Sunny Balwani, president and COO of Theranos, was entertaining one of his buddies, and Indian software consultant. The consultant had struck another employee's car in the parking lot and declined to tell anyone. John Fanzio, a supply-chain manager at the company, noticed the damage and noticed a same-sized gash on the Indian consultant's vehicle. (He actually used a tape measure to check.) John confronted the consultant about it when the man went outside for a smoke-break. The consultant denied it and complained to Sunny, who promptly fired Fanzio. (Supposedly screaming at him "Oh, really, you want to be a cop? Go be a cop!")
I'm trying to imagine this happening anywhere else, and my imagination is coming up empty. It just seems so beyond-the-pale corrupt that a high-rolling consultant would lie about a minor traffic accident, and that the president of a company would actually cover for him! Maybe I'm sheltered and someone will comment to tell me that this kind of shit happens all the time. Apologies if I'm way off base here. (Maybe Sunny and his friend are just enormous assholes. Or, hell, maybe Sunny's friend was actually innocent.) This seems like the kind of corruption that just isn't done, at least not here in the U.S.
I can't help but think: Is this an example of someone importing corrupt practices from their home-country? I'm an open-borders person. I believe we should have a regime of vastly liberalized immigration, compared to what we currently have. But I think we need to be on guard about stuff like this. Americans have different social norms and political institutions than other parts of the world. Read The Beautiful Tree, which describes in detail the corrupt practices in Indian political institutions. Paying bribes is seen as normal, just another cost of doing business. (The Beautiful Tree is a book about private schools in the third world. Indian private schools often don't meet "regulations", which are often designed with the express intent of making private schools unfeasible. They get around these regulations (e.g. requiring an impractically large recreational area in the middle a crowded city like Delhi) by bribing inspectors. This kind of tit-for-tat, two-wrongs-make-a-right dynamic definitely breeds corruption.) Or if you like, read Games Primates Play, which is ostensibly a book about human behavior but describes in detail the corruption of Italian institutions. Or read Thomas Sowell's Migrations and Cultures, or any of the other books in his ...and Cultures trilogy for that matter. In her book Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes her attempt to socialize Somali immigrants who came to the Netherlands. She had to explain to mothers of small children that it's not okay to hit back. Violence isn't okay just because someone else nominally "started it." (My last book plug for this paragraph: read The Law of the Somalis for a good discussion of Somali legal institutions, and how tit-for-tat violence can mostly keep people in check in that particular society. Ali has a great discussion of why these institutions lead to civil war in Somalia, but the Dutch expectation that "violence is totally unacceptable" leads to social harmony in the Netherlands.) Culture matters, and people do tend to bring their culture with them. Sometimes one person's cultural expectations can clash with another's. You might even say that some cultures are more consistent with a liberal order, with functioning markets and pluralistic social norms, than other cultures.
Conservatives and skeptics of open immigration worry about this kind of thing. They warn that we'll be overrun by backwards people, that we'll import their bad cultural norms, that they'll pollute our political institutions with citizens who will vote for bad policy. They warn that immigrants with bad political ideas will "kill the goose that laid the golden egg", and we'll no longer have the liberal society and corruption-free institutions that we currently enjoy. I think this is overblown and doesn't justify an outright refusal to admit an immigrant to the country, but I don't want to pretend that this isn't even a thing. I don't know what the answer is. The Dutch supposedly make immigrants watch videos showing men kissing and women sunbathing topless. Supposedly this is directed at Muslim immigrants from Morocco and is an effort to drive home the point "you're going to see stuff like this here, so get comfortable with it or don't come here." A part of me finds this kind of social engineering creepy. But on the other hand, if someone comes from a culture that shames female sexuality and treats homosexuality as a capital offense, we're under some sort of obligation to inform them that those cultural attitudes are totally unacceptable and beyond the pale in the society they are entering. ("Bro, just between you and me. The following behaviors are totally normal and you are likely to encounter them frequently... Got that? Okay, good. Responding with violence to said behaviors is totally uncool. Just so you know." I don't know if this has to be delivered with a waving finger or if it can be delivered as a quiet aside without the finger-wagging "your culture is backwards and inferior" overtones.) I don't know if this kind of "immigrant orientation" should be part of official government policy or be left to private actors who set those boundaries. I like the argument that it's more merciful to conditionally admit an immigrant than to unconditionally say "No" to them. Even when those conditions seem unfair (unfair compared to what? Languishing in third-world poverty?). So if Immigration Services wants to identify cultural problems that are causing trouble and try to nix them with an "orientation" video or some kind of written exam, that's okay if it leads to more overall immigration. It also might be a way to sell liberalized immigration policy to skeptics, as in "We have a program that already addresses this problem."
This all feels very creepy, and just writing it down makes me feel very uncomfortable. But I don't see a way around it. It seems like someone has to point out to a new immigrant that "Some of the cultural norms and expectations you're used to will not fly here. We tolerate alternative lifestyles. Sexism is very much frowned upon, even a fireable or possibly arrestable offense. We report traffic accidents immediately. Unlike in your home country, tax compliance here is very high. Bribes simply are not done, and you will probably be arrested if you try it." It's not necessarily finger-wagging cultural imperialism. It's a downright merciful warning, similar to a "Bridge Out" or "Clearance 9' " sign. We might even say to German and Swiss immigrants, with a culture of overcompliance with rules, "Psst. People flout traffic laws and 'Walk' signals all the time. It's okay. You're kind of weird if you actually wait for the 'Walk' signal when there's no traffic, and it's odd if you don't speed by 5-10 over." If we ever get truly open borders and immigration increases dramatically, we should expect a need for more of this kind of orientation. Contra conservatives, I think this is a fixable problem. And contra some open borders advocates, I think it is a problem with a non-zero magnitude.
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Bryan Caplan and Garett Jones have a debate/discussion of the long term effects of open immigration here. I'm reading Garett Jones as saying that "bad culture" effects are real and harmful, and I'm reading Caplan as saying they're not a big deal and not likely to be as harmful as Jones is claiming. I'm more on the Caplan side of this debate than the Jones side. But I think we should admit that this is potentially a problem that needs to be solved to make open immigration more feasible and palatable.
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