Borjas Likes His Closed Clubs
His writing very rarely holds much sway for me. His values have him point out things that sometimes do not get mentioned by other economists who blog on immigration. Very often, he is right, or at least has strong evidence that he is right, on the questions of fact. But I just don’t care. I like the idea of nations as open clubs and find treating “natives” as more important than foreigners as rather repugnant.
Nevertheless, the comparison of immigrants to robots is intriguing. It brings up something that occasionally crosses my mind: how would the economy change if near-instant, cheap, global macro-teleportation could be invented. Besides effectively nuking Detroit, how would we grapple with lack of need for roads, cars, harbors, ships, drivers, and creators of the above. Would the next WalMart/Amazon be an instant off the factory floor to your home teleportation unit order (with or without packing material)? I think the situations are closer than they might otherwise appear at first blush.
I have to mention that Japan has a rather significant record of xenophobia.[1] That a country with such a reputation would turn to robots to replace what would otherwise be immigrant labor does not bode well for the value of your position.
Immigrants Or Robots
I’ve long been interested in the Japanese reaction to the “shortage” of low-skill workers. Unlike the United States, they’ve chosen not to import such immigrants. Instead, they decided to build robots:
Robots could fill the jobs of 3.5 million people in graying Japan by 2025, a thinktank says, helping to avert worker shortages as the country’s population shrinks.
Japan faces a 16 percent slide in the size of its workforce by 2030 while the number of elderly will mushroom, the government estimates, raising worries about who will do the work in a country unused to, and unwilling to contemplate, large-scale immigration.
The thinktank, the Machine Industry Memorial Foundation, says robots could help fill the gaps, ranging from microsized capsules that detect lesions to high-tech vacuum cleaners.
Which path is most beneficial for the pre-existing population of the country? Importing low-skill immigrants? Or building robots? And is the difference in the economic benefits between the two alternative policies big enough that one should pay more careful attention to this choice?
Footnotes:
- See e.g. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, in particular the 2006 reports on xenophobia. I will deep link a few of these, but they do not appear to be reliable permanent links. Here is the document list. [↩]
