All posts by Joel Newman

Joel has a bachelor’s degree in history from Pomona College and works as a teacher in Beaverton, Oregon. See also: our blog post introducing Joel all blog posts by Joel

Open Borders and the Child Immigrants from Central America

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As the arrival on the U.S. border of thousands of minors from Central America has consumed the attention of U.S. politicians and the media, open borders is rarely suggested as a policy option.  One exception is the Libertarian Party, which has issued a strong statement in favor of open borders  for these children, as well as most other would-be immigrants.  Another, noted in a previous post,  is from Ross Douthat of the New York Times: “One answer, consistent and sincere, is that the child migration really shows we need an open border — one that does away with the problems of asylum hearings and deportations, eliminates the need for dangerous journeys across deserts and mountains, and just lets the kids’ relatives save up for a plane ticket.”

As Mr. Douthat suggests, open borders would release the government from spending enormous amounts of money detaining Central American child migrants and adjudicating their cases. (President Obama is requesting billions more for these purposes.) Open borders also would help the child migrants and their families immensely.   Families could be more easily reunited and wouldn’t have to pay thousands of dollars to have their children smuggled into the U.S., and the children wouldn’t be exposed to dangers on their long journey to the border, nor would they have to endure often miserable stays in U.S. detention.  The children also could escape horrendous conditions in their home countries, without the fear that they would be deported back.

Related to the inability to consider the open borders option for these child migrants are references to the situation as a “crisis” (here and here) or a “problem.”  Apprehending, detaining, and adjudicating the children is a self-imposed policy choice Americans have made, and it is this interference with the migration flow that is creating the strain on government resources.  Without this interference, the “crisis” or “problem” wouldn’t exist for the government.  The child migrants would travel safely to the U.S., disperse throughout the country, link up with (or arrive with) family, and start new lives. Some schools may see an increase in their student populations, which would involve some strain and expense for school districts, but eventually the children, like their U.S.-born peers, would become working members of society.  (See here for information on the economic impact of immigration on the receiving country.)

Beyond these self-evident advantages of open borders in addressing the child migration flow, here are three additional thoughts about the flow and the commentary surrounding it.  The first is that given the dire conditions and limited resources for children in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, the source countries for most of the recent child migration, the U.S. should facilitate their migration, in addition to opening the borders.  Loans could be provided to families or individual children to use for air transportation to the U.S., and once families are working they could begin to repay the loans.  This support could be provided exclusively by private organizations and individuals, but in a previous post on facilitating migration, I noted that the government may be in a better position to help than private entities.  As previously mentioned, this would allow poor families to avoid ground transportation through an often dangerous Mexico.  It also would enable them to quickly escape the violence and poverty endemic in their homelands.  Graphic descriptions of the dystopian conditions in the three aforementioned countries have appeared in recent articles and reports, including the following from the New York Times about conditions in Honduras:

Narco groups and gangs are vying for control over this turf, neighborhood by neighborhood, to gain more foot soldiers for drug sales and distribution, expand their customer base, and make money through extortion in a country left with an especially weak, corrupt government following a 2009 coup… Carlos Baquedano Sánchez, a slender 14-year-old with hair sticking straight up, explained how hard it was to stay away from the cartels.  He lives in a shack made of corrugated tin in a neighborhood in Nueva Suyapa called El Infiernito — Little Hell — and usually doesn’t have anything to eat one out of every three days. He started working in a dump when he was 7, picking out iron or copper to recycle, for $1 or $2 a day.  But bigger boys often beat him to steal his haul, and he quit a year ago when an older man nearly killed him for a coveted car-engine piston.  Now he sells scrap wood.  But all of this was nothing, he says, compared to the relentless pressure to join narco gangs and the constant danger they have brought to his life.  When he was 9, he barely escaped from two narcos who were trying to rape him, while terrified neighbors looked on.  When he was 10, he was pressured to try marijuana and crack. “You’ll feel better. Like you are in the clouds,” a teenager working with a gang told him.  But he resisted.  He has known eight people who were murdered and seen three killed right in front of him. He saw a man shot three years ago and still remembers the plums the man was holding rolling down the street, coated in blood.  Recently he witnessed two teenage hit men shooting a pair of brothers for refusing to hand over the keys and title to their motorcycle. Carlos hit the dirt and prayed. The killers calmly walked down the street. Carlos shrugs. “Now seeing someone dead is nothing.”  He longs to be an engineer or mechanic, but he quit school after sixth grade, too poor and too afraid to attend.  “A lot of kids know what can happen in school. So they leave.”

The New York Times piece adds that “asking for help from the police or the government is not an option in what some consider a failed state. The drugs that pass through Honduras each year are worth more than the country’s entire gross domestic product. Narcos have bought off police officers, politicians and judges. In recent years, four out of five homicides were never investigated.”  (See also here for information on conditions in El Salvador and here for conditions in a number of countries.)

The second idea is that the emphasis that some are putting on ensuring that the child migrants receive due process to determine if they are refugees, while possibly helping some immigrants stay in the U.S., is harmful to the open borders cause.  It helps to legitimize the exclusion of those who are not determined to be refugees. Sonia Nazario, the author of the aforementioned New York Times piece  describing conditions for children in Honduras, urges the creation of refugee centers in the U.S. where the children’s cases can be adjudicated.  She emphasizes the need for officers and judges to be “trained in child-sensitive interviewing techniques” and that children be represented by a lawyer.  However, she doesn’t hesitate to condone deportation for economic child migrants: “Of course, many migrant children come for economic reasons, and not because they fear for their lives.  In those cases, they should quickly be deported if they have at least one parent in their country of origin.”  Similarly, Jana Mason, a United Nations employee, states that “… these children, if they need it, should have access to a process to determine if they’re entitled to refugee protection.  If they’re not, if they don’t meet that definition, we fully understand, then they’re subject to normal U.S. deportation or removal procedures.”  Their implied message is that if the children get a fair examination of their refugee claims, they have been treated fairly, even if they end up being deported.

So what Ms. Nazario and Ms. Mason are saying is that if the only problem Carlos, the previously mentioned 14 year old, has in Honduras is that he only gets to eat two out of every three days and lives in a tin shack, he shouldn’t be allowed to emigrate to the U.S. And some children do want to migrate for economic reasons.  In a recent survey of Salvadoran children who wish to migrate to the U.S., some cite this reason for wanting to migrate.  Referring to children living in the most impoverished areas of the country, the survey’s author writes that “this desire for a better life is hardly surprising, given that many of these children began working in the fields at age 12 or younger and live in large families, often surviving on less than USD $150 a month.”  Ms. Nazario and Ms. Mason also imply children shouldn’t be allowed to migrate if their sole reason is to reunite with family already in the U.S., but again many want to migrate for this reason.  According to the survey of Salvadorans, about half have one or both parents in the U.S., and about one third identify family reunification as a reason for them to migrate.

John has noted that this effort to exclude non-refugee migrants can result in the exclusion of refugees.  Notwithstanding Ms. Nazario and Ms. Mason’s emphasis on a pristine asylum process, the process of identifying who qualifies can be flawed, especially if you consider the history of asylum adjudication.  As I’ve written previously, asylum is very narrowly defined under the law, and it is easy for asylum applicants to not qualify.  Furthermore, when politics intrude, asylum decisions can be tainted.  During the Cold War, asylum seekers from Communist countries were favored over those from non-Communist countries, including El Salvador and Guatemala, according to Bill Frelick and Court Robinson (International Journal of Refugee Law, Vol. 2, 1990)  And the recent arrival of immigrant children has become highly politicized, with “pressure on the president from all sides,” according to The New York Times.  The Times reports that “… administration lawyers have been working to find consistent legal justifications for speeding up the deportations of Central American children at the border…”  In addition, the outcome of an asylum case can depend greatly on who is adjudicating the case.  Finally, as Ms. Nazario suggests, if the U.S. doesn’t make it easier to apply for refugee status in Central America, refugees will still have to make a dangerous journey to the U.S. to even be able to apply for asylum.

The larger point is that it is immoral, with some rare exceptions, to stop people from migrating, regardless of their reason for doing so. There is, as John suggested recently, no justice in “an immigration system which arbitrarily excludes innocent people purely because of their condition of birth…”  Similarly, the group No One is Illegal, which supports open borders, suggests that it is morally impossible to bar some immigrants while allowing others to enter: “… the achievement of fair immigration restrictions — that is the transformation of immigration controls into their opposite — would require a miracle.”  Refugee advocates like Ms. Nazario and Ms. Mason, by emphasizing a distinction between those who deserve to be allowed to immigrate and those who do not, do harm to the effort to achieve the ability of all people to migrate freely.

The third idea is that the U.S. may bear some responsibility for the violent conditions in Central America.  In the case of Guatemala, the U.S. helped overthrow a democratic government in the 1950s, leading to a succession of repressive regimes and a civil war with massive killings of civilians by the government.  While it is difficult to prove causation, this legacy may account for some of the country’s current violence and poverty.  In addition, the U.S. deportation of Central American immigrants in the 1990s apparently has contributed to violent conditions in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.  Matthew Quirk, writing in The Atlantic six years ago, explained this link:  A small number of Salvadoran immigrants formed the MS-13 gang in Los Angeles in the late 1980s,

but MS-13 didn’t really take off until several years later, in El Salvador, after the U.S. adopted a get-tough policy on crime and immigration and began deporting first thousands, and then tens of thousands, of Central Americans each year, including many gang members.  Introduced into war-ravaged El Salvador, the gang spread quickly among demobilized soldiers and a younger generation accustomed to violence.  Many deportees who had been only loosely affiliated with MS-13 in the U.S. became hard-core members after being stranded in a country they did not know, with only other gang members to rely on… MS-13 and other gangs born in the United States now have 70,000 to 100,000 members in Central America, concentrated mostly in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.  The murder rate in each of these countries is now higher than that of Colombia, long the murder capital of Latin America.

Finally, the Libertarian Party has pointed out that “… U.S. government policies have caused the conditions that some of these Central American children are fleeing. The War on Drugs has created a huge black market in Latin America, causing increases in gang activity and violent crime.”  (For more information on connections between the drug war and immigration, see here.)  While U.S. contributions to problems in certain countries may not support a case for open borders, it does add another layer of U.S. responsibility for doing what is just for migrants from these countries.

In conclusion, establishing an open borders policy, combined with U.S. facilitation of migration, is the only moral and pragmatic response to the influx of Central American children.  Efforts to aid only a portion of the children in their quest to stay in the U.S. are morally insufficient and help to justify immigration restrictions.

More Thoughts on Climate Change and Open Borders

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In 2012 Nathan suggested that the negative impacts of climate change likely “… will fall disproportionately on poor countries…” but that the ability of residents of those countries to migrate to more prosperous countries would allow them to escape “… possible humanitarian catastrophes.”  He concluded that “if we are altering the climate, we need to adapt to that, and migration, moving from the areas most damaged by environmental change to the areas most favored by it, is one of the most powerful instruments of adaption available.”  Open borders would provide a means for people to escape Third World countries like Bangladesh and island nations in the Pacific which are likely to be negatively affected by global warming.  In this post I will examine additional aspects of the relationship between climate change and open borders.

First, the ability to emigrate from advanced countries may be important in the future if climate change severely impacts those countries.  In a previous post I observed that open borders would be beneficial to citizens of advanced countries by allowing them to access opportunities outside of their home countries.  This availability to move to other countries would be especially important in certain climate change scenarios. In the book American Exodus, Giles Slade states that severe droughts, heat waves, forest fires, superstorms, and other adverse weather events associated with climate change will lead to many lost lives and expensive damages in the U.S.  (A recently released report also discusses the negative impact of climate change on the American economy. )  He predicts that “… as America’s Southwest dehydrates and its northeastern shorelines erode… many more human migrants will seek out cooler climes and higher ground.  Canada, of course, is the obvious destination for Americans suffering from the increasingly ‘hot, flat and crowded’ conditions of the United States in the 21st century.” (p. 221)  While the book hints that areas of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska could serve as refuges for Americans in this scenario, open borders would provide Americans another sanctuary in Canada.  Open borders also might be essential to residents of other advanced countries who might be threatened by climate change, such as those living in southern Europe and Australia.

Second, climate change can drive migration, but migration from developing countries to developed ones also might drive climate change.  Vipul has noted that some argue that “if open borders prevailed, many people would migrate to the developed world, and their resource consumption would increase dramatically… It could exacerbate problems of resource scarcity as well as global warming.”  This argument that open borders would accelerate global warning needs to be thoroughly addressed.

One response to the argument is that it is unjust to have a de facto policy of keeping would-be migrants poor by preventing them from moving to an advanced country.  The Immigration Policy Center observes that “blaming immigrants for climate change suggests that less-developed countries should stay that way… Based on this logic, unauthorized immigration isn’t the problem, increased wealth and international development are.”  In an effort to combat global warming, should there be a global campaign to keep the residents of developing nations poor and to impoverish residents of advanced countries?  If this idea is outrageous, how is it acceptable to single out a specific group, residents from poor countries wishing to migrate to advanced ones, for such treatment?

Another possible response to the argument is that, as Nathan points out in his post, since some regions could benefit from global warming  and so long as the world has open borders, people can adapt to the accelerated warming caused by migration through further migration, like the idea of Americans emigrating to Canada.  Klaus  Desmet and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, who have researched the economic impact of global warming, write that even in extreme scenarios of climate change, “… the overall welfare effect of climate change is negligible.  Although agricultural productivity declines in some places, it increases in others.  As long as the world can trade and people can move, the impact is minimal.”  However, they note that in “very extreme” scenarios, “things could turn disastrous… welfare would decline precipitously.”

So could we have open borders without the risk that the world could warm up too much?  Apparently, yes. Jared Diamond, professor of geography at UCLA, highlights the current different environmental impacts between those in advanced and developing countries and the implications of higher levels of consumption by individuals residing in poorer countries.  He states that “the average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world.  That factor of 32 has big consequences.”  He also notes that “what really matters is total world consumption, the sum of all local consumptions, which is the product of local population times the local per capita consumption rate.”  Not surprisingly, “people who consume little want to enjoy the high consumption lifestyle.  Governments of developing countries make an increase in living standards a primary goal of national policy.  And tens of millions of people in the developing world seek the first-world lifestyle on their own, by emigrating, especially to the United States and Western Europe, Japan and Australia.  Each such transfer of a person to a high-consumption country raises world consumption rates, even though most immigrants don’t succeed immediately in multiplying their consumption by 32… if the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase elevenfold.  It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people.”

However, Mr. Diamond apparently does not promote restricting migration as a solution.  Instead he sees the solution residing in the more intelligent use of resources.  He states that “we could have a stable outcome in which all countries converge on consumption rates considerably below the current highest levels… whether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our present rates are unsustainable.  Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates.  Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life.  For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion…”  He notes fisheries and forests could be managed sustainably, though most are not. He predicts that “within most of our lifetimes we’ll be consuming less than we do now” and “per capita consumption rates in many developing countries will one day be more nearly equal to ours.  These are desirable trends, not horrible prospects.  In fact, we already know how to encourage the trends… I am cautiously optimistic.  The world has serious consumption problems, but we can solve them if we choose to do so.”

Similarly, an article on the website for the Center for American Progress  notes that “for years, anti-immigrant groups have waved the green flag to push a xenophobic agenda… And while there is a relationship between population growth and environmental destruction, it is a complex one.  Environmental impact is determined not just by our numbers, but by how we use our resources—our systems of production and consumption and the policies that shape them… it’s crucial to reduce consumption in the affluent countries, by, for example, investing in mass transit and ‘green’ urban planning that can reduce the environmental impact (and greenhouse gas emissions) of large, growing cities.”

Increased immigration could actually reduce consumption rates in host countries.  Vipul posits that the increased population density that open borders would create in advanced countries with relatively low density, such as the U.S. and Canada, could reduce the per capita carbon footprint in those countries.  For example, the enlargement of municipalities through immigration could make mass transit feasible where it wasn’t before.  This difference in population density may explain why the U.S. economy is more  carbon-intensive than that of Western Europe.  Increased density could mitigate the increased carbon footprint from larger migration flows.

In conclusion, open borders could be important for people in both advanced and developing countries to escape the negative consequences of climate change.  At the same time, fears of accelerated climate change due to increased migration shouldn’t undermine open borders; rather than fighting an unjust campaign to keep those in the developing world poor, advanced countries must focus on how resources are used.

Another Take on Moderate Vs. Radical Approaches to Immigration Policy

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The mainstream debate in the United State over immigration policy focuses on whether there should be “immigration reform” or not, with reform being generally synonymous with the immigration bill passed by the U.S. Senate last year and endorsed by President Obama.  The bill would raise legal immigration levels by 50 to 70 percent within five years and legalize the millions of undocumented individuals already in the U.S., while also spending more money on tightening control of the southern border.

Earlier this year, John examined the similarities and differences between those backing “immigration reform” (“moderate reformers”) and those promoting open borders.  He noted that both groups share the beliefs that immigration can be beneficial economically and socially to a receiving country and that immigration enforcement is often inhumane.  Yet, as John points out, moderate reformers “shrink from any inexorable conclusion, no matter how firmly the evidence may point towards it, that open borders could possibly be the right thing to do.”

I recognize that the perfect can be the enemy of the good and have written how moderate reforms can benefit some immigrants, and Vipul has pondered whether the work of the moderate reformers may be more valuable than that of open borders advocates. Nonetheless, the moderate reformers’ intransigence in their thinking about open borders is vexing.

So it is satisfying when the reform camp is challenged in the mainstream media to consider an open borders policy.  Ross Douthat, a New York Times columnist, criticizes reformers with regard to the recent influx of children from Central America.  Mr. Douthat argues that “the mere promise of an amnesty” has been a factor in the migration.  He then presents an open borders solution: “One answer, consistent and sincere, is that the child migration really shows we need an open border — one that does away with the problems of asylum hearings and deportations, eliminates the need for dangerous journeys across deserts and mountains, and just lets the kids’ relatives save up for a plane ticket.  Come one, come all.  But this is not the answer that President Obama or the congressional architects of an immigration bill would offer.  Instead, the official promise is always that we’ll get amnesty and a system of enforcement that will deter and deport and police employers more effectively…”  While I disagree with Mr. Douthat’s position that building “a more effective enforcement system” should be attempted before considering amnesty, I applaud his suggestion that the open borders position on the migration of children and immigration generally makes more sense than that of the reformers.

Similarly, on the PBS Newshour Jan Ting of Temple University, a foe of increased immigration levels, has pushed reformers to clarify their thinking: “… I think we have to answer the fundamental question: Do we want unlimited immigration to the U.S. or not?… I actually think a rational, coherent argument can be made for completely open borders… we have just got to make up our minds.  Is illegal immigration a problem, yes or no?  If it’s not a problem, let’s let everybody in.”

In the long run, it will be beneficial to the open borders cause for the moderate reformers to embrace open borders and join us in pushing for its realization.  At the same time, perhaps in the short run it might be beneficial to have both groups, with moderate reformers achieving some gains for immigrants while open borders advocates begin pushing for larger gains in the more distant future.  Open borders advocates also can lay the groundwork for moderate reformers to join our cause by continuing to point out the flaws in their thinking, as John has done.  Opponents of both reform and open borders, like Mr. Douthat and Mr. Ting, are welcome to help out in this effort.

Open Borders Allow People, Not Their Place of Birth, To Control Their Lives

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Fabio Rojas has written that to convince the public to support open borders, advocates “need a simple and concise idea that undermines the belief that people from other countries must be forcibly separated from each other. This idea must subtly, but powerfully, undermine the distinctions that make people believe that only citizens have the right to travel and work without impair.”  He suggests that this idea must appeal to “basic moral intuition” and that “lengthier academic arguments,” while persuasive, are ineffective.  I propose the following intuitive, simple message to help convince people to favor open borders: Open borders allow people, not their place of birth, to control their lives.

The content of this message is not original, although the wording may be.  The content is borrowed in part from John Lee,  who has implored, “… let’s not use birth as a reason to deny those less fortunate than us some of the same opportunities you and I had.”  Similarly, R. George Wright of Indiana University has written, in “Federal Immigration Law and the Case for Open Entry,” how those with the “undeserved good fortune to have been born in the United States resist… accommodation of the undeservedly less fortunate.”

There are several reasons why this message may resonate with the public.  First, it refers to “people,” not “immigrants.”  Using Fabio’s language, this “undermines the distinctions” between those in immigrant receiving countries and would-be immigrants by emphasizing the common humanity between both groups.  Second, at least for the American public, its emphasis on “control” taps into commonly held values of individualism and self reliance.  Third, again at least in an American context, the idea that birthplace should not be permitted to negatively impact opportunity connects with the widely accepted notion that people should not be discriminated against based on congenital traits such as gender and skin color.

To humanize the message, examples of people constrained by conditions in their birth country must be provided. An powerful example would be the Dalits, or “untouchables,” of India.  A report   by two Dutch organizations explains the plight of this group:  “The caste system divides people on the basis of birth into unequal and hierarchical social groups. Dominant castes enjoy most rights and least duties, while those at the bottom – the Dalits–in practice have few or no rights. They are considered ‘lesser human beings’, ‘impure’ and ‘polluting’ to other caste groups. Untouchables are often forcibly assigned the most dirty, menial and hazardous jobs, such as cleaning human waste. Caste discrimination is outlawed in India, but implementation of legislation is lacking. It is estimated that in India there are around 200 million Dalits.” (page 9)  A Mother Jones article on abusive conditions for girls who work in garment factories in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu describes the situation in a village where some of girls come from: “Most of the tea workers are from the lower castes and make about $3 per day; it costs a month’s salary just to outfit a child with books and a uniform for school.”

Another example of conditions ruling lives is provided by Luis Alberto Urrea in The Devil’s Highway, which chronicles the suffering of a group of Mexicans who crossed into the U.S. through the Arizona desert in 2001.  Mr. Urrea notes the economic conditions at the time in the state of Veracruz, Mexico, where several of the individuals in the group came from:  “The people were killing themselves working the ranchos on the outskirts.  The fishermen couldn’t catch enough protein in the sea.  The cane cutters couldn’t cut enough cane.  The small peasant farmers couldn’t get good enough prices to cover the costs of planting and harvesting their coffee… Prices kept rising, and all families… were able to afford less and less.  Food was harder to come by: forget about telephones, clothes, cars, furniture.  Even chicken feed… was expensive.  Pampers, milk, baby formula, shoes, tuition, tools, medicine… Between Americanized prices for their frijoles, and the unpredictable spikes in the price of tortillas, the Veracruzanos sometimes didn’t even know how they would feed their families.” (pp. 44-45)

Beyond poor economic conditions, there are also numerous situations to be cited in which people’s lives are controlled by unsafe conditions in their home countries, such as the civil wars in Syria and Central African Republic.  Even without mass conflict, in many countries the average person has little protection from the violent whims of others.  In a recent column entitled “The Republic of Fear,” David Brooks notes that in many countries, especially in the developing word, unless a person is part of a wealthy, powerful elite, he cannot “take a basic level of order for granted.”  Mr. Brooks writes that “People in many parts of the world simply live beyond the apparatus of law and order.” As I have written previously, women especially have little protection from family members or strangers in many parts of the world.

Lack of control over one’s life is especially apparent in parts of the world where people cannot practice their religion, cannot choose what they wear, cannot marry whom they want, or cannot be openly gay.  In western countries that value such freedoms, emphasizing the opportunity open borders would provide individuals to acquire these freedoms should particularly resonate with the public.

The message emphasizing control also must be accompanied by evidence that open borders would not negatively impact the lives of most people in immigrant receiving countries and that there would be mechanisms instituted to compensate those who might experience economic losses from open borders.  (Vipul has summarized these mechanisms.)  The Immigration Policy Center site provides more such evidence, as does this site (Here, here, here, and here).

It is true that no one has total control over their lives.  Even in advanced countries, the family environment in which we were raised, our natural abilities, and our health often determine our options.  The idea in the message Open borders allow people, not their place of birth, to control their lives is to remove place of birth as a limiting factor.

Hopefully advocates will reach a consensus on a simple, powerful message supporting open borders that will resonate with the public.  The message promoted here can be a starting point.

With Open Borders, Should Governments Facilitate Migration?

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Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute has suggested helping America’s long-term unemployed by having the U.S. government subsidize their relocation from areas in the U.S. with poor labor markets to ones with stronger markets.  He states that “many of the long-term unemployed living in, say, New Jersey would likely have a much easier time finding a job in North Dakota.”  Noting that many of the unemployed don’t possess the resources to move, Mr. Strain states that the subsidies would cover a majority of their moving expenses.

Similarly, should governments of advanced countries subsidize the relocation (or even cover the total cost of moving) of destitute foreigners into their countries as part of open borders policies that hopefully will one day be adopted?  An impoverished Bangladeshi would seem to have even less ability to move to an advanced country than an unemployed resident of New Jersey would have to move to North Dakota, even without legal barriers to migration.  An impoverished Bangladeshi also would have greatly improved opportunities to better her economic situation in an advanced country.

There are many powerful moral arguments supporting open borders, but what are the ethics involved in helping individuals immigrate?  While this question does not appear to have been explored, one argument for open borders would seem to easily incorporate migration assistance into its case for unimpeded movement.  Joseph Carens  of the University of Toronto, using John Rawls’ question about what laws people would adopt if they knew nothing about their personal situations, concludes that people would choose the right to migrate since “it might prove essential to one’s plan of life…”   Since many impoverished people might not be able to take advantage of open borders, people who know nothing of their situations would probably support both the right to migrate plus government provided relocation aid to those who need it.  This  would ensure that if they were one of those needing aid they would have the opportunity to improve their lives through migration.

The moral philosopher Peter Singer’s  drowning child parable also seems to suggest that relocation aid for would-be migrants would be morally obligatory.  In the parable, which is meant to help Mr. Singer’s students “think about the ethics of what we owe to people in need,” a student sees that a child is drowning in a shallow pond.  Saving the child would be easy, although the student’s clothes would get muddy and, having to change clothes, the student would miss their class.  Mr. Singer notes that his students unanimously agree there is an obligation to rescue the child.  In addition, most students agree that it would not make any difference “if the child were far away, in another country perhaps, but similarly in danger of death, and equally within your means to save, at no great cost–and absolutely no danger–to yourself… distance and nationality make no moral difference to the situation.”  He then suggests that citizens of advanced countries can, at little cost, save lives in the Third World through donations to aid agencies, just like the student can easily save the life of the drowning child in the parable.

Some people desiring to migrate to an advanced country may be truly in mortal danger, whether through starvation or persecution, and helping them migrate would save their lives.  Like in Mr. Singer’s parable, citizens of advanced countries, acting through their governments, could help some of them migrate to their countries at little cost.  Thankfully most would-be immigrants aren’t in such dire situations, but many could see vast improvement in their lives by being able to migrate with the help of advanced countries.  (Would-be immigrants who aren’t in immediate danger would generally be easier and cheaper to assist than those who are starving or being threatened with violence.)  Furthermore, arrangements could be made for the migrants to reimburse governments for the migration assistance, perhaps through garnishment of wages from jobs they find in the advanced countries.

Other supporters of open borders may have a different perspective on using government funds to assist migration.  The economist Bryan Caplan writes that “Yes, you have an obligation to leave strangers alone, but charity is optional.”  Having a government compel its citizens to pay for the relocation of migrants from other countries into their country may not be morally justifiable in his opinion.  Private funding of migration would probably be Mr. Caplan’s preferred approach.

With the advent of open borders policies, perhaps aid organizations would shift their focus from providing help to the needy in the countries where they live to providing migration assistance that would allow individuals to move to advanced countries where they could help themselves through work.  Perhaps organizations or businesses in the home countries of would-be migrants would provide loans to help them emigrate, although in some instances these arrangements could be abusive.  Should these entities provide the resources necessary for people to migrate, then the question of migration support from governments of the advanced nations would be a moot point.

However, these resources from private sources may be insufficient to meet the needs of all who wish to migrate.  The availability of government support would help ensure that all those who wished to migrate could do so.  Unlike private entities, governments could also more easily employ transportation assets to facilitate migration, such as the U.S. sending ships or planes to Haiti to collect migrants and bring them to the U.S.

Under open borders, related questions also arise.  In countries with murderous conflicts like the one in Syria, should advanced countries intervene to create safe passages for those who wish to flee the countries and settle in a different country, most likely an advanced one?  Should advanced countries punish countries like North Korea that forbid or severely impede emigration?  Hopefully open borders will be embraced in the not too distant future, and questions about the extent of government facilitation of migration will constitute the debates citizens in the advanced countries have over immigration.

In a future post, Vipul will discuss whether migration flows under open borders would be too large, too small, or optimal.  Government intervention to facilitate migration would be another factor when considering the amount of migration under open borders.

The image featured at the top of this post is a 1917 painting depicting Armenian refugees at Port Said, Egypt.