"I have two Ivy League degrees. And I am on the verge of deportation."
So you obviously deserve to come here, while the people living on $1 a day in extreme poverty and under oppressive regimes, they should be kept out? No, you didn't say all that, but I'm passionate about the cause of open borders (http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/08/the_efficient_e...., http://www.openborders.info), and I can tell you a lot of Americans think exactly that way - they have a poor understanding of economics and they imagine that importing relatively unskilled laborers into our country would somehow 'taint' or bring down our economy toward their levels of poverty. (See here: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/02/always_keep_you.... if you have yet to be disabused of this fallacy.) And your suggestion that you should be allowed in because of your degrees is suggestive of that kind of broken thinking. Productivity is the root of societal prosperity. And labor, whether skilled or unskilled -- in fact, especially unskilled labor -- is able to be much more productive when allowed to move to the first world. That extra productivity benefits everyone. Economists estimate, on average, that a move from the status quo to fully liberalized migration (open borders) would result in a DOUBLING OF GLOBAL GDP. That's an INSANE silver bullet.
And most of those gains would go to the extreme poor: in fact, it would be by far the most effective step we could take to reduce extreme poverty - which a lot of people don't realize is the single worst humanitarian crisis of all time, killing ~10 million people per year, a higher rate than WWII, which was the deadliest war ever. Open border should be foremost on every smart, informed, ethical person's mind, and it's a crying shame that it isn't. Instead you see people whining about the plight of 1st-world Uber drivers and middle class Americans and not being able to stay in the US with their Ivy League degrees. Spoiler alert: all those people are crazy rich relative to the extreme poor. There are ~1 billion people, 1/7th of the world's population, living in extreme poverty, which is defined as making less than $1.25 per day. That's PER DAY, NOT PER HOUR. They are literally starving, malnourished, have no clean water, no education - they have practically nothing. So unless you can show me evidence that you've spent many hours worrying about open borders and the extreme poor, screw your first world problem.
And by the way, I'm a rich american with an Ivy League degree myself, so this is not coming from a place of ivy-envy or anything. I've just spent a lot of time reading and thinking about open borders and the state of the world and I'm disappointed in my fellow educated first worlders that they're so oblivious, apathetic, uncaring, so this gets me angry.
Please see my other comments in this thread for more of my thoughts.
I feel that even something much smaller (esp. in the US), like allowing labor shortages to be filled would make a huge difference. Simplifying the process so that a farmer in need of workers doesn't have to hire a lawyer to do complicated paperwork that takes 6 months would be a first step. Granting these workers green cards on entry (instead of the restrictive H-2 visa) would ensure their freedom. The same goes for skilled workers. Even just allowing all workers in fields where there is a huge variation in skill (e.g. STEM, journalism, culinary arts, etc) to immigrate on the basis of well-paying job offer would make a huge difference.
The efficient, egalitarian solution to poverty is improvement of the home countries, not open borders. This is most obvious for China; that country has so many people that if one attempted to "solve Chinese poverty" via brute force importation of their people, the entire First World would have flipped to a Chinese majority. Instead, Chinese poverty is being solved more than an order of magnitude more efficiently and less disruptively--this is a thing that is actually happening, not spherical-cow theorizing--via trade, technology transfer, and related methods.
Open borders may still have merit (I'd certainly value the additional convenience), but your argument for it is obviously wrong.
So you obviously deserve to come here, while the people living on $1 a day in extreme poverty and under oppressive regimes, they should be kept out? No, you didn't say all that, but I'm passionate about the cause of open borders (http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/08/the_efficient_e...., http://www.openborders.info), and I can tell you a lot of Americans think exactly that way - they have a poor understanding of economics and they imagine that importing relatively unskilled laborers into our country would somehow 'taint' or bring down our economy toward their levels of poverty. (See here: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/02/always_keep_you.... if you have yet to be disabused of this fallacy.) And your suggestion that you should be allowed in because of your degrees is suggestive of that kind of broken thinking. Productivity is the root of societal prosperity. And labor, whether skilled or unskilled -- in fact, especially unskilled labor -- is able to be much more productive when allowed to move to the first world. That extra productivity benefits everyone. Economists estimate, on average, that a move from the status quo to fully liberalized migration (open borders) would result in a DOUBLING OF GLOBAL GDP. That's an INSANE silver bullet.
And most of those gains would go to the extreme poor: in fact, it would be by far the most effective step we could take to reduce extreme poverty - which a lot of people don't realize is the single worst humanitarian crisis of all time, killing ~10 million people per year, a higher rate than WWII, which was the deadliest war ever. Open border should be foremost on every smart, informed, ethical person's mind, and it's a crying shame that it isn't. Instead you see people whining about the plight of 1st-world Uber drivers and middle class Americans and not being able to stay in the US with their Ivy League degrees. Spoiler alert: all those people are crazy rich relative to the extreme poor. There are ~1 billion people, 1/7th of the world's population, living in extreme poverty, which is defined as making less than $1.25 per day. That's PER DAY, NOT PER HOUR. They are literally starving, malnourished, have no clean water, no education - they have practically nothing. So unless you can show me evidence that you've spent many hours worrying about open borders and the extreme poor, screw your first world problem.
And by the way, I'm a rich american with an Ivy League degree myself, so this is not coming from a place of ivy-envy or anything. I've just spent a lot of time reading and thinking about open borders and the state of the world and I'm disappointed in my fellow educated first worlders that they're so oblivious, apathetic, uncaring, so this gets me angry.
Please see my other comments in this thread for more of my thoughts.
Great links: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/01/sitting_on_an_o.... https://vimeo.com/15000835 http://www.bottombillionfund.org/extreme_poverty.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/magazine/debunking-the-myt... http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/04/if-... http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/08/the_efficient_e.... http://www.openborders.info