SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES
Immigration, American citizenship, and the endowment effect
Jun 22, 2018, 3:46 PM
Darwin Micheal Mejia, right, holds hands with his mother, Beata Mariana de Jesus Mejia-Mejia, June 22, 2018, in Linthicum, Md. The Justice Department agreed to release Mejia-Mejia's son after she sued the U.S. government in order to be reunited following their separation at the U.S. border. She has filed for political asylum in the U.S. following a trek from Guatemala. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
(AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
So what’s really going on at the southern border? Is it just me or does there seem to be a disproportionate amount of anger towards migrant people?
I’ve have people on my Twitter feed basically tell me that putting toddlers in cages is OK because what the parents did was illegal in the first place. Mmm, OK.
RELATED: Policies that separate children from families are nothing new, especially in Washington
I’ve tried to wrap my brain around this mindset and see if I can understand what’s going on with people that I respectfully disagree with. I think I might have one possible insight from the world of behavioral economics. It’s called the endowment effect. It hypothesizes that “that people ascribe more value to things merely because they own them.”
The most famous experiment on this was done at the University of Chicago by Nobel Prize winning economist Richard Thaler. People were brought into a room and shown some coffee mugs and pens with the school logo on them. The mug and the pen both had the same value, around $5, at the campus book store. The participants were told the values of the items.
An interesting thing happened once someone was given a mug. The perceived value of said mug doubled in the mind of the recipient. People would not trade the mug for the pen even though they knew they had the same value.
The Wikipedia post on this experiment states: “They found that the amount participants required as compensation for the mug once their ownership of the mug had been established was approximately twice as high as the amount they were willing to pay to acquire the mug.”
Interesting, right?
Endowment effect and immigration
So what does the endowment effect have to do with the southern border? I think there are millions of Americans that see a migrant coming into the United States the same way a person in the previous experiment saw being asked to trade their coffee mug. They overly value the thing they already have: citizenship. Then, they want some kind of compensation to give it away to someone else perceived as less deserving. Psychologically, giving away a thing that you value to someone else feels like you are diminishing the value of your own item.
It’s difficult to arrive at point where you think there are enough coffee mugs to go around for everyone, and that giving them away doesn’t decrease the value of my coffee mug.
But I’d like to submit to you that is exactly the situation we have here. Granting a migrant asylum into the United States does not devalue your citizenship in any way. The two things are not connected, even if it feels like they are. You are not losing anything by letting someone else win.
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