Country shopping

I suspect that the migrant tide surging into Europe in recent months, ultimately means the end of relaxed attitudes towards immigration and border control, and the beginning of a new politics of "immigration restriction". Trump in America, and Orban in Europe, are just the start. However, for now those forces are not in power (Orban rules in Hungary, but he's an outcast in Brussels), and their positions are shunned by an establishment which extends across politics, business, the media, and the academy.

One small feature of this intellectual landscape is the "open borders" movement. I find it hard to say whether these people are subliminally influential, or just ideologically notable for presenting the extreme position. In any case, the debate pro and con often takes the form of (pro) an open-borders advocate presenting a simple-minded economic argument that purports to demonstrate why unrestricted immigration is good for Gross National Product, and (con) an open-borders opponent fulminating about the replacement of a country's traditional race, religion, and culture by immigrants who will not assimilate.

It may be that the open borders opponents will win without constructing an economic counter-ideology - indeed, their position may be mostly negative and critical, that the kind of economics which supports open borders is biased, blind, and false. Anyway, I would certainly agree that the models used by the open borders advocates don't describe what is actually happening (nor are they supposed to; they are models of the better world where open borders is official policy); and I have not seen, say, a simple neoclassical model of what's going on in Europe. Until today, I wouldn't even have known where to begin in making such a model.

But now, thanks to two words seen in a blog comment, I do know where that academic work of modeling the European migration wave could start. The magic words are: country shopping. Let the microeconomic analysis begin!