The politics of migration from poor countries to rich is structured by exploitation and segmentation.

For a migrant flow to be politically sustainable in the destination country, the migrants should constitute a labor force which

• [exploitation] works under conditions that would be considered exploitative from the perspective of natives of the rich destination country (although not necessarily relative to the norms of the source country);

• [segmentation] works under those conditions only in segments of the labor market that citizens of the destination country have effectively withdrawn from and ceded to migrants, so that the migrant flow doesn't undermine natives' bargaining power in their own labor markets.

When societies are unequal and divided, the incidence of the surplus from exploitation also becomes important. The case for immigration to natives is that "we all" benefit from exploitation of their labor. If the surplus value is thought to be captured by private bosses, rather than shared with the public in the form of low consumer prices or social democratic benefits, that will undermine the case for immigration.

Immigration from poor countries is not so controversial in places like the UAE or Singapore. "Guest workers" have extraordinarily limited rights. They work in roles that native Emiritis and Singaporeans understand as proper to immigrants and do not seek, and are widely understood by natives to provide benefits that are broadly shared. We live like kings because they work like paupers.

Immigration from poor countries becomes controversial in places where immigrants are, or are perceived to be, supported rather than exploited. Denmark might be an example. Instead of natives exploiting immigrants (popular!), immigrants are seen as exploiting or harming natives (not popular!).

Even when immigrants clearly do work under exploitative terms, immigration becomes controversial when migrants compete in the same labor markets as native workers. Then — even if "in aggregate" the destination country benefits from exploiting the migrant labor force — workers whose bargaining power is undermined become cross. Questions of the incidence of the surplus from exploitation come to the fore. Is immigration just a tool by which the rich get richer while immiserating and exploiting their own fellow citizens?

In liberal states and social democracies, many of us have high-minded ideals, and pretend that migration from poor countries to rich should be embraced on moral grounds, rather than on the basis of exploitation. However admirable those ideals, this often yields unsustainable policy and dangerous backlash.

Regardless of good intentions, migration yields its benefits and costs. Natives will in fact enjoy a surplus or bear a burden, the surplus from exploitation net costs of service provision and social disruption. Elements of society will experience an incidence of those benefits and costs, so even immigration that is net positive for natives may impose steep costs on certain groups.

Framing migration in moral terms invites overlooking unsupportable costs, or celebrating benefits that are narrowly captured by some natives while imposing costs on others. It's great to believe that accepting migrants from difficult circumstances is a moral obligation. But that doesn't absolve us of carefully accounting for the burdens and benefits of taking on that moral obligation. It doesn't excuse us from building consent for our choices among the democratic public, or from ensuring that any burdens and benefits are shared fairly, another moral obligation.

If you are "for immigration" in ways that don't seriously take these questions into account, you are for immigration only performatively. Those of us who do see immigration in moral terms should try to give immigrants as good a deal as is politically sustainable. That is, rather than try to maximize the surplus we extract from our immigration policy, as Singapore and UAE do, we should seek to vouchsafe from immigrants unmistakable benefits for natives, but for a limited tenure, while they "pay their dues". We must still exploit, enough that the migrant flow more than compensates its burden, providing natives with benefits that are widely recognized and broadly distributed. But once the cost has been covered, we can welcome them as coequal citizens rather than take them for all we can squeeze.

In the United States, we do not in our public politics think clearly about these issues. We put things mostly in moral terms, pitting cosmopolitan human rights against against communal rights to protect ones kith and way of life. Framing things in terms of rights, as always, prevents us from thinking clearly about trade-offs and compromises.

Nevertheless, over the years, the United States has found equilibria that quietly embrace the twin pillars of exploitation and segmentation. We criminalize a migrant labor force while winking at the businesses that employ them. The function of criminalization, of course, is not actually to prevent the flow of migrants, upon which many businesses quite depend. We criminalize in order to minimize the bargaining power of migrant workers, and maximize exploitation on behalf of natives. Spokespeople for industries like agriculture and meatpacking are quite candid that, absent this labor force, our food prices would be higher. (The cynical among us are left to wonder how much of this surplus from exploitation actually finds its way into lower prices for consumers, versus how much pads profits and managerial salaries.)

We all quietly understand that these industries are segmented. Hand-harvesting of ground crops is "work Americans don't want to do", which means it's work Americans would not consent to do at the wages and under the conditions that criminalized, exploited laborers accept. In exchange for cheap food, Americans withdraw from these labor markets, cede them to maximally exploitable migrants.

Exploitation. Segmentation.

We all understand this bargain, even if we pretend we don't. Democrats get performatively mad at mistreatment of migrant workers, but don't actually upset the apple cart. Republicans sometimes make a show of pretending criminalizing immigration means "really, no illegals". They quietly, quickly, walk it back.

For agricultural labor, we do have a more civilized alternative, the H-2A visa for temporary farm workers. It's conceivable we could expand this program to regularize the status of the people doing "work Americans don't want to do", exploit them just a bit less, but keep the basic contours of the deal in place. The H-2A program respects a labor market segmentation we as a political community have now tacitly accepted.

The H-1B program does not. The H-1B is for high-value white collar work that Americans broadly would love to do. It brings migrants from poorer countries under exploitative terms, because workers are placed at risk of losing immigration status if they lose their jobs. So H-1B workers tolerate wages and works condition less generous than native workers accept, or would accept absent competition or threat of replacement by H-1B workers.

Exploitation and segmentation are twins. If a class of migrants is not exploitable, then its labor needn't be segmented.

The United States offers a range of employment-based immigration visas, under which workers labor with roughly the same security and on close to the same terms as US citizens. More migrants come to the United States under these visas than via the H-1B program, with almost no controversy. These visas are extended to people who are expected to do high-value work. The work, and the taxes that result from it, are presumed to be contribution enough to the welfare of other Americans.

Employers like to pretend the H-1B program is used like the "Einstein Visa", as a way to recruit the most extraordinary foreign talent to play for Team America. But if that's the case, the appropriate visa is an employment-based immigration visa, not the intentionally precarious, notionally temporary, H-1B.

The H-1B program exploits the workers it recruits, but fails to segment the exploited workforce from native labor markets. We can argue about magnitudes, but this has the plain economic effect of reducing native worker bargaining power, and the predictable political effect of enraging native workers. One might conspiratorially attribute the allocation of H1-B visas by lottery rather than by salary not to poor design, but to the possibility employers value the program not so much for the employees it permits them to hire, but for its ability discipline labor across the salary spectrum.

On both moral and practical grounds, I favor more rather than less migration. I have a soft spot for the H-1B program, because I have friends who'd not be here without it. Nevertheless, it is a bad program. Accepting a class of immigrants on terms that render them exploitable relative to native workers without ensuring that the labor markets they participate in are segmented from the work natives pursue is class warfare.

The right way forward is to fold the H-1B program into employment-based immigrant visas. Existing H-1B holders should be able to trade their status for EB visas. Currently, roughly 140,000 employment-based immigrant visa are allocated each year. Including slots for professionals with advanced degrees, up to 85,000 H-1B visas are made available. We should just expand the employment-based immigrant visa program to 225,000 per year and call it a day.

American firms should indeed recruit the very best talent from India and everywhere. When they do, the American government should hand these remarkable people green cards, rather than hand their employers a weapon, a cudgel, a threat they deploy against both migrant workers and their native colleagues.

“Wreckresentative democracy” is the name I’ve given to what stands in for representative democracy in the American system.

Rather than meaningful, collaborative, representation — which we do not and cannot have, when our “representatives” are charged with “representing” almost 800,000 randos — we content ourselves with constraining the assholes who pretend to represent us, by wielding a credible threat to “throw the bums out” if they do something we dislike. We don’t have representation, but we retain some influence by virtue of our capacity to wreck politicians' careers.

Most of us are of course happily, rationally ignorant of whatever our “representatives” are or are not doing. So how can we sustain any credible threat?

Human beings are wired for outrage and altruistic punishment as means of enforcing pro-social behavior. So while we remain rationally ignorant of most things our legislators do, including the “good things”, we are primed to sense scandal, betrayal, and to punish it.

The fact that the role of public participation in our democracy is almost entirely negative — we punish rather than guide — explains a lot about how our politics actually function. A few years ago Simon Bazelon and Matt Yglesias pointed out that while Congress often seems hopelessly gridlocked, a lot of constructive activity occurs in what they termed “Secret Congress” — when legislators quietly get together to hash out deals about issues with little public salience, outside of the spotlight of media and partisan controversy.

This makes sense in the context of “wreckresentative democracy”. Whatever action is taken on any salient, polarizing public controversy, it will create losers for whom the action will be a betrayal. It will create winners too. But most of the public will not perceive itself directly as winners. Losers will make a case to a mostly disengaged public that the legislation was an act of treachery. They will try to power up the wrecking ball of public revulsion, encourage coalescence behind an impulse to punish.

Legislators enjoy little electoral advantage from the engaged sliver of the public that perceives an action as virtuous, but faces a serious risk that the engaged sliver that perceives itself as losing will gin up an electorally dangerous reaction. Inaction is close to costless. Action on matters of open controversy is dangerous.

Note that this is a pathological result of “wreckresentative democracy”. It simply would not occur under genuine representation. In an actually representative system, constituents would not be 800,000 random citizens with widely divergent values and interests, but some much smaller number of people who actually share similar views that a representative could understand and advocate. The particulars of a legislative proposal might be obscure to constituents. Representation exists to absolve ordinary citizens of those details. But when a public controversy erupts, the position taken by a representative will be straightforwardly related to interests widely shared by her constituents. She might win or lose, but constituents would feel represented rather than betrayed regardless.

The gridlock we take for granted on matters of sharp controversy, the paradoxical result that “democracy” can only progress when it addresses matters the electorate is too ignorant much to care about, all result from the asymmetry of incentives built into wreckresentation, where constituents have little means to reward a “representative” but they can sure as hell punish.

Bee-sting theory is a name I gave to a view expressed by David Shor, that political parties are basically always punished for bold action. You might call it the opposite of "deliverism".

In Shor’s view, when a political party wins power, it can and sometimes should do big, important things, because that’s what political power is for. But like a bee choosing to sting, it is undertaking an action that will grievously harm it on behalf of some greater good. It should not expect to be rewarded, electorally. It should expect to lose, and should act only when the political cost will be worth it.

A common interpretation of the phenomenon Shor describes is status quo bias. "The electorate," intone sad politics-knowers, "often claims to want change but in fact hates to see its habits disturbed."

I think Shor is onto something descriptively, but the status quo bias story is wrong. There are times — not at all rare times! — when much of the public actually does want bold change from their government.

However, proponents of any particular bold change are mixed together in the same constituency with people who would absolutely oppose the change, and with a much larger group that has never given the matter much thought. In a genuinely representative system, people would have been presorted into constituencies that would favor the change and constituencies who wouldn’t, and enacting the change would not be electoral poison for representatives of the former. In our wreckresentative system, where people pretend to represent huge populations that are not meaningfully sorted, the bigger the change the more easily it can be spun to the politically less engaged majority, by those who oppose the change, as a terrible betrayal.

What looks like status quo bias in the electorate as a whole is not that at all. It is an artifact of asymmetrical incentives that "representatives" face due to how we have structured electoral and legislative institutions. An infantilized electorate without meaningful representation, with no real influence except its capacity to lash out, lashes out.

Although I have my fancier ideas, conventional multiparty proportional representation would go a long way towards fixing this.

This post is dedicated to John Roberts.

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People I talk to whose worldview is close to mine often profess a sense of bafflement:

I mean, they are just destroying this country. It's one thing to want to win, to want to run the place. But what's the point of ruling a country if you turn it into a cesspool of corruption?

The "Iron Law of Institutions", propounded by Jon Schwarz, offers one potential answer.

I want to offer a less cynical explanation. Perhaps where we see corruption, our opponents see virtue. Is "influence peddling" such a problem if the pedlars are, well, a good influence?

We tend to see collective action problems, tragedies of the commons, self-interested, transactional decisions that compose to catastrophes no one could want.

What if to our opponents these outcomes are not catastrophes at all, but great successes, a righting of wrongs?

A republic if you can keep it

From the moment of the American founding, our "republican form of government" has been Janus-faced.

To most of us, in most of our civics classes, a "republic" just means representative democracy. Unqualified "democracy", direct democracy, doesn't scale. It suffers from information problems, as high-quality lawmaking requires more attention and expertise than can be expected of ordinary citizens, if we are to have lives and a prosperous economy as well.

In a "republican" system, rather than participate directly in lawmaking, our information problem is simplified to periodically electing full-time professionals to represent our values and interests in the lawmaking process. Fundamentally, the system remains democratic. We've just settled upon a more practical, effective structure for government of the people, by the people, for the people than pretending we can run legislatures millions of citizens strong.

But the republican form of government makes an appeal to a quite distinct tradition, also strong at the American founding.

Under this second tradition, all men are not equal in real life, regardless what they were when our Creator endowed them. Some men are fit to rule. Other men and women are fit to serve.

In a well-ordered nation, the best men must rule. This is an edict not of any parochial interest or self-dealing faction, but of nature itself. It serves the interest of all.

A slave may have no control over his circumstance, yet be much better off than if he did, when his betters order a world in which his labor contributes to a prosperity that, in due measure, he also enjoys.

Whatever it is called — "Congress", "Parliament" — the republican form of government vouchsafes a kind of aristocracy. The great virtue of a republic, in this tradition, is that it attaches to this aristocracy institutions of notional consent, easing the burden leaders always face of persuading the ruled to submit to those who rightfully rule them.

The US Constitution was the Barack Obama of its time, fresh-faced and inspirational and sufficiently vague that different factions could project their own hopes onto its form. Idealists inclined to democracy could scry within it an improvement on the Athenian tradition. Entitled men who fancied themselves practical saw clever machinery for manufacturing consent in rule of the country by its natural rulers.

We frequently discuss particular deformities framers of the Constitution adopted to ensure its ratification — "equal suffrage" of the states (and therefore radically unequal suffrage of citizens) in the Senate, counting slaves as three-fifths persons, the odd formula behind the electoral college. But the republican form of government itself — is it a duck or a rabbit? is the dress gold or blue — was the Constitution's main trick, allowing political opponents to rally together behind one document they interpreted quite differently.

Ever since, of course, we have been fighting over just what kind of document it is. On paper a duck and a rabbit may be contrived to take a single form, but in life the two animals behave distinctly.

Money as a martial virtue

Traditionally aristocratic lineages distinguished themselves in war. Men who were natural rulers held land, taxed peasants, raised armies for their own glory or to serve the even greater glory of the king. Men who held and taxed land, or who won the debt and favor of the king, became noblemen and ruled, as God and nature intended.

By the American founding, commerce was already vying with conquest as a source of wealth and power. Nevertheless, suffrage under the early Constitution was usually restricted to men who owned land, a reflex of deference to the natural ruling class.

Following the Industrial Revolution, however, the notion that land ownership uniquely demarcated the best and most capable became both normatively and practically unsustainable. Surely the claim to greatness of some ranch owner paled in comparison to the conquests of an industrialist like John Rockefeller. Just as surely, men like Rockefeller had the means to ensure that their interests would not be subordinated to those of a gentry that fancied itself Jeffersonian.

Proponents of aristocratic republicanism are not, have never been, mere throwback feudalists. Like all living traditions, aristocratic republicanism has adapted with the times. Rather than land, the marker of right-to-rule has been increasingly recast as wealth, money. In centuries past, men proved their mettle on horseback with lance or rifle. Now men contest for greatness on the terrain of business. In either case, the best men, those worthy of rule, are the winners.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with your dorky economics textbook. The basis for deference to winners isn't because they must have provided goods and services at higher quality or lower prices than their rivals. It's because they fucking won. The more unfair the contest, the more impressive the victory.

Business is the successor to the pillage and conquest that created duchies, kingdoms, empires. What of the theories of Friedrich Hayek? Milton Friedman? Bandits who style themselves kings have always hired balladeers to recast their pillage as glory unto God, service to the greater good. Even now, now more than ever, they extravagantly groom jesters and fools.

Antitrust is abhorrent to this tradition. Antitrust is for slaves. When the Huns poured from the steppes and overtook Europe, could defenders lay one hand horizontally across their other hand held vertically, call "time out" and demand that referees inspect the rulebook?

No. They fucking fought and fucking died. Or else they killed, held their patch of land and therefore continued to rule.

In a fallen world chock full of slaves, people contending to be masters recognize no higher authority. The idea is abhorrent. They themselves are the highest authority, or else they are a corpse.

Lineage

Emperors do not concede that their domains must crumble when frailty overtakes their skin and bones. The quality that martial or business conquest reveals, in which inheres the right to rule, must subsist, then, not in individuals but in families, lineages.

You can put this in terms as dweeby as you want. Just like they hire their Milton Friedmans, they hire their Charles Murrays and Arthur Jensens, balladeers who sing a different key. Men who rule are not "following the science" about genes and DNA and heritability. It simply is an axiom they require, that the unit of analysis for human quality should be lineage rather than person. Clever slaves can write up the textbooks.

You have your axioms. They have theirs. Don't imagine that you fool yourself any less when you choose the foundations for your version of "reason".

In any case, to understand the behavior of aristocratic republicans, you must understand that among them, excellence and awfulness, capability and cravenness, are characteristics of families rather than individuals. A just political order weighs and sorts whole lineages, rather than particular individuals. Inheritance is just, because it is the lineage, not the person, that conquers, accumulates, and so earns the spoils of conquest.

Every family will have its black sheep, its morons, its fail-sons and squanderers. All of that is noise, the private business of great families to address. Usurpers and strivers who trade in gossip about such characters in order to contest the status of the lineage should be crushed.

The constitutional order

From the perspective of aristocratic republicans, the purpose of the Constitutional order is to durably and reliably elevate the best to rule, while cloaking that coronation as the result of "democratic contestation", reflecting "consent of the governed".

But there is always a danger that forms of democratic contestation might give way to substance, to an order in which mobs of lesser men and women grasp the reins of power and do mischief — not least to their own interests, as unsuited men elevated to rule inevitably do.

So there must be a kind of dance. On the one hand, the forms of institutions must be sufficiently "democratic" or at least "legitimate" to cultivate the voluntary submission upon which a peaceful, prosperous order depends. On the other hand, the institutions should not be so "democratic" as to permit among the unworthy more than token representation in the halls of power.

Suppose there were some kind of council, a chamber in which robed wise men could fine-tune and reconfigure the institutions that are only vaguely sketched on the several pages of the American Constitution.

Congress must be elected. Inadequate vigor on the part of the council's predecessors has rendered universal formal suffrage a fait accompli. The Senate as well as the House is now directly elected.

Perhaps in time these errors can be reversed. But holding actions are needed now. The best men — recognizable as the richest men — must rule, despite institutions that insist on formal equality for all.

What would you do?

If there must be elections, you might ensure that the best have influence over those elections as mighty as they can muster.

Elections are managed at the state level, and some states are, unfortunately, run by governments beholden to the other republican tradition, villainous mob democracy.

But some states are not. States that are run under virtuous, aristocratic republicanism — if they given freedom to manage how elections are run, or to strategically define electoral districts — will vigorously use those powers to elevate men suited to rule, or men and women who can be counted upon to do those men's bidding.

States that rule in the democratic republican tradition will refrain from using these powers with full, cold-eyed vigor as a counterweight. To do so would be to violate and undermine the very democratic norms they are besotted to protect. Idealists rather than warriors, they are hobbled. (Idiots. Fools. How could one trust such men to rule?)

With great effort, considering several decades of backsliding, elections have been reoriented towards what the founders (at least those in the aristocratic republican tradition) intended — plebiscites that imbue legitimacy to rule by natural rulers.

But the republic is large, messy. Some states are still run by usurpers, idealists, communists, "democrats". Unworthy men and women will, unfortunately sometimes be elected, and placed in positions where they can do real harm to the interests of the republic, even to interests they would understand as their own, if they were not so unworthy.

So it is important that the best men retain channels of informal influence, by which they can guide and tutor men and women who rise above their station. They must be permitted to reward the best and worst alike for acting correctly.

When the Constitution was debated, the danger of mob rule was well understood by men in the aristocratic republican tradition. They calculated that, between the institutional safeguards ("checks and balances") within the new Constitution and attention to the administration of elections, the mob could be simultaneously coöpted and kept at bay. There have been some difficult decades, but patriots are now well on their way to restoring that balance. Elections are less and less a threat.

Men who seek election are usually ambitious and vain. That is providential, because such men can be bought by those who have proven suited actually to rule by achieving and sustaining great wealth.

Over the past few decades, however, a new threat has emerged, one that was not foreseen by the founding generation. A "professional civil service" — peopled by men of modest ambition but tremendous pride, confident in false moral and social theories — has arrogated to itself much of the state's capacity to govern. By virtue of their limited ambition and dangerous theories, this class of people is somewhat resistant to remunerative tutelage by their betters.

Fortunately, these "professionals" are very devoted to the notion of service in the context of paid employment. Establishment of a revolving door between professional roles in government and "private sector" jobs arranged in their interest can usefully serve to educate them.

Nevertheless, as a class, they remain vexatious and dangerous.

Happily, this class can be cast as illegitimate under both the aristocratic and democratic republican traditions, by virtue of being insulated from the influence both of money and elections. As at the founding, adherents of these two grand traditions, marinated in the best "common sense" money can buy, join together in a common goal — routing the influence of "unelected bureaucrats".

We are now well on our way to neutralizing this pox.

Yea and truly, we are finally restoring the American founding.

One side of it, that is.

Duck or rabbit, gold or blue. In the end, there can be only one.

I think most people misunderstand what constitutional democracy is all about.

A constitutional democracy is not a system in which a king or aristocracy stands periodically before a popular plebiscite. You do not live in a constitutional democracy if, every eight years, you reaffirm the autocrat, even if the affirmation is not coerced, even if it reflects genuine support (whatever that might mean in the context of a media environment that the autocrat controls).

Under the US Constitution, the President is not supposed to be king. Congress is not a ruling aristocracy.

The point of a constitution in a constitutional democracy is to define a web of procedures and relationships that constructs a whole quite distinct from any of its parts. State action should result from deliberation and contestation in which all interests and values held by members of the polity play a role.

Melting pot is the metaphor, not battleground. We construct a common mind together, an “artificial intelligence” that none of us dominate or control, but within which all of us have some influence.

Of course we frequently disagree with one another. Our common mind must sometimes choose between mutually exclusive courses of action. So in that sense, some of us win, some of us lose, love is a battlefield.

But even when we lose, we condition the results. Our arguments that haven’t won the day contribute to risk management, as “winners” of the argument address our concerns as much as possible consistent with the project we have chosen. No one has been excluded or locked out. Choices have been made, not by some of us against the will of others, but by all of us together, even as some will be delighted by those choices and others bitterly disappointed.

Ideally this “mind” is constantly working, frequently acting across a wide range of concerns. We all “win some” and “lose some”, not every two years in occasional elections, but every day and week. The mind is wise because it aggregates and weighs the experience of all of us who compose it. We accord it legitimacy, we “trust” it, because we see our own values and interests reflected in the portfolio of choices it delivers, even though we all “lose” frequently with respect to particular choices. “Turn-taking” should be as fine-grained as possible.

Obviously this is none of our experience of contemporary American government, or of contemporary American life. We are sharply divided into two tribes, many of whose members see themselves as substantially sharing values and interests which the other tribe viciously opposes. Each group wrestles to control the state in bitter, zero-sum contests. Every two years we fight over which tribe will be aristocrats, and which tribe subjects. Every four years we have a grand fight over who will be king.

We constitute together no wise common mind. Deliberation gives way to propaganda, a necessary evil given all the lies the other guys are telling. Losers get shut out, rather than see their insights incorporated into our common project. We become collectively incapable of coherent, adaptive, effective action. The actions we take are rendered ill-informed and cartoonish as we become intoxicated by our own side’s propaganda.

We are where we are. But it’s worth taking a moment to remember that this is not our system working as intended. This is dysfunction, pathology, atrocity. Constitutional democracy in which we are ruled by none and all, in which state action emerges from a common mind we together constitute, is possible, achievable. It has nowhere ever been perfect, but it has often been better, here and elsewhere.

We are on the verge of giving way to cynicism and reverting to tyranny as a more practical and capable, if brutal, form of government.

I’d rather we understand how and why we’ve simplified, calcified, infantilized ourselves into absurd, moronic factions, and work to undo that. We actually can improve the institutions by which we collectively deliberate and choose and act.

Constitutional democracy remains possible. You, dear reader, have your own values, interests, and perspective. For me, I am quite sure constitutional democracy would be far superior to the status quo to which we’ve devolved, much better than the brash alternatives all the strivers and grifters tout and shout in clashing cacophonies of bitter enthusiasm.