Blogs and more traditional news are full of immigration-related stuff these days. But I've seen little discussion interrelating globalization, population dynamics, and the environment. In Population, migration, globalization, Ecological Economics (2006: forthcoming) , Herman Daly attempts it, arguing that we rightfully ought to be as concerned over unfettered capital flight, and outsourcing, as we right now seem to be over immigration here in the US. Daly contrasts globalization ("global economic integration of many formerly national economies into one global economy, mainly by free trade and free capital mobility, but also by somewhat easier or uncontrolled migration) to internationalization (which retains a substantive nation-state presence while highlighting "increasing importance of international trade, international relations, treaties, alliances, etc.").
Was NAFTA supposed to help with the US/Mexico problem? Did it fail in this regard? In other regards? If so, will CAFTA fail too? And if we are to get serious here in the US about limiting immigration, how are we to do so with the 1000 mile long US/Mexico border separating the two countries? Machine-gun turrets (or 9000 new border guards) don't seem prudent political choices. Or maybe they are. Are there really any "rising tides to lift all boats" out there? Or are we just whistling past the graveyard, hoping to ride out the impending storm and somehow then being able to bootstrap the global economy and polis toward a better world. Or maybe there is no storm, just massively enhanced productivity and trickle-down profits that allow the poor to get rich, while the rich get richer.
Daly's thoughts, highlighting links to immigration:
…[W]hat if globalization began to entail the overt encouragement of free migration? Even some free trade advocates might recoil from the radical cosmopolitanism of such a policy. Perhaps they can see that it would lead to massive relocation of people between world regions of vastly differing wealth, creating a tragedy of the open access commons. The strain on local communities, both the sending and the receiving, would be enormous. In the face of unlimited migration, how could any national community maintain a minimum wage, a welfare program, subsidized medical care, or a public school system? How could a nation punish its criminals and tax evaders if citizens were totally free to emigrate? Indeed, one wonders, would it not be much cheaper to encourage emigration of a country's poor, sick, or criminals, rather than run welfare programs, charity hospitals, and prisons? …Posted first at Ecological EconomicsFurther, one might reasonably wonder how a country could reap the benefit of educational investments made in its own citizens if those citizens are totally free to emigrate. Would nations continue to make such investments in the face of free migration and a continuing "brain drain"? Would a country make investments in education if it experienced massive immigration pressures, which would dilute the educational resources of the nation? Would any country any longer try to limit its birth rate, since youths who migrate abroad and send back remittances can be a good investment, a fact that might increase the birth rate? (With unfettered migration, a country could never control its numbers anyway, so why even talk about the controversial issue of birth control?)
To some this skepticism will sound like a nationalistic negation of world community. It is not. It is the view that world community should be viewed as a "community of communities," a federation of national communities rather than a cosmopolitan world government lacking any historical roots in real communities. A "world with no boundaries" makes a sentimental song lyric, but community and policy cannot exist without boundaries. For mainstream—neoclassical—economists, only the individual is real; community is just a misleading name for an aggregate of individuals. From that perspective, national communities impose "distorting" interferences upon the individualistic free market, and their disintegration is not a cost but something to be welcomed. To the contrary, I would argue, this aspect of globalization is just another way in which capitalism undermines the very conditions it requires in order to function.
Few would deny that some migration is a very good thing—but this discussion concerns free migration, where "free" means deregulated, uncontrolled, unlimited, as in "free" trade, or "free" capital mobility, or "free" reproduction. One must also be intensely mindful that immigrants are people, frequently disadvantaged people. It is a terrible thing to be "anti-immigrant." Immigration, however, is a policy, not a person, and one can be "anti-immigration," or more accurately "pro-immigration limits" without in the least being anti-immigrant. The global cosmopolitans think that it is immoral to make any policy distinction between citizen and non-citizen, and therefore favor free migration. They also suggest that free migration is the shortest route to their vision of the summum bonum, equality of wages worldwide. Their point is fair enough; there is some logic in their position—so long as they are willing to see wages equalized at a low level. But those who support free migration as the shortest route to equality of wages worldwide could only with great difficulty try to contend with problems of an open access commons, the destruction of local community, and other issues raised above.
A more workable moral guide is the recognition that, as a member of a national community, one's obligation to non-citizens is to do them no harm, while one's obligation to fellow citizens is first to do no harm and then try to do positive good. The many dire consequences of globalization (besides those mentioned above)—over-specialization in a few volatile export commodities (petroleum, timber, minerals, and other extractive goods with little value added locally, for instance), crushing debt burdens, exchange rate risks and speculative currency destabilization, foreign corporate control of national markets, unnecessary monopolization of "trade-related intellectual property rights" (typically patents on prescription drugs), and not least, easy immigration in the interests of lower wages and cheaper exports—amply show that the "do no harm" criterion is still far from being met.
Some feel that U.S. economic policies have harmed third-world citizens, and that easy immigration to the U.S. is a justified form of restitution. I have considerable sympathy with the view that U.S. policies (precisely those of globalization) have harmed third-world citizens, but for reasons already stated, no sympathy with the idea that easy immigration is a fair or reasonable restitution. For restitution I would prefer a series of small grants (not large interest-bearing loans), accompanied by free transfer of knowledge and technology.
…To avoid war, nations must both consume less and become more self-sufficient. But free traders say we should become less self-sufficient and more globally integrated as part of the overriding quest to consume ever more. We must lift the laboring masses (which now include the formerly high-wage workers) up from their subsistence wages. This can only be done by massive growth, we are told. But can the environment sustain so much growth? It cannot. And how will whatever growth dividend there is ever get to the poor, i.e., how can wages increase given the nearly unlimited supply of labor? If wages do not increase then what reason is there to expect a fall in the birth rate of the laboring class via the "demographic transition"? How could we ever expect to have high wages in any country that becomes globally integrated with a globe having a vast oversupply of labor? Why, in a globally integrated world, would any nation have an incentive to reduce its birth rate?
Global economic integration and growth, far from bringing a halt to population growth, will be the means by which the consequences of overpopulation in the third world are generalized to the world as a whole. They will be the means whereby the practice of constraining births in some countries will be eliminated by a demographic version of the “race to the bottom,” rather than spread by demonstration of its benefits. In the scramble to attract capital and jobs, there will be a standards-lowering competition to keep wages low and to reduce any social, safety, and environmental standards that raise costs.
Some are seduced by the idea of "solving" the South's population problem and the North's labor shortage problem simultaneously—by migration. However, the North's labor shortage is entirely a function of below-equilibrium wages. The shortage could be instantly removed by an increase in wages that equated domestic supply and demand—simply by allowing the market to work. But the cheap-labor lobby, in the United States at least, thinks we must import workers in order to keep wages from rising and thereby reducing profits and export competitiveness. Of course this also keeps 80% of our citizens from sharing in the increased prosperity through higher wages. …
…The real solution to the South's problem is for those countries to lower their birth rates and to put their working-age population to use at home producing necessities for the home market. And the reply to the half-truth that the United States is really more overpopulated than India because each American consumes so much more than each Indian, is that the United States needs mainly to lower its per capita consumption (and secondarily its population growth), while India and China need primarily to lower their population growth, and are in no position to lower per capita consumption, except for the elite. …
Demographers and economists have understandably become reluctant to prescribe birth control to other countries. If a country historically "chooses" many people, low wages, and high inequality over fewer people, higher wages, and less inequality, who is to say that is wrong? Let all make their own choices, since it is they who will have to live with the consequences.
But while that may be a defensible position under internationalization, it is not defensible under globalization. The whole point of an integrated world is that these consequences, both costs of overpopulation and benefits of population control, are externalized to all nations. The costs and benefits of overpopulation under globalization are distributed by class more than by nation. Labor bears the cost of reduced wage income; capital enjoys the benefit of reduced wage costs. …I lament the recent tendency of the environmental movement to court "political correctness" by soft pedaling issues of population, migration, and globalization.
Recently I had the opportunity to look at a forty-year-old issue of Scientific American, in which there was an article on the state of global poverty then. A third of the world's population, it bemoaned, was living on less than a dollar a day. Now it's forty years later, the population has more than doubled, and twice that many people are living on $2 a day--that's 2008 dollars, worth far, far, less than $1 was in 1968.
The heartbreaking thing is that some of this could have been forestalled. For about fifteen minutes, at the beginning of the environmentalist movement, advocacy of family planning in the southern countries was seen as something that was acceptable, even urgently necessary. But religious and cultural conservatives where opposed to contraception on principle, while most of the left wing came to believe that telling anyone other than prosperous people in prosperous countries to consider limiting family size was arrogant and intrusive. And Caucasians and Japanese people living comfortably were exactly the people who didn't need to be urged to have fewer children, because they were already doing so.
That was an important boat we missed.
Posted by: James | February 09, 2009 at 11:28 PM