Immigration is better than voting

 

“Immigration is better than voting.” That’s how I described what I was reading in January while I enjoyed the fantastic book, Free to Move, by Professor Illya Somin.

Voting supposedly increases people’s freedom, but does it? And immigration typically improves people’s economic circumstances – but couldn’t it also enhance individual freedom? The beautiful lesson from Free to Move is that immigration is excellent at doing both these things – and much better than voting at both as well.

In Free to Move, Professor Somin examines three patterns of “foot voting”: international foot voting, foot voting within federal systems, and foot voting in the private sector. Each of these offers individuals with tremendously greater opportunities for freedom than voting does. International foot voting is familiar, of course. Second, within the federal systems such as the United States, citizens of one state can freely immigrate to another with minimal questions asked by the government. This mechanism allowed thousands of Californians and New Yorkers to escape the crushing hand of their state government’s tax burdens and absurd regulations. The huge number of Californians fleeing to Texas for greater freedom is now a familiar meme. All of the people who moved could have stayed, saying, “I’ll just vote for my state to get better in the next election.” But they would be right to think that’s a silly and totally ineffective way to make your important life choices.

In the private sector, foot voting is everything. Every business we patronize and every day with our employer is only with our intentional approval. The foot voting of customers and employees keeps prices low, quality good, and workplace cultures healthy. Now, imagine if no one could move jobs or change grocery stores without getting the approval of a majority of their coworkers or neighbors. It would be slow, cumbersome, and absurd, but only as absurd as the expectation that voting should be the first tool in the shed to enhance freedom.

Of course, voting is completely ineffective at increasing individual freedom, although it’s not like immigration is only slightly better than a nonstarter. As discussed in Free to Move, voting in elections systematically fails to improve individuals’ freedom for at least three reasons.

First – elections construct an appearance of choice where very little actually exists. Sure, you’re supposed to find the “representatives” that believe in your views and cross your fingers they follow through after you hand them a victory. But candidates are simply corralled about in a two party system. Voters still have no relevant choice. The Bernie Sanders supporters are used to being outraged along these lines by the way Hillary was shoe-horned in despite Bernie’s allegedly greater support. Instead of voters having a meaningful choice in elections, we’re more often threatened that we are traitors implicitly voting Republican if we don’t vote Democrat, and vice versa – on top of the silly line about “wasting your vote” if you choose anything outside the orthodoxy.

Second – the issues at stake in elections are likely to ignore what’s most important to particular people. For example, suppose you want to work as a hair braider without paying thousands in government fees or spending 3,200 hours in government-approved trainings. You’re better off immigrating because occupational licensing will never be voted on – it’s handled by regulatory bureaucrats. For another, suppose you are interested in starting a business that ships goods by sea from Los Angeles to Seattle, you’re also out of luck because the Jones Act makes this illegal and it will never be on any voter’s ballot. In a formerly-extreme-now-everyday example, suppose you want to leave your house to take a walk but your government enforces a strict, France-style lockdown – no voting there either. Better flee.

Third – and perhaps most obviously – voting fails to increase individual’s freedom because individuals do not determine the outcome. In any election, your probability of being the decisive vote is 1 divided by the number of voters. This gives an irrelevant chance even in small elections. For example, in my home county with a population of 2,206,750, there is a 0.00000045% chance that an individual would decide a county election. I’d definitely emigrate before I put any hope in that.

There is a better way. Individuals can decisively increase their freedom by moving to another place. We Americans are less familiar with this technique but it is the tried-and-true method that delivers results. There are obvious examples such as North Koreans running to China or South Korea. Sadly their opportunities were further cracked down on recently when North Korea laid land mines in the river crossing to China. But when a North Korean manages to escape their totalitarian state, it’s quite certain their freedom will increase. No political games or neighbor’s votes interfere – although an immigration bureaucracy certainly could. In this way, North Koreans are “voting with their feet.” They have no vote in North Korea. If they did, they’d be executed for voting against the dictator anyway. North Korea is certainly the most extreme example of political oppression we have in today’s world. But the opportunity to vote with our feet has worked before and continues to serves everyone around the global. In the famous Mariel boatlift episode, the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro permitted anti-communists to flee to the United States from Mariel Harbor.

Even we Americans could benefit from voting with our feet if we wanted to. For all the talk of “freedom” in America, the country has been falling in global freedom rankings for years and is rated 20^th out of 169 countries for 2020. We could enhance our freedom by voting with our feet to more free countries like Switzerland (4), Ireland (5), Australia (3), Singapore (1), Taiwan (6), or even the United Kingdom (7). A higher freedom ranking means better protection of property rights, a lower tax burden, lower government spending, and greater labor and trade freedom, among other factors. Perhaps some of us would already be gone to these places if we hadn’t waited in vain so long for voting to help.

If we’re feeling unfree, yes we can vote, and that’s better than autocracy at the margin. But voting is hardly the end-all-be-all of political freedom as some idealists would have us believe. Foot voting (immigration) is so powerful at increasing freedom that it should have a much greater role in the world than it does today. In Free to Move, Professor Illya Somin shows that the arguments for limiting immigration are feeble compared to its power to increase freedom and wealth. Most interesting to me was that most anti-immigration arguments would apply to restricting within-county migrations. Think about someone who says, “We don’t want any of you pesky Californians here in the great state of Texas, taking out jobs and ruining our culture.” The US federal government should not appease that person by banning Californians from immigrating to Texas, and it should be recognized the same across the board. With more open immigration, authoritarian governments across the world would lose their power as their citizens fled in mass and reallocated to more productive, free areas. Even if immigration didn’t enhance economies – which is clearly does by a million miles – freedom is reason enough to adopt a much more open immigration policy.