open borders essay

The Case for Open Borders

Is a world without borders an idea so crazy it just might work? Scholars weigh in on how open borders might solve the world’s immigration problem.

A country’s borders carry a lot of meaning, beyond simply the geographic limits of a state. Explains academic Harald Bauder , “Borders serve as a tool to manage national labor markets, foreign affairs agendas, and security concerns; they create identities of belonging and non-belonging.”

This question of belonging is front and center on the international stage right now, and there are few topics more relevant than immigration .

Detractors of open immigration policies insist immigrants steal jobs, increase crime, and leech welfare programs. On the other side of the debate, supporters say immigrants are necessary and take on otherwise undesirable jobs, serving as the cruxes of certain industries and bringing with them diversity and financial benefits.

It’s obviously an extremely polarized discussion, and one that is fueled by feelings more than facts. At a time where even loosening restrictions on immigration inspires fiery debate, the most radical idea might be a world with open borders. Yet The Economist ventures that the idea is so crazy, it just might work, going so far as to call it a $78 trillion dollar free lunch .

“Labour is the world’s most valuable commodity—yet thanks to strict immigration regulation, most of it goes to waste,” argue Bryan Caplan and Vipul Naik. “Making Nigerians stay in Nigeria is as economically senseless as making farmers plant in Antarctica.”

Bauder tackles the idea of borders from various ideological perspectives, and contends that border controls are wrong from a moral standpoint, as well as economically disadvantageous:

From a liberal political-theory perspective, migration controls violate overarching liberal principles such as human equality…A neoliberal (and neoclassical) economic perspective critiques border controls and migration restrictions because they obstruct the free circulation of labor…A materialist-Marxian perspective critiques border controls for creating and reinforcing social injustices…Another materialist perspective, rooted in feminist scholarship and antiracist and anticolonial struggles, opposes borders because of the role they play in the formation of oppressive subject identities.

All, he summarizes, find border controls problematic: “These controls and restrictions enable the unequal treatment of human beings who are otherwise equal; they distort free markets; they facilitate exploitation and unjust accumulation; and they permit and reinforce various forms of oppression.”

Bauder also clearly states that however eloquent theoretical arguments may be, in practice, they may be completely different, subject to external factors. For example, open borders mean foreigners may move to a country: does that mean they’re granted citizenship? If not, what rights do they have? How would they be protected under domestic law, if they’re protected at all? What does that mean for how they’re treated by citizens of the country?

The Economist , too, grants that there are myriad unknowns: how many people would uproot and leave? Are current predictions at all accurate? Would immigrants bring their cultural problems with them?

Although tempers may be too hot right now to allow the idea to root, or allow experts to investigate these with any depth, the fact that prominent economists and scholars have been debating the potential benefits of open borders suggests there may be a future for them.

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• April 24, 2019

What Would an Open-Borders World Actually Look Like?

Borders have turned the american southwest, the mediterranean, and countless other areas of our world into unnecessary graveyards for migrants. it’s time for a new way., trump is spiraling, and getting creepier, about women voters trump is spiraling, and getting creepier, about women voters, the rise and fall of new york clubbing the rise and fall of new york clubbing.

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Why Do We Need Open Borders?

What would a borderless world look like.

If you have been in the US for at least five years [as a “lawfully present” immigrant], and paid certain taxes for at least 10 years…you can get Medicare for free. If you haven’t paid those taxes, you buy Medicare at a hefty price. What is that policy doing? It is aligning beneficiaries and payers. It is requiring you to have paid into the system—either through a decade of taxes or through paying an ongoing price for coverage—before you can benefit from it. That makes sense, and it helps protect Medicare coverage for both natives and immigrants. It does that without physically barring anyone from the US. It is based on your individual identity and what you have paid in, not on which side of a wall you are located.

How Can We Create a Borderless World?

Members of a caravan of migrants from Central America walk toward the US border and customs facility in Tijuana, Mexico on April 29, 2018. (Reuters / Jorge Duenes)

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Seven reasons why there should be open borders.

Let’s be honest, most people are already in favor of free movement – at least for themselves. If we care about poverty and justice, we need to start working towards a world of globally open borders for all.

Here’s why:

1. Borders are a form of global apartheid

Borders preserve the privilege of the wealthy at the expense of the poor by preventing the movement of the world’s poorest people, restricting their access to the resources and opportunities available in wealthy countries.

Modern immigration rules exist to enable those in power to keep out anyone deemed ‘unwanted’ but borders cannot prevent desperate people from migrating. They simply make their journeys harder. Many migrants left their homes because of reasons outside their control, whether that was conflict, poverty, economic injustice or climate change.

With global inequality at unprecedented levels, modern borders have become a form of global apartheid: segregating who can and can’t access resources and opportunity.

2. Borders produce violence but do not stop immigration

The number of people dying while crossing borders has reached unprecedented levels. Last year, for instance, over 5,000 people died in the Mediterranean attempting to reach Europe. Instead of offering safe passage, Europe has intensified its border enforcement and forced people to take more perilous journeys.

Borders cannot prevent desperate people from migrating

While the EU has stood firm on free movement within the single market, for those outside the union it has become ‘Fortress Europe’. Europe’s external borders have become the most violent in the world – more people die at Europe’s borders than any other border worldwide.

Projects such as the EU’s Operation Sophia, a Naval mission patrolling the seas near Libya in order to stop, search and destroy smugglers’ boats, has only made people’s journeys more dangerous as it led to cheaper and more dangerous rubber dinghies being used.

And then there are Europe’s violent outsourced borders in places such as Libya, where despite UN reports of widespread abuse and violence, Europe continues to fund migrant detention camps.

Even if people do reach Europe, they will likely be faced by further violence or incarceration under Europe’s system of mass detention and deportation. In the United Kingdom, over 30,000 people are locked up in immigration detention centers each year. Australia notoriously sends people seeking asylum to outsourced detention camps in Papua New Guinea. While in the USA, which operates the largest immigration detention system, some 350,000 people passed through immigration detention last year. Europe’s deadly deportation schemes such as the Joint Way Forward deal with Afghanistan means people are returned to countries where they risk persecution, torture and even death.

But these deterrents and brutal border enforcement policies don’t prevent people migrating.

3. Blaming migrants for low wages divides workers and creates a race to the bottom

Excluding migrants from work and refusing them access to basic services, means they are often stopped from contributing to society and the economy.

Because they are then forced to work in the shadow economy, they also often end up working for below minimum wage, which pushes down labor standards. But where they are allowed to work legally, this is not the case.

Study after study shows how wages are only ever minimally affected, if at all, by immigration. Possibly the most detailed study on this issue comes from Denmark. Economists followed the wages and employment of every worker in the country between 1991 and 2008, and monitored the impacts of large influxes of refugees. They found that low-skilled wages and employment actually rose in response to the influx of refugees. This is because immigrants are not just workers, but they also consume goods and take part in society, which in turn creates jobs.

Instead of building borders, we should organize and fight for better rights for all working people, whatever their country of birth.

4. More migrants would be able to return home safely

Open borders would mean that people could move freely, helping more immigrants return back home with the risks associated with crossing borders removed. For example, in the 1960s, 70 million Mexicans crossed into the USA, 85 per cent of whom later returned to Mexico. As the US border has become heavily militarized in recent decades, however, it has increased the dangers associated with moving, and thus discouraged immigrants from going back.

5. Open borders would make the world a richer place

According to economist Michael Clemens, opening the world’s borders could double global GDP. That is because the change in a worker’s location to a higher value economy increases their economic productivity. In addition, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), across Europe, the average immigrant household contributes more in taxes than they take in benefits. 

Of course, the economic value of a human being should never be the sole basis on which to allow them to exercise the right to move – and neither is GDP or economic growth the best measure of wellbeing. But we can be reassured that the world’s economy would not collapse under a system of open borders.

6. We can’t have free movement for some and not for all

Europeans have always exercised this right, such as the hundreds of thousands who migrated to North America in the 17th and 18th centuries. Citizens of rich countries continue to do the same today. We rarely hear opponents of free movement arguing to curtail their own rights to move, live, work, study or travel. Arguments for preventing free movement are always presented with the assumption that it is the movement of ‘others’ being stopped.

The current system of border controls is such that the accident of birth determines the extent to which you can exercise the right to free movement.

7. The rich already have open borders – it’s time to extend that to everyone

Borders barely exist for the movement of capital, and multinational companies can easily cross borders to extract resources and exploit labor. The world’s richest people can buy citizenship of many countries, including within the EU. In Cyprus you can buy citizenship for a €2 million investment, while Portugal offers full residency and only asks for a mere €500,000 investment.

The xenophobic media, which is so loud in its calls to stop desperate people fleeing the horrors of so-called Islamic State, is strangely quiet about the free movement of billionaires and oligarchs – and their rights to snap up luxury accommodation in cities like London, while pushing out the poor.

It is fundamentally unfair that corporate bosses can move jobs across the world, while ordinary workers do not have the freedom to move themselves.

We might not be able to open all borders tomorrow, but the first step is to begin working towards achieving the conditions that could make this a reality, for example through a universal minimum wage and global standards for workers’ rights.

A longer version of this post was originally published at the New Internationalist . 

Image: Immigrant rights march in Los Angeles on May Day, 2006, by Jonathan McIntosh, CC-BY-2.5 

A World Without Borders

The un’s stakeholder approach is dangerous for democracy, youth activists discuss world parliament and global issues, democracy plays no role in the un’s pact for the future, un needs to “open its doors to the world’s people”, civil society demands.

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The Case for Open Borders

In the past decade, the government of Australia spent more than fifteen million dollars on an advertising campaign designed to deter prospective migrants. The multimedia effort, which has been lauded by President Trump, featured bold, red text—“ NO WAY: YOU WILL NOT MAKE AUSTRALIA HOME ”—over images of dark, choppy seas. The Department of Homeland Security has distributed similar flyers at migrant shelters in Mexico, near the border: “The next time you try to cross the border without documents, you could end up a victim of the desert,” they warn. Canada has mounted billboards in Hungary to deter Roma asylum seekers; Germany has sponsored posters on the sides of Kabul buses; Norway has purchased Facebook ads targeted at young men from Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Eritrea whose profiles indicate interest in “travelling” or “Europe.”

Activists and observers have criticized the hostile tone of these ad campaigns. Still, the ads’ underlying premise—that governments have a right to control entry into their countries—seems beyond dispute. Even immigration activists implicitly accept that it must be controlled: the movement to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for example, speaks to the question of how American borders are policed, not to whether they ought to be policed in the first place. In a new graphic-nonfiction book, “ Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration ,” Bryan Caplan, a libertarian economist at George Mason University, makes the radical pro-immigration argument that others don’t. In his view, immigration should be essentially unlimited. He envisions a future in which Democrats and Republicans vie to become the country’s “open border party,” each calling for nearly unrestricted immigration.

The difference between Caplan’s world and our own is that Caplan presents immigrants not as threats—to low-skilled workers, to social services, to public culture—but as generators of wealth. Citing the work of the development economist Michael Clemens, Caplan claims that global freedom of movement would increase the gross world product by between fifty and a hundred and fifty per cent. The basic principle of his claim is that workers in poor countries are underutilized. (“How productive would you be in Haiti?” Caplan asks.) If people could travel as freely as commodities and capital do, they could produce “vastly more stuff,” insuring that “almost everyone ends up better off.” Restrictions on immigration, Caplan writes, are the equivalent of leaving “trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk.” (He borrows that phrase from Clemens; Zach Weinersmith, the book’s illustrator, draws a cartoon Caplan and Clemens making angels in snowdrifts of cash.)

Opening the world’s borders wouldn’t mean abolishing them, Caplan explains. Countries could still issue passports and maintain territorial notions of belonging. But immigrants—perhaps after passing some sort of criminal background check—would be automatically accepted at all standard ports of entry. Governments would relinquish their exclusionary authority, so that anyone, regardless of citizenship, could “accept a job offer from a willing employer or rent an apartment from a willing landlord.” In one illustration, a cartoon Caplan serves a trillion-dollar blueberry pie; its slices are distributed to landlords with apartments to rent, retirees with newly affordable elder care, and mothers reëntering the workforce thanks to lower child-care costs. Caplan concedes that, in countries like the U.S., wages could decrease for some native workers. But he argues that the influx of new consumers would stimulate the economy, and that many members of America’s working class would end up “managing and training new arrivals, not competing with them!” Big businesses are notably absent from Caplan’s list of beneficiaries, although they would profit from an expanded labor pool, too. Partly for this reason, Charles Koch has come out in favor of open borders. (In 2015, Bernie Sanders characterized the idea as “a Koch brothers proposal” designed to “bring in people who will work for two or three dollars an hour.”)

What about poorer countries, with low returns on labor, from which immigrants would flow? Presumably, an open-border policy would lead to a mass exodus. And yet an illustrated version of Caplan, working as a Western Union teller, reassures these countries that they would be rewarded with compensatory, monumental remittances. Brain drain wouldn’t be an issue, since the total liberalization of movement would allow everyone—not just the highly skilled—to emigrate. Caplan writes that a “ghost town,” in which a dwindling labor pool keeps wages high, is preferable to the “zombie” towns, which trap their residents in moribund economies, that are created by the current system. (A sign on a zombie-infested Main Street reads “ BRAINS 50% OFF !”)

Caplan imagines a debate with Milton Friedman, who once declared that free immigration and a welfare state couldn’t coëxist. Caplan, pictured alongside Friedman in a maternity ward, explains why the fact that some immigrants end up depending on social services is a weak argument: some native-born babies grow up to depend on social services, too, and yet no one argues that we ought to restrict reproduction. Anyway, Caplan tells Friedman, “when we crunch the numbers,” immigrants represent a net fiscal benefit to the U.S. government. According to data from the National Academy of Sciences, the average new arrival generates two hundred and fifty-nine thousand dollars in tax revenue. Data also shows that American-born citizens tend to impose a larger fiscal burden, and are more likely to commit crimes, than immigrants. In the book’s fantasia, Friedman, who died in 2006, doesn’t contest Caplan’s assertion that “most immigrants pull their own weight—and then some.”

Caplan’s case isn’t entirely about economics: he also makes a moral appeal. Consider the case of “Starving Marvin,” who needs food and is prepared to purchase it legally. On his way to the market, he is turned away by an armed guard. If Marvin subsequently dies of starvation, Caplan asks, is the guard guilty of murder? The philosopher Michael Huemer, who first introduced this hypothetical, in 2012, concluded that the answer was yes. He writes, “If a person is starving, and you refuse to give him food, then you allow him to starve, but if you take the extra step of coercively interfering with his obtaining food from someone else, then you do not merely allow him to starve; you starve him.” Caplan doesn’t go that far, but he does argue that the guard is wrong to prevent Marvin from feeding himself.

As a libertarian, Caplan generally seeks to avoid distinguishing between citizens of different countries. Instead, he condemns the “global apartheid” that borders perpetuate. Exclusion on the basis of one’s country of birth, he maintains, is no less reprehensible than discrimination on the grounds of gender, race, or religion. We are right to value equality of opportunity—but, if it’s valued at home, then it should also be valued on a global scale, where inequality is much starker.

Many people see inequality within a country as morally urgent in a way that they do not consider inequality across borders to be. The philosopher Christopher Wellman offers an explanation for this attitude: he points out that, although we might quickly condemn parents who pay for their sons to attend college but not their daughters, we could forgive cash-strapped parents who pay no one’s tuition. The latter situation is worse, strictly speaking, but at least it feels unavoidable. We might conclude that global inequality, though lamentable, is the result of vast historical forces that we can’t be expected to change. It’s just the way the world is.

In Caplan’s estimation, though, global inequality isn’t inevitable, and immigration isn’t a zero-sum game. Opening the world’s borders would be an act of revenue-generating humanitarianism—a form of laissez-faire global distributive justice, on the order of seventy-five trillion dollars a year. Letting in Starving Marvin isn’t just “the decent thing to do” but also “the smart thing to do.” Turning him away would be wrong both morally and financially. We aren’t the impoverished parents who can’t afford to send anybody to college. We’re the rich parents who choose to send some kids but not others.

The illustrations in “Open Borders” are playful, bright, and irreverent; their simple style evokes Caplan’s relentless optimism. And yet, when they aren’t harmlessly humorous—statistics floating in hot-air balloons; Americans eating “Conspicuous Pecansumption” ice cream—they tend to reduce their subjects to caricature. “Poor countries” are depicted using images of generic slums and anonymous, emaciated brown people; a person who smuggles migrants in the desert is represented as an actual coyote, wearing sunglasses. At times, the images embrace stereotypes in glib ways: a Chinese couple running a restaurant stand in for high-skilled immigrants, and a pickup truck crossing the border is presumed to contain those who are low-skilled. At other times, perhaps intentionally, the figures are dissonantly cartoonish. It’s hard to reckon with a cartoon version of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old boy who drowned while fleeing Syria, lying face down on the beach. Caplan and Weinersmith may be trying to reach those who looked away from the original photo: elsewhere in the book, Caplan suggests that open borders would make poverty more visible. “Immigration restrictions hide even more poverty than they create,” he writes.

Caplan’s “Open Borders” isn’t the only recent book on the subject of free immigration. In September, the far-right polemicist Michelle Malkin published “Open Borders Inc.: Who’s Funding America’s Destruction?,” an exploration of how “foreign and domestic enemies”—among them George Soros, Silicon Valley billionaires, and assorted “globalists”—are working together, under humanitarian cover, to throw open the nation’s gates. Caplan doesn’t engage with the immigration-as-a-conspiracy crowd, but he does seek to address the concerns of a socially conservative audience. He acknowledges worries about adult immigrants who never achieve full English fluency, but notes that their children surely will; he also suggests that America, a country without an official national language, could impose an English-language entrance test, if it wanted to. He frames cosmopolitanism as a route to cultural superiority—a way of aggregating “the best lifestyles! The best art! The best food!” And he imagines the opening of borders as a strategic move in the clash of civilizations. “Westernization is quietly winning” around the world, he writes, but it “will win faster if people stuck in closed societies can freely vote with their feet.”

Caplan sometimes ventures into territory that liberal readers will find unsettling. He disputes Donald Trump, Jr.,’s provocation about Syrian refugees—“If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful?”—noting that a realistic bowl would be so large as to fatally undermine the metaphor. He also argues that, if Muslims “were evenly distributed throughout the world, they wouldn’t be the dominant culture anywhere,” and suggests that a country might “raise non-Muslim immigration” as a pro-immigration alternative to a Muslim ban. As a concession to conservatives who worry about new arrivals not assimilating culturally or politically, he allows that laws could make immigrants “wait years and years to naturalize, so they have ample time to learn to love our political ideals.” (In an illustration, an immigrant leans despondently against an hourglass.) For any remaining skeptics, Caplan cites Alex Nowrasteh, of the libertarian Cato Institute, who advises a “wall around the welfare state, instead of the country.”

Caplan also points out that increased immigration doesn’t have to go hand in hand with permanent settlement or political representation. Most people migrate for work, he writes, and not for “the subtle satisfaction of voting.” In a recent piece for Foreign Policy , Caplan praised the Gulf states, such as Qatar, whose temporary-worker programs, which don’t offer paths to citizenship, have made them “more open to immigration than almost anywhere else on Earth.” Such programs have attracted migrants—but they have also proved to be fertile ground for human-rights violations, including passport confiscation and physical abuse. Ideas like immigration without representation look one way against the backdrop of “global apartheid” and another in the context of these realities. As in his previous books, such as “ The Case Against Education ” and “ The Myth of the Rational Voter, ” Caplan sometimes assumes the lightened burden of the provocateur, pulling out all the stops in an effort to challenge widely held beliefs. By the end of “Open Borders”—when a cartoon narrator pushes the Overton window to the far edge of the page, revealing the sun shining over an open-bordered world—one might wonder how seriously to take his ideas, and how seriously he takes them. His open-borders proposal, of course, is almost certainly political non-starter.

Still, there are reasons not to discount open-border thinking as mere provocation, or to see it as an idea confined solely to libertarianism. Caplan argues that birthright citizenship is a lottery of opportunity—in an accompanying illustration, a gambler at an immigration slot machine hits the jackpot (“U$A”)—and other thinkers agree. Instead of invoking the metaphor of apartheid, the egalitarian political philosopher Joseph Carens suggests that our current system is a contemporary equivalent of feudalism: routine restrictions on mobility compound existing disadvantages, denying the global “peasantry” the resources to escape their position. (Today, one loophole in the system is citizenship by investment: one can become a citizen of Malta, for example, which is part of the European Union, by spending about eight hundred thousand euros on property or other projects there.)

Caplan doesn’t address asylum explicitly, in part because he doesn’t need to: an open-bordered world wouldn’t distinguish between those who are escaping persecution and those who are seeking opportunity. But such a world would likely benefit asylum seekers whose situations diverge from the classic definition of the refugee, laid out by the United Nations’ 1951 Refugee Convention. (Starving Marvin doesn’t flee persecution, which is at the center of the current definition, but his country’s failure to meet his basic needs.) An open-borders system could likewise address the coming displacement of millions, by rising sea levels, droughts, fires, and storms. The Global North, which is responsible for the great majority of greenhouse-gas emissions, might consider the opening of borders a fair exchange for almost two centuries of pollution. Some activists see migration policy as a tool for reparative justice more generally. If today’s migrations can be understood as resulting, in part, from a history of colonialism, then the opening of the world’s borders might be a form of reparations.

Today, as American immigration reformers confront the detention of children and the building of border walls, arguments in favor of open borders might seem frivolous. A 2018 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center found that only a third of Americans think that legal immigration should be increased; a quarter want it decreased. Caplan notes that the average immigrant to the U.S. holds political views similar to the ones held by the average American; this, he writes, suggests that the United States could open its borders without substantially transforming its political culture. But he also acknowledges that citizens might respond to increased immigration by changing their political outlooks. In one of Weinersmith’s illustrations, a Norwegian woman with long blond hair smiles approvingly as she imagines a portion of her salary being redistributed to a fellow-Norwegian, in a universal-basic-income scheme; she looks displeased, however, when she hears that the program includes non-citizens. (Two-thirds of Norwegians support such programs, but, when non-Norwegians are involved, approval drops to less than half.)

In the United States, the 2016 election revealed that even a perceived increase in immigration could inspire a political backlash. Immigration advocates, for the most part, have responded to anti-immigrant sentiment by making empathy-based, humanitarian appeals. In “Open Borders,” Caplan takes a different approach. He makes a pragmatic argument about collective self-interest, expressed in terms of gross world product. His presumption—perhaps a good one—is that moral arguments will be of limited effect compared with the trillion-dollar potential of his open-bordered world.

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Does immigration strengthen or undermine tolerance?

Full acceptance, not mere tolerance, is a better goal for open societies, says denzel chung.

By DENZEL CHUNG

This essay is the winner of The Economist ’s Open Future essay competition in the category of Open Borders, responding to the question: “Does immigration strengthen or undermine tolerance?” The winner is Denzel Chung, 18 years old, from New Zealand.

Moving from Malaysia to New Zealand, our family has seen it all. We have seen a brave new world of inclusive multiculturalism. We saw genuine efforts made to start understanding and embracing the unique culture we brought with us, just as we made our own efforts to understand and embrace the culture of our new neighbours.

We have learned (albeit reluctantly) to put Marmite on toast as well as in rice congee. They have learned (albeit reluctantly) to use peanuts and spices in satay sauce, instead of peanut butter and cream. We have learned to kick back on Waitangi Day or Queen’s Birthday Weekend and get to know New Zealand’s rich Māori and Pakeha history, while they have learned about the cacophonous, multicultural Malaysian feasts of Chinese New Year, Hari Raya Aidilfitri and Deepavali.

We have also seen a darker underbelly, the seething resentment and implicit discrimination occasionally boiling over into outright racism (that dreaded “r-word,” so potent and so feared, and so much more convenient to brush off and sweep under the carpet).

We saw as my parents, well-paid professionals in Malaysia, trudged through a variety of menial jobs, struggling to apply for minimum-wage work; and not for a lack of qualifications, experience or even English-language ability. We cringed as apoplectic politicians attacked yet another farm, factory or residential home being sold to “the Chinese”; culminating in the then-opposition Labour Party claiming an overseas hijacking of our housing market, based on the fact that 39.5% of house purchasers in Auckland had “Chinese-sounding names”. We groaned as we went through the usual baptism of fire for any new immigrant, the cocked-eyebrow and puzzled look as you struggle to get your words across, the constant sniggers and cries of “sorry, I didn’t get that,” little snipes at the outwardly different and the distinctive.

New Zealand has been a land of immigrants throughout its modern history, and, like the rest of the world, has experienced significant growth in immigration in the last several decades. This was usually thought to have been driven as much by a liberalisation of attitudes as much as of borders and air travel. How, then, can immigration serve both to strengthen tolerance and seemingly undermine it? This seemingly hypocritical juxtaposition becomes clearer when the meaning of the word “tolerance” is made clearer.

Why the word “tolerance” was chosen to hearken a new age of enlightened multiculturalism is forever a mystery to me. “Tolerance” implies a reluctant, begrudging acceptance, and indeed it is defined as an ability to bear with something one disagrees with, or dislikes, without interference. If this is tolerance, immigration has certainly strengthened it. Through immigration, there is broad consensus across wide swathes of society that immigrants are actually extremely useful, vital to prevent shortages of skilled professionals as well as being a potent engine of economic growth. For instance, for the last few years, New Zealand’s economy, generally subject to the swings and roundabouts of commodity prices and tourist numbers, has been growing consistently, driven almost exclusively by immigration and its flow-on effects.

The 2017 Perceptions of Asia survey, carried out by the Asia New Zealand Foundation, found that the vast majority of New Zealanders saw Asian tourism, investment and economic growth as being positive to New Zealand’s future. In a similar vein, the 2017 European Social Survey found that a skilled professional or a student with good grades could overcome the “ethnic penalty” of discrimination generally applied to non-European, non-Christian migrants, so strongly was individual approval of migrants tied to their relative skills or talents.

While respondents would consistently favour unskilled labourers from Europe over those from elsewhere, an individual would theoretically view any skilled professional immigrant, whether from Ireland, India or the Ivory Coast, equally highly. However, just because the presence of an immigrant is tolerated and their skills appreciated does not necessarily mean that they are welcomed, or even accepted, and the endless apocryphal tales of woe circulated among new migrants can be backed up by evidence of an attitude towards immigration that can verge on hostility.

Notably, attitudes towards the different cultures and ways of life immigrants bring with them are significantly cooler than attitudes towards immigration in general. Recent research in Australia, for instance, found almost half of respondents agreeing that people from minority groups should behave more like mainstream Australians and that “Australia is weakened by people of different ethnic origins sticking to their old ways”.

The 2017 European Social Survey found much more positive attitudes towards migrants of the same race or ethnic group, such as other Europeans, as well as agreement in the importance of immigrants committing to their host country’s “way of life”. The Asia New Zealand Foundation’s survey found that less than half of respondents actually believed Asian immigration, or Asian cultures and traditions, would be positive for New Zealand’s future, notwithstanding the fact that large majorities of respondents saw tourism and investment from Asia as being positive for New Zealand’s future.

These case studies show most clearly the danger of accepting a mere “tolerance” of immigrants. This begrudging acceptance may lead to outward harmony, but hides toxic viewpoints that can significantly strain interracial relations further down the track. Yes, a tolerance of immigrants indicates that they are broadly viewed as useful, whether for driving demand, mitigating skill shortages or providing investment capital and empirical evidence (as shown above) tends to support this.

However a tolerance of immigrants also indicates, at best, an apathetic disregard for them, and at worst, an active hostility kept under wraps simply because they are perceived as necessary. Empirically, negative views of immigrant cultures and traditions seem to persist, as does a view that immigrants should behave more like native-born “locals,” that they conform more tightly to the attitudes of the majority. Like a liberal democracy trading with an ideological foe, an outward relationship that seems cooperative, or even congenial, conceals a demonstrable, marked hostility, a fundamental, unresolved mismatch of mutually-misunderstood cultures and attitudes.

The current viewpoint of strengthening “tolerance” towards immigration forestalls efforts to connect with immigrants, engage with them or learn more about their culture and heritage. It dehumanises immigrants, promoting a view of them as merely a “necessary evil”. It reduces them to the role of a machine to do what needs to be done, a machine that should get on with its job quietly, out of sight and with minimal fuss. Despite 59% of New Zealanders in the Asia New Zealand Foundation survey of 2018 admitting little involvement with Asian people or cultures, some of the primary reasons that some respondents felt “less warm” towards them was a cited “influx” of Asians, or their tendency to “stick to their own,” rather than “integrate”.

When immigrants are reduced to the status of a mere machine, it becomes terrifyingly easy to dispense with them or dismiss them if circumstances render it necessary. Eventually, for the media and politicians of all stripes to alternately celebrate and slander them as the tides of national opinion ebb and flow becomes not so much heartlessness as mere pragmatism.

Of course, immigration strengthens tolerance. Immigration is vital to cover deficits of skilled workers and manual labourers, as well as deliver economic growth. Even racial supremacists and bigots recognise that immigrants can be necessary to the proper functioning of a nation. However tolerance is not the same as acceptance, and just because immigrants are able to live relatively peacefully in a country does not necessarily indicate a full-throated agreement to their presence, never mind their culture or their way of life.

Just as the investment-starved apartheid regime of South Africa welcomed wealthy Japanese as “honorary whites,” a superficial recognition of immigrants as economically necessary exists across the world today. Though external peace is present, this ultimately does as little to change the broader national attitude around immigrants as accepting the Japanese did for multiculturalism in South Africa. A broader sentiment of resentment towards new arrivals continues below the surface, with terrible consequences both for host citizens and the immigrants in their adopted home.

To make the shift requires less a change in policy or legislation as a change in attitude. It requires people to move past the traditional viewpoint of seeing immigrants as a necessary evil, as mere machines to make economic indicators more impressive or to sit in offices and hospitals because no one else wants to.

We should look past just celebrating immigrants’ bank balances and university degrees, to also see their unique cultures, perspectives and ways of life; if not always to be celebrated, to at least be understood in perspective. We must no longer simply stand for "tolerance" of immigrants, but we must stand for accepting, respecting and understanding them too.

Denzel Chung is a student in health sciences at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.

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17 Biggest Pros and Cons of Open Borders Immigration

Open borders immigration involves the free movement of goods and people between national jurisdictions without restrictions on their activity. It may be open because of a lack of legal controls, funding, or international legislation that allows for de jure. The Schengen Agreement in Europe is one of the best examples of this process, with European borders often marked with a simple sign, no customs controls, and no passport check.

People can choose to immigrate in an open borders situation wherever they wish in their destination country. The impact is similar to what Americans experience when they choose to live in a different state. After they take care of their administrative responsibilities, obtain licenses, and secure housing, their household becomes another member of that community.

Although there are critics who believe open borders immigration creates security concerns and additional local disadvantages, pervasive controls at international borders is relatively new. World War I became the point when these controls became common. Even before the 1880s, immigration to the United States was not fully controlled.

List of the Pros of Open Borders Immigration

1. It would eliminate the costs of immigration control at national borders. The United States spends over $18 billion per year enforcing immigration laws at its borders. A majority of this expense occurs at the southern border with Mexico, although there are checkpoints at all international airports, the Canadian border, and in U.S. territories. Having open borders immigration would free up that money since there would no longer be a need for a wall or Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

If everyone were allowed to go to whatever country they preferred, then there wouldn’t be issues with family separations. Deportations would become minimal. Even the Border Patrol would see a reduction in the scope of their duties, transitioning to a true patrolling duty to maintain law and order.

2. Open borders would create temporary immigration opportunities. Having an open border would make it easier for families to improve their lifestyle and livelihood in a variety of ways. Parents could bring their children to a new country so that they could go to school. You could receive the medical care you need, a better job, or a variety of additional benefits that aren’t available in their home country. The theory of this advantage is that people would come for a few years, accomplish what they need to do, and then move back with their family and friends.

3. It would improve the flow of immigrants to each country. The idea behind the open borders concept is that the countries would only want to send the “best” people to live elsewhere. Restrictive laws reduce the advantages that wealthier or more educated households experience by moving away from home. The time and cost to complete the paperwork and follow the set of processes become burdensome. That’s why more illegal immigration comes from Mexico. If you don’t care about following the admin costs, then coming right over creates a risk-reward equation that is worth considering for many families.

4. Having open borders would help to diversify local economies. Immigrants bring new ideas, experiences, and perspectives to their new communities. With this added diversification, there is more strength to be found within the community. Immigrants start businesses, earn an income, and support others on the local level. The availability of open borders creates an increase in domestic production, creating more profits that work to help the economy. Healthy economies based on immigrant perspectives tend to find the most advancement opportunities.

Immigrants already raise the GDP even when there aren’t open borders to support their activities. The total value of their work in the United States is over $70 billion annually. Even if we remove the annual cost of enforcement, that would give a 0.1% economic boost to everyone.

5. Open borders help to increase the population base for communities and economies. About 800,000 people become naturalized citizens of the United States every year. The legalized immigration process allows this to happen with the current restrictions at the border. If those stoppages were disallowed to create open movement, then more people would have an opportunity to select citizenship or permanent residency for themselves.

Although there could be security issues to manage with this process, the result of having open borders would be more diversity in each community. With access to more perspectives and experiences, it becomes easier to innovate at every level of the business spectrum.

6. It would encourage more development around the world. The number of countries that have gone through a formal Industrial Revolution is counted at less than 40. Current income levels around the world are less than $2 per day in many countries. If we were to allow open borders, then it would force the governments in the developing world to dedicate more resources to domestic improvements. If people have a chance to live in a yurt to barely scrape by or a chance to build a modern life for their family, most people are going to choose the second option.

7. Higher levels of immigration create lower levels of crime. Immigrants are under-represented in almost every relevant statistic about crime collected in the developed world. Even in places where illegal immigration is considered a severe problem, the people who cross a border without permission aren’t the ones causing a majority of the felonious acts that occur. Texas estimates that approximately 6% of their total population involves illegal immigrants, but they are less than 5% of the prison community. When you compare the actions of people with natural citizenship to those without it, the rate of crime for the latter group is about 70% less.

8. Immigration eliminates the employment gaps that exist in each economy. In low-skill employment areas, the strong presence of immigrants may indeed depress wages. If we take a look at this issue from a comprehensive labor market viewpoint, this advance shows that open borders immigration helps to fill in the recesses that form when low unemployment rates exist.

Immigrants allow communities to remove employment bottlenecks. They reduce the risk of productivity issues happening at the local level. That means when the income levels of newcomers rise, so do the wages of every other household.

9. Open borders immigration could reduce retail prices for consumers. Immigrants are not the only households that benefit when migration occurs to a specific community. Every employee gains an advantage because of the laws of supply and demand. Executives, lawyers, and translators all have new possibilities available to them that they may not have had otherwise because there are more people available to e goods.

As the demand levels rise or new workers, the prices begin to fall for the goods and services in the marketplace. That means everyone gets to profit from the lower costs.

10. Open borders would reduce immigrant exploitation issues. When people immigrate illegally to a country, then they become part of a vulnerable population group. Individuals can exploit these families because there is no safety net for them. Examples from the United States include refusing to pay someone their salary, filing false charges with the police, or committing physical abuse.

Even if someone is in a country legally, the threat of calling a department like ICE can create hardships for people. An American citizen was detained for over three weeks being suspected of illegal immigration before being eventually released to his mother. Having an open borders policy would eliminate many of these issues.

List of the Cons of Open Borders Immigration

1. It could reduce the skill of immigrants coming to a new country. Having an open border might encourage wealthier families to move to a new country to pursue opportunities, but the opposite could also happen. People with fewer skills and resources might be more tempted to build a life in a different nation because there’s nothing tying them to their current home. There are educated and skilled immigrants already choosing to remain in their homeland rather than immigrate now even though they have the resources available to move already.

2. Open borders could make more people eligible for government assistance. Immigrants with fewer skills are already entering countries around the world. If there were open borders, it would only increase the flow of movement because there wouldn’t be any obstacles in place. That means there would be more people eligible for government assistance schemes and programs, bogging down the economics of the entire society because the Middle Class and above are forced to subsidize the new living arrangements in that scenario. It would create burdens that could be a challenge to manage if a family is already struggling to scrape by on what they currently earn.

3. It would increase competition for available employment opportunities. When people can move across an international border without restriction to live somewhere new, then it creates a broader set of potential applicants for employers to evaluate. That means the added competition for open jobs could reduce the opportunities for people in their home country. Since there is more availability and the potential of individuals being willing to work for lower wages, it could reduce the standard of living in some communities.

4. Open borders immigration could create over-population problems. The developed nations of the world would become the primary target for immigration opportunities if open borders become a reality. Over-population issues would occur immediately with this movement as there would be a scramble to be the first families in the new economy. The home nations would begin to see problems with worker supply, creating a set of supply problems for the import-export market eventually.

We got a glimpse of this issue in 2017 when 2.2 million people sought asylum throughout Europe. It was the biggest refugee wave to hit the continent since World War II. The political fallout from that movement created xenophobia and populism that still impacts society today.

5. Some families may struggle to integrate into their new surroundings. Diversity can make us stronger as humans, but not everyone is willing to embrace that concept. Having new cultures, perspectives, or traditions in an established area can cause tension. This disadvantage is fueled by fear since we’re naturally cautious around people we don’t know. If there are more neighbors around that took advantage of an open borders policy than the people we grew up around, then it can feel like a loss of identity occurs.

Families become wary that something will go awry in these circumstances. There might be proactive calls to law enforcement, more security monitoring, and adverse personal reactions with each other under the guise that everyone is trying to stop trouble from happening.

6. Open borders immigration would still cause families to split up. Even if there are no restrictions in place with open borders immigration, families can’t move to another country for free. There must be some amount of resources available to them so that they can establish a new home. That means many of the elements of illegal immigration are still going to be happening in the developed countries around the world. Families will split up to support themselves, creating homeland gaps in availability that could lower the quality of services available.

The end result of an open borders effort could be a reduction of opportunities and a lower standard of living for everyone.

7. Immigration from desperation does not guarantee results. There are times when open borders immigration makes sense to implement. When families have an opportunity to follow their jobs without restriction, then local economies benefit. The problem that all immigration opportunities face is the attitude of desperation that people face. Households look at what might be if they can make it to a different country, see that chasing a dream there is better than their current reality, and then they decide to take a leap of faith.

The only problem with that leap is that some people are going to fall. Open borders would create significant stress points on the social services of a country in that situation, creating adverse income and taxation impacts that could make life worse instead of better for many people.

The presence of open borders makes it easier to buy and sell goods and services. People can immigrate to new countries as a way to chase employment, start a new life, or climb out of poverty.

There are economic stimulus benefits to consider with the open borders approach. We also have security concerns that are relevant, and they must be taken into consideration.

The pros and cons of open borders immigration depend on what each country and community require for growth. There are several success stories to review, such as New Zealand and Australia, Ireland and the UK, and most of Europe. If we can control the adverse components of this approach, then the positives may be worth the risk on a more global perspective.

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• > Immigration and the Constraints of Justice
• > Rights-based arguments for open borders

Book contents

• Frontmatter
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Statism, self-determination, and associative ownership
• 3 Refining associative ownership
• 4 Rights-based arguments for open borders
• 5 Distributive justice and open borders
• 6 The significance of national identity
• 7 Applications
• Bibliography

4 - Rights-based arguments for open borders

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2011

It is perhaps difficult to imagine, but during the United States' early years a policy of nearly open borders prevailed. Immigrants were an important source of labor for a fast-expanding country busy developing and pushing into frontier territory. In the 1860s:

Some US consuls hired full-time agents to attract prospective settlers with free land. The federal government was far from alone in this venture. While Western states and territories continued to use immigration agents and publicity campaigns to induce immigration from Europe, railroad companies sent agents to Germany to recruit farmers to develop vast railroad lands.

The few immigration-related laws passed prior to the Civil War did little to restrict the flow of immigrants, pertaining instead to naturalization and record-keeping. Although almost a century has passed since the United States first developed a comprehensive immigration policy (as opposed to laws meant only to exclude particular racial or national groups), the idea of the United States as opening a golden door for the world's tired and poor retains a foothold in political and popular discourse.

Moreover, in arguments regarding the ethics of immigration policy, many analysts advocate open borders (Ackerman 1980; Carens 1987; Carens 1992; Cole 2000; Dummett 2001; Lomasky 2001; Pritchett 2006; Wall Street Journal 1984). For example, Michael Dummett argues that:

All states ought to recognize the normal principle to be that of open borders, allowing all freely to enter and, if they will, to settle in any country that they wish.

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• Rights-based arguments for open borders
• Ryan Pevnick , New York University
• Book: Immigration and the Constraints of Justice
• Online publication: 24 February 2011
• Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511975134.004

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Open Borders: Pros and Cons

• B.S., Texas A&M University

Open border policies allow people to move freely between countries or political jurisdictions with no restrictions. Open border pros and cons run the gamut. A country’s borders may be opened because its government either has no border control laws by choice or because it lacks the resources needed to enforce immigration control laws. The term “open borders” does not apply to the flow of goods and services or to the boundaries between privately owned properties. Within most countries, borders between political subdivisions like cities and states are typically open.

Key Takeaways: Open Borders

• The term “open borders” refers to government policies allowing immigrants to enter the country with little or no restriction.
• Borders may be open due to the absence of border control laws or the lack of resources needed to enforce such laws.
• Open borders are the opposite of closed borders, which bar the entry of foreign nationals except under extraordinary circumstances.

Open Borders Definitions

In the strictest sense, the term “open borders” implies that people may travel to and from a country without presenting a passport, visa, or another form of legal documentation. It does not, however, imply that new immigrants will automatically be granted citizenship.

In addition to fully open borders, there are other types of international borders classified according to their “degrees of openness” as determined by the enforcement of border control laws. Understanding these types of borders is critical to understanding the political debate over open border policies.

Conditionally Open Borders

Conditionally open borders allow people who meet a legally established set of conditions to freely enter the country. These conditions represent exemptions to existing border control laws that would otherwise apply. For example, the United States Refugee Act grants the President of the United States the authority to permit a limited number of foreign nationals to enter and remain in the U.S. if they can prove a “credible and reasonable fear” of racial or political persecution in their home nations. Internationally, the United States along with 148 other nations have agreed to adhere to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocols, which allow people to cross their borders to escape life-threatening situations in their homelands.

Controlled Borders

Countries with controlled borders place restrictions—sometimes significant—on immigration . Today, the United States and a majority of developed nations have controlled borders. Controlled borders typically require persons crossing them to present a visa or may allow for short-term visa-free visits. Controlled borders may impose internal checks to ensure that people who have entered the country are complying with their conditions of entry and have not overstayed their visas, continuing to reside in the country illegally as undocumented immigrants . In addition, physical passage across controlled borders is usually restricted to a limited number of “points of entry,” such as bridges and airports where conditions for entry can be enforced.

Controlled borders typically require physical barriers, such as rivers, oceans, or fences to ensure that the border controls are not bypassed. People wishing to cross the border are directed to authorized border crossing points where any conditions of entry can be properly monitored. Controlled borders also require internal checks and internal enforcement within the jurisdiction to ensure that people who have entered the country for work, holidays, study, and other reasons are complying with any entry conditions and not overstaying temporary visas to reside illegally or as undocumented residents. By legislative statute, as in the U.S., most international borders are controlled borders. However, where there is a lack of adequate internal enforcement or where the borders lack physical barriers, the border is often controlled only on parts of the border, while other parts of the border may remain open to such an extent that it may be considered an open border due to lack of supervision and enforcement.

Since taking office in January 2021, the administration of President Joe Biden has been faced with a growing number of migrants at the US-Mexico border, many of whom are now from Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Recently released U.S. Customs and Border Protection data shows that in fiscal year 2022, border authorities encountered more than 2 million migrants, some of whom repeatedly tried to cross the border. The data showed a marked increase from fiscal year 2021 when there were more than 1.7 million such encounters.

While control of the U.S. border with Mexico remains a source of political debate, the border is guarded by a powerful and well-funded national security agency. The U.S. Border Patrol has nearly doubled in enforcement capacity since 2000, from fewer than 10,000 agents to more than 19,500 in 2020. President Biden has requested $97.3 billion in funding for the Department of Homeland Security for fiscal year 2023, including billions of dollars for border security and internal immigration enforcement. 

Additionally, the Biden administration has limited the opportunity to apply for asylum for many migrants at the border by continuing the controversial usage of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Title 42 public health authority initiated under the Donald Trump administration in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, the administration has carried out more than 1 million expulsions in the first 11 months of fiscal year 2022, on top of the more than one million deportations conducted during the fiscal year 2021.

However, on November 16, 2022, a US District Court gave the Biden administration five weeks to end all enforcement of Title 42, finding it to be an “arbitrary and capricious” policy that violated federal regulatory law. But when it ends, the Title 42 system will be replaced by an expanded application of Title 8 proceedings that were in place at the border before COVID and which can bring criminal charges for repeated improper entries, thus further adding to the administration’s border enforcement capabilities. Rather than specifying COVID, Title 8 defines an inadmissible alien as, “Any alien who is determined … to have a communicable disease of public health significance; …”

On March 28, 2022, President Biden submitted his Fiscal Year 2023 budget proposal to Congress, a $5.8 trillion request containing $56.7 billion for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and $1.4 billion for the Department of Justice’s immigration courts. The request includes a 700% funding increase for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and an 80% increase for the immigration courts. Of that request, the administration has requested $765 million specifically for caseload and backlog reductions. The discretionary funding is intended to decrease rising asylum backlogs, improve refugee processing, and address the historic backlog of applications for work authorization, naturalization, green cards, and other immigration benefits.

For 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) will receive 13% more funding than in 2021, with the administration’s request of $15.3 billion to hire an additional 300 Border Patrol agents and 300 officials to process the paperwork and applications of undocumented people entering the country at the southwest border. The budget prioritizes improvements to border processing and management, with funding earmarked to “enforce immigration law, further secure U.S. borders and ports of entry, and effectively manage irregular migration along the Southwest border.” The budget requests $309 million in modern border security technology and $494 million for “noncitizen processing and care costs.

Closed Borders

Closed borders completely prohibit the entry of foreign nationals under all but exceptional circumstances. The infamous Berlin Wall that separated the people of East and West Berlin, Germany, during the Cold War was an example of a closed border. Today, the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea remains one of the few closed borders.

Quota Controlled Borders

Both conditionally open and controlled borders may impose quota entry restrictions based on an entrant’s country of origin, health, occupation and skills, family status, financial resources, and criminal record. The United States, for example, applies an annual per-country immigration limit, also taking into consideration “preferential” criteria such as an immigrant’s skills, employment potential, and relationship to current U.S. citizens or legal permanent U.S. residents .

Main Open Border Pros

There are several open border pros and cons. Some of the main arguments in favor of open borders are:

Controlling borders creates a financial drain on governments. For example, the United States budgeted $1.6 billion for a new border wall along the Gulf of Mexico and $210.5 million to hire Border Patrol Agents in 2019 alone. In addition, during 2018, the U.S. government spent $3.0 billion—$8.43 million per day—to detain undocumented immigrants.

Throughout history, immigration has helped fuel the economies of many nations. In a phenomenon dubbed the “immigration surplus,” immigrants in the workforce increase a nation’s level of human capital , inevitably increasing production and raising its annual Gross Domestic Product . For example, immigrants increase the GDP of the United States by an estimated $36 to $72 billion per year.

Societies have consistently benefited from ethnic diversity resulting from immigration. The new ideas, skills, and cultural practices brought by new immigrants allow society to grow and thrive. Open borders advocates argue that diversity fuels an environment in which people live and work harmoniously, thus contributing to greater creativity.

Main Open Border Cons

Some of the main arguments against open borders are:

Some opponents of open borders argue that open borders lead to increased crime. According to data from the U.S. Department of Justice, undocumented immigrants made up 37% total population of federal prisoners as of 2019. In addition, U.S. border control officers seized nearly 4.5 million pounds of illegal narcotics at border crossings and ports of entry in 2018.

Some opponents of open borders also argue that immigrants only contribute to economic growth if the taxes they pay exceed the costs they create. This happens only if a majority of immigrants attain higher income levels. Historically, opponents contend, many immigrants receive below-average incomes, thus creating a net drain on the economy.

Large-scale immigration from poorer countries into richer countries can create a "brain drain" in the source country, where educated professionals leave their home country to live elsewhere, depriving their home countries of an educated workforce. For example, in 2010 more Ethiopian doctors were living in Chicago than there were living in all of Ethiopia itself.

In the United States, it has been argued that it may cause increased backlash from the white population who carry a majority of the political vote. This backlash includes preventing immigrants' access to basic forms of government or community support as well as the creation of policies that specifically criminalize immigrants. 

Countries With Open Borders

While no countries currently have borders that are completely open for worldwide travel and immigration, several countries are members of multinational conventions that allow free travel between member nations. For example, most nations of the European Union allow people to travel freely—without visas—between countries that have signed the Schengen Agreement of 1985. This essentially makes most of Europe a single “country,” as it applies to internal travel. However, all European countries continue to require visas for travelers coming from countries outside the region.

New Zealand and nearby Australia share “open” borders in the sense that they allow their citizens to travel, live, and work in either country with few restrictions. Several other nation-pairs such as India and Nepal, Russia and Belarus, and Ireland and the United Kingdom share similarly “open” borders.

Additional References

• Kammer, Jerry. " The Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 ." Center for Immigration Studies, 30 Sep. 2015.
• Nagle, Angela. " The Left Case Against Open Borders ." American Affairs, 2018.
• Bowman, Sam. " Immigration Restrictions Made Us Poorer ." Adam Smith Institute, 13 Apr. 2011.
• " How the United States Immigration System Works ." American Immigration Council, 10 Oct. 2016.

“ The 1951 Refugee Convention .”  UNHCR. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

" Budget-in-Brief Fiscal Year 2019 ." U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“ The Math of Immigration Detention, 2018 Update: Costs Continue to Multiply .”  National Immigration Forum . 9 May 2018.

Benefits of Immigration Outweigh the Costs , bushcenter.org.

Bump, Philip. “ Want to Know Where Most Drugs Cross the Border? Look at the Border Patrol's News Releases. ”  The Washington Post , 1 Feb. 2019.

Bump, Philip. “ Want to Know Where Most Drugs Cross the Border? Look at the Border Patrol's News Releases .”  The Washington Post, 1 Feb. 2019.

What We Can Learn from the United States’ Mostly Closed Borders

Thanks to Peter Skerry for also providing a thoughtful response to my lead essay and Wretched Refuse more generally. Peter raises a number of important issues that are not directly addressed in Wretched Refuse or my lead essay. Wretched Refuse is explicitly an empirical examination of the new economic case for immigration restrictions, not an examination of all issues that could stem from increased immigration. My lead essay focuses on one aspect of that examination—immigration’s impact on economic freedom.

However, my focus on how immigrants impact formal and informal institutions that impact productivity in destination countries does implicitly and indirectly address many of the issues raised by Peter. If, as we argue in Wretched Refuse , immigration does not harm institutions responsible for high productivity, then the overall economic gains from greatly liberalized immigration are massive. So massive, in fact, it’s hard to not find ways for public policy to redirect some of the massive gains to address other issues—fiscal, distributional, infrastructure adjustments, and so on. So-called “keyhole” solutions in Ilya’s response essay . If that is done, my work with Alex is not just a utilitarian perspective. Elsewhere, the case has been made that if the forecast gains from liberalized immigration are anywhere near accurate, then every major ethical framework recommends unrestricted immigration (Caplan and Naik 2015; Caplan and Weinersmith 2019; Powell and Brennan 2021).

Accordingly, my response here focuses on the aspect of Peter’s essay that is most directly relevant for assessing how immigration could impact the institutions responsible for our prosperity. How has recent immigration impacted economic freedom in the United States?

First, however, we need to be clear, that contrary to his title “What We Can Learn from Our Relatively Open Borders,” the United States has nothing close to an “open border,” if by that we mean an essentially unrestricted quantity of immigrants entering. Peter oscillates in his essay about how “open” the U.S. border is, from stating plainly that “we clearly do not” have a de facto open border to later saying that the United States “has been conducting an experiment in relatively open borders” in recent decades. So, let’s clear up how restricted immigration to the United States actually is. The fact that somewhere between 11 and 13 million foreign-born people reside in the United States illegally does not mean that the border is relatively open. It isn’t hard to see the evidence that the border is mostly closed. Otherwise, why would so many people be on waitlists (sometimes decades long) to legally migrate to the United States? They would “simply” come illegally. Of course, there is nothing simple about coming illegally, otherwise why would coyote fees for smuggling people across the border be so high? The high smuggling fees are an indication of how closed the border is.

More scientifically, we can turn to the wage differentials between the United States and immigrants’ origin countries. It’s hard to find any labor market on the planet where there are real wage differentials much greater than 1.5 across geographic regions where works are free to relocate. Clemens and coauthors’ (2019) study of real wage differentials between the United States and 42 poorer immigrant origin countries found wage differentials for identical workers (controlling for gender, age, education, etc.) of 3.95 between the United States and the median origin country. The differences ranged from a high of 16.4 to a low of 1.7 among the 42 countries. If immigration to the United States was relatively open, these wage differentials would not exist.

That said, even with a mostly closed border we can still learn something about the impact of immigration on U.S. institutions related to our productivity. In my lead essay , I highlighted some of what I think we can learn from when the United States had largely unrestricted immigration until 1921, its most closed borders from 1921 to 1965, and the intermediate degree of closedness from 1965 to the present. Peter wants to focus more on what we can learn from this most recent period.

The number of foreign-born people in the United States has increased substantially over the last 30 to 40 years, and the distribution of those people varies tremendously across U.S. states. Most immigrants live in California, Florida, New Jersey, New York, or Texas. Between 1980 and 2010, the average share of a state’s population that was foreign born was 7.6 percent, but the standard deviation was almost as large, at 6.5 percentage points. A few papers have taken advantage of this variation to examine how recent immigration has impacted U.S. state-level economic freedom.

Padilla and Cachanosky (2018) look at 10-year panels from 1980 through 2010 and employ pooled OLS, fixed-effect OLS, and system GMM methods to analyze how initial shares of foreign-born adults or naturalized citizens impacted state-level economic freedom a decade later. They control for initial levels of freedom, so that they are essentially using initial stocks of immigrants to examine how they impact the change in economic freedom. In follow up papers Padilla and Cachanosky (2019) follow a similar methodology but then separate the foreign born into four different quartiles based on the economic freedom in their origin country to see if immigrants from less free origins might have a different impact than those from more free origin countries. Similarly, their third follow up paper (Padilla et al. 2019) divides the foreign born by educational attainment to see if less educated immigrants are detrimental to economic freedom. Tuszynski and Stansel (2019) is closely related to the Padilla and Cachanosky studies but attempts to better deal with endogeneity by using two decade-lagged stocks of immigrants. Yao et al (2019) take a different approach and use a synthetic control methodology (like we did for Israel and Jordan) to see the impact the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) had on state level economic freedom. After reviewing each of these studies in much greater detail in Chapter 5 of Wretched Refuse , Alex and I summarize their overall findings:

Taken as a whole, the group of papers studying the effect of immigration on state-level economic freedom is not as positive as our findings for how immigrants affect country-level economic freedom. However, the US state-level research does not find any compelling systematic evidence that greater immigration erodes state-level economic freedom either. Results are often insignificant or weakly significant at the 10 percent level and, even when they are statistically significant, their magnitude is small. The statistically significant changes reviewed here would rarely result in any state changing its economic freedom ranking among the other states if it received a one standard deviation increase in its immigrant share. Taken together with the study of IRCA, the overall results in this section suggest essentially no meaningful relationship between immigration and US state-level economic freedom (Nowrasteh and Powell 2020: 94).

This finding is largely consistent with what we should expect from surveys on the policy opinions of the foreign-born in the United States and their political participation rates. Alex’s coauthored work with Sam Wilson found that naturalized immigrants (those eligible to vote) and descendants of immigrants had policy views not statistically different from the native-born on government spending on welfare programs, Social Security benefit levels, government spending on the environment, and government programs to reduce income differences. The opinion differences on these issues shown by non-citizen immigrants was larger but still not statistically significant (Nowrasteh and Wilson 2017).

In his recent book, Bryan Caplan (Caplan and Weinersmith 2019) also examines the policy opinions of immigrants using the General Social Survey and finds that immigrants and the native born are equally hostile to taxes on the poor and middle class and, if anything, immigrants are more hostile to taxes on the rich than the native-born. In contrast to these more general results, he finds that immigrants without a high school degree are more in favor of greater government regulation of the economy and spending. However, there are good reasons why these policy views might not influence actual policy as measured by economic freedom. First, many of these low-skilled immigrants are not eligible to vote. Second, immigrant voter turnout rates (48 percent of those eligible) are lower than native-born turnout rates (72 percent), and voter turnout rates among low-education immigrants eligible to vote are even lower (27 percent).

To sum up, although the United States does not currently have anything close to unrestricted mass immigration, I do think we can learn something from how recent immigrants have impacted U.S. institutions of economic freedom. So far, what we’ve learned is that they don’t have much impact on state-level economic freedom.

Caplan, B. and Naik, V. (2015). A Radical Case for Open Borders. In B. Powell, eds., The Economics of Immigration: Market-Based Approaches, Social Science, and Public Policy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Caplan, B. and Weinersmith, Z. (2019). Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. New York, NY: First Second.

Clemens, M., Montenegro, C. and Pritchett, L. (2019), The place premium: Bounding the price equivalent of migration barriers. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 101 (2): 201-213.

Nowrasteh, A. and Powell B. (2020). Wretched Refuse: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nowrasteh, A. and Wilson, S. (2017). Immigrants Assimilate into the Political Mainstream. Economic Development Bulletin No. 27. Washington DC: Cato Institute.

Padilla, A. and Cachanosky, N. (2018). The Grecian horse: Does immigration lead to the deterioration of American institutions? Public Choice, 174(3-4), 351-405.

Padilla, A. and Cachanosky, N. (2019). The Grecian Horse II: Do Immigrants Import Their Home Country’s Institutions Into Their Host Countries? The Case of the American States.” SSRN. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3316415 .

Padilla, A. and Cachanosky, N, and Beck, J. (2019). Immigration and Economic Freedom: Does Education Matter?. Journal of Private Enterprise. Forthcoming.

Powell, B. and Brennan, J. (Forthocming) The Ethics of Doing Business with Illegal Immigrants. Independent Review.

Tuszynski, M, and Stansel, D. (2019). Examining the Relationship between Immigration and State Institutions: Does Region of Origin Matter? Working Paper.

Yao, L., Bolen, B. and Williamson, C. (2019). The Effect of Immigration on US State-level Institutions: Evidence from the Immigration Reform and Control Act. Working Paper.

Also from this issue

Looking specifically at immigrants’ effects on economic institutions, Benjamin Powell finds little to be concerned about. Natural experiments in Israel and Jordan in particular suggest that immigration does not lead to reduced economic freedom, and historical data from the United States corroborates this. Though the matter isn’t open and shut, the evidence needed to establish a likelihood of harm appears so far to be lacking.

Response Essays

Suppose that immigration skeptics are right, and that higher immigration levels threaten American institutions. That threat need not always come to fruition; in particular, if we suspect that it’s coming, we can prepare for it. Not only that, but economists have observed that higher immigration levels translate to substantially more wealth for both the immigrant and the host country. Ilya Somin argues that we can and should spend some of this new wealth on sustaining the institutions that help to create it.

Eric Kaufmann explains the mechanism by which immigrants degrade a host country’s institutions: Because they are of a different ethnicity, immigrants cause mistrust; labor unions in particular are weakened. This results in a relatively free market for labor, which lowers living standards for the working class. Beyond a certain level of fragmentation, even political parties come to be dominated by ethnic concerns, and ethnic parties corrode a society still further. The way to address these problems, says Kaufmann, is to limit immigration to the rate at which immigrants can assimilate to the host society.

Peter Skerry questions the relevance of Powell and Nowrasteh’s analysis to the United States, because the “quasi-natural experiments” they highlight—two large but discrete migrant flows in the Middle East—differ drastically from the prolonged U.S. experience of mass immigration, legal and illegal, that began in 1965 and has ramped up to the present day. More lax enforcement than explicit policy, this American “experiment” has led to an entrenched undocumented population of 10-11 million and provoked a backlash exacerbated by five aspects of the contemporary debate: 1) a rhetorically convenient but operationally simplistic distinction between “good” legal immigrants and “bad” illegal ones; 2) a deliberate blurring, by advocates, of the distinction between immigrants and refugees; 3) post-Cold War, globalist rhetoric of a “flat” and “borderless” world; 4) organizationally debilitated political parties that do not seek to assimilate newcomers as they once did; and 5) a media-driven politics that portrays immigrants, especially Hispanics, as having the same problems, and needs, as the poorest and most marginalized black Americans.

The Conversation

• Fractionalization, Trust, and Populist Backlash by Benjamin Powell
• What We Can Learn from the United States’ Mostly Closed Borders by Benjamin Powell
• Immigration Restriction and Liberal Democracy by Eric Kaufmann
• Immigration Advocates Must Consider Virtue, Not Just Economics by Peter Skerry

View the discussion thread.

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5 Global Equality and Open Borders

• Published: February 2020
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Egalitarians disagree about the extent to which states should have open borders. Sometimes, this disagreement is due to a deeper disagreement about the scope of egalitarian justice. Egalitarians holding that equality has domestic scope only may be inclined to favor restrictive immigration policies to protect the welfare state. Egalitarians holding that equality has global scope, on the other hand, may be inclined to support more open borders in order to reduce global inequality. This chapter argues that equality has global scope and then considers the implications of global egalitarianism for the issue of open borders. Furthermore, the chapter provides an argument for why (more) open borders can be expected reduce global inequality. Then some objections to this argument are considered, based on brain drain, threats to welfare states, and in-group bias. Finally, the chapter considers the suggestion that (more) open borders is not the best (or most efficient) way of reducing global inequality.

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The Case for Getting Rid of Borders—Completely

No defensible moral framework regards foreigners as less deserving of rights than people born in the right place at the right time.

To paraphrase Rousseau, man is born free, yet everywhere he is caged. Barbed-wire, concrete walls, and gun-toting guards confine people to the nation-state of their birth. But why? The argument for open borders is both economic and moral. All people should be free to move about the earth, uncaged by the arbitrary lines known as borders.

Not every place in the world is equally well-suited to mass economic activity. Nature’s bounty is divided unevenly. Variations in wealth and income created by these differences are magnified by governments that suppress entrepreneurship and promote religious intolerance, gender discrimination, or other bigotry. Closed borders compound these injustices, cementing inequality into place and sentencing their victims to a life of penury.

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Enforce the Border—Humanely

The overwhelming majority of would-be immigrants want little more than to make a better life for themselves and their families by moving to economic opportunity and participating in peaceful, voluntary trade. But lawmakers and heads of state quash these dreams with state-sanctioned violence—forced repatriation, involuntary detention, or worse—often while paying lip service to “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Wage differences are a revealing metric of border discrimination. When a worker from a poorer country moves to a richer one, her wages might double, triple, or rise even tenfold. These extreme wage differences reflect restrictions as stifling as the laws that separated white and black South Africans at the height of Apartheid. Geographical differences in wages also signal opportunity—for financially empowering the migrants, of course, but also for increasing total world output. On the other side of discrimination lies untapped potential. Economists have estimated that a world of open borders would double world GDP.

Even relatively small increases in immigration flows can have enormous benefits. If the developed world were to take in enough immigrants to enlarge its labor force by a mere one percent , it is estimated that the additional economic value created would be worth more to the migrants than all of the world’s official foreign aid combined. Immigration is the greatest anti-poverty program ever devised.

And while the benefits of cross-border movements are tremendous for the immigrants, they are also significant for those born in destination countries. Immigration unleashes economic forces that raise real wages throughout an economy. New immigrants possess skills different from those of their hosts, and these differences enable workers in both groups to better exploit their special talents and leverage their comparative advantages. The effect is to improve the welfare of newcomers and natives alike. The immigrant who mows the lawn of the nuclear physicist indirectly helps to unlock the secrets of the universe.

What moral theory justifies using wire, wall, and weapon to prevent people from moving to opportunity? What moral theory justifies using tools of exclusion to prevent people from exercising their right to vote with their feet?

No standard moral framework, be it utilitarian, libertarian, egalitarian, Rawlsian, Christian, or any other well-developed perspective, regards people from foreign lands as less entitled to exercise their rights—or as inherently possessing less moral worth—than people lucky to have been born in the right place at the right time. Nationalism, of course, discounts the rights, interests, and moral value of “the Other, but this disposition is inconsistent with our fundamental moral teachings and beliefs.

Freedom of movement is a basic human right. Thus the Universal Declaration of Human Rights belies its name when it proclaims this right only “within the borders of each state.” Human rights do not stop at the border.Today, we treat as pariahs those governments that refuse to let their people exit. I look forward to the day when we treat as pariahs those governments that refuse to let people enter.

Is there hope for the future? Closed borders are one of the world’s greatest moral failings but the opening of borders is the world’s greatest economic opportunity. The grandest moral revolutions in history—the abolition of slavery, the securing of religious freedom, the recognition of the rights of women—yielded a world in which virtually everyone was better off. They also demonstrated that the fears that had perpetuated these injustices were unfounded. Similarly, a planet unscarred by iron curtains is not only a world of greater equality and justice. It is a world unafraid of itself.

This article has been adapted from the forthcoming book How to Save Humanity .

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There’s Nothing Wrong With Open Borders

Why a brave Democrat should make the case for vastly expanding immigration.

By Farhad Manjoo

Opinion Columnist

The internet expands the bounds of acceptable discourse, so ideas considered out of bounds not long ago now rocket toward widespread acceptability. See: cannabis legalization, government-run health care, white nationalism and, of course, the flat-earthers.

Yet there’s one political shore that remains stubbornly beyond the horizon. It’s an idea almost nobody in mainstream politics will address, other than to hurl the label as a bloody cudgel .

I’m talking about opening up America’s borders to everyone who wants to move here.

Imagine not just opposing President Trump’s wall but also opposing the nation’s cruel and expensive immigration and border-security apparatus in its entirety. Imagine radically shifting our stance toward outsiders from one of suspicion to one of warm embrace. Imagine that if you passed a minimal background check, you’d be free to live, work, pay taxes and die in the United States. Imagine moving from Nigeria to Nebraska as freely as one might move from Massachusetts to Maine.

[ Farhad Manjoo answered your questions about this column on Twitter . ]

There’s a witheringly obvious moral, economic, strategic and cultural case for open borders, and we have a political opportunity to push it. As Democrats jockey for the presidency, there’s room for a brave politician to oppose President Trump’s racist immigration rhetoric not just by fighting his wall and calling for the abolishment of I.C.E. but also by making a proactive and affirmative case for the vast expansion of immigration.

It would be a change from the stale politics of the modern era, in which both parties agreed on the supposed wisdom of “border security” and assumed that immigrants were to be feared.

As an immigrant, this idea confounds me. My family came to the United States from our native South Africa in the late 1980s. After jumping through lots of expensive and confusing legal hoops, we became citizens in 2000. Obviously, it was a blessing: In rescuing me from a society in which people of my color were systematically oppressed , America has given me a chance at liberty.

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ECONLOG POST

Dec 14 2020

Open Borders : Pegg's Essay Questions

Bryan caplan .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-wrapper.box-post-id-69046.pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline.multiple-authors-target-shortcode.box-instance-id-1 .pp-author-boxes-avatar img { width: 80px important; height: 80px important; } .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-wrapper.box-post-id-69046.pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline.multiple-authors-target-shortcode.box-instance-id-1 .pp-author-boxes-avatar img { border-radius: 50% important; } .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-wrapper.box-post-id-69046.pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline.multiple-authors-target-shortcode.box-instance-id-1 .pp-author-boxes-meta a { background-color: #655997 important; } .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-wrapper.box-post-id-69046.pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline.multiple-authors-target-shortcode.box-instance-id-1 .pp-author-boxes-meta a { color: #ffffff important; } .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-wrapper.box-post-id-69046.pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline.multiple-authors-target-shortcode.box-instance-id-1 .pp-author-boxes-meta a:hover { color: #ffffff important; } .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-wrapper.box-post-id-69046.pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline.multiple-authors-target-shortcode.box-instance-id-1 .pp-author-boxes-recent-posts-title { border-bottom-style: dotted important; } .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-wrapper.box-post-id-69046.pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline.multiple-authors-target-shortcode.box-instance-id-1 .pp-author-boxes-recent-posts-item { text-align: left important; } .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-wrapper.box-post-id-69046.pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline.multiple-authors-target-shortcode.box-instance-id-1 .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-li { border-style: none important; } .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-wrapper.box-post-id-69046.pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline.multiple-authors-target-shortcode.box-instance-id-1 .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-li { color: #3c434a important; } .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-wrapper.box-post-id-69046.pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline.multiple-authors-target-shortcode.box-instance-id-1 .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-li { border-radius: px important; } .pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline ul.pp-multiple-authors-boxes-ul { display: flex; } .pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline ul.pp-multiple-authors-boxes-ul li { margin-right: 10px }.pp-multiple-authors-boxes-wrapper.pp-multiple-authors-wrapper.pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline.multiple-authors-target-shortcode.box-post-id-69046.box-instance-id-1.ppma_boxes_69046 ul li > div:nth-child(1) {flex: 1 important;}.

By Bryan Caplan, Dec 14 2020

IUPUI ‘s Scott Pegg assigned  Open Borders this semester, and kindly gave me permission to post the following essay questions on the book.  Enjoy!

Please answer one of the following four questions. Because this is an open book, open time assignment, I expect to see some detail and specificity in your answers. References to Caplan and Weinersmith’s book  Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration  should be made whichever question you choose. Your answers should be somewhere in the vicinity of 3-5 pages double-spaced typed in Times New Roman 12 point font. Take as much time as you need to answer the question. This is not a timed exam.

1) Explain why Caplan and Weinersmith believe that “open borders has jaw-dropping potential to enrich migrants and natives alike” and “is a shortcut to global prosperity.” Upon what causal logic or what empirical findings do they base these claims? How does open borders compare in this regard to other potentially enriching policy changes like freer trade or greater global financial integration that we could pursue? Indicate whether you find Caplan and Weinersmith’s arguments that open borders potentially offers the prospect of “trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk” convincing or not.

2) In 2016, Americans elected Donald Trump as their president. One of his central campaign promises was to restrict immigration into the United States and build a wall to keep immigrants out. In 2020, President Trump faces a tough re-election battle but will likely carry the state of Indiana where we live easily. Given that, it’s probably not unreasonable to assume that give or take a majority of students in this class share views on immigration that are closer to President Trump’s than they are to the views expressed by Caplan and Weinersmith in  Open Borders . Highlight which arguments put forward in  Open Borders  you most disagree with or find the most problematic and explain why. Make, develop, and support the best critique of the ideas put forward in this book that you can.

3) In attempting to make their case for a more open and less restrictive system of immigration, Caplan and Weinersmith consider several objections to open borders including immigrants threats to low-wage workers, freedom, our government’s fiscal position, our culture or way of life and even lowering our average national intelligence (IQ) score. Give specific examples of how Caplan and Weinersmith undermine these critiques or sources of opposition to their ideas or what they suggest as solutions to overcome these fears. Indicate which criticisms, if any, you think they effectively address and which criticisms, if any, are still strong or effective arguments against open borders.

4)  Open Borders  is premised upon the idea that “we live in a world of global apartheid. An apartheid based not on the race of your parents but on the nation of your parents.” Caplan and Weinersmith go on to argue that “It’s wrong to tell people where they can live or work because they are black… or women… or Jews. Why isn’t it equally wrong to tell people where they can live or work because they were born in Mexico, Haiti or India?” While these sentiments appeal to our better angels, they are completely unrealistic at a time when the US doesn’t even have open borders with Canada. Explain why Caplan and Weinersmith believe that “even if open borders never wins, the ideal can still serve as our moral compass.” What kind of progress can we or should we make short of fully opening borders?

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Bryan caplan on immigration, reader comments.

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Dec 14 2020 at 2:56pm

I’m no longer in college, so I don’t have to write big long essays. But here are my short answers to these questions (just as an intellectual exercise).

1. Even someone who is less productive in literally every activity when compared to others, still can add tremendous value to our lives. Why? Because every second he spends doing an unproductive task is (up to) a second that another person can spend doing more productive tasks, and not that unproductive task. The world’s best surgeon, who is also the world’s best secretary, should still hire a secretary, as every second he is doing secretarial work are seconds he could spend doing surgery.

If we take this principle, and combine it with the fact that many people reside in very unproductive countries, where even productive people are largely engaging in largely unproductive tasks. It’s easy to see how allowing these (both productive and relatively unproductive) people to move to the first world, where they can then engage in significantly more productive tasks greatly increases the productivity, and wealth, of the nation as a whole.

2. Honestly, I don’t buy the argument that the biggest reason immigrants vote democrat is because Republicans make immigrants feel unwelcome. I think how people vote have a lot more to do with peer effects (e.g. I’m going to vote a certain way to make my peers like me) and fundamental differences in the way people seek and process information (e.g. where and why do you watch the news), than vague emotional references (e.g. “feeling unwelcome”).

To the extent that minimum wage laws hurt people, they are hurting the poorest and most vulnerable in society. Does this make poor people feel unwelcome in the democratic party? I doubt it. If anything, they are more likely to feel welcome in the democratic party, because the democrats are vocally signalling that poor people deserve more money. Likewise, why wouldn’t republican’s anti-immigration message (to the extent that it actually exists) make immigrants feel more welcome? After all, coming to the USA is like winning the lottery, do you really want to cheapen that victory?

How then can we explain the fact that immigrants used to vote more Republican than they do now? I don’t know, but I think there are plenty of plausible explanations that hold just as much merit as Bryan’s theory. For example, couldn’t the selection effect in favor of republican-leaning immigrants have been stronger in the past. Who is more likely to just intrinsically vote republican, a Cuban who travels to America in 1958 fleeing communist takeover or a Cuban who travels to America in 2020? Another example, social media has likely had an effect on the way we vote. Younger generations are more likely to vote democrat, perhaps in part because they log into social media and see all of their friends signalling about voting democrat, which makes them more likely to vote democrat. Whereas before social media, they wouldn’t have been exposed to peer effects this strong. Perhaps immigrants, who have different peers on their social media accounts (e.g. their relatives outside of the country), are subject to these peer effects to a degree that’s even stronger than natives.

3. I think on the questions of basic morality and economics, minus institutional impacts, their arguments are stellar. When it comes to the more institutionally minded economic arguments (culture, IQ, voting patterns), their arguments are less sound, though to be fair, these are just hard questions and Bryan and Zach probably do much better than their opponents at trying to represent the issues.

4. How about opening the borders with Canada, for one?

Putting the cheek aside, I’m particularly interested in the idea of a country just setting a hard-line date for open borders. For example, what if the US Federal Government just said “On January 1st 2070, we are opening our borders, this is a constitutional amendment, it cannot be overturned, it’s happening, there’s nothing that can be done to stop it, go.” In such a situation, what would happen? I would hope that we would slowly, over time, modify our institutions (to the extent that they need to be modified) such that they would be resilient to open immigration. My fear is that people wouldn’t modify their institutions, and simply wait and complain when the immigration did happen, and start resorting to more primitive measures of constructing institutional resilience (e.g. racism, xenophobia, actual apartheid, etc).

Dec 15 2020 at 3:18am

At rock bottom, libertarians often have feet of clay or seem, well, irrelevant.

Immigration.

OK, suppose we move to a privatized system of self-government, that is cities, and even regions, are privately owned and operated. Libertarian nirvana.

If you are allowed, you can live in a particular private city or region. Perhaps birthrights would be respected, or at least for the first 21 years of life, etc.

So, a privately owned city or region could bar access to anything or person it wanted. No imports, no immigration, if that is what the charter or rules of the private city/region hold. I imagine most, if not all, cities and regions would have somewhat strict rules on permanent residency.They would have to, or suffer from adverse selection. Non-residents would have to show their permits quickly and plainly, or get the boot.

Libertarians would have no problem with this arrangement.

Even roads between regions and cities could be private toll-ways.

All of this acceptable to libertarians.

But the minute a government upholds a border…wrong, wrong, wrong!

In a curious way, libertarians are calling for the US to engage in adverse selection of residents.

Dec 15 2020 at 7:25am

Yes, strongly deontological and absolutistic libertarianism is definitely a self-contained immunizing strategy. And that is also a problem that radiates. In a certain way, libertarians are in constant dialectical conversation with the government and the state about how these should respect, guarantee, define, protect and frame their property rights without violating them. Just as Marx was in a crazy conversation with capital to prevent the alienation of labor that capital produces.

Dec 15 2020 at 8:31am

That is a text book example of a ¨straw man falacy¨.

Dec 15 2020 at 8:52am

A straw man fallacy? How so?

Are you allowed to enter a large private-housing development? Why would you have open access to private city?

Would it not make sense to sell all roads to private operators?

If you actually owned shares in a private city, would you want to control who lived in the city? I would. I imagine, like a co-op, there would be extensive examination of applicants.

We might allow residency, without share ownership, in certain worker dorms, within conscribed areas. A version of this goes on in Singapore.

Explain your thoughts further.

Dec 15 2020 at 12:15pm

The post does not say a single word about “private cities”

Dec 15 2020 at 11:31am

I think your scale is all wrong.  I doubt you would get any or not very many organizational structures larger than the HOA level.

You wouldn’t have privately owned cities or regions, at most privately owned neighborhoods.  Sure, there might be some chains, so you might have a Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong neighborhood franchise in every city – if you are a citizen of one, you are a citizen of them all.

Dec 15 2020 at 1:20pm

All of which is entirely beside the point as far as the question of whether your community, be it a privately owned a city or state-governed country, should open its borders (for utilitarian reasons). That’s the important question.

Whether a state has more of a right to than a privately owned polity depends on whether the people deciding who gets in has the right to do so (e.g., do they have a valid claim of ownership over the area from which they’re excluding others). Maybe that’s irrelevant in practice, but if we accept the idea that there is such a thing as just ownership (and many people, not just deontological libertarians, believe there is), then a justly privately owned city refusing to let people in is no more comparable to a modern state not letting people in than someone not letting anyone into their house is comparable to someone stealing someone else’s house and not letting anyone into the house they stole.

Thomas Hutcheson

Dec 16 2020 at 12:17pm.

Although possibly subsumed in #2, I’d like to see exploration of the difference between “open borders” and vastly greater but still selective immigration.

Comments are closed.

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Alberto mingardi .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-wrapper.box-post-id-69046.pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline.multiple-authors-target-shortcode.box-instance-id-1 .pp-author-boxes-avatar img { width: 80px important; height: 80px important; } .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-wrapper.box-post-id-69046.pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline.multiple-authors-target-shortcode.box-instance-id-1 .pp-author-boxes-avatar img { border-radius: 50% important; } .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-wrapper.box-post-id-69046.pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline.multiple-authors-target-shortcode.box-instance-id-1 .pp-author-boxes-meta a { background-color: #655997 important; } .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-wrapper.box-post-id-69046.pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline.multiple-authors-target-shortcode.box-instance-id-1 .pp-author-boxes-meta a { color: #ffffff important; } .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-wrapper.box-post-id-69046.pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline.multiple-authors-target-shortcode.box-instance-id-1 .pp-author-boxes-meta a:hover { color: #ffffff important; } .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-wrapper.box-post-id-69046.pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline.multiple-authors-target-shortcode.box-instance-id-1 .pp-author-boxes-recent-posts-title { border-bottom-style: dotted important; } .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-wrapper.box-post-id-69046.pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline.multiple-authors-target-shortcode.box-instance-id-1 .pp-author-boxes-recent-posts-item { text-align: left important; } .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-wrapper.box-post-id-69046.pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline.multiple-authors-target-shortcode.box-instance-id-1 .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-li { border-style: none important; } .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-wrapper.box-post-id-69046.pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline.multiple-authors-target-shortcode.box-instance-id-1 .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-li { color: #3c434a important; } .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-wrapper.box-post-id-69046.pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline.multiple-authors-target-shortcode.box-instance-id-1 .pp-multiple-authors-boxes-li { border-radius: px important; } .pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline ul.pp-multiple-authors-boxes-ul { display: flex; } .pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline ul.pp-multiple-authors-boxes-ul li { margin-right: 10px }.pp-multiple-authors-boxes-wrapper.pp-multiple-authors-wrapper.pp-multiple-authors-layout-inline.multiple-authors-target-shortcode.box-post-id-69046.box-instance-id-1.ppma_boxes_69046 ul li > div:nth-child(1) {flex: 1 important;}.

A few days ago the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed of mine, on the new Christmas restrictions that the Italian government passed for coping with Covid19. Here’s a link (gated). I am not a fan of the restrictions. Italians are no longer free to move through the country; they may travel only within their respective...

Response to a Friend about Fear of Death

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My friend Ross Levatter sent me a thoughtful email challenging some aspects of my posts (here and here) on the risks we should fear. He gave me permission to post the whole thing. I also shared it with co-author Charley Hooper, who emailed me his thoughts. I'll answer, and give Charley's answer, after his letter. Here'...

IUPUI's Scott Pegg assigned Open Borders this semester, and kindly gave me permission to post the following essay questions on the book.  Enjoy! Please answer one of the following four questions. Because this is an open book, open time assignment, I expect to see some detail and specificity in your answers. Re...