> I suspect if Europe imported more peaceful immigrants, or even had a credible plan to handle this issue, the sudden influx would be less of a problem.
Well, that's the problem, isn't it? If the immigrants are all "some Indian or Russian working at a bank, doing yoga after work and then going home" then we're fine, but unrestricted immigration would mean accepting the violent criminals, or racists, or foreign agents under orders to move to strategic voting districts etc.
> From what I can tell, neither BI nor traditional welfare states can come even remotely close to the benefits of open borders.
Open borders make competition much more aggressive. A complete lack of competition is inefficient, but competition within borders is generally adequate for that, especially when the border is the size of the US or the EU.
Sufficiently aggressive competition produces local maxima. It means no one has any margins to invest in the future. It erodes the tax base because taxes have to come only out of discretionary income or people will starve, but with enough competition employers can pay subsistence wages. And consumers making subsistence wages are price sensitive which drives down the margins of businesses. This is all very "efficient" -- it's the thing competition is "good at" -- except that it means there is no money for people to go to college or do any R&D that won't pay out in the current fiscal year or anything like that.
Borders artificially reduce competition somewhat. That isn't always bad.
A basic income helps with this. It gives people unconditional money that they can use to escape the local maxima created by aggressively competitive markets. Then those people can go to college and invent medicines and technologies that benefit people on the other side of the border.
That works better than everyone being "equal" because everyone is making subsistence wages.
You seem to be suggesting that it's perfectly fine to have tremendous inequality (compare Dharavi to Baltimore) as long as it enables long term business investments.
Is there any reason why that argument doesn't apply to inequality within a country as well?
In particular, what about inequality caused by within country trade barriers?
> You seem to be suggesting that it's perfectly fine to have tremendous inequality (compare Dharavi to Baltimore) as long as it enables long term business investments.
Having some amount of inequality is the only way it's possible to have long term business investments -- or any investments at all. Because we need doctors, engineers and businessmen but also miners, truck drivers and janitors. These professions will never have equal status, and it will always take more resources to train an engineer than a janitor, but it isn't "fair" that one person gets to be the engineer while another has to be the janitor. Yet that unfairness is inherently necessary if we want to have engineers.
> In particular, what about inequality caused by within country trade barriers?
The goal is to have a moderate amount of competition. Too much and everyone is making subsistence wages and no one can afford to go to college (and your government has no tax revenue to subsidize it). Too little and the inequality becomes unnecessarily excessive (which is, among other things, inefficient).
Notice that there are two different kinds of competition here. Between employees we have quite enough already, because employees largely aren't organized. But competition between business entities is currently on the low side. Compare e.g. the market share of Facebook in the market for social media with the market share of an individual Facebook employee in the market for software developers.
So the questions have different answers. The sweet spot for employees seems to be no restrictions within the US/EU but restrictions between countries. For business entities even the trade barriers between countries seem to restrict competition too much. (Or at least, a lack of trade barriers doesn't inherently lead to ruinous competition there, because there are other factors inhibiting competition between businesses.)
But the EU has a population about twice that of the US. So why shouldn't we impose trade barriers within the EU to bring this awful competition down to American levels? Similarly, India should perhaps split herself into US-sized chunks, and Biharis shouldn't be allowed to migrate to Bombay? (Shiv Sena would love this.)
Similarly, as the US grows, shouldn't we start imposing internal trade barriers to keep our size down to the optimum?
This idea that there is some optimal size that just magically happens to correspond to national boundaries is belied by the fact that countries have hugely different sizes.
But India does have a problem with excessive competition keeping wages low. The rest of the EU might actually be better off with fewer countries in it (e.g. without Greece). Measures to keep the US population stable rather than growing could be beneficial.
And there are obviously political considerations. Nobody is going to let you carve up national borders over this, so we're stuck with the existing borders even if that isn't 100% perfectly optimal. Estimating the optimal size is going to be at the "orders of magnitude" level anyway.
Well, that's the problem, isn't it? If the immigrants are all "some Indian or Russian working at a bank, doing yoga after work and then going home" then we're fine, but unrestricted immigration would mean accepting the violent criminals, or racists, or foreign agents under orders to move to strategic voting districts etc.
> From what I can tell, neither BI nor traditional welfare states can come even remotely close to the benefits of open borders.
Open borders make competition much more aggressive. A complete lack of competition is inefficient, but competition within borders is generally adequate for that, especially when the border is the size of the US or the EU.
Sufficiently aggressive competition produces local maxima. It means no one has any margins to invest in the future. It erodes the tax base because taxes have to come only out of discretionary income or people will starve, but with enough competition employers can pay subsistence wages. And consumers making subsistence wages are price sensitive which drives down the margins of businesses. This is all very "efficient" -- it's the thing competition is "good at" -- except that it means there is no money for people to go to college or do any R&D that won't pay out in the current fiscal year or anything like that.
Borders artificially reduce competition somewhat. That isn't always bad.
A basic income helps with this. It gives people unconditional money that they can use to escape the local maxima created by aggressively competitive markets. Then those people can go to college and invent medicines and technologies that benefit people on the other side of the border.
That works better than everyone being "equal" because everyone is making subsistence wages.