Why Erasing All the World’s Borders Would Double World GDP

Post by Nathan Smith (see all posts by Nathan Smith)

The article below, by me, was published this morning at the Daily GOOD: http://www.good.is/posts/why-erasing-all-the-world-s-borders-would-double-gdp.

Economists have estimated that opening the world’s borders to migration could double world GDP. To get the gist of that number, imagine that your boss walked into your office tomorrow and said, “we’re doubling your salary”—and the same thing happened to everyone else, too.

Nathan Smith vs. Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Post by Nathan Smith (see all posts by Nathan Smith)

When I wrote Principles of a Free Society, I believe that I very dimly had in mind Hans-Hermann Hoppe as an intellectual adversary, but for some reason– some stray remarks at the Cato Institute which I over-interpreted, I think– I had the impression that Hoppe was so disreputable that it would be a kind of sin to mention him or read him. Thinking it over now, that’s hardly fair! My views on the Iraq War would, I suppose, make me at least as heretical from a Cato Institute perspective as Hans-Hermann Hoppe for his views on immigration (and homosexuality, but that’s not relevant here). Hoppe seems, like me, to aspire to a thoroughgoing rationalism, and to like Lockean homesteading as an origin for property rights. We have enough in common to provide the basis for an argument. Moreover, what I realize now is that even before I wrote Principles, I had heard a rumor about Hoppe’s argument for migration restrictions, guessed the nature of the argument from that rumor, and wrote Principles, among other things, to refute it. But since my argument against Hoppe is spread out throughout Principles and does not explicitly mention Hoppe, it seems worthwhile to bring Hoppe’s argument and my refutation together in one place. This is my contribution to the debate summarized at our anarcho-capitalist counter-factual page.

First, Hoppe’s argument, from “Natural Order, the State, and the Immigration Problem.” Hoppe starts by suggesting, without really arguing for it, that:

People of one ethno-culture tend to live in close proximity to one another and spatially separated and distant from people of another ethno-culture. Whites live among Whites and separate from Asians and Blacks. Italian speakers live among other Italians and separate from English speakers. Christians live among other Christians and separate from Muslims. Catholics live among Catholics and separate from Protestants, etc.

Well, no, they don’t tend to, really, except when the government compels them to. Segregation occurs often in history, but so does integration. And anyway, given that the suggested groupings of people overlap greatly– there are white, Asian, and black Christians; there are white Christians and Muslims and atheists; there are people who speak both Italian and English– the proposed regime of spatial segregation doesn’t seem to make sense (unless the segregation is very fine indeed, e.g., “only Italian-speaking white Catholics in this neighborhood”… but that’s hardly typical). But Hoppe’s next move is what makes his argument distinctive:

Let us take one more step and assume that all property is owned privately and the entire globe is settled. Every piece of land, every house and building, every road, river, and lake, every forest and mountain, and all of the coastline is owned by private owners or firms. No such thing as “public” property or “open frontier” exists. Let us take a look at the problem of migration under this scenario of a “natural order.”

First and foremost, in a natural order, there is no such thing as “freedom of migration.” People cannot move about as they please. Wherever a person moves, he moves on private property; and private ownership implies the owner’s right to include as well as to exclude others from his property. Essentially, a person can move only if he is invited by a recipient property owner, and this recipient-owner can revoke his invitation and expel his invitees whenever he deems their continued presence on his property undesirable (in violation of his visitation code).

Given this assumption, the rest of the argument is rather predictable, at least to me. Still, we may as well follow Hoppe a little further. First:

In a natural order, there is no such thing as “freedom of migration.” People cannot move about as they please. Wherever a person moves, he moves on private property; and private ownership implies the owner’s right to include as well as to exclude others from his property.

Second, on roads and other transportation:

There will be plenty of movement under this scenario because there are powerful reasons to open access to one’s property, but there are also reasons to restrict or close access. Those who are the most inclusive are the owners of roads, railway stations, harbors, and airports, for example. Interregional movement is their business. Accordingly, their admission standards can be expected to be low, typically requiring no more than the payment of a user fee. However, even they would not follow a completely non-discriminatory admission policy. For instance, they would exclude intoxicated or unruly people and eject all trespassers, beggars, and bums from their property, and they might videotape or otherwise monitor or screen their customers while on their property.

To this we will return. Finally, it is in residential property where Hoppe expects to see the highest degree of segregation:

It is in the residential housing and real estate market where discrimination against and exclusion of ethno-cultural strangers will tend to be most pronounced. For it is in the area of residential as contrasted to commercial property where the human desire to be private, secluded, protected, and undisturbed from external events and intrusions is most pronounced. The value of residential property to its owner depends essentially on its almost total exclusivity. Only family members and occasionally friends are included. And if residential property is located in a neighborhood, this desire for undisturbed possession—peace and privacy—is best accomplished by a high degree of ethno-cultural homogeneity (as this lowers transaction costs while simultaneously increasing protection from external disturbances and intrusions). By renting or selling residential property to strangers (and especially to strangers from ethno-culturally distant quarters), heterogeneity is introduced into the neighborhood. Transaction costs tend to increase, and the peculiar peace-and-privacy-security—the freedom from external, foreign intrusions—sought and expected of residential property tends to fall, resulting in lower residential property values.

Many very interesting things to note here. First of all, Hoppe’s scheme must create a strong bias in favor of the right to invite. Second, Hoppe’s scheme justifies not only immigration restrictions but also domestic residential segregation of the kind that existed in the US before the 1960s. I suppose one must give Hoppe credit here both for consistency and for political incorrectness. Hoppe does not presuppose the moral relevance of countries and assume a right to free migration within but not across national boundaries. He explicitly envisions a society of ethno-culturally homogeneous neighborhoods, based on a generalized preference that he seems to regard as an indelible human propensity to stick with one’s own kind. Though Hoppe is much too complacent about this, Robert Putnam’s work probably demands that this view be taken more seriously than political correctness might admit. Hoppe goes on to introduce the state, and argue that the lack of freedom of migration that, he supposes, would prevail in a “natural order” should cross-apply to a society ruled by a state. Even then, the right to invite persists:

If a domestic resident-owner invites a person and arranges for his access onto the resident-owner’s property but the government excludes this person from the state territory, it is a case of forced exclusion (a phenomenon that does not exist in a natural order). On the other hand, if the government admits a person while there is no domestic resident-owner who has invited this person onto his property, it is a case of forced integration (also nonexistent in a natural order, where all movement is invited).

It’s not clear to me that VDARE restrictionists are right to claim Hoppe as an ally within the libertarian camp. After all, an unlimited right to invite might not look much different from open borders– many US natives would quickly learn to sell their rights to sponsor immigrants to the highest bidder– and limiting the right to invite violates Hoppe’s principles. But I’m not not too interested in how to apply Hoppe’s argument at this stage, because my dissenting argument branches off at the stage in the argument where Hoppe defines the “natural order.” Read more of this post

Nonexcludable but rival goods

Post by Nathan Smith (see all posts by Nathan Smith)

There seems to be a widespread sense that while immigration can benefit immigrants, it hurts natives because immigrants grab a share of the pie. This argument is invalid as regards private goods and public goods, but it may be valid for nonexcludable but rival goods.

Economists distinguish private goods from public goods by two criteria: (a) rivalry, and (b) excludability. Private goods are rival and excludable. Public goods are nonrival and nonexcludable. At least, that’s what economists do when they’re being rigorous. There’s a frustrating tendency to stretch the concept of a public good from the narrow niche in which it is most proper and to which the theory of public goods– for example, the idea that you sum demand curves for private goods horizontally and demand curves for public goods vertically– properly applies, and use the word in a loose populist fashion to include lots of stuff that governments in fact provide even though it’s rival and/or excludable. Most obviously, here: public education. If economists had more logical rigor and theoretical integrity, they would proclaim with one voice that public education is not a public good, because classroom seats are rival– only one student can sit in a seat at a time; teachers can only grade one homework assignment at a time– and excludable– it’s perfectly feasible, though not permitted by current law but that’s irrelevant in principle, not to let a student into the classroom. But since that’s too politically incorrect, they usually say, with a shade of embarrassment, that, well, yes, education must be a public good, although it’s not an “impure” public good, since… well, since it doesn’t really meet the criteria for being a public good, at all. (At most, it has positive externalities.) I won’t say that education isn’t a public good, since everyone muddle-headedly insists that it is and I don’t feel I have a right to redefine the phrase public goods to be consistent with the theory. But I would advocate limiting the use of the term to exclude education.

While private and public goods get the most attention, the two criteria clearly imply, not merely a dichotomy, but a four-way typology, as shown in the table below:

There would be many grey areas here even if what ought to be the clear case of education were definitely reclassified as a private good. We don’t exclude people from the park; but could we? Could we do it at reasonable cost? The park is usually non-rival, but perhaps on a brilliant bright Saturday when winter suddenly melts into spring, it is so crowded with picnickers that one can’t find a place on the grass, and the park becomes rival. Emergency room care is technically excludable: one could leave people who don’t have insurance or cash bleeding outside the doors. But it’s not legally excludable, since 1986, and perhaps it’s not morally excludable somehow, if we think a doctor has a moral obligation to help someone in desperate need in his field of vision even if they can’t pay. (I’m much less sure that that’s true, than that it’s wrong to exclude peaceful people from US territory by force.)

Now, the comparative advantage argument suffices to show that natives will collectively benefit from immigration to the extent that only private goods are at stake, and in a sort of rough, approximate fashion, migration taxes and transfers to natives should be able to make open borders Pareto-improving with respect to private goods. Basically, just by coming into the country, immigrants don’t acquire access to any of the private goods natives previously possessed. Natives’ exclusive claims to their private goods aren’t affected.

As for public goods, while immigrants can’t be prevented from enjoying them, this is not a downside to immigration, because public goods are, by definition, nonrival. The fact that immigrants are enjoying them doesn’t reduce natives’ ability to enjoy them, at all. Even if immigrants make zero contribution to the public goods of their host country, natives have no grounds for objecting to their presence, because the natives still enjoy just as much of the public good as they did before. More likely, immigrants will make at least a small, possibly a large, contribution to the host country’s public goods. In that case, natives are strictly better off.

Nonrival but excludable (or partially excludable) goods are important because they include designs, ideas, blueprints, technologies, whatever you want to call them. Migrants won’t reduce the supply of those. Well, unless open borders has a negative effect on the progress of the global economic frontier, but that’s a topic for another post.

The category of goods for which the nativists’ “smaller-share-of-the-pie-for-us” notion might be valid is for goods that are nonexcludable yet rival. Parking spaces may serve as an example, for although exclusion is sometimes possible– parking meters, gates and tickets in parking garages– it’s costly to regulate street parking, so to hold down transactions costs it might sometimes be best to treat parking as nonexcludable. If parking is nonexcludable, newcomers to a city may lower the quality of life for existing residents, by crowding the streets with cars and making it hard to find a parking space.

How many nonexcludable but rival goods are there? We treat public education as one, though in principle it need not be. Likewise emergency room care. The streets themselves are treated as nonexcludable (and probably exclusion would be infeasible and/or would violate rights in many cases) and might be rival in some respects, e.g., if you’re using the street for a rally of shouting protesters, I can’t very well use it to play serene classical music. Do storefronts have a nonexcludable but rival character for window shoppers on a crowded day? Does the random interaction of people with strangers on the street somehow have the character of a nonexcludable, rival good?

The Gang of 8 immigration deal

Post by Nathan Smith (see all posts by Nathan Smith)

I’m not a political junkie (anymore) and I try to follow all the feints and counter-offers and posturing and whatnot that comprises so much of political discourse, but at this point the momentum for immigration reform in Washington seems really to be bearing fruit. A deal has been made. The New York Times celebrates:

Huge news from the scorched desert of immigration reform: germination!

At last there is a bill, the product of a bipartisan group of senators who have been working on it for months, that promises at least the hope of citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants. It is complicated, full of mechanisms and formulas meant to tackle border security, the allocation of visas, methods of employment verification and the much-debated citizenship path…

There will be much to chew on in coming weeks, but it is worth a moment to marvel at the bill’s mere existence, and at the delicate balancing of competing interests that coaxed this broad set of compromises into being…

The bill gets around the “amnesty” stalemate by turning the undocumented into Registered Provisional Immigrants — not citizens or green-card holders, but not illegal, either. They will wait in that anteroom for a decade at least before they can get green cards. But they will also work, and travel freely. The importance of legalizing them, erasing the crippling fear of deportation, cannot be overstated.

Yes! Deportation is a particular disgraceful feature of the American polity, and it will be a tremendous moral relief to have it, if not permanently and generally abolished, at least abolished for most of the millions who live under the threat of it now. The Times deplores the length and difficulty of the path to citizenship:

That said, a decade-plus path is too long and expensive. The fees and penalties stack up: $500 to apply for the first six years of legal status, $500 to renew, then a $1,000 fine. If the goal is to get people on the books and the economy moving, then shackling them for years to fees and debt makes no sense.

The means of ejection from the legalization path, too, cannot be arbitrary and unjust — people should not be disqualified for minor crimes or failure to meet unfair work requirements. It should not take superhuman strength and rectitude, plus luck and lots of money, for an immigrant to march the 10 years to a green card.

Here I’m ambivalent, except about the “means of ejection” sentence. You can’t justly deport someone just because they don’t want a job, and to deport someone for, say, a speeding ticket, is a violation of just proportionality. My sympathies lie with a relatively short and easy path to citizenship. But reason tells me that if your goal is an immigration regime that is simultaneously incentive-compatible and humane, you can’t make the path to citizenship easy. And $500 here and $1,000 there are nothing compared to the income gains that immigrants to the US typically enjoy, though I’d prefer to see money extracted from immigrants in the form of taxes attached to earnings rather than as lump-sum fines and fees, so we can raise more revenue from those doing relatively well while mitigating the hardship we cause for the poorest immigrants. Read more of this post

The tendency of economic activity to concentrate itself

Post by Nathan Smith (see all posts by Nathan Smith)

At a family reunion in Alaska in August 2007, during a beautiful hike to a place called Exit Glacier, several strands of thought I had been mulling over came together and exploded in my mind. I was in a state of intense intellectual excitement. Without diminishing my enjoyment of the company and the beautiful scenery, I felt an urgent need to be somewhere else, namely, sitting in front of a stack of papers, scribbling equations. David Warsh’s book Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations had clarified for me the bottleneck that economic theory was in– that theory relied on a notion of “equilibrium” to close models which presupposed constant returns– and I saw the way out of it– implement market equilibrium by the interactions of agents in a computer memory instead of by solving systems of equations. Equations, and especially mathematical optimization, still had its place, for agents’ methods of maximizing utility subject to a budget constraint would be lifted lock, stock, and barrel from traditional methods… though more modifications were needed, as I learned the hard way. My first attempt (as a graduate student that fall) involved 90+ pages of code and was a complete fiasco. I got no results at all. Desperate after a failed presentation (though Professor Rob Axtell, sympathetic to my Herculean if futile efforts, asked for my code for an excuse to give me an A-), I went home and read Joseph Schumpeter’s Theory of Economic Development for inspiration. After an enormous amount of work, many rethinkings and failures, I succeeded, yielding a dissertation, Complexity, Competition and Growth (free version here), and helping me to land an academic job at Fresno Pacific University. So far, frustratingly, I haven’t managed to get what my dissertation chair called “a breakthrough” (I agree) into the academic journals, for whom, I suppose, the piece is intimidatingly eccentric and complex (and perhaps arrogant in its sweeping claims, though I can’t really scale them back much). Here’s my latest attempt, entitled “The Aggregate Production with Endogenous Division of Labor,” submitted last week to the Journal of Economic Growth.

This is connected with open borders because it is a theory of increasing returns and therefore of how economic activity tends to concentrate itself. Surely this is one of the most obvious facts about the economy. Economic activity is concentrated spatially: we call those places cities. Economic activity is concentrated temporally: we call the working day. Some theories of economic booms and busts– “coordination failure” models– see them, essentially, as a tendency for economic activity to concentrate itself in time, but I wouldn’t stress that too much. Of course, economic activity is concentrated in certain countries, too. We call those developed or rich countries; those where economic activity is not concentrated we call developing or poor countries. Certainly, the principle that makes people concentrate in cities is not the only principle at work in determining the wealth and poverty of nations. But it probably is one of the principles. In “Geography and Economic Development,” Sachs, Mellinger, and Gallup (1999) make a strong case that geography does much to determine the development, and one of the ways in which it does this is that it places landlocked places, places far from coasts and with poor access to the sea, at a disadvantage, because they can’t plug into networks of international trade.

Imagine what would happen if economic activity has a tendency to concentrate itself but people are not allowed to concentrate themselves. In the places where economic activity is concentrated, the ratio of economic activity to population will be high, and people will be rich. In the places where economic activity is not concentrated, the ratio will be low, and people will be poor. Of course, it’s never as simple as that. Economic activity can’t usually concentrate itself without people concentrating themselves to some extent. But it seems to be true that massive inequality tends to arise when mobility is restricted and people are not allowed to go where the jobs are, or where the high wages are.

Why does economic activity tend to concentrate itself? Adam Smith understood. The first three chapters of The Wealth of Nations are titled:

I. Of the Division of Labor, which begins by asserting that “the greatest improvement*17 in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.”
II. Of the Principle which Gives Occasion to the Division of Labor [namely, the human propensity to truck, barter and exchange]
III. That the Division of Labor is Limited by the Extent of the Market

When people live in close proximity, they can specialize more, and trade with more specialists. There are all sorts of jobs, and all sorts of services, which one can do, or hire, in New York City, that one can’t do, or hire, in a small town. Cuisine and culture are the most obvious, because here the consumer observes the benefits directly. Foodies and theater fans will fare much better in Manhattan than in Muncie, Indiana. But the same holds in business. If you want to run a think tank, there are big advantages to doing it in DC, where the pool of specialists is deep and rich, and you can find someone with experience privatizing electricity generation or someone who knows a lot about factional infighting in Tajikistan. A friend of mine worked as a professional trumpet player in Chicago, and made a decent living. Now, for the sake of his wife’s job, he lives in a small town in Maine. You can’t make a living by trumpet gigs there. Of course, what business there is might be easier to catch, because the competition is slight, too. But that means that if you want to hire a professional trumpet player, for an Easter service, say, or a wedding, it won’t be easy. It’s not just a matter of urban vs. rural or city vs. small town. I live in a medium-sized city, Fresno. The eating’s OK, but it has far fewer vegetarian options than DC. Classical music concerts take place every month or so, maybe. There’s a continuum, with the abundance of specialized jobs and the availability of specialized services steadily increasing as the city grows. More than that, cities themselves specialize, with LA specializing in movies, Houston in energy, Seattle in airplanes, Detroit in cars, Palo Alto in information technology, New York in finance and culture, Boston in higher education, Washington, DC, in politics and government.

Of course, there’s a downside to concentration, too. People may suffer from one another’s negative externalities– smog, car noise, light pollution, crime– but more importantly, the free goods of nature become scarcer. If you want to live on a large plot of land, that’s exorbitantly expensive in Manhattan. That said, Central Park is available to all, and I’ve often noticed that if you want to take a nice walk and enjoy greenery, it’s sometimes easy to do this in big cities, with their verdant parkland, than in the countryside, with its agriculture and fences. But the free goods of nature are also inputs to production, and for production processes wherein the free goods of nature are important, economic activity has to spread itself out through rural areas. Farming, in particular, has to be spread out over vast expanses of rural territory. Farmers need services– grocery stores, auto dealers, schools, hospitals– so other economic activities, besides farming itself, follow them. Tourists seek beautiful natural scenery, and economic activity follows them, too. Then there’s logging, and drilling for oil and gas, etc. The free goods of nature draw people to rural areas, small towns locate near them, big towns locate near small towns. Meanwhile, when large-scale economic activities don’t particularly depend on the free goods of nature, but also have relatively few synergies with other large-scale economic activities, it may not make sense to locate them in the same city, driving up land prices and giving rise to the usual negative externalities of urban life without important economic complementarities to offset these costs. All these reasons explain why we don’t all concentrate ourselves in one enormous city.

By the way, feel free to challenge me on this, but I think it’s fair to say that neoclassical economics, the mainstream paradigm in economics today, is largely blind to all this. To see why, think about a standard supply-and-demand chart, the central concept of neoclassical economics. Demand slopes down. Fine so far. Supply slopes up. Why? Because marginal costs rise when you produce more? Do they? It seems more typical, if anything, for prices to fall when suppliers can produce in bulk. In that case, however, it doesn’t make sense to view suppliers as “competitive” “price takers.” But neoclassical economics must impose price-taking, because it predicts what will happen in markets by solving a system of equations for the “market-clearing” price that equilibrates supply and demand. Without that device, it doesn’t know how to close a model. Of course, neoclassical economists know that economic activity tends to concentrate itself, and most of them probably understand clearly enough why, namely the benefits of specialization and trade. But when making formal models, they habitually write down production functions with constant returns to scale, thus ruling out an important role for specialization, trade, and the division of labor, and making the existence of cities suddenly mysterious. That was the challenge I set out to tackle.

In the latest iteration of my simulation-based economic modeling, I report a lot of results, but it’s hard to know the best way to elucidate their significance to lay readers, or for that matter to professional economists, who are in some ways in a better position to understand what my model does, but in some ways, not. In some ways, well-trained professional economists may even be at a disadvantage because they have to unlearn certain habits, such as looking for market-clearing prices and “interior solutions” and shunning “corner solutions,” increasing returns, and chaotic, imperfect competition. My work is very close in spirit to Adam Smith and the classical tradition, but from the neoclassical point of view it is definitely “heterodox.” Indeed, if I ever manage to publish versions of these results in both the academic journals and the popular press, it will be interesting to see whether professional economists or lay readers are more receptive. At any rate, the results of one simulation run are shown in the chart below:

Each point in the chart represents a simulation run, with the shape of the point roughly indicating total GDP. The curves represent “isoquants” derived from the production function I estimated from the data. This estimate involved regressing log GDP against log capital and log labor, which yielded the following:

where Y is income, K is total capital, and N is total labor. What matters here is not the precise values of the coefficient and exponents, which would vary randomly depending on the technological specifications, but the high degree of increasing returns that the production function exhibits. If such a production function describes the US economy, a doubling of the labor supply with no influx of new capital would only reduce per capita income of all residents slightly. In the model, capital’s share of income exhibits no tendency to be equal to the aggregate elasticity of capital. Returns on capital and entrepreneurial profits together generally comprised a little over half of income in the simulation, with the rest going to labor. When society’s capital stock increased, the return on capital fell, consistent with the neoclassical prediction, except much less precipitously. A tenfold increase in the capital stock would reduce the return on capital by less than half. Meanwhile, holding the capital stock constant, an increase in labor, holding the capital stock constant, tends to raise the return on capital almost in proportion to the increase in labor, while the effect on the wage of labor, though it is usually negative, is mild.

How is this possible? Because population growth leads to the introduction of new goods, the intensification of patterns of specialization and trade. If the lessons from this model cross-apply to the US economy, under open borders we would see the big cities get even bigger, and even richer in the variety of goods and services they have to offer, while many small towns would grow into big cities, and new towns would spring up– so there would be no shortage of small town life for those who prefer it, but there would be a wider variety of urban life available to city-lovers, including some cities bigger than any available now. (Not that new cities would be founded to surpass New York. Rather, New York itself would surpass what it is now, while other cities would become what New York was.) Wages wouldn’t fall much if at all for low-skilled workers. They might find new niches. Owners of other factors– land, capital, entrepreneurship– would enjoy new opportunities and rising incomes. Specialized jobs that don’t exist now would appear. Specialized jobs that currently exist only in, say, New York, would appear in other places. Foreigners would benefit too, not only from access to “public goods” or “institutions,” but from being able to plug into America’s complex division of labor. New patterns of specialization might emerge at the level of cities, with some cities becoming global rather than merely national hubs for this or that industry.

You can make a strong case for open borders from the standpoint of neoclassical economics. The case for open borders is largely the same as the case for free trade, except that instead of trading with people living abroad you trade with people from abroad now resident in your own country, likely in goods and services that, for whatever reason, can’t be traded internationally. But endogenous division of labor strengthens the case for both free trade and open borders.

Venice, city of refuge

Post by Nathan Smith (see all posts by Nathan Smith)

From Peter Ackroyd’s lyrically beautiful history of Venice, entitled Venice, Pure City:

Venice has been construed as a great ship upon the sea… The ship was once, for the early settlers, a place of refuge. The ship of Venice was, from the beginning, a haven for exiles and wanderers. It was an open city, readily assimilating all those who came within its borders. One 15th-century traveler noted that “most of the people are foreigners,” and in the following century, a Venetian recorded that “apart from the patricians and the citizens, all the rest are foreigners and very few are Venetians.” He was referring principally to the shopkeepers and artisans. In 1611, an English diplomat, Sir Dudley Carlton, described Venice as a “microcosmos,” rather than city. It was created in the fashion of orbis [the world], rather than of urbis [city]. And so it has remained for the rest of its history. There were French and Slav, Greek and Fleming, Jew and German, Oriental and Spaniard, as well as assorted citizens from the mainland of Italy. Certain streets were named after them. All the countries of Europe and of the Levant were represented. It was something that all travelers noted as if quite suddenly they had come upon the tower of Babel in St. Mark’s Square.

No other port in the world held so many strange peoples. In many 19th-century paintings, the gabardine of the Jewish merchants, the scarlet caps of the Greeks, and the turbans and robes of the Turks, are seen jostling among the more severe costumes and tophats of the Venetian gentlemen. It might be said that the Venetians fashioned their own identity in perpetual contrast to those whom they protected. The Germans were granted their own miniature Germany in a complex known as the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, at Rialto, which contained two halls for dining and 80 separate rooms. The merchants were supervised and monitored by the government, but it was said that “they love the city of Venice more than their native land.” In the sixteenth century the Flemish settled in large numbers. The Greeks had their own quarter, with their own church dedicated to the Orthodox faith. After the fall of Constantinople in 1204, and the abandonment of that city to the Turks in 1453, there was a further flow of Byzantine Greeks– among them soldiers, mariners, artists and intellectuals looking for patrons. The Armenians and the Albanians had their own districts. Eventually an Armenian monastery was established on the island of S. Lazzaro, where Byron travelled to learn the Armenian language as a way of exercising his mind among the more sensual pleasures of Venice. There was a colony of Turkish merchants, established as the Fondaco dei Turchi, where a school for the teaching of Arabic was maintained. So Venice was the setting for a thriving cosmopolitan life. It was not altruism or generosity that occasioned this inviting embrace. Venice could not have survived without its immigrants. Some of them were raised to the rank of citizens; some of them intermarried with the indigenous people.

They were not all, of course, well protected. Many thousands of poor immigrants were cramped into cheap housing, sharing the corners of rooms with others of the same race or nationality. Many of them came as refugees from Balkan wars, or from impossible poverty; some of them were escaping the plague. They congregated in the poorer parishes and by the sixteenth century, as a result of the influx, Venice had become the most densely populated city in Italy. The immigrants also provided cheap labor for the city, and were even employed in the galleys of the Venetian warships. They did the work that the Venetians themselves preferred to avoid.

In the fourteenth century the Italian poet, Petrarch, celebrated Venice as the “sole shelter in our days of liberty, justice, and peace, the sole refuge of the good.” As a port, the city attracted such epithets as “shelter” and “refuge.” They were natural images. Pietro Aretino, himself an exile from Rome who had found safe haven in Venice, put it another way. In an address to the doge in 1527 he declared that “Venice embraces those whom all others shun. She raises those whom others lower. She affords a welcome to those who are persecuted elsewhere.” There were, after all, refugees who travelled to Venice for reasons other than commercial. There was a toleration in this open city that was unknown in other regions. That is why it became, from the eighteenth century forward, a resting place for what Henry James called “the deposed, the defeated, the disenchanted, the wounded, or even only the bored.” The deposed were a particular speciality of Venice. Many of the dethroned princes of Europe made their way here. At one time in 1737 there were five dispossessed monarchs living in the city, one of them being the young Charles Edward Stuart.

It was also a haven for those broken of spirit, for wanderers, and for exiles. Venice became the home of the dispossessed and the deracinated. Its watery and melancholy nature suited those who were acquainted with sorrow. It became a haven for those who were uncertain of their origin or of their true identity and for those, perhaps, who might have wished to escape from them. It was like a mother, endlessly accessible and accommodating. It was a womb of safety. The people were known for their placability and civility. Venice was a city of transit, where you might easily be lost among the press, a city on the frontier between different worlds, where those who did not “fit in” to their native habitat were graciously accepted… There came here, too, swindlers and fraudsters of every description; there were failed financiers and statesmen, shamed women and soldiers of fortune, alchemists and quacks. The rootless were attracted to the city without roots.

Venice was also a frontier between different faiths, Catholic and Orthodoxy, Islam and Christianity. So it attracted religious reformers of every description. A secret synod of Anabaptists was established here in the middle of the sixteenth century, and the German community harboured many Lutherans among its number. Venice always kept its distance from Rome, and protected the independence of its Church from the depredations of the pope; so it became, in theory, an arena for religious renovation. There was even a time when the English government believed the republic to be ready to join forces with the Reformation. In that, of course, it proved to be wholly mistaken.

If you had failed, then Venice was a good place for you to forget your failure. Here you were in a literal sense insulated from the outer world, so that its scorn or simple inattention could no longer wound you. Venice represented an escape from modernity in all its forms. And, like any port, it offered anonymity. If you were an exile in Venice you could lose your identity; or, rather, you could acquire another identity entirely in relation to the floating city. You, too, could become fluid and elusive. Tell me who I am. But not who I was.

We need cities like Venice today.

The progress of freedom

Post by Nathan Smith

This will be a bold claim, but I think that much of the history of the progress of freedom is summarized in three general patterns:

1. Accountability vs. sovereignty.
2. Separation of solidarity from violence.
3. Rights flow from insiders to outsiders.

Clearly these need some explication.

1. Accountability vs. sovereignty. By sovereignty, I mean the separation of rulers from the ruled, the claim of certain persons or organizations to be above the law, not answerable for following the moral rules that most people expect one another to abide by. Sovereignty appears to be primordial: at the dawn of history, we see the absolutist phaorohs elevating themselves to divine status and commandeering the labor of Egypt to build them spectacular tombs. The opposite principle, accountability, means people having to render an account, and the hearers of the account being placed, in some way and degree, in a position to judge the adequacy of the account. Accountability is subjection to the moral law. The slogan “a government of laws not men” is one way of putting the struggle of sovereignty vs. accountability. Under sovereignty, accountability consists in the subject being accountable to the sovereign, not the other way around. To make the sovereign accountable creates logical difficulties and a danger of an infinite regress, which is why thinkers like Thomas Hobbes are contemptuous of it, but in fact roundabout, tangled-up, ambiguous, confusing systems of accountability make the framework of freedom in which civilization flourishes. Senate, House of Representatives, Supreme Court, states, Federal Reserve, common law… Who’s in charge here?! There’s no answer, and that’s the point. Nowadays, democracy is taken to be the touchstone of legitimacy, and perhaps the dimly understood yet potent reason for this is that democratic accountability gives the regress somewhere to stop. “Who’s in charge here? The people,” says the democrat. But in truth, elections can’t and shouldn’t be the whole story of accountability: can’t, because of all the logical problems with democratic decision-making noted by (among many others) Buchanan and Tullock (1962) and Arrow (1951/1970); and shouldn’t, because when “the people” do agree, they might agree on doing something very bad, like segregation or slavery or electing Hitler. It’s good if the power of the people to get what they want is hedged about and constrained by courts that protect individual rights and economic technocrats to manage the money supply and international treaties that protect foreigners from the whims of domestic majorities and churches and civil disobedience movements that appeal to higher laws and stand ready to defy the democratic state when it is in the wrong.
   
2. Separation of solidarity from violence. The word “solidarity” is not part of an economist’s usual vocabulary, and I don’t find it easy to define, but I think it’s historically important. Solidarity is people working together in pursuit of a common goal. Solidarity is people bonding, forming a group, a shared identity. Solidarity is fans rooting for the local sports team, friends helping one another move house, wearing the school colors or waving the flag or singing the family’s favorite song. An economist, habituated to methodological individualism, or a libertarian, adhering to an individualistic ideology, might want to dispense with it, with the practice, with the concept. It’s a part of human nature and human history. It’s also necessary to achieve all sorts of good ends– even including the cohesion of profit-seeking firms. Miller (1993) painstakingly shows how it’s impossible to arrange incentives within a firm so that the interests of all the individuals who comprise the firm coincide with those of the firm as a whole (in whatever sense). Doubtless, firms are shot through with misaligned incentives and conflicts of interest and operate inefficiently for that reason, but surely there is also a good deal of genuine team spirit and corporate loyalty and forgetfulness of self-interest, in short, solidarity, in firms, that makes them run better than they otherwise could. Of course, this applies more obviously to ideological groupings in civil society– Cato Institute fundraisers doubtless appeal to solidarity when asking donors for cash– as well as churches, nations, and so on. Of course, solidarity is not at all an unmitigated good. It is often a great evil, or at least a means to great, evil ends: the solidarity of white southerners against black civil rights; or the solidarity of the Germans under Hitler against the Jews. Now, at the dawn of history, it seems that solidarity was usually bound up with violence, in two senses: (a) it was in the crucible of war that solidarity was chiefly formed, and (b) the maintenance of solidarity was typically backed up by threats of violence. Of course, this is true even today: the solidarity of the Anglo-American alliance, a crucial historical force in the 20th century, owes much to their fighting two world wars together; the solidarity of the United States itself owes much to various wars going starting with the Revolution, and was also sealed in the Civil War, which set a precedent that perhaps deters would-be secessionists even today by a threat of violence. But as civilization advances more and more forms of solidarity arise that are independent of violence: the Christian church (perhaps ultimately the fountainhead of them all); the monastic orders of the Middle Ages; the “associations” whose abundance Tocqueville celebrated when he visited America in the 1830s; the teeming NGOs of today. Most striking of all, perhaps, are the great civil disobedience movements: Gandhi’s satyagraha campaigns; Martin Luther King’s marchers; and Polish Solidarity, which brought about the fall of communism. But also schools and political parties and sports clubs and, as I said, firms. As freedom progresses, more and more of the groups with which we identify ourselves are consensual. Some institutions, like families, largely retain their form but become more consensual in character, while others, like feudal suzerain-vassal hierarchies or ethnic tribes, vanish, and new, more consensual institutions appear.
3. Rights flow from insiders to outsiders. Societies entirely lacking in justice and rights seem rare in history, though perhaps that’s only because they don’t produce much that’s worth remembering. Stalin’s Soviet Union, where even, or especially, top Communist leaders were routinely liquidated, might be an example of a society from which every vestige or simulacrum of justice had been utterly erased. Perhaps phaoronic Egypt was like that, I don’t know. But more often, some clique or set around the centers of power enjoys rights and conduct within it is shared by some norms or standards of justice, only no one thinks these norms apply to outsiders. In The Iliad, the Greek heroes appear to have no scruples about seizing women as sexual prizes and raping the wives of the Trojans, yet they do have some sense of justice among themselves, and Agamemnon, when he seizes a girl whom the army had allotted to Achilles, is definitely thought to be in the wrong. The progress of freedom often consists in the extension of rights established among themselves by some clique or inner circle to more and more of those outside the circle. The impressive freedom of speech which existed among the Greek heroes in The Iliad, but which did not extend to the ranks of common soldiers, was later, in the democratic revolution in Athens, extended to the whole people. Early 19th-century Americans prided themselves on their freedom, but did not grant the same freedom to black slaves or Indians. Later on, these freedoms were extended to all Americans. Constitutional government in England began with the Magna Carta, when the barons demanded and won recognition of their rights from the king, but as time passed, the liberties of the English, from habeas corpus to (much later) the vote, were extended to all Englishmen.

In view of these patterns, open borders can be seen as a natural next step in the progress of freedom.

1. My co-blogger John Lee, in posts like this and this, highlights the arbitrariness and lack of accountability in immigration enforcement. Discretionary exercise of consular authority to exclude and deport people is an anomalous bastion of unaccountable sovereignty, a bewildering and often shocking exception to “government by laws, not men.” But to abolish discretion would be to recognize some sort of right to migrate, which virtually implies open borders, at least in an attenuated form.
2. In immigration restrictions, solidarity continues to express itself in the form of violence against outsiders. We are we, therefore they must go. The maintenance of our collective identity somehow depends on the expulsion by force of foreign-born persons, the separation of families, the splitting up of communities, etc. The long transition from violent to peaceful forms of solidarity suggests that history will tend to move away from this.
3. Open borders consists of extending some of rights of citizens, won in part through political struggle but demanded ex ante and recognized ex post as the requirements of justice quite apart from historical contingencies, to the foreign-born.

I don’t mean to say that open borders are inevitable. Logically, I don’t see why the progress of freedom should be inevitable, and while history gives considerable reason for optimism, it also shows that vast backsliding is possible. The early modern period in most of Europe seems to have seen a major reversal of the progress of freedom that had been attained in the High Middle Ages. Slavery, which had largely disappeared in medieval Europe, began again in the New World. Absolutist sovereignty gained ground at the expense of medieval accountability, with its patchwork of customary and feudal rights, including the parliaments and Cortes and Estates-General and zemskiy sobor and so on, which were eviscerated or ceased to be summoned. This was true even in England to some extent before 1640. Again, a major reversal in the progress of freedom occurred in the early 20th century, from which in some respects we have yet to recover. But open borders is the sort of advance that the progress of freedom, when it happens, has historically tended to realize.    Read more of this post

In defense of the nation-state

Post by Nathan Smith (see all posts by Nathan Smith)

This post is a response to Vipul Naik’s recent post on open borders versus no borders, but I thought it deserved a separate post. A defense of the nation-state against a critique like Vipul’s must be (a) a defense of there being any state, plus (b) a defense of state being national in scope.

First, the state. Vipul is an astute reader, and his being left in some doubt as to where Principles of a Free Society comes down on the question of state legitimacy is a very intelligent response to the book. At first, the book seems to be building up a defense of a Lockean social contractarian state, with natural rights, property, social contract, etc. But mid-way through this exercise, there is a concession that the social contract defense of state legitimacy, though Principles suggests that it’s the best available, is not very successful. An anarchist reader might conclude that all historical states are illegitimate, and go on to try to imagine a stateless world, and to develop a program for how best to pursue it. But I don’t really do that. Vipul suggests I’m a “minarchist.” I had never heard this nifty word before but I assume it means what it sounds like: a believer in minimal government. That’s a decent characterization of me, though possibly it might pin me down more than I would like. At any rate, I’m not an anarchist. Why not? (Principles doesn’t single out anarchism for refutation since it’s such a small minority view.)

Vipul distinguishes “anarcho-capitalism” from “anarcho-socialism,” but that’s not the typology I would adopt. I would distinguish pacifist-anarchism from all kinds of anarchism that allow some violence. If the definition of the state is an agency that claims a monopoly of violence, then one way to be an anarchist, a non-believer in the state, is to completely reject all violence. The New Testament can be read as a template for such a way of life. It isn’t really a political program at all. To such basic political questions as how are people to be defended from assault?– the answer of the pacifist-anarchist is, “They aren’t. We’ll try to prevent assault through moral suasion, and our non-violent example may have great power to achieve moral suasion. We won’t know until we try. But whatever happens, we must refrain from violence.”

Alternatively, you can accept violence in self-defense, and maybe defense of property or something, but deny that violence should or legitimately can be monopolized by one agency called the state. That leads to speculations about competition and cooperation among private security agencies and whatnot. To me, that’s just the state by another name, and I don’t really see “anarchism” in this sense as being as distinctive or coherent as the term suggests. Perhaps I’d translate some versions of anarchism as: All currently existing states are illegitimate, we need to dissolve them and establish new states, legitimately based on voluntary consent. But I think there are systematic reasons why such a project can’t be achieved, or at any rate can’t be planned and permanently, sustainably established. To put it differently, I doubt that any political equilibrium is attainable without coercion that lacks a warrant in the defense of natural rights, or to put it in pithier language, without injustice. The Christian church may, I suspect, be an example of a “state” that has been based on the voluntary principle for two thousand years, though one would have to appeal a hypothesis about its secret, invisible history, and write off a lot of coercion by official ecclesiastical hierarchies as not “really” the work of the Church. In any case, even if this is true, it would be the exception that proves the rule. Also, a purely voluntary state, a state without injustice, might, I suspect, be attainable briefly by a generation of peculiar virtue and under the influence of a particularly admirable personality. But fallen human nature would reassert itself. Apologies: this paragraph was perhaps unusually speculative and vague.

I think the “common sense morality” which Huemer and Caplan like to take as a starting point isn’t entirely valid as a starting point because its content is importantly shaped by the experience of being the citizen of a state. But my “natural rights” approach is akin to Huemer/Caplan’s in that it starts an ethical inquiry from the “micro” level, and from our moral intuitions. I won’t say more on that, however, until I’ve read Huemer’s book. But I think that in practice, aspirations to utopian nonviolence, unless one takes the monastic path and tries to realize them at a personal level, should be tempered with a good deal of deference to the flotsam and jetsam of tradition and to the imperatives of fundamental eye-for-an-eye justice. And while idolatry of the state is one of the great, permanent dangers of the human condition, it’s usually best willingly to accept the leadership of a moderately just and beneficent state, when it’s available.

So much for my defense of the state. What about the nation-state?

The first thing to observe is that nation-states are a novelty. The Roman Empire wasn’t a nation-state. Athens and Sparta in the golden age of classical Greece were not nation-states. Carthage wasn’t a nation-state. Egypt might qualify, but not, I think, Babylon or Assyria, and not the Persian empire. Some of these, along with the Han empire in China and its various successors, might be described as civilization-states, an entire civilization, united in a single polity. The Chinese kingdoms of the Warring States period before the Han don’t seem to have been nation-states either. Ancient Israel was something like a nation-state, and it would be interesting to know to what extent ancient Israel provided, through the culture of Christianity, the template for the modern nation-state and, by extension, the global regime of nation-states that exists today. Several modern European nations– England, Poland, Russia– seem to have had “Chosen People” complexes at some point in their history. Still, there were no nation-states in Europe in the High Middle Ages. France was not a cultural and linguistic unity at the popular level. What unity it had was feudal in character: France was the area where all the ascending links of vassal to suzerain converged in a certain king. Its borders shifted a good deal from Charlemagne’s time to that of St. Louis, and kept shifting thereafter, down to the end of World War I. Of course, by 1870, the people were thought to deserve a say in the matter, and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by Bismarck’s Germany was an outrage. In the later Middle Ages, national consciousness began to take shape in England and France, foreshadowing those modern nations. Italy and Germany were not nation-states at all then. Italy was home to many city-states during the Renaissance, which were then absorbed into non-Italian empires; and the “Holy Roman Empire” in Germany, which eventually came to be dominated by the Hapsburg dynasty, was not at all like a nation-state, with its weak centralization, its variety of subject peoples, and its antique and dynastic principle of legitimacy. Incidentally, the Hapsburg Empire, in which the Austrian school of economic liberals was born, may deserve more respect as a possible template for modern polities. Only in the late 19th century, as the nation-state model became normative, were Italy and Germany created as nation-states.

That the nation-state is a comparatively recent development is a clue that we should not expect it to prevail permanently as the worldwide norm for political organization. Still, there is a good deal to be said for it in the meantime.

There is a deep connection between the nation-state and democracy. If democracy is “rule of the people,” who are “the people?” The answer is usually this or that “nation,” and it’s not obvious what else it could be. (“Nation” and “people” can be near-synonyms, of course.) But what’s a “nation,” anyway? A common language is the most obvious marker, but that’s clearly not a universal rule. India is one nation (I suppose) with many mother tongues; the English-speaking world consists of at least six independent nations; and there are even more Spanish-speaking countries. The unity of India is probably best understood as a function of Hinduism and history with a little help from geography, and all of those factors sometimes help to define nations, but none are necessary or sufficient. Britain and Ireland were one polity for seven hundred years, but are now separate. Similarly Russia and Ukraine, which also (for the most part) share a common religion. Italy was a geographical expression before it was a nation, but there is no particular geographical logic to the separation of France from Germany from Belgium from the Czech Republic, etc. Germany has long been home to both Catholics and Protestants. For that matter, though Catholicism is crucial to Irish identity, yet there is a “Church of Ireland” which is Protestant. And of course, Catholicism is the common religion of many nations without being a reason to unite them into one. There’s a lot of historical accident here, and the best definition is probably Benedict Anderson’s (suitably arbitrary) “imagined communities.” To define the nations is to define the sets of people who, under democracy, govern themselves. To drive the point home, note that one of the characteristics of democracy is the tolerance for a “loyal opposition.” Loyal to what? Not to the present government, exactly, else they would not be an opposition. Loyal, rather, to the nation, a reality deeper and more permanent than the ruling regime.

Democracy is a sort of idol in our times, and tends to be much overrated. It has considerably merit nonetheless, but to appreciate it properly one must start by realizing that from a strictly logical perspective, democracy has grave flaws, to which a kind of myth of democratic beneficence blinds modern people. There can be “tyranny of the majority,” but as Mancur Olson argued, there can be tyrannies of minorities too, small groups that can organize to pursue their special interests while the public doesn’t know what’s going on. More fundamentally, why people vote at all is rather mysterious– one vote essentially never decides an election, so why bother?– and if it’s just that voting is, after all, negligibly cheap, then we shouldn’t expect people to vote in an informed way, since researching politicians’ platforms is expensive. Bryan Caplan’s Myth of the Rational Voter argues that people are “rationally irrational” at election time, choosing opinions that feel good rather than opinions that are true, since there’s effectively no cost to being wrong. When the issue space has more than one dimensional (or when preferences are not “single-peaked”), cycling can arise, where majority rule would cause collective preferences to cycle permanent among three or more alternative policies.In theory, democracy is a hopeless mess.

I think part of the reason democracy works better than this in practice is that people identify with, take an interest in, and care about their nation-states. I know a lot of people who follow politics as one follows a sport. A lot of money gets donated to political campaigns, sometimes by lobbyists with a tacit quid pro quo, but often freely and altruistically, for the good of the country as someone conceives it. People talk about politics in their spare time. All this raises the level of political information well above what would be “rational” for people to acquire. I think it’s a reasonable approximation to characterize people’s behavior as somewhat altruistic in many situations, and especially in the voting booth, where one’s actions potentially affect so many other people. If we imagine people having “vectors” of “altruism coefficients,” what matters in the voting booth may be not so much (a) the extent to which voters are altruistic, since even tiny altruism coefficients (say, 0.01) are enough to swamp self-interest, as (b) whether they are disproportionately altruistic towards certain sub-groups of their fellow citizens in such a way that some groups become effectively disenfranchised. This is why democracy in ethnically fragmented states can occasionally lead to disasters, to racial segregation or ethnic cleansing or civil war or breakdown leading to totalitarianism. Anyway, that democracy, which in theory doesn’t seem like it should be able to work at all, in practice often manages to muddle along tolerably well, has a lot to do with the national basis of most democratic states.

What’s democracy good for? Vaguely, I think it’s a good thing for the people who live under a regime to have a say in how it behaves. Politicians in democracies really do pay attention to what voters want. Voters know something about the laws because they have to live under them. In the aggregate, they have a lot of information relevant to what policies work, and don’t work. Public opinion is a very imperfect vehicle for aggregating this information, but it does seem to seize on and condemn clear cases of corruption and atrocious human rights abuses (at least against citizens), and make policymakers at least try (or at least pretend, but then you can’t fool all the people all the time) to serve the general welfare (e.g., as crudely summarized in macroeconomic statistics). It is sometimes effective in securing and reinforcing freedoms, though these might have to emerge and grow strong at the level of private mores before democracy can be trusted to protect them. Britain was free before it was democratic. The danger nowadays is not so much “tyranny of the majority” as the exaggeration of the extent to which democracy confers legitimacy. There is a widespread sense nowadays that democracies can do anything that they want, that law, or even that right and wrong, have no source, origin or meaning except in the will of the people. The Constitution is the exception that proves the rule, for while laws democratically passed may be (in the US) ruled unconstitutional (other countries have similar arrangements), the Constitution itself is probably assumed to derive its force only from the of certain past electoral majorities. And note that if democracy consists in people having a say in the laws that govern them, then immigration restrictions are the limiting case of undemocratic law, since the set of people who are subject to them is the mathematical inverse of the set of people who have a say in making them. For all these reasons, there is an urgent need to limit the power of the democratic nation-state, but I would not be in a hurry to dissolve it.

If one agrees that the democratic nation-state should have limited powers, there is no logical problem with combining open borders and the nation-state. One can say that it’s a good idea, at this particular historical moment, to organize political power along nation-state lines, but that there are powers nation-states should not have, and one of these is to exclude non-citizens from their territory arbitrarily and by force. They can defend their borders against armed invasion, and probably even against unarmed migrants whom they have good reason to believe constitute an immediate threat to public order or even public health. (By “public health” I mean “freedom from contagious diseases.” The phrase is often used in a more elastic sense.) To the extent that a certain power to tax arises with the provision of judicial support for property rights and provision of public goods– admittedly a difficult question– it extends to non-citizen residents as well as to citizen residents. They cannot justly exclude foreigners simply to prevent their citizens from having to see poverty on the streets, or to avoid incurring moral responsibility for foreigners’ welfare (if such moral responsibility exists, it in any case does not depend on whether foreigners are resident on the national territory or not), or to keep up domestic wage rates. It is desirable to arrange for some change in public opinion, law, and/or international relations that will render this practice intolerable and obsolete, like slavery. But justice allows more discretion to regulate the acquisition of citizenship. More generally, constitutions, law, and political civil society need not be fundamentally revolutionized. Such is a world of democratic nation-states with open borders.

Is that sustainable in the long run? Could the democratic nation-state maintain its essential nature in the presence of huge masses of non-citizens, whose basic human rights would be recognized and respected, but who would have little or no access to political participation? Wouldn’t the democratic character of a state be compromised if there were so many resident non-voters? To some extent, yes, though we should always bear in mind that “voting with the feet” is a substitute for voting in the ballot box, in some ways a superior substitute. There might be a problem with resident non-voters being alienated and trying to exert influence by extra-political channels. Much here would depend on the evolution of political norms. After all, there was a time when the acceptance of the rightful leadership of dynastic kings was as universally accepted as democracy is today. One can envision a future in which migrants took political exclusion for granted and didn’t complain about it, or even think about it. Still, there might have to be deep, subtle changes in the ideology that undergirds political legitimacy, to the detriment of the democratic nation-state model. “Altruism vectors” might sometimes be altered in ways that make the democratic nation-state dysfunctional or unstable– though closed borders is no guarantee against that, either. I suspect that open borders would accelerate the decline of the nation-state.

But I also think the nation-state is destined to decline anyway. We’ve seen that it’s historically novel. I think its rise is a side-effect of the printing press. The printing press reshaped the conversation of mankind on national lines, empowering and homogenizing vernaculars, giving rise to the daily newspaper, inducing the decline of Latin and other lingua franca. Eventually political arrangements caught up to the new consciousness. Now the internet is reshaping the conversation of mankind again, fueling the dominance of English, making it irrelevant where something is published, globalizing social networks. Eventually– but in this case, as with printing/nation-states, it may take a long time– political arrangements will catch up with that too. If this prediction is right, open borders might be compared to constitutional monarchy. They’re a way of ameliorating an institution whose legitimacy, strong for now, is doomed to long-term decline, and easing, even if it might also accelerate, the transition to political arrangements more suitable to the society and economy that the latest technologies are gradually bringing into being.