Immigration costs and benefits. (Letters).

SIR: Up to this point, the immigration debate has been viewed (incorrectly) as a battle between compassion and selflessness on the one hand, and narrow self-interest on the other. Professor Wolfgang Kasper's call (November 2001) for a rational, cost-benefit analysis and debate on immigration is therefore long overdue. While the left's appeal for compassionate collectivism might convince a few bleeding hearts, it will not persuade those of us whom the left apparently finds so loathsome.

A more honest, informative and successful strategy would be to appeal to ideas which those on the left apparently find so distasteful: reason, economic selfishness and the principles of free-market capitalism. The costs and benefits of immigration--like all economic costs and benefits--are purely subjective. Thus, it is simply not possible to assert, as Professor Kasper does, that the "elites in their wealthy ghettoes" are ignoring the transaction costs of immigration by choice because "they find them tiresome". Perhaps they simply find these costs to be minutely small; or perhaps they really are just ignorant of the true costs. By the same token, of course, the costs to those at the coal-face of immigration could be higher than the "cultural elite" could even imagine. But, on the other hand, perhaps these "non-elite" are unaware of--or simply choose to ignore--the benefits of immigration. We simply do not know for sure.

What we do know with a greater degree of certainty is that many of the transaction costs that Professor Kasper mentions--such as adapting to new influences, and adhering to virtues like truth, tolerance, liberty and justice--are up-front, fixed costs. They are not true marginal costs which enter into every single future social ...