A world of free movement would be $78T richer

It's also because national boundaries tend to be more about resource allocation and political necessity than the preservation of culture or religion. Look at the problems caused by the British Empire carving up the Middle East after World War 1.

Now perhaps you might argue the national borders there should correspond more to local tribal and cultural identity (and maybe they should) but the point is they don't, and they rarely do anywhere.

>And it supports my thesis really well, as this immigration lead to severe problems amongst groups of different cultural backgrounds.

At one time, Americans felt that Irish and Chinese immigrants could never properly integrate... to say nothing about free Africans. Yet all of those groups have been unambiguously integrated.

I work around Indian and Middle Eastern immigrants. Hindus and Muslims. It's remarkable how unremarkable they are given how incompatible "Western culture" is supposed to be to them. There aren't always "severe problems" with immigrants from different cultural backgrounds. Sometimes there are, yes, but it isn't a rule of nature.

>Those groups living clustered together isn't integration but segregation.

Those aren't boolean states. Someone can maintain a connection to their heritage while still being a part of greater society.

I'm sure the same argument was made in favor of slavery way back when it was still legal. After all, slaveowners were free to pursue more meaningful things while their slaves were collapsing of heat exhaustion and malnutrition while working on the plantation.

Illegal immigrants often find "employment" at below minimum wage, and in inhumane working conditions, because otherwise what's the reason to hire them over locals? They're also more likely to be abused or mistreated, because what are you gonna do, go to the police?

A less harsh variant of this often happens with H1Bs, which I know all too well because I was an H1B myself 15 years ago: you get hired for a job that's way below your skill/pay level, and then you keep your mouth shut until you get a green card, which for some nationalities takes a decade or more. Glorified indentured servitude. If you lose your job - GTFO of the country in 2 weeks. Doesn't matter if you have a child or whatever, GTFO anyway.

It boggles the mind that people could be in favor of illegal immigration and H1B abuse, especially if these same people are in favor of worker rights and unionization.

For those confused as to the difference between the two, reread pg's essay on How to Make Wealth. http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

"If we had open borders we'd be $X trillion richer" is silly. It makes the huge assumption that institutions would stay the same, or inexplicably trend better everywhere, instead of worse. There is no thesis for why this is so, it is hand-waved here.

> Suddenly, they can join a labour market with ample capital, efficient firms and a predictable legal system.

This should prompt some navel gazing about:

* Why some countries succeed in building institutions and what is different about them.

* Why some countries used to have good institutions and now have dysfunctional ones. (Like say, Argentina, Lebanon, etc)

They might even learn something about why free movement isn't common.

> A Nigerian in the United States cannot be enslaved by the Islamists of Boko Haram.

The author has almost figured it out.

> If lots of people migrated from war-torn Syria, gangster-plagued Guatemala or chaotic Congo, would they bring mayhem with them? It is an understandable fear (and one that anti-immigrant politicians play on), but there is little besides conjecture and anecdotal evidence to support it.

Okay, he hasn't quite.

The planet is awash with dysfunctional institutions clawing away at function and semi-functional ones. Just going off of his Boko Haram example, the South Thailand Islamic insurgency is 13 years and counting of fighting from Muslim separatists. The Myanmar Islamic insurgency has been going on for 70 years and counting. The Somali civil war has been ongoing for my whole life, the Nigerian insurgencies over the years are numerous and ongoing, boko is just a continuation. I'm sure you know the story of other countries, weary reader.

So why isn't the thesis "A world of free movement would spawn a new era of separatists"? Crazy, yes, but at least we have some precedent for it as a nonsense headline.

No discussion of why nations differ in institutional quality is one thing, but no explanation of why the good-institution countries wouldn't degrade is another. As Taleb says, Economists don't seem to understand things that move.

~~~

A little tangential, but one of the things I think is under-discussed, is what happens to the places where people mass migrate from.

Recently there has been massive brain drain from Southern & Eastern Europe to West: Half of Romania's doctors left between 2009 and 2015: http://www.politico.eu/article/doctors-nurses-migration-heal...

In Venezuela, 40% of recent medical school graduates have left. Medicine shortage + lack of physicians = countrywide health crisis: https://panampost.com/sabrina-martin/2017/12/12/venezuela-he...

Other countries, like Lebanon after its civil war, are similar. Syria might end up similarly, I don't know.

It is hard to fault people moving en masse for a better life, but it further solidifies that the places they leave behind will continue to be governed by the looney bin for the decades to come. I wish there was a more thinking about solutions to this problem, and less glee at the capital class counting chips over the obverse.