"It's fairly hilarious that he claims the current situation is "closed borders"."
Most of the people who want to migrate are prevented from doing so by law. That's close to "closed borders". And he makes it pretty clear in the first paragraph that he's talking about restrictive immigration policies (including current ones), so the semantics on "open" vs. "closed" borders aren't the most relevant point.
Regarding suppression of research: Richwine didn't have tenure. Prof. George Borjas hasn't been fired (or censured), but he has numerous influential publications on immigration and he calls for more restrictive policies. There are a lot of studies on the fiscal impact of immigration, and while many are positive or near zero, some are negative. If there's strong evidence of publication bias, I would be genuinely interested in seeing it.
For what it's worth, I don't think Richwine should have been fired just for anti-PC stuff on IQ. But that's just Heritage's PR decision.
IMO a more likely explanation is that economists have a consensus in favor of immigration liberalization as a pro-market policy. There is plenty of research on the issue that does indicate positive effects of immigration:
Re favelas: Okay, it depends what you prefer, to be honest. If you care a lot about avoiding visible poverty in the First World, having open borders is a bad idea. If you care about reducing absolute global poverty, it's probably a very, very good idea. If you wanted some kind of compromise, one option would be to let them enter the country but have restrictive zoning laws to keep the slums outside of existing major cities (and just build new cities where immigrants move to).
Nothing about adding a few hundred million people to the US population (and keep in mind, they would probably trickle in at first at a slower rate) would be inherently catastrophic. Scary-looking numbers aside, it's the truth. The US has low population density by most standards, and it wouldn't be difficult to build some new cities. If anything, it would raise the values of American's homes, which could benefit people quite a lot. And if there really were an issue with some scarce resource (water, maybe), there's a price system to handle that.
"Migration controls serve as a blindfold, enabling Americans to ignore most of the poverty, deprivation, and vulnerability that exist in the world by keeping it physically at a distance. In the past, people lived without this blindfold. The wealthy lived amidst poverty, sometimes engaging in generous charity to the poor, sometimes learning, perhaps callously, to ignore them.
Citizens of a modern welfare state, by contrast, feel that the state should coerce people to give to the poor so as to remove from the streets the kind of visible poverty that would make them feel obliged to give, allowing them to feel conscientious and affluent at once. The price of this moral complacency is paid by would-be immigrants who are not allowed to come to America to better their condition by honest labor, lest their poverty trouble the consciences of affluent Americans."
Most of the people who want to migrate are prevented from doing so by law. That's close to "closed borders". And he makes it pretty clear in the first paragraph that he's talking about restrictive immigration policies (including current ones), so the semantics on "open" vs. "closed" borders aren't the most relevant point.
Regarding suppression of research: Richwine didn't have tenure. Prof. George Borjas hasn't been fired (or censured), but he has numerous influential publications on immigration and he calls for more restrictive policies. There are a lot of studies on the fiscal impact of immigration, and while many are positive or near zero, some are negative. If there's strong evidence of publication bias, I would be genuinely interested in seeing it.
For what it's worth, I don't think Richwine should have been fired just for anti-PC stuff on IQ. But that's just Heritage's PR decision.
IMO a more likely explanation is that economists have a consensus in favor of immigration liberalization as a pro-market policy. There is plenty of research on the issue that does indicate positive effects of immigration:
http://openborders.info/economist-consensus/
Re favelas: Okay, it depends what you prefer, to be honest. If you care a lot about avoiding visible poverty in the First World, having open borders is a bad idea. If you care about reducing absolute global poverty, it's probably a very, very good idea. If you wanted some kind of compromise, one option would be to let them enter the country but have restrictive zoning laws to keep the slums outside of existing major cities (and just build new cities where immigrants move to).
Nothing about adding a few hundred million people to the US population (and keep in mind, they would probably trickle in at first at a slower rate) would be inherently catastrophic. Scary-looking numbers aside, it's the truth. The US has low population density by most standards, and it wouldn't be difficult to build some new cities. If anything, it would raise the values of American's homes, which could benefit people quite a lot. And if there really were an issue with some scarce resource (water, maybe), there's a price system to handle that.