.

One begins to wonder what acceptable behaviour remains. Perhaps the ideal immigrant arrives with a suitcase full of money, gives it to an Australian at the airport, consumes nothing, produces nothing, and immediately flies home. This is not an economic theory. It is a prosecution searching for charges. The verdict is “keep him out”; the indictment is rewritten according to whatever the defendant happens to be doing.

The contradictions matter because they reveal something about the source of the objections. If both X and not-X are evidence for the same conclusion, neither is likely to be the real reason for believing it.

The Imaginary National Pie

“Immigrants take our jobs” depends on imagining wealth as a cake baked sometime around Federation, with Australians still arguing over the slices. Watch another customer enter Woolworths and put bread in his trolley. Literally, there is now less bread available for you. Yet nobody proposes a National Bread Migration Cap. We understand that customers cause supermarkets to stock more bread. Demand calls forth supply because satisfying demand is profitable. Why should labour operate according to a different economic law?

An immigrant does not arrive as a consumer attached to a résumé. He produces, earns, spends, saves and invests. His rent becomes someone’s income. His purchases become businesses’ revenue. His labour makes some investments profitable that were not profitable before. He may start the business himself. There is no iron vault under Parliament House containing Australia’s fixed supply of jobs. Jobs are relationships created when human wants encounter productive capacity. Add people and you add both wants and productive capacity.

If the fixed-pie theory were correct, population growth should have been one of history’s great economic disasters. A world of eight billion people should be fighting over the jobs and food left behind by the first billion. Instead, humanity became richer. The pie grew because people bake pies.

Australia is a particularly awkward country in which to pretend otherwise. About one-third of Australians were born overseas. The country has somehow survived this invasion of doctors treating patients, builders constructing houses, engineers designing things, customers buying things, entrepreneurs starting companies and employees turning up to work.

The immigrant is apparently always about to destroy Australia. Australia has spent two centuries repeatedly failing to be destroyed.

Competition is not Theft

There is one part of the objection worth conceding without hesitation. An immigrant can make a particular Australian worse off. So can an Australian. A better accountant can win your client. A new restaurant can take your customers. A twenty-two-year-old graduate can beat you for a job. A machine can make your profession obsolete. This phenomenon has a name: competition and progress.

Suppose an Australian engineer and an Indian engineer apply for the same job. The employer chooses the Indian. The Australian has suffered a real disappointment. But what has been stolen from him? Nothing. He never owned the vacancy. To prohibit the Indian from competing is therefore not to protect the Australian’s property. It is to give the Australian an unearned entitlement to somebody else’s earned opportunity.

Apply that principle consistently and civilisation stops. The horse trainer acquires a veto over the motorcar. Kodak gets jurisdiction over digital cameras. The local mediocre restaurant receives a restraining order against anyone who can cook. Protectionism attempts to preserve an economic photograph by forbidding the subjects to move. A free economy is a film. Capital moves, prices change, occupations disappear, businesses form, workers retrain and technology creates opportunities nobody previously knew to protect from foreigners.

There are adjustment costs. Of course there are. Life has adjustment costs. But the freer the market, the more routes adjustment can take. If housing becomes scarce, higher prices make construction more profitable. If particular labour becomes abundant, businesses have an incentive to organise production around it. If demand rises, firms have an incentive to expand. Government can then perform a particularly impressive trick: prohibit construction, obstruct investment, regulate businesses, constrain supply, observe the resulting shortage and blame the immigrant.

It is rather like tying someone’s shoelaces together and complaining that he walks too slowly.

The Welfare-State Escape Hatch

At this point the immigrant often undergoes a remarkable transformation. A moment ago he was a ruthless economic predator stealing every available job. Now he is apparently incapable of finding one. What if he lives on welfare? Then abolish the welfare state.

Government builds a trough filled by compulsory taxation, worries that additional people may drink from it, and constructs a wall around the country to defend the trough. The obvious alternative receives remarkably little consideration. Remove the trough.

In a free society, an immigrant supports himself through work, savings, investment, insurance, family or voluntary charity. He possesses no blank cheque drawn on strangers. The fiscal argument is especially strange in Australia because the government’s own modelling has found many migrant cohorts to be substantial net fiscal contributors, particularly skilled migrants. Apparently even after constructing an enormous transfer state, the feared foreigners have displayed an surprising tendency to work and pay taxes.

Then immigration policy reaches its comic climax: some visa holders, including students, are legally restricted from working. The sequence is magnificent. Immigrants may be dangerous because they won’t support themselves. Therefore, under certain visas, they must not support themselves by working. Imagine applying the principle elsewhere. “We are deeply concerned that you may starve. Accordingly, fishing is prohibited.”

At that point the real principle becomes clearer. The objective is not merely self-sufficiency. It is government control over which peaceful adults may participate in economic life.

Who Owns Australia?

The deeper premise hides inside one innocent possessive pronoun: our. Our jobs. Our houses. Our wages. Our industries. Our opportunities. But ownership means something. A worker owns his labour. A businessman owns his company. A homeowner owns his house. “Australians” collectively do not acquire title to all three because the assets happen to lie between Cape York and Tasmania.

If an employer wants to hire an Indian engineer, what property does a third Australian possess that entitles him to veto their agreement? If a Vietnamese entrepreneur opens a restaurant and Australians voluntarily prefer it, what has the old restaurant owner been robbed of? If a homeowner prefers a foreigner’s offer, when exactly did the losing bidder acquire ownership of the house?

The collectivist conception treats Australia as a vast country club whose existing members jointly own every economic opportunity inside the fence. Foreigners may enter only when the committee determines that their presence serves the membership.

Capitalism recognises no such collective title deed. The immigrant is not trespassing on “the Australian economy”. There is no such piece of property. He is dealing with particular human beings, each of whom remains free to tell him no.

Immigration restrictions convert their yes into the government’s no.

I am an Immigrant

I have a particular reason for finding the fixed-pie picture ridiculous. I am an immigrant.

My family came to Australia from Russia when I was five. I went to Australian schools and universities. I have worked in Australian businesses, generated revenue, taught Australian university students, founded an Australian company, organised events and paid taxes. I now intend to build businesses here. I have consumed a tremendous amount of Australian food in the process. I apologise for the depletion of the national chicken reserve. What I actually did was what immigrants normally do: I joined the economy. I consumed and produced. I bought and sold. Other Australians created values for me and I created values for them. And there is an uncomfortable fact behind my own story. I do not think my Russian family, arriving under the circumstances in which we actually arrived, would qualify to immigrate under Australia’s present system. That should make anyone cautious about pretending bureaucrats can identify in advance which human beings are economically worth admitting.

The five-year-old immigrant does not arrive carrying his future CV. No visa officer looking at me in 2006 could have known what I would study, whom I would teach, which businesses I would work for, what company I might found or what I might create at thirty, forty or sixty. The bureaucrat sees an application file.

Reality contains a life that has not happened yet. And this is true of every immigrant. Human potential is not administratively legible.

The Psychology of Anti-Immigration

Why do the objections survive their own contradictions? Because the immigrant represents something deeper than labour supply. She represents change. He may work harder than you. She may build the better company. Their children may outperform yours. Their restaurant may replace yours. Their skills may make yours less scarce. Their ambition may transform a neighbourhood you expected to remain unchanged.

The world refuses to remain arranged around your present circumstances. For someone oriented toward achievement, this is the pulse of life. For someone who wants security against change, it feels like an invasion. The political demand becomes: “Hold the world still for me!” Protect my job from competition, my industry from innovation, my wage from new workers, my neighbourhood from development and my expectations from reality. But there is a slight engineering problem with designing a society around stillness.

Stillness is what we call a living thing when it dies.

Sufficient to Stand

Milton’s God explained that man was created:

“Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.”

That is a magnificent description of man’s capacity to direct his life. Man possesses reason. He can learn, produce, judge, trade and adapt. He is not born requiring another man’s failure in order to succeed. He is sufficient to stand, but freedom includes the possibility of falling.

A free society cannot guarantee that your profession will remain valuable, your business will survive or nobody better will compete with you. To guarantee your present position, government must chain everyone else to it, while chaining you to the mediocrity of others. Freedom offers something harder and greater: the opportunity to stand by your own judgement and effort.

Many people have spent so long asking the state to break their falls that dependence feels like solid ground.

The Value of Another Man

The anti-immigration mentality looks at another human being and sees subtraction: another mouth, another bidder, another worker, another claimant.

Spinoza saw something more profound:

“There is no singular thing in nature which is more useful to man than a man who lives according to the guidance of reason.”

Civilisation is the evidence. Look around your room. Almost nothing you depend upon was created by you. Other minds discovered the mathematics, designed the machines, raised the food, wrote the software, invented the medicines and accumulated the knowledge embodied in your ordinary Tuesday. Most of these values did not come from Australians. The division of labour turns the productive capacities of strangers into an extension of your own reach. A great engineer does not diminish you because the country now contains “one more engineer.” He can build something you cannot. An entrepreneur does not consume a scarce unit from the National Entrepreneurship Reserve. She creates an organisation that did not exist yesterday.

A productive immigrant does not arrive carrying a spoon to take his portion from Australia’s bowl. He arrives carrying a mind. The zero-sum mentality looks at one candle lighting another and worries that the first flame has been divided. Capitalism notices that there are now two flames. But none of this is the source of the immigrant’s rights. Rights are not prizes awarded to foreigners after a government cost-benefit analysis. An immigrant does not have to prove that he will become a surgeon, found a billion-dollar company or generate an acceptable lifetime tax surplus. Neither did you when you were born. He may become a billionaire, a baker, or a failure. His life remains his. Punish force, fraud and actual crime under objective law. Otherwise, get out of the way.

Nobody needs to prove his right to exist.