Schneier on Security

kangaroo • June 17, 2010 11:19 AM

HJohn: I wish open borders were realistic, but sadly, they just aren’t.

Open borders are perfectly realistic if, and only if, common markets include infrastructure development throughout the zone.

The problems we have with Mexico have nothing to do “culture, language, history” as Geek Prophet claims. It has all to do with Mexico being a poor country relatively, while Canada is a rich country.

When the Europeans created a common market with open borders, what did they do? Spend a shit-load of German, French and British money building infrastructure in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Poland, etc (including financial infrastructure, as we’re seeing in Greece today).

What did the US do when we created NAFTA? Not a damn penny went into lifting Mexico to US & Canadian standards, while creating a common market that leads to common costs throughout the zone. Any moron (aka, economist) could have predicted that would lead to people migrating from high-cost (due to common market), low-pay (low infrastructure) regions to high-cost, high-pay (high infrastructure) regions.

So the Europeans get a manageable migration from Poland to Germany or Greece to France, while we have an out-of-control migration. Where Europe has trouble is that they have trade agreements, bilateral and WTO, with Africans which increase the motivation for Africans to migrate across the Mediterranean.

We’re just fuckin’ geniuses. Penny-wise, pound foolish, and we blame the folks who have the least influence on the situation, while ignoring the essential factors that lead to this.

As always, it just costs money. You can’t exploit a world market and keep all the profits to yourself — not unless you’re an idiot asking for blow-back.

kangaroo • June 17, 2010 3:08 PM

HJohn: That is not to say all mexicans are bad any more than it is to say all americans are good.

Your jingoism is showing — that’s pretty damn ugly (unintentional, I assume).

That’s not to say that all Americans are jingoist morons, any more than it to say that all mexicans are reasonable cosmopolitans.

kangaroo • June 17, 2010 3:17 PM

@Geek: If it had been relevant to the discussion, I would have ranked economic status highest. However, I submit that there are plenty of examples throughout history that language and culture matter in relationships between two countries. I believe it is naive to ever say that anything big and complex is “all to do with” only one factor.

Except we’re not talking about the “relationship between Mexico and the US over history”, but the specific issue of immigration currently in the aftermath of NAFTA. There’s plenty of evidence from the EU common market that migration patterns in common markets are driven primarily by economic factors — and not by, say, the historical antipathy between Poles and Germans, or the language differences between Greeks and Brits.

Culture, language (and RACE as sociologically constructed, and not as some silly non-scientific “actual race”) are relevant to the discussion of why the US was so stupid as to imagine that we could have a common market with Mexico without improving the infrastructure without unleashing massive uncontrolled migration, border controls or no border controls. That’s the “complicated” situation you talk about — but when people will move from one country to another is pretty damn simple.

Open markets in 1900 — huge migrations within Europe and from underdeveloped Europe to the US. Closed markets from 1930 on — relatively small migration (even though normally attributed to changes in law, we can see that those laws are useless in the face of economic forces).

kangaroo • June 17, 2010 4:54 PM

Jess: Just so I understand, are you arguing that the sudden availability of additional supplies of goods caused prices for those goods in Mexico to rise? Or that USA protectionism had been good for Mexican workers?

It meant that the local replacement for those goods were no longer competitive. While wages rise slowly in response to new markets opening — not only are there issues of negotiation and convention, but the fact that those jobs never rise to the level of the costs in the richer country — old employments disappear.

So while the new cheap goods come in, most people can’t afford them. They’ve become a part of the same market — so now you get cheap T-shirts, say, but the employees who would buy them no longer can sell the old woven shirts, making them “shirt-poor”. The price of shirts overall may come down, but a skilled job has disappeared and replaced by crappy factory jobs.

It’s the same thing that happens in the richer country — you get cheaper tomatoes in the US, but the farmers are out of business working at McDonald. Some folks do very well in the new common market — and if infrastructure is built in the poorer country so that the “differential advantage” is one in skills, culture, etc, and not just a labor cost differential, almost everyone comes out better.

But if the main difference between regions is labor costs, then a whole lot of people end up worse off.

Look at the American South between 1865 and 1950. Common market right? Did it do most Southerners a lick of good? The South was basically a third-world banana republic, with huge chunks of the population living as share-croppers, dirt-farmers, and cheap labor.

It was only when the North funded massive infrastructure development during FDR’s term and after WWII that the South (defined as the mass of Southerners) could take economic advantage of the common market. Before, only the wealthiest Southerners enjoyed a high standard of living — cheap goods from the North plus cheap Southern labor. But for most, they might as well have been living in Latin America.

Additionally, you see massive migrations occurring from 1900 on from the South to the North — as soon as African Americans had access to trains, they dumped the cheap labor region to the high cost labor region. That’s not a complicated “culture” thing — that’s just economics. They weren’t getting the advantages of cheap goods — they were just having chipped away the skilled jobs that were available to them.

And now some African Americans are migrating back to the South. Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure.