Immigration and Redistribution

Why is it that, as I said yesterday, restricting the flow of immigrants would give a boost to redistributionist politics? Here's the issue. Suppose I propose a measure that would reduce the well-being of the highest-income third of Americans but increase the well-being of the lowest-income third of Americans. Well, I'm going to have trouble getting anywhere with this proposal because the top third have way more political influence than the bottom third. There are a whole series of reasons why the top third's influence is greater -- money in politics, higher turnout on election day, more social capital, etc. -- but one reason is that many people at the bottom of the income spectrum are immigrants who can't vote.

Right now, in other words, the median voter's income is substantially higher than the median person's income. If we totally cut off immigration, that would still be the case, but over time the gap would get smaller so a political agenda centered around bolstering the incomes of low-income people would grow more viable. That's not, I think, an adequate reason to favor cutting-off immigration but it is one reason why savvy conservatives might have some doubts about the wisdom of the restrictionist agenda.

Comments

It would probably also be a good idea to stop having our economic and political and trade policies push Reaganite idiocies on Latin America, and maybe even favor some degree of just and equitable development, so that there might be a bit less of a "push" factor.

For example, people have been shouting for months now that the implementation of the last chapter of NAFTA which looks to make the ejido campesino farmers in much of Mexico pretty much income-free (given the end of any protection to these small-trade / subsistence producers in dry milk, corn, and beans). This will pressure even more hundreds of thousands of desperate out-migrants, first to Mexican urban areas, and finding no paradise of jobs there, to the U.S.

And so far, of course, trade ideologues here and the government there mouth their typical empty platitudes about how there need to be some sort of social palliatives.

So far there have been no real programs introduced to help. And it doesn't look like there will be, given the scale of the problem and the tradition of the Mexican central & state governments to introduce huge patronage projects under fancy long acronyms which tend not to solve the problem.

But let's try to get everyone to act all surprised that soon we see new thousands of Mexican campesinos filtering into the U.S., and to also make sure and de-link the issue from anything other than "immigration" policy.

Posted by El Cid | April 4, 2008 9:31 AM

This is certainly true, but the effect isn't nearly as large as you're making it out to be. Just look at the percentage of adult non-citizens in the American population.

Meanwhile, you're ignoring the far larger effect that poorer people *always* tend to vote less than richer people, whether they have the right or not.

The far bigger impact on redistributionalism would be that curtailing/eliminating immigration would cause a bidding-up of the price of labor at the owner end of the scale, thereby tightening the distribution.

But *increasing* the immigration of higher-skill people would have exactly the same effect. If we start bringing in a vastly greater number of doctors, lawyers, engineers---and DC pundits!---the wages of these groups would fall compared to that of nannies and gardeners.

Eventually every Latino nanny would be able to afford TWO full-time DC pundits to amuse her children...

Posted by RKU | April 4, 2008 9:34 AM

So the mechanism here is that immigration — both illegal immigration, and legal immigration that doesn't include a quick path to voting rights — is very substantially reduced over a long enough time period to substantially decrease the proportion of low-income people who aren't citizens. This would reduce one reason out of many why the rich have more political influence than the poor.

If this is meant as sour grapes for a supporter of more open immigration policy, this is very weak tea, if you'll forgive the mixed metaphors.

Also, the rich already do have doubts about the wisdom of the restrictionist agenda, judging by the split within the Republican Party over this very issue. As I remember, Bush and some other leaders of the Republican Party supported a not-horrible immigration policy that pissed off their base. That's usually attributed to a more short-term concern about an underclass who's willing to work for low pay, though.

Posted by Cyrus | April 4, 2008 9:37 AM

Worrying about the second order effects of completely halting all illegal immigration is sort of like worrying about the future viability of the car market if humans spontaneously developed the power to fly.

Posted by IMU | April 4, 2008 9:42 AM

For a pure capitalist, having a disenfranchised laboring class is ideal. Immigration (legal and illegal) has multiple negative effects on indigenous unskilled and semiskilled labor. So does globalization. The country-club Republicans who run the party are completely aware of what they're doing. For them the nativists are sucker to be played.

The Clinton Democrats' obliviousness or hostility to the bottom third or half of the labor force was a long-term disaster both politically and policywise. Krugman and DeLong are vaguely admitting that they might have been a teentsy bit wrong in 1994, but I'm not sure they quite realize what happened, even now.

Democrats are wrong to identify opposition to immigration in a kneejerk way with racism. There's something else there.

Posted by John Emerson | April 4, 2008 9:51 AM

The immigration "issue" had been around for decades and now it's being used as a political football. First of all, it's not ONE issue; it's many. Putting a halt to all immigration would shatter our economic model...and would damage high, low, and middle income people.

Posted by AKBY | April 4, 2008 9:53 AM

Fine, AKBY, but that sounds like you just don't want to talk about it.

Posted by John Emerson | April 4, 2008 9:57 AM

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~lbarnes/UnequalParticipation_Princeton.pdf

Unequal turnout may lead to policies that do not reflect the interests of the population as a
whole. In particular, the Meltzer-Richard model of redistributive policy has the income of the
median voter as a key parameter. Thus it would appear that who votes may matter, given the
well documented class bias in voting. This paper investigates the income distribution of voters
compared to the income of the whole population. I find that the two distributions differ very
little, both in the US and cross nationally. I also find that correcting for the turnout bias does
not lead to any change in the effect of inequality on redistribution in US states between 1972
and 2000, where the Meltzer-Richard model finds little support. Neither does turnout make
a difference in considering the effect of inequality on preferences over redistribution across the
countries in the ISSP. However, in these data the positive effect of inequality on preferences for
redistribution is borne out by the data.

Posted by stefan | April 4, 2008 10:15 AM

Another way to make more of the bottom third voters would be to end the disenfranchisement of felons. Letting felons who were convicted of nonviolent crimes and have served their time vote would go a long way here.

Posted by flippantangel | April 4, 2008 10:22 AM

This is a somewhat odd argument in that it seems to turn on the idea that people vote according to where they are on the array of people living in the country rather than according to what their actual financial situation is.

Given that actual legislation does not generally take the form of taking money from people according to what percentage of the population makes more money than them, and giving it to people according to what percentage makes less, this seems to be an odd kind of assumption.

In fact, somewhat perversely, some provisions like the additional child tax credit (that is probably not the right name, but it is a provision that gives people the full $1000 a child credit even if it gives them a negative income tax burden) does not allow the poorest people to claim it.

Obviously it is possible that the disappearance of immigrants would change the fortunes of the bottom third that remains in ways that would affect their voting patterns. But the argument above does not seem to turn on this. And it seems very strange to think that it is being in the bottom third that would change their voting patterns absent changes to their fortunes.

Posted by Lon | April 4, 2008 10:44 AM

"Savvy Conservatives" have no intention of restricting immigration in any meaningful way -- they just want to posture on the issue enough to keep the xenophobe vote.

Posted by dukej | April 4, 2008 11:00 AM

Wouldn't the gap between the median voter and the median person tend to be closed in this scenario by the median voter moving *down*? Good luck selling that to anyone, as a policy or a messaging strategy.

Posted by Aaron S. Veenstra | April 4, 2008 11:40 AM

What Lon said.

Generally, people like Matt seem to confuse cohorts and percentiles a lot. For example, to take Matt's point to the extreme, suppose by cutting off immigration you actually ended up with just the people currently making up the top 2/3rds of the economy. Why on earth would someone currently in the top 1/3rd of the economy find that possibility threatening? Yes, the new bottom 1/3rd would probably have more political weight than the old bottom 1/3rd did, but the new bottom 1/3rd would all be people who used to be in the old middle 1/3rd. In other words, a world in which even the "poorest" people around are "middle class" by recent standards is not exactly a world in which the rich should be excessively concerned about redistribution.

No, the reason rich people don't want to cut off immigration is that they think it will hurt the economy, and thus make them less rich. But if they thought they could cut off immigration without trashing the economy, it would probably be in their political interests to do so.

Posted by DTM | April 4, 2008 12:02 PM

For example, to take Matt's point to the extreme, suppose by cutting off immigration you actually ended up with just the people currently making up the top 2/3rds of the economy.

That's not at all like Matt's position, even taken to the extreme.

Why on earth would someone currently in the top 1/3rd of the economy find that possibility threatening?

Because the top 1/3 (and the top 1/10, and the top 1/100) want everything they can get. If average and below-average Americans were all politically citizens, regardless of where the line was drawn, the very top strata would lose control.

Posted by John Emerson | April 4, 2008 12:09 PM

Flippantangel up there has a good idea on a way of dealing with this; giving the franchise back to convicted (non-violent) felons. After all, if the point is to reduce the median income of voters, one option is as valid as another.

(Perhaps another could be speeding up the process of getting citizenship?)

Posted by Demosthenes | April 4, 2008 1:06 PM

Actually, it's pretty obvious that the overwhelmingly-dominant factor is the weight of *money* rather than the weight of votes.

Under America's stupid current system, media campaigns are gigantically expensive, so money largely determines votes. This is even more true if you extend this analysis to the indirect role of money (advertising/ownership) in determining the coverage in the free media. And although I don't know the exact figures, it wouldn't surprise me if the economic top 1/3 of the population contributes 100 times more money to campaigns than the bottom 1/3. This is obviously a MUCH larger difference than Matt's few percentage points of relative voting-rights.

Let's just pick some random political issue...oh, say "immigration." All the polls for decades have shown that a very considerable fraction of the national electorate is---rightly or wrongly---anti-immigrationist, yet this view has (mysteriously) almost never been endorsed by major political figures of either party. Same for economic-populist policies in general. Pretty mysterious...

Or let's consider the crazy Iraq War. Probably 80% of the Democratic electorate wants a very rapid American pullout, but neither major candidate is willing to promise this, or (I'll bet) will do this if elected. That's because probably something like 80% of the big Democratic donors are on the other side, and money carries more weight than votes.

I'm sure Don Williams can expand on this point at considerable length...

Posted by RKU | April 4, 2008 1:18 PM

If we could actually get immigration under control--let's just imagine that, like a unicorn--then the average taxpayer would also begin to lose the fear that some undefined horde of "illegals" was ready to queue up for government programs and services. That could have a huge psychological effect, especially in the Southwestern states and places where folks are suddenly seeing a novel influx of identifiable immigrants, i.e., Messicans.

Posted by elle loco | April 4, 2008 2:00 PM

John Emerson,

I think my extrapolation is perfectly fair. Matt wrote:

"There are a whole series of reasons why the top third's influence is greater -- money in politics, higher turnout on election day, more social capital, etc. -- but one reason is that many people at the bottom of the income spectrum are immigrants who can't vote. Right now, in other words, the median voter's income is substantially higher than the median person's income."

My extrapolation just imagined the entire bottom third of the income spectrum was immigrants who can't vote, and that by cutting off immigration these people would disappear. That would cause the median voter income to converge on the median person income, but one way of putting my point is that wouldn't mean the median voter income moved down to meet the median person income. Rather, the median person income would move up to meet the median voter income, and that is if anything a good development if you are worried about redistribution (because at a minimum, some people might annoyingly vote for redistribution out of a sense of neighborly charity).

Further, you wrote:

"Because the top 1/3 (and the top 1/10, and the top 1/100) want everything they can get. If average and below-average Americans were all politically citizens, regardless of where the line was drawn, the very top strata would lose control."

Like Matt, you are confusing cohorts and percentiles. Take a person just over the border into the current top 1/3. Suppose we then cut off the bottom 1/3 (including in my extreme example all of the non-voters). Now the new bottom 1/3 of our society is voters. Should our person be horrified at his or her new political prospects?

Um, no. In fact, note this person is no longer in the top 1/3: they are now at the median. So again, if anything they are in a better position politically when it comes to possible redistributions (they may well end up benefiting!).

Yet another way of putting this point is the following: what is stopping the bottom 50% + 1 of the voter population from voting to redistribute wealth from the top 49% of the voter population? Including non-voters, that may well mean the middle 1/3 voting to redistribute wealth to themselves from the top 1/3, or the second 1/10 voting to redistribute wealth to themselves from the top 1/10, or so on. But since there is no rule which says a redistribution scheme has to be from the top 1/2 to the bottom 1/2 including non-voters, it really doesn't change anything to hypothesize cutting low-income nonvoters out of the current situation.

Posted by DTM | April 4, 2008 3:52 PM

The current system of high rates of unskilled immigration tends to give us the worst of both worlds:

-- devil take the hindmost capitalism, with less support for intelligent social welfare programs like health insurance

-- corrupt Tammany Hall type ineffectual party machine government

Posted by Steve Sailer | April 4, 2008 6:30 PM