An Altruism Paradox in Our Attitudes toward Foreigners
As I discuss in “What is a Supply-Side Liberal?” and “Inequality Aversion Utility Functions: Would $1000 Mean More to a Poorer Family than $4000 to One Twice as Rich?” Most Americans have an inequality aversion above two. That means that they assess a dollar to a family twice as rich as making only a quarter the difference to the lives of those in the richer family. Conversely, to a family living on a tenth the income, a dollar would make one hundred times the difference to their lives that it would mean to a family ten times richer than they are. Even if we decided that foreigners should have a welfare weight only one hundredth as big as an American citizen (something I call “The Aluminum Rule” because it is a far cry from the Golden Rule of loving one’s neighbor as oneself), there are many foreigners so poor that they would matter a lot in welfare calculations. As far as I can tell, our policies don’t follow the Aluminum Rule. They seem to follow something more like the “Dirt Rule” of treating poor foreigners like dirt when they show up at our borders, with a welfare weight far below .01 times the welfare weight of an American citizen.
So it comes as a surprise that as a nation we slow-walked booster shots for Americans in order to free up more vaccination shots for folks abroad. (I talk about this more in “Lying is Bad.”) Unlike dollars, that are worth more to people who have fewer of them, life versus death counts about the same for a rich person as a poor person. So if we had that attitude for citizens and then followed the intermediate Aluminum Rule of a .01 welfare weight on non-citizens, we wouldn’t be shipping vaccine doses abroad when there are supply shortages. However, it seems that rather than following this logic, people have much more sympathy for folks abroad who might die from Covid-19 than folks abroad who face an elevated risk of dying from abject poverty and a lot of poverty misery along the way who just want a chance to work in a decent country like ours. We are getting closer to the Golden Rule than to the Aluminum rule for getting vaccines to poor folks in other countries, but follow the Dirt Rule when poor folks in other countries want to immigrate to the US. What is going on?
For more on the moral dimensions of immigration policy, see: