Objections

Below are some broad classes of objections to open borders:

General strategy for addressing objections

The general strategy for addressing objections borrows from the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. However, we focus here on only three of these five stages: denial, bargaining, and acceptance:

  • Denial: Question the empirical claims of harm, or the philosophical arguments, by pointing out offsetting benefits, questioning the empirical or epistemic basis for the claims, etc.
  • Bargaining: Point out the possibility of keyhole solutions that address the specific harms while avoiding blanket restrictions on migration.
  • Acceptance: In cases where the harms are real and keyhole solutions are not feasible, point out that the overall case for open borders is still very strong, and the harms are not sufficient to overcome this case.

"The Efficient, Egalitarian, Libertarian, Utilitarian Way to Double World GDP" — Bryan Caplan