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Pure open borders and keyhole solutions: is the distinction semantically valid?

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This post builds on my preceding post not-quite-open borders: keyhole solutions, complementary policies, and blanket restrictions. Although it’s not necessary to read that post first, doing so would provide better context for understanding this post.

The keyhole solutions page on our site dates back to the site’s inception, and discussion and comparison of different keyhole solutions has been an important part of our site and blog since then. The basic idea behind keyhole solutions: for any identifiable problem, try to find a solution that addresses the problem as specifically and narrowly as possible, while not forbidding or restricting other actions. For instance, if the concern is that immigrants’ use of welfare benefits will lead to fiscal bankruptcy, placing and enforcing stronger restrictions on immigrant welfare access would be the keyhole solution that allows migration, preserves the existing welfare state for existing users, and allegedly solves the alleged problem. More at the keyhole solutions page.

My co-blogger Nathan Smith had devised his favorite keyhole solution, Don’t Restrict Immigration, Tax It (DRITI), long before Open Borders: The Case existed.

Does the site advocate keyhole solutions? Not officially, but it’s clear that we give them serious consideration as one of the alternatives to pure open borders as a way of liberalizing migration. In one of the first systematic explorations of the subject, I noted that there are six possible rank-order preferences one might have between “pure” open borders, open borders with keyhole solutions, and the closed borders-ish status quo. For any keyhole solution A, the three options being ranked are:

  1. Open borders without keyhole solution A (that one might loosely call “pure” open borders).
  2. Open borders with keyhole solution A.
  3. Closed borders and/or status quo.

This loose trichotomy (pure open borders, open borders with keyhole solutions, and closed borders) has been loosely endorsed by other bloggers on the site, such as Samuel Wilson in his discussion of moral intuitions and the euvoluntary principle in connection with open borders, myself in my discussion of the permissibility, desirability, feasibility, and stability of keyhole solutions, and Paul Crider in his critique of keyhole solutions. Paul offers a great summary of keyhole solutions before taking them down (which, in the above jargon, means endorsing (1) > (2) > (3) over (2) > (1) > (3)).

Implicit in this discussion is the view that some approaches to a more liberal migration policy are identifiable as (closer to) pure open borders whereas others are identifiable as keyhole regimes. Broadly, this is true, which is why my post, and Paul’s, make eminent sense. And I think that keyhole solutions are an important idea in the lexicon of people thinking about realistic regimes with substantially more liberal migration policies than exist today. However, I think that the distinction between pure open borders regimes and keyhole regimes is quite fuzzy. But first, a little detour.

Keyhole solutions, complementary policies, and blanket restriction

As I discuss at more length in my post not-quite-open borders: keyhole solutions, complementary policies, and blanket restrictions, there are actually three slightly different types of policy adjustments and compromises that often get put in the broad bucket of keyhole solutions:

  1. The first addresses the perceived problem at the intersection of migration status and welfare eligibility. Prima facie, this targets the problem most narrowly and is most deserving of the “keyhole solution” label. I’ll call this type of solution a true keyhole solution.
  2. The second addresses the problem but focuses on the broader issue of welfare use and welfare eligibility. Rather than focusing on migrants per se, it addresses a potential problem that is made more severe due to migration flow, but it addresses it in a way that does not per se discriminate on the basis of migration status. I’ll call this type of solution a complementary policy change.
  3. The third seeks to preserve the status quo as far as possible with respect to domestic policy, and addresses the potentially dangerous interaction with migration by forbidding the forms of migration perceived as risky. I’ll call this type of solution a blanket restriction.

Ceteris is not paribus: some mathematical background

(This section doesn’t strictly require, but can benefit from, broad familiarity with the concept of derivatives and multivariable calculus).

In economics and the social sciences, it is customary to consider questions of the form “ceteris paribus, how does a change in variable x affect variable u?” Here, ceteris paribus is understood to mean “other variables being left unchanged.” The concept of partial derivative is a particular encapsulation of this idea of trying to isolate the effect of one variable on another while holding the remaining variables constant.

Back when I taught multivariable calculus to economics majors, I used to emphasize the important fact that the concept of ceteris paribus is ill-defined, because the choice of “other variables” that you keep constant heavily depends on how you coordinatize the system (you can read more here, and also watch the embedded videos). The “real-world” example discussed on the page is quoted below (and isn’t directly related to migration, but will help illustrate the general line of argument):

Suppose a country’s military spending is determined by just two factors: its per capita GDP and its population. We want to study the relationship between per capita GDP and military spending.

There are two sensible ways (among many) of trying to do this:

  • Study the relationship between per capita GDP and military spending holding population constant. In other words, take the partial derivative with respect to per capita GDP holding population constant. In this case, we are thinking of military spending as a function of the two variables: per capita GDP, and population.
  • Study the relationship between per capita GDP and military spending holding total GDP constant. Prima facie, this is similar to the previous one, because total GDP is just a product of per capita GDP and population. However, what we have done effectively is consider a partial derivative of the function in a new coordinate system, where the two variables of interest are: per capita GDP, and (per capita GDP) times (population).

The point is that the partial derivatives will have different expressions depending on what we hold constant.

Ceteris is not paribus: the problem of distinguishing between “pure” open borders and a compromised solution

In the simplest telling, pure open borders refers to a situation where we “just open the borders” and keep all other policies essentially unchanged. Keyhole solutions (viewed broadly) involve opening the borders but making some changes to policies. These changes could be true keyhole solutions (operating at the intersection of migration and the relevant domestic policy), complementary policy changes (such as changes to general rules for welfare eligibility or changes to the minimum wage), or blanket restrictions on some types of migration.

However, this raises the question: what are those other things that we hold constant? If nothing else, open borders will lead to changes in the size of the population in many countries, and sometimes quite significant changes. What would it mean, for instance, to say that we open the borders without changing any policies or rules related to the welfare state? There are many possible interpretations:

  • The rules for welfare eligibility, and the size of welfare benefits per capita for recipient, remains the same.
  • The total size of the welfare state (i.e., the amount of money allocated to pay for welfare benefits) stays the same, or stays the same relative to the population, or stays the same relative to the size of the economy.
  • The total number of welfare recipients remains the same, or remains the same relative to the population size.

These are all different senses of “staying the same.” In most contexts, these differences don’t matter much (or at least, don’t appear to matter much) because the overall global changes to the relevant quantities aren’t very large. However, if open borders is going to be a big deal, then it likely won’t be possible to hold all of these constant or even close to constant. Once we concede that not all aspects of existing policy regimes can be held constant, the conceptual distinction between pure open borders and keyhole solutions becomes more tenuous. Both “pure open borders” and “keyhole solution”-type policies offer plausible descriptions of a world with more liberal migration that nonetheless preserve or inherit some features from the status quo. Calling one set of policies “pure open borders” is mostly about exercising a value judgment regarding which features are central to and represent the essence of the system.

Similarly, consider minimum wage policies (the minimum wage is a topic that has been discussed extensively in the Open Borders Action Group, and we intend to do blog posts about it). Again, there are many different ways in which we can consider minimum wage levels:

  1. We can think of them as associated with specific currency units, not adjusted for inflation. So a minimum wage of $8/hour remains a minimum wage of $8/hour even if the dollar depreciates significantly in value.
  2. We can think of a minimum wage in terms of the associated consumption basket, i.e., indexed for cost of living.
  3. We can set the minimum wage in relation to median wage levels.
  4. We can set a minimum wage threshold based on the maximum amount of unemployment we are willing to tolerate.

There are arguably many different ways of thinking about the appropriate level of a minimum wage (and whether there should be a minimum wage at all). Our choice of preferred rationale for justifying the status quo will determine what sort of minimum wage regime we’d like to see in an open borders world.

For those who simply think of the minimum wage in terms of a currency unit, little head-scratching needs to be done. For those who associate minimum wages with consumption baskets, median wages, or tolerable levels of unemployment, however, the nature of changes under open borders could be quite different. Migration can change the cost of living structure by making some services cheaper and others more expensive. Thus, cost-of-living calculations could change quite a bit. Median wage levels could change both because the wages of existing residents change and because of compositional effects arising from inclusion of the new migrants. Finally, given differences in the skill level of migrants compared to natives, the minimum wage would probably need to be reduced to maintain a similar unemployment rate to the status quo.

With all that said …

I don’t want to exaggerate how dramatic open borders would be. I think a fairly liberal migration regime is fairly consistent with the nation-state roughly as we know it, and while it might push the world to a “no borders” condition over the long run, that won’t happen in short order. But a lot of the specifics will change, in ways that are somewhat but not entirely predictable, and in some cases not pretty. Thus, the concept of “pure” open borders (“just open the borders and don’t touch anything else”) is not as clear-cut as we might naively presuppose. At the end of the day, a policy implementation has to consider many other existing policies in conjunction with changes to migration levels.

With that said, it is still possible to advocate purely for open borders, without advocating for the concept of pure open borders. When I say “advocate purely for open borders” I mean advocate for change in the direction of open borders, without being picky about the specifics, and being flexible about the selection of specifics based on more detailed context-specific empirical analysis. This might mean advocating for changes that could go in directions you consider more “pure” versions of open borders, or advocating in directions you consider more like keyhole solutions or open borders with complementary policies.

Related reading

In addition to inline links within the blog post, check out:

How my day in Wagah led me to rethink borders

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This post continues the personal anecdote series on the site. The series includes pieces both by people who are active supporters of open borders and by people who aren’t directly involved but have formed opinions on the issue informed by their personal experience. This blog post is of the latter kind. The author is a middle-aged female who has lived all her life in India, and the post is being published anonymously at her request.

As a young schoolgirl growing up in India, I assumed borders were fixed and necessary. In geography classes I drew them on maps as dark lines and then shaded and labeled the two sides in different ways. I considered foreign countries as the “other,” especially Pakistan, because I had lived through two Indo-Pak wars. Soon after the 1965 war, when my father was transferred to a military station not far from the border, neighbors showed us a bombed church and the cellars they had used during air raids to stay safe. During the dramatic 1971 war that split Pakistan, I was older and living in Delhi. I remember rushing around putting off lights when the siren sounded. And huddling over a small transistor radio all day to get updates. Later, I was one of the school kids who lined the road to welcome the leader of the newly formed Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman when he arrived in Delhi to meet the Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi. Even otherwise, life was full of comparisons with Pakistan, and quarrelling kids would be told not to fight like “India-Pakistan.”

It took a trip to Punjab with my parents to get me thinking about what borders mean.

I was in my teens and visiting Amritsar with my parents when my father suggested going to Wagah (on the border with Pakistan) because he had some work there. This was just a few years after the 1971 Indo-Pak war and I asked my father whether it would be safe. He laughed.

By Kamran Ali
The evening flag lowering ceremony at the India-Pakistan International Border near Wagah. Taken from the Pakistani side. By Kamran Ali. Source. Licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0

My mental image of what a border should be like was vague and uninformed—something impenetrable, something clearly separating two countries that had fought wars. The border I saw the next day was so commonplace that I can’t remember any details. What remains in my memory is my utter disbelief that the land on the other side of the gate, so nearby and similar, was Pakistan. Men from the two sides were exchanging mail bags in a normal, everyday manner.

My mother noticed my surprise. Half-exasperated, half-amused, she asked, “What did you expect?”

I felt downright foolish. What difference had I expected to manifest itself suddenly across a border? But surely a border should be more secure. I asked her why we didn’t have tall walls with barbed wire and broken glass and with the army guarding the entire length of the border. She asked me if I had thought about how very long the border was and whether that would be practical (It’s 2900 km, according to Wikipedia).

On the way back, and for the weeks that followed, my mind kept slipping back to that glimpse of the Wagah border.

All our relatives and friends were from North India and had been affected, in small or big ways, by the 1947 Partition of India but they rarely talked about their tragedies and losses except in hushed tones when they thought the children were not listening. My mother, for example, had spent part of her childhood in a city now in Pakistan. I knew many families that had hurriedly migrated to India during the Partition. I tried imagining a village getting split into two because a border now ran through it, families either divided across countries, or forced to leave their homes, abandoning most of their belongings and objects gathered over generations. The tragedies depicted in fiction based on the Partition moved out of the pages of story books and into my heart.

Back then, in the 1970s, we had no Google search or Wikipedia pages to satisfy our fleeting curiosity. We had to scout around for relevant books and articles, or pester elders, and our curiosity had to cross a threshold to make such perseverance worthwhile. Yet, even though I moved on to other areas of interest, there was a shift in how I thought, not just about Pakistan, but about countries, borders, immigration, and patriotism in general.

I began realizing that nations may be created overnight based on emphasizing some aspects of identity (such as language spoken, religion, borders of older kingdoms, geographical features like mountains, rivers, and seas) through hastily re-arranged populations and enforced borders but the emotions of people are not so easy to change and that a lot of the silence or rhetoric around that division is based on frustration, bewilderment, pain, and loss. Citizenship began seeming more like chance, a combination of history and time and space, rather than a person’s intrinsic characteristic, and while I appreciated that countries needed borders and laws around them, I started thinking of the rigidity and emotional fervor around the sanctity, shape and impenetrability of borders as excessive.

I had changed in small ways. For example, while watching a match of cricket, a sport passionately followed both in India and Pakistan, I cheered more often based on the quality of the game rather than the country playing. India’s performance in a match did not seem tied to my core identity. I no longer felt either “proud” or “ashamed” of being an Indian. My being Indian was just a fact of my life. There seemed no logical reason to believe that my country was better than others merely because I was born here. Paradoxically, I was more open-hearted in my appreciation of significant Indian milestones because that was based on genuine evaluation rather than pre-scripted loyalty.

Many of my peers had started going abroad for higher education and jobs driven by practical factors like available opportunities and quality of life. They were opting for resident status outside India, things like green cards or citizenship. I wondered how they felt while taking the oath of citizenship of another country and how they emotionally reconciled it with a childhood spent singing the Indian national anthem, and expressing pride in India’s culture and heritage.

Much has changed in the four decades since I saw the Wagah border. Information is more easily available. Borders seem superfluous when surfing the Internet, except when countries ban certain sites, a rude reminder of reality. We know far more about life in other countries than we did a few decades ago, and many prominent products and brands are available in all countries. International travel is easier and more common, and many families are scattered across the globe. When my peers express fears that their children may not return to India, I tell them that our children’s generation does not view moving between countries and settling in one country as against another as a major emotional decision. They choose their location based on multiple factors that include quality of life, type of jobs, convenience, and so on. That they were born or brought up in a country is just one of the several criteria.

The hitches in mobility across borders jar more in this interconnected world. Time and again I hear of persons working outside India being tense because their stay abroad depends on that country’s rules and quotas rather than on their productivity and contribution to its society.  That seems a suboptimal way for the world to run, maybe suboptimal even for the country enforcing the rules.

To me, borders seem somewhat arbitrary, whether of countries or smaller geographic units. Once, on a visit to a small and beautiful hill station (in North India) I saw large notices declaring that “outsiders” could not buy land and build in that town because that would involve chopping trees and clearing land, thus spoiling the natural beauty. Interestingly, the officials in the town’s governing body had moved to that town just a few decades ago, and had bought and cleared land there to build their elaborate houses. It seems self-serving when current residents of a place label future migrants as outsiders, although they, too, are migrants.

Borders don’t just demarcate and divide and keep people out, they are the cause of simmering or outright conflict. Reminders of their existence pop up at unexpected times, even for persons like me who rarely cross borders.

Recently, when preparing a presentation for an international conference, I was looking for a map to illustrate country-wise data. I had often read of some issues of international magazines getting banned in India because they depicted the Indian map wrongly. On surfing the Internet I realized that this (‘wrong’) depiction was the one used all over the world. If I selected a map consistent with what my fellow-countrymen expected, the map would not match what persons from other countries expected, especially those from neighboring countries. And if I used the one that the international audience was familiar with, the Indians would be uncomfortable.

On a somewhat philosophical note, it puzzles me that people assume that borders are a given, that they must exist, and that the only debate is on who can cross them and when and how. My attempts to discuss issues around borders with peers have resulted in my being stared at as though I were weird, maybe even (gulp) unpatriotic and thus a bad person.

Many countries, especially democracies, have legislations prohibiting discrimination based on race, age, religion, and gender. Discussions on topics like gender-discrimination, racism, ageism, and communalism can be openly found–some emotional and even confrontational, and others well-reasoned and insightful.

But discrimination based on place of birth and citizenship is accepted as reasonable, moral, and good. Each country wants to guard its resources and therefore promotes patriotism and pride in one’s country through the education system, laws, and other mechanisms. Society promotes this. As a result, we consider the welfare of our country more important than that of the world as a whole.

I am now in my fifties and I have not been outside India except for a few, very short trips. My current day-to-day life is not particularly affected by the existence of borders or the rules around them. I do not know enough about “open borders” to take a position on their desirability or wisdom. This is not one of the causes that I am active in. But I consider this area important enough for serious discussions, and not just confined to activists or people directly affected by immigration. Such discussions could be part of developing systems that work for what is better for the world as a whole.

Related reading

This section was added by the Open Borders editorial staff to provide more background for readers interested in the material,
See more posts in our personal anecdote series.

Other posts related to themes touched on in the piece:

Some related site background pages:

  • We use the term citizenism (coined by immigration critic Steve Sailer) to describe the idea that government policy, particularly immigration policy, should favor the interests of current citizens.

For more on how the Indo-Pak border was actually drawn, check out Wikipedia’s page on the Radcliffe Line.

Here’s an advertisement by Google Search intended to highlight the power of technology to help people reunite across borders:

Note: The author has requested that the article not be republished without consent, and be published under standard copyright rather than using a Creative Commons license. Due to technical limitations of our software, the piece may show up as marked with a CC-by-NC-ND license.

February 2015 in review

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Febraury 2015 has been yet another decent month for Open Borders: The Case. It’s been a quiet month with steady traffic, despite a substantial reduction in the number of published posts.

Traffic patterns: overall summary

Controlling for length, February did almost exactly as well as January in terms of pageviews. Both months were a little lower than the unprecedently high-traffic months of November and December. Traffic is likely to grow at a slow and steady rate from this level, with occasional spikes during times when migration becomes a topical issue.

Social media successes

None of our posts published February were extraordinary successes. But some of our posts did perform well:

We had a much lower Facebook spend than usual. We only promoted the first two of the posts listed above, after it was established that they were doing quite well organically.

We also had some success with older posts, including:

Search interest

The pages we got traffic to based on search interest remained the same as in January 2015. See the January 2015 review for more information.

Open Borders Action Group highlights

Below are listed some posts in the Open Borders Action Group that generated considerable discussion. OBAG posts that led to subsequent blog posts aren’t included.

There’s a lot more discussion at the Open Borders Action Group. Do check it out and join the group if you’re interested in participating.

Site traffic: details

Pageviews for Open Border: The Case:

Month and year Pageview count (WordPress) Pageview count (Google Analytics)
February 2015 26,205 25,351
January 2015 28,149 25,702*
February 2014 14,964 15,409
January 2014 17,521 17,709

*Google Analytics was dysfunctional for a few days and a few hours on other days, causing that number to be an underestimate.

WordPress traffic by day for the past few weeks:

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Google Analytics traffic by day for the past month:

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  • Facebook likes for our Facebook page stayed fairly steady over the month, increasing from about 4180 to about 4250. We did not spend any money on page promotion. This was very similar to last month’s growth number.
  • The Open Borders Action Group expanded from 867 members to 905 members.
  • Our Twitter account @OpenBordersInfo saw its follower count increased from 1048 at the beginning of the month to 1084 at the end of the month. This was very similar to monthly growth in January.

Are restrictive guest worker programs in employers’ interests?

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This post revisits a subject I last wrote about in December 2012. In that post, I discussed Daniel Costa’s critique of guest worker programs as they exist now, and noted how moves in the direction of more liberal guest worker programs of the sort considered on this site would be less susceptible to those problems than the status quo. Discussions of the (real or alleged) worker exploitation found in guest worker programs are often used as justification for ending the programs and moving instead to a more closed border regime.

Below are some examples of critiques of guest worker programs:

The critiques span a range of perspectives, and need to be addressed in terms of their explicit claims, philosophical assumptions, and tacit connotations. For what it’s worth, I think many of the factual claims are correct, but some of the connotations are mistaken. In this post, I concentrate on a specific claim, usually subtextual, but occasionally explicit, namely:

Guest worker programs where workers are tied to a specific employer and cannot easily move to other employers without losing their legal status in the country:

  1. allow employers to exploit workers in ways they wouldn’t if the workers were free to move around,
  2. benefit employers at the expense of both migrant workers and the native workers who do similar jobs, and
  3. exist in their current form (as opposed to a more liberal form) precisely because they allow employers to exploit workers.

(for a related discussion, and some articulation of these points, see here).

I think (1) is true but the emphasis is off, (2) is true only in certain circumstances, and (3) is probably not true. Continue reading Are restrictive guest worker programs in employers’ interests? →

Not-quite-open borders: keyhole solutions, complementary policies, and blanket restrictions

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A naive thinker about open borders might think of it as simply a continuum of possibilities: we can open the borders a bit, or a lot. This distinction is discussed on our moderate versus radical open borders page.

The idea of keyhole solutions has added more dimensions (in a very literal mathematical sense, in addition to the more metaphorical one) to the discussion. Rather than thinking simply of “how much more open should borders be?” the question shifts to “what sort of policy combinations can allow for us to get the most benefit out of migration, in the ways we care about?” The term “keyhole solutions” has come to represent the general idea of exploring a larger space of possibilities with respect to how migration can be expanded.

The purist in me isn’t too happy about this, because “keyhole solutions” as I believe the term originated had a more narrow meaning: to refer to narrow, targeted solutions that address the particular (real, perceived, or predicted) problem at the intersection of migration and whatever other domain is being considered, while trying to interfere as little as possible with the rest of the universe. But meaning is imbued by usage, and I’m okay with the meaning expanding and getting more fuzzy. In this post, however, I discuss some important distinctions between different approaches to “compromise” on open borders policy. There are a few additional subtleties that I’ll deliberately refrain from here, thereby meaning that my post is not reflective on my full thinking on the topic. I’m making that trade-off to keep the post simple.

A simple illustration of the distinction between true keyhole solutions, complementary policies, and (selective) blanket restriction

Consider the (abstract) problem that high levels of migration, along with current de facto rules for the rules for eligibility for welfare benefits, could lead to fiscal bankruptcy. Consider three potential “solutions” (note that these don’t even come close to exhausting the space of possible “solutions” — but they help to illustrate the distinction I’m trying to draw here):

  1. Improve the effectiveness with which immigrants (perhaps limited to the additional immigrants under migration liberalization) are walled off from the welfare state (this could involve changing the rules, or enforcing existing rules more effectively, or a combination).
  2. Reduce welfare benefits across the board for the whole population (see also our contraction of welfare state page).
  3. Forbid the migration of people for whom the probability of welfare benefit use, or the extent of such use (in expectation) exceeds a threshold.

In a loose sense, these are all “keyhole solutions” insofar as they attempt to address the (perceived or predicted) problem of migrant welfare benefit use.

However, they are all different in important ways:

  1. The first addresses the perceived problem at the intersection of migration status and welfare eligibility. Prima facie, this targets the problem most narrowly and is most deserving of the “keyhole solution” label. I’ll call this type of solution a true keyhole solution.
  2. The second addresses the problem but focuses on the broader issue of welfare use and welfare eligibility. Rather than focusing on migrants per se, it addresses a potential problem that is made more severe due to migration flow, but it addresses it in a way that does not per se discriminate on the basis of migration status. I’ll call this type of solution a complementary policy change.
  3. The third seeks to preserve the status quo as far as possible with respect to domestic policy, and addresses the potentially dangerous interaction with migration by forbidding the forms of migration perceived as risky. I’ll call this type of solution a blanket restriction. To emphasize that the blanket restrictions don’t apply to everybody, we might call it selective blanket restriction.

However, from another perspective, (2) and (3) are examples of keyhole solutions, insofar as they directly address problems created by migration. Whatever names you choose, I want to claim that there is an important conceptual distinction. Continue reading Not-quite-open borders: keyhole solutions, complementary policies, and blanket restrictions →