Immigration and population
I just listened to a debate on immigration. The anti-liberty view was promoted by someone with the odd name of Frosty Wooldridge. I listened to his views and even went and read some of the essays he wrote.
His anti-immigration view was based on several claims. One was that population impoverishes a nation and letting in more people will make a nation poorer. His second argument was that this poverty is due to the fact that we are running out of resources. And third he argued that these "people" are have bad values, are destructive to the nation, etc.
In other words take some Malthusian panics, add in a dose of socialist economics and toss in a pinch of nationalist racism and you have Wooldridge's argument. He basically stayed away from substance and engaged in demagoguery panting breathlessly about the evils of Mexicans (because he is in the US).
One "fact" he claimed was: "Because of these illegal aliens ... 25 Americans are killed every day by these illegal aliens." Supposedly 13 by drunk driving and 12 by violence. That would be about 4,400 murders a year. That in year when there were 16,700 murders in total. In other words he is saying 26% of all murders in the US are by individuals without government papers allowing them to live there.
Could this be? I went to the U.S. Department of Justice to see what they said. They have a data table for murder offenders. Remember we are trying to determine whether or not a killer was Hispanic since that is who Wooldridge is talking about when it comes to illegals. I don't think he's worried about Canadians.
In 2005 there were a total number of 17,029 people classified as "murder offenders". Of these 4,899 were listed as having a unknown race. I assume if they are unknown then nobody knows if they are Hispanic. Of the ones who are known 5,452 were White and 6,379 were Black and 299 were other. Not it could be that all those Hispanic killers Wooldridge was talking about were classified as White. But I doubt it. On the other hand maybe the illegal aliens Wooldridge was speaking about were Canadians! Blame Canada.
He also said that if were one of the people having "these people" as neighbours you wouldn't like it. But the murder issue certainly wouldn't apply. See one of the secrets about murders is the US is that they mostly carried out intraracially. Blacks who kill tend to kill other blacks. Whites who kill tend to kill other whites, etc. So if illegals are killing in the numbers Wooldridge claims then most their victims are likely to be other illegal aliens.
Another fact about murder. If illegals are killing so many people then as the percentage of illegals in the US rises, and it is rising, the number of murders ought to be going up. They aren't. They are dropping. In 1991 the murder rate was 9.8 per 100,000. By 1994 it was 9.0, by 96 it was 7.4, by 98 it was 6.3, by 2000 it was 5.5 and since then it has remained fairly steady ranging from 5.5 to 5.7 in any one year. Since 1996 the murder rate in the US has dropped by 24%. Is this because there are fewer illegals in the US? For Wooldridge to be correct that would need to be the case.
Illegal aliens are dangerous, says Wooldridge, because the murder others. But the higher the number of illegal aliens in the US the lower the murder rate. Something doesn't fit.
Geographically it doesn't fit either. Most illegals from Mexico reside in the West for pretty obvious reasons. Sure not all do but many, many do. But the highest murder rate is not in the West but in the South. Murder rates in the American South are almost twice as high as in the West.
Now if illegals are more prone to murder then the murder rate ought to be higher per capita in the West than the rest of the country. But this is not the case. Twenty-three percent of Americans live in the West and 23 percent of all murders are committed there. No variation with the percentage expected by population.
There are about 41 million Hispanics living in the United States. That is somewhere between 13% and 14% of the entire population. Some on the nationalist Right argue the numbers are much, much higher. So are these people more prone to violent crime? Again US Justice Department statistics provide some clues. Hispanics make up 19% of all prison inmates. That is higher than their raw percentage in the population. But the numbers would need to be higher than that to account for them allegedly killing 25% of murder victims in the US.
And there is an important factor that needs to be taken into account. Crime, particularly violent crime tends to be age related. Youths commit more than their share of crimes while the elderly rarely go on the rampage. Any population group that is significantly younger than other groups will have a higher crime rate not because they are members of that race, or any similar group but because they are younger. And the Mexican population is younger than the general population. if we include only those between ages of 15 and 30, the prime crime years, we find that about 28% of all Mexicans in the US are between these ages. This is higher than in other groups. Youths are more likely to commit crimes in any group and any group that has a higher number of young people will have a higher crime rate. What is the factor is not legal status per se but age.
But let me get to the core of the claims. Does population density increase poverty?
Wooldridge said it did. His proof was that he bicycled around many parts of the Third World and they are poor. Bicycling is a bit hard to do in major cities. It can be done but it is much harder. One tends to bicycle across country in rural areas where the population density is lower if not low. But that aside are the poor nations of the world countries with high population density. The total population is irrelevant. Five million people in France would be nothing but five million in Monaco is a different matter. What counts is the population density.
But the highest population densities in the world are not the poor nations of the world. If one compared African nations which are poor, to European nations which are wealthy, you would immediately see that the European nations have much higher population density rates.
India is often used as an example but the population density there is well below the density in wealthy places like Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea. Africa is the poorest continent and outside Antarctica is also one of the least densely populated continents on the planet.
If more people cause poverty then as the populations of nations increase they ought to become poorer. But that is not happening. Even as China's population continues to grow the people are becoming wealthier and better off. Wooldridge was horrified that the US had 300 million people when not that many years ago it had 200 million. But the American people today have a higher standard of living not a lower one. They live longer and have more. Increased population didn't make them poorer.
India's population is still increasing. And so is the average standard of living. As their populations grow they are not becoming more impoverished at all. You can find more articles discussing this trend here.
Now the typical response to the fact that countries are becoming wealthier is that they are doing so by depleting non-renewable resources. But this is a self-defeating claim. If the resources were being depleted at a rate that would make them more scarce then the price of the resources would be going up. Adjusted for inflation that is not happening.
What is happening is that the cost of a unit of the resource, relative to the labour needed to purchase it, is going down. There are ups and downs like in most markets but on a whole the cost of resources have been declining not increasing. And if they were increasing in costs then we'd be getting poorer. Our costs of living would increase faster than our wealth forcing each of us to consume less and less. But that is not what is happening.
Markets are like ecosystems with feed back loops built into them. If we were to start to run out of copper the price of copper would dramatically increase. But if it did then we'd find other ways of doing the same thing with less and less copper or none at all. And the consumption of copper would drop and so would the price. If we reached the point where were supplies were actually dwindling in any meaningful way the costs would increase. We are seeing diminishing costs for most resources and, over time, for all resources.
And since all the demographic studies show that the world's population is going into free fall this is a moot issue. Already a large percentage of the world's nations are losing population. Europe's population is aged and will shortly start dying off at unprecedented levels. Europe is expected to lose a quarter of its population by 2050. One reason that European economies are doing so poorly is because of the decline in the number of people of working age. America is doing better in part because of a growing population. And without immigrants America's population would stagnate or decline.
Unless you are middle-aged or older the chances are that you will live in a world with declining population numbers. And what people don't realise is that the number of children in the world is already declining. Every day that goes by means that fewer children are being born than die or become adults. The total number of children is declining. The total number of the aged is growing. But the old don't live forever. And the baby boom generation that was born in large numbers will just as suddenly die in large numbers.
Wooldridge's arguments were wrong on so many levels it is hard to dissect his arguments. But I know his economics are wrong. That much is sure.
It may well be that there is an argument for closed borders and policies that Mr. Wooldridge would appreciate. But he didn't make them in the presentation I heard. Instead he merely appealed to fear and racism. His conclusion was: "I stand by the fact that the greater the population the lower the standard of living, and the lower the quality of life." He can stand all he wants but he's wrong. In nation after nation we see standards of living rising as even as population numbers rise. it is true in the US. It is true in China, it is true in India. It has been true in the past and it is still true today.
As far as I could see Wooldridge merely relied on rhetoric, myths, lies and plenty of racism to bolster his case. He came across as an ignorant bigot. But then there may be a reason for that.
All items in this journal reflect the personal opinions of the author and are not necessarily those of the Institute for Liberal Values or its Board members.
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Institute for Liberal Values, Thursday September 9th 2010. |
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