In mid-October 2023, I wrote a draft of a blog post that I ultimately didn’t publish. I present it below, word for word as I wrote it in October. In October, I ran it by a very pro-immigration friend and, although he largely agreed with her, he thought my proposal would have no chance of being accepted. The barriers to immigrating from anywhere, he rightly argued, are simply too high. So the idea of letting people from Gaza in didn’t seem worth pushing.
He convinced me. I shouldn’t have been convinced. Because look what just happened. The Biden administration is starting to talk about letting people in from Gaza. Here is an article by Dave DeCamp of antiwar.com, titled “White House considers welcoming Palestinian refugees from Gaza.”
And here is a quote from his short article:
The Biden administration plans to welcome some Palestinian refugees and offer them permanent refuge in the United States, CBS News reported Tuesday.
The report said officials at several government agencies are examining options for resettling Palestinians whose immediate family members are U.S. citizens or permanent residents. They are also considering offering this option to Palestinians with American family members.
The number of Palestinians eligible for permanent resettlement in the United States is expected to be relatively small, but the report said it would be the first time the U.S. refugee program has accepted Palestinians in large numbers.
I should not have accepted the idea that proposals which seem improbable today will be improbable in 6 or 7 months.
Here is my message from October. I kept the same title.
Or at least let some in.
Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis were recently competing for the title of most interested in stopping Gaza residents from entering the United States. I can’t compete, because I want to allow many Gazans into the United States. And even in the likely event that I fail to convince many people, I want to allow many people to leave Gaza. They are not allowed to do this now.
Many critics of Israeli government policies have claimed that Israel has turned Gaza into an “open-air prison.” But one glance at a map tells you that can’t be true. The Israeli government cannot do this alone. What has made Gaza an open-air prison is the fact that the Israeli government will not let many Gazans into Israel and the Egyptian government will not let many Gazans into Egypt. There is no complete shutdown for people entering Israel, or, at least, there was none before the horrific Hamas killings on October 7. Likewise, there has not been, until recently, a complete closure of Egypt. But in both cases it was a countdown.
Of course, there is another possible way to leave Gaza: by boat. But the Israeli navy is forcibly preventing people from leaving Gaza by boat.
Let’s imagine that the US government or another government decides to let some people in from Gaza and the various governments persuade the Israeli government to let them go. How would a government choose who to let in?
It should be obvious that it is a very bad idea to let in Hamas members or even non-members who strongly support Hamas’s agenda to eliminate the Jews. And controlling them is not easy. What types of documents would a government need? When I immigrated to the United States in 1977, I had to obtain a declaration from the RCMP stating that I had no criminal record in Canada. It was relatively easy to do. Can the US government trust a police force in Gaza to the same extent that it could trust the RCMP? Probably not.
In short, I don’t have a good method to suggest for vetting potential immigrants from Gaza. But that doesn’t mean no one does it. In particular, I would like to know what Alex Nowrasteh and David Bier, two immigration analysts and proponents of the Cato Institute, think.
One thing that helps solve the verification problem is self-selection. Many people would rather stay in Gaza than leave because they still believe they can take over Israel and throw the Jews into the sea. Fortunately, it’s very unlikely, but try telling them that .
Better yet, don’t try to tell them that. Leave them and choose from those who want to come.
Let’s say the control problem is solved. It is unlikely that we will be able to accommodate, say, a million people from Gaza. It is more likely to be hundreds of thousands. If there were, say, 200,000, that would be about 10 percent of the population. This may not seem like much. But one conclusion I came to when I was an economist on President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers is that if you solve 10 percent of a problem, and do so with almost no new government spending, you’ve accomplished a lot.
And for the government to spend virtually no money beyond the amount spent on control, we have to let them work. People coming from Gaza, like immigrants from other low-income countries, would immediately multiply their productivity, as Bryan Caplan shows in Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. It would therefore not be necessary for the government to house or feed them.
You may be wondering why governments in various cities are breaking budgets to house and feed immigrants arriving across our southern border. This is for one main reason: for the first 180 days they are here, they cannot legally work.
What about the fear that even those who don’t support Hamas are anti-Semitic? This is a reasonable fear. But before Ariel Sharon forcibly expelled thousands of Jews from Gaza, these Jews got along reasonably well with many of their Arab neighbors. What has changed is that now the only contact most Gazans have ever had with Israelis (the median age of a Gaza resident is around 19) is with Israeli soldiers. or the Israeli police. This is bound to negatively affect their overall impression of Jews. The late Carlos Ball, whose father was once Venezuela’s ambassador to the United States, told me that his father said, “Never judge a country by its government bureaucracy.” The implication was that the people of any country are almost always nicer than the bureaucrats. If I had to judge Americans by the way the bureaucrats at the Immigration and Naturalization Service treated me, I wouldn’t have wanted to come. Likewise, many Gazans who come here may well be anti-Semitic. But most of them would be too busy earning a living and enjoying the incredible wealth they would create. Trade creates peace. It also reduces racism.
