… is from my colleague Bryan Caplan’s recent EconLog post entitled “Krugman’s Cursory Case Against Open Borders” (links original):
What the history of immigration restrictions shows, however, is that decent folk should nevertheless be deeply uncomfortable with democracy. Why? Because most voters are nationalists, and nationalist voters consistently do to foreigners what low-income voters almost never do to the rich: Strip them en masse of their basic rights to work, reside, and travel. Why? For the flimsiest of reasons. Flimsy reasons like: Trapping millions of foreigners in dire poverty and bloody repression probably makes our safety net somewhat stronger.
