April 19, 2008

Is Bryan Caplan the world's looniest libertarian? (give every Haitian a green card)

The New York Times offers "Across Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger" (link) about high food prices having a detrimental effect on the third world, focusing on Haiti: "experts say there are few quick fixes" to the problem.

That causes "economist" Bryan Caplan of George Mason University to offer the self-evidently ludicrous "The Quick Fix: For the Love of God, Give Every Haitian a Green Card" (link). His grand plan helps show just how insane the libertarian support for open borders is:

Well, I've got a quick fix. Give every Haitian a green card. Invite the world's most precious resource - human labor - to leave a dirt-based economy and get an entry-level job in the modern economy. It's called doing well while doing good. And unlike everything else the world has ever done for Haiti, it works.

This isn't the first time Bryan Caplan has descended into self-parody, and it probably won't be the last.

There are over 8 million Haitians and having most of them come here would present a huge number of social costs, both financial and non-financial. Taking a glance at the CIA page on the country, their literacy rate is just over 50%, meaning that around half of those who came here would only be able to do manual labor, if that. And, the national languages of the country are French and Creole, not English. So, even those who can read and write would have to learn English in order to get a job other than manual labor.

And, the 2003 HIV rate was 5.6%. While not as high as Botswana at 37.3%, that's still much higher than the U.S. at 0.6%. They also have "pervasive corruption" and other issues that are ingrained in their culture. While eventually some or many would Americanize, in the intervening decades those negative cultural issues would simply be moved to the U.S. And, since there are hundreds of millions or even billions of people in the same or worse dire straits, why exactly we should favor Haiti over, say, Bangladesh, Belize, or Botswana is a mystery only Caplan can answer.

Discussing all the other issues with Caplan's beyond-childlike plan is left as an exercise for his students.

Posted to Immigration2008a at April 19, 2008 12:36 PM