DISQUS

stuart · 2 years ago

Good way to test if Steve Sailer reads your blog.

David · 2 years ago

Great post. Indeed, its hard to make the MORAL case for restricting citizenship at all. Citizenship in an OECD country is a valuable property right. It is distributed primarily on the basis of heredity. The only moral arguments for limiting access to it to outsiders would have to involve consideration of the investment and good will of ancestors who created the possibility for their descendents to have access to such opportunities as we have today. There's something to that argument, but I suspect it is not strong enough to justify what are otherwise arbitrary citizenship distinctions. Now obviously as a practical matter, we can't just give everyone in the world US citizenship (or even do away with national citizenship entirely and remove all restrictions on international movement, which would be easier) so all of this is merely an intellectual exercise -- but its an important one because I don't think the case can be made on specifically moral grounds for granting citizenship rights to some and not others.

Steve Olson · 2 years ago

Brilliant post Will,
I like how you use Holland and Zimbabwe as examples. It is a great 'what if' scenario, setting up a liberal capitalist society within the geographical borders of countries like Zimbabwe or South Africa and see what happens to population shift. I think the results are obvious. The only problem I see is how you deal with squatting and crime? Prisons? Then what happens to the liberal capitalist area?

stuart · 2 years ago

South Africa!?

Yes, South Africa is far from perfect, but is it really a good example to use, being both liberal and capitalist. The Economist recently rated the worlds democracies and South Africa did better than Italy.

Bondwoman · 2 years ago

I like the idea of allocating passports instead of, or as well as, traditional 'development aid'. I think the idea of buying up chunks of land from illiberal rulers is much more problematic because it makes a lot of assumptions about what people 'want' in terms of institutions which we are hardly qualified to make for others. Passports would be a much better way of subverting the system, although there would be the problem of a market developing in these, and corruption and what have you.

mk · 2 years ago

Wait, there's plenty of people who want to enter the U.S., right? Wouldn't a more direct way to achieve these things be to simply liberalize immigration regulations? (Which I'm entirely in favor of, BTW)

There are some differences between the immigration approach and the passport lottery approach:

- People who can't afford travelling to the U.S. get a crack at citizenship
- People who don't want to travel to the U.S., or don't want to immigrate, have a chance to be citizens
- There is more interplay between "dual" U.S./Zimbabwe citizens and "single" Zimbabwe citizens. This interaction may have beneficial effects on Zimbabwe.
- It is very expensive to support these new citizens.


I'm not sure whether I see a strong advantage over the simple approach...

Another possibility would be a "temporary citizenship" (which may already exist), kind of like the temporary worker program, except perhaps with full-fledged (temporary) benefits. The "churning" effect (people coming to U.S., returning home with skills/money) could be an effective de facto form of foreign aid.