Greetings and salutations Open Borders bloggers! I’d like to thank Vipul for inviting me to participate on this blog, and with luck I can bring some interesting points to this discussion. I want to begin by talking about Native Americans. This is something of an elaboration on a point I brought up on econlog, the original comment you can find here (there is a lot in that comment but the part I’m elaborating on is conveniently labeled).
We can find on the Internet a number of images of Native Americans that satirize the position of closed borders advocates. Clever closed borders advocates embrace the analogy and note that the alien invasion by European immigrants was not all that beneficial to Native Americans. Thus, the downfall of Native Americans becomes an example of the potential problems of open borders. This is at first glance a convincing point. European immigration did lead to the downfall of pre-existing Native American societies. But in reality it is not the concept of immigration this historical example condemns. Two key factors were distinct about this immigration which were responsible for what might even be called genocide (there can be some dispute about this, but that’s not the argument I’m interested in having today). These are disease and invasion.
Disease is the first, and largest, problem arising from contact with Europe. Estimates have some variation, but books like 1491 by Charles Mann suggest that diseases could have killed in excess of 95% of the Native American population. This is devastation that often occurred simply on first contact, not when immigration began. Furthermore, the chances of such an apocalypse today are remote at best. Beyond the advances in modern medicine and quarantine techniques, the globalization of the modern world means that any disease that could now arise and kill that many people would not likely selectively hit certain groups sparing others. European diseases had the effect they did because Native Americans had been isolated for centuries. Now disease is already shared constantly across continents. There are no “privileged” groups with greater immunity.
However, that point may be readily accepted, but that does not fully explain the tragedy of Native Americans. If Europeans had restricted relations to simply trading then this may have allowed Native Americans time to adjust and recover from the (mostly) accidental genocide they faced. But the problem was not the immigration of Europeans to North America but the invasions they undertook. The difference between the two is simple. Immigration occurs when a group of people peacefully move to a new area. Invasion constitutes the use of force to conquer a region. The early Spanish colonies almost entirely were made up of invasions, as were many English and French colonies. However, there are compelling examples of simple immigration which did not cause the problems of invasion. Colonies such as early Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and the French Acadians moved into areas peacefully and interacting with Native Americans in mutually beneficial ways. These colonies were typically among the freest in terms of individual rights, and particularly in the Acadian case, created prosperous societies intermingled with one another. That superior European military technology alongside the weakness from disease losses made Native Americans easy to conquer is not the fault of immigration.
So does the Native American example teach us anything about the advisability of open borders? In the broad sense, not much. Most interactions between Native Americans and Europeans were of invasion, which inherently does not respect the border crossing policies of the invaded nation. This is clearly not applicable to the modern Western world whose military advantage over the countries sending migrants cannot be seriously doubted. But there were some instances of simple immigration which offer a tantalizing glimpse at what might have been. There were immigrants from often extremely repressive societies mixing with natives in societies with (generally in North America, if not Central or South) more respect for individual liberties, creating prosperous, peaceful, and free communities.
The upshot of this? Given that invasion is a separate issue from political externalities, the political externalities problem has failed to kill the goose that laid the golden egg not only in 19th century America, but as far back as European immigration to Native American areas. Is this a definitive argument for open borders? No, but it seems to me that when individual liberty is on trial, liberty should be considered innocent until proven guilty. And in contrast to those who use the example of Native Americans to warn against increased immigration, most of the evidence is invalid and that which is valid tends to the opposite conclusion.
Maybe you should read Swedish-Kurdish classic liberal Tino Sanandaji’s blog and his take on Open Border Libertarianism.
His latest post “Open Border Daydreams” on Somali immigration to Sweden and the US/UK.
http://super-economy.blogspot.se/2012/10/open-borders-fantasies_31.html?m=1
Dear Old Whig,
Thanks for stopping by. Since I don’t see the relevance of this comment to the post, I am guessing your comment is addressed more to the site at large.
I (and probably the other bloggers here as well) am quite familiar with Sanandaji’s writings. We even have a page on Sanandaji here: http://openborders.info/tino-sanandaji linking to various of Sanandaji’s writings that are referenced on the website. However, I hadn’t seen this latest piece by Sanandaji prior to your link. I’ve taken a look at it now. It might be the subject of a future Open Borders blog post.
Thanks once again, and I appreciate your taking the time to comment on this website.
Hey Old Whig,
As Vipul says this isn’t exactly directly related to this topic, but I do think it’s a point worth addressing in later posts. For now, suffice it to say that I don’t think his use of poverty statistics is particularly useful when describing whether Somalis are finding “success”, his complaints may be related to issues other than immigration (to which keyhole solutions may be a superior alternative), and I’m unconvinced of his claim that those outside of a nation should not be counted as part of “society.” But a more detailed look at the problems would have to come later (from one of us anyways).
Chris, regarding the point you make about disease, I would add that the bigger danger is from tourism and short business trips, not from long-term migration. In the US, there are about 20X as many short-term business/tourist visits as the number of migrants (legal and illegal), as David Friedman documents here: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2006/03/immigration-and-terrorism.html
So a restrictionist who takes the disease argument seriously should wish to close down the borders not just to migrants, but to short-term business/tourist visas. I doubt even restrictionists would be willing to bite that isolationism bullet.
I’d say it can get even worse than that! Traditionally disease has traveled along trade routes meaning that you might have to abandon free trade as well. Furthermore, even allowing your own citizens to leave for tourism or business would be problematic as they might catch diseases. At minimum you might have to quarantine them and any plane/ship crews they traveled with whenever they come home due to the threat of diseases with long incubation periods. Disease doesn’t respect any citizenism distinctions.
Yup, the disease argument is quite weak, which I think is why it doesn’t seem to come up a lot in the restrictionist arguments I’ve seen. This may not fit the tone of the Disease page, since it comes from the irreverent humour site Cracked.com but this account of one Australian’s immigration to the US points out the silliness of immigration policy as a solution to disease transmission: http://www.cracked.com/article_18552_so-you-want-to-be-american-5-circles-immigration-hell.html
“You can never be too careful when it comes to disease, right? Well, the thing is, at the time I embarked on my medical check, I had already spent three months in America on a “tourist” visit, meaning that I didn’t need to apply for a visa or do anything other than show up in LAX with a passport.
“During those three months, I’d had ample opportunity to breathe the air, cough on people with my foreign, disease-infested lungs, and share used needles with schoolchildren while bleeding openly into the water supply. Had I wanted to, I could have disappeared inside the borders and stayed on as an illegal, inflicting my unvaccinated self on the country for all time.
“Despite this, America was only interested in protecting her citizens from my foreign germs when I actually applied for a visa to immigrate legally. In other words, the socioeconomic class that can actually afford the time and money to pay for the legal immigration process, the ones who are most likely to be healthy, vaccinated and non-consumptive, are the ones whose health and germs America worries most about. Doesn’t that make you feel safer?”
Saying it was a accidental genocide is wrong. White people deliberetly trade blankets with smallpox infesting to natives so that they would die from disease. Nothing accidental about it. White people always lying instead of owning up to it