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Borders and Inequality

February 5, 2015 Katy Long 7 Comments

This is a guest post. Please see the author bio, editorial note, and related reading at the bottom for more context.

Inequality is big news. From Piketty’s bestseller to Oxfam’s reminder to Davos’ economic elites that by 2016, the richest 1% will own more than all the rest of us combined, we are newly concerned with the threat growing inequality poses to global stability. And in seeking to meet what US president Barack Obama has called ‘the defining challenge of our time’, many politicians have claimed that mass immigration is contributing to inequality and poverty at home: that the movement of people leads to lower wages, higher unemployment and greater dependency upon social security and the welfare state among displaced citizens.

Understood in these national terms, if inequality is the problem, the solution would seem to involve less migration and stronger borders. Yet for champions of global justice, the opposite is true. In 2009, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) determined that migrants who moved from a low-income to a high-income country saw, on average, a 15-fold increase in income, a doubling of education enrollment rates and a 16-fold reduction in child mortality numbers. Framed like this, migration is no longer contributing to the problem of inequality. In fact, on a global scale, it’s the solution.

So who’s right? Is inequality really a zero-sum game, in which global justice comes at the expense of national equity? Do we have to choose between addressing inequality between citizenships, and inequality between citizens? And if this is the case, what are the implications for the Open Borders movement?

Of course in strict utilitarian terms, if more migration maximizes total benefit at a global level, national effects are secondary. But when it comes to politics, global justice arguments can’t simply trump national ones because – at an almost instinctive level – the vast majority of people would claim that nations – communities – are important, and effects of migration at a local level can’t simply be discounted.

It’s therefore important to recognize that the evidence for many claims made about the injurious effects of immigration upon locals is dubious. In the case of the UK, for instance – where anti-immigration rhetoric has proved popular in recent elections – economic data suggests that the effects of immigration on the labour market are minimal, and that immigrants make an unambiguous net fiscal contribution to the UK treasury, paying in much more in taxes than they take out in benefits. Yet even if the idea that immigration is bad for equality at home doesn’t hold up to close empirical scrutiny, we still need to ask why it continues to hold such sway when it comes to public opinion and political action.

So why do nations matter? Part of it undoubtedly is about culture and belonging. We are none of us ‘unencumbered individuals’, and national cultures play a role in shaping our identities. Yet in practice, national identity is often a chameleon: ask a San Franciscan and an Alabaman what it means to be an American, and the chances are you’d get very different answers. This means ‘national culture’, in and of itself, isn’t a justification for why we need nation-states – let alone why we should restrict migration.

Instead, arguably the most persuasive progressive case for national borders rests upon something more tangible: the promise of equality of opportunity that is a fundamental component of citizenship. In a modern state, that promise is usually articulated through the funding of a whole set of national institutions designed to close this gap – social security, healthcare, education. This is the nation-state not – in David Goodhart’s words – as a ‘mystical attachment’, but the institutional arrangement that can consistently deliver the democratic, welfare and psychological outcomes that ‘most people, when given a choice, seem to want’. Many in favour of tightly restricting migration argue that it’s these institutions that really make national citizenship meaningful. They also insist that such institutions can only function if borders be drawn somewhere, in order to turn a universal but vague commitment to equality of opportunity in principle into a limited but tangible effort to create more equality in practice.

Of course, in practice, equality of opportunity is still a fiction at a national level too. Outcome and opportunity cannot be so easily separated. In 2007, the richest 1% of Americans already owned 35% of the country’s wealth. In the UK, the wealthiest 1% is 215 times wealthier than the poorest 10% of Britons. But for advocates of tighter border controls, this is just further evidence that we should make good on national promises first, before turning to think about the greater challenges we face in tackling global inequality.

And at first glance, this seems reasonable: pragmatism legitimized by the bonds of community. After all, nearly all of us ultimately care more about our family members’ wellbeing than that of our acquaintances, especially when it comes to action rather than sentiment. Arguably, favouring locals over migrants is just an extension of this – a recognition that being part of a national community cements closer ties, so a fellow-citizen’s wellbeing matters more to us than that of a stranger. Follow this argument to its logical conclusion, and we have a justification for a bordered world, carefully tied to the measuring of fiscal contribution and social cohesion.

Yet we should also see the limits of this argument. Rights of inheritance, ‘special’ family bonds, and Old Boys’ Networks entrench a great deal of privilege and power in our communities: look at the political dynasties that sit in Parliaments and Congresses, or the wealthy oligarchs who will their children vast fortunes. “Close ties” have a habit of spilling from protection into nepotism. In other words, acknowledging that borders may protect some of the most vulnerable close to us does not mean that we can ignore the fact that the inequalities between citizenships are often much more acute than the inequalities within our own communities.

For the effects of birthplace upon life chances cannot be overstated. In 2012, the World Bank concluded that ‘more than fifty percent of one’s income depends on the average income of the country where a person lives or was born … a very large chunk of our income will be determined by only one variable, citizenship, that we generally acquire at birth’. Where we are born determines to an enormous extent both how likely it is we are going to need to move, and also how free we will be to do so.

Inequality, then, is largely determined at birth and tied to geography. This means there’s still a powerful moral case for using migration as a means to remedy the arbitrary inequalities of birthplace that we usually conveniently ignore. Norway, for instance, offers much more to all its citizens than Afghanistan can. The West’s citizens cannot possibly claim that the relative riches that derive from our citizenship are fair: they are above all a fortunate accident of birth. When it comes to justifying borders as a means of preserving some equality within – protection for the poorest citizens – this needs to be balanced against the risk that such borders aren’t about protection as much as they are about maintaining privilege.

So what does this mean when it comes to thinking about borders and inequality? First, it suggests that ‘protection, not privilege’ is a good maxim around which to build a ‘fair’ migration policy. Our fellow citizens should be protected from harm, the basic promises of the social contract met. However, providing this is done, international migrants should not be locked out. For at that point our interest in maintaining what are essentially inherited privileges – that 50% lifetime birthplace bonus – begins to look pretty selfish. At some point, borders are no longer self-preservation: they’re greed.

Principle, of course, is one thing: practice is another. This line of reasoning has at least two important political implications. First, if borders are to be defended as a protection against inequality, the justification rests first on demonstrating tangible progress in promoting equality between citizens, and then on showing such measures are being helped by restricting immigration. The evidence strongly suggests that states are currently unable to show either of these conditions holding true. In fact, immigration plays a crucial role in underpinning the current institutions and fiscal commitments that are intended to bridge the equality gaps between citizens too.

Second, if more migration is to be justified on the grounds that it helps to reduce global inequality, efforts to relax border controls and open up freedom of movement cannot focus only on the movement of elites: the highly-skilled and the highly-paid. This is directly counter to current policy trends. Increasing numbers of states are selling citizenship to the highest bidder: but in an age of elite hypermobility, fences are also being built to ensure the poor are kept in place.

There is thus a powerful case to be made that when it comes to inequality, the real fight isn’t between migrants and citizens: it’s between the elites and the ordinary. And if equality of opportunity is the end, then greater freedom of movement is one means by which such a goal can be achieved. This means that most immediately, there’s a need to counter the efforts being made to reduce immigration by many states, and to articulate the reasons why efforts at immigration reform in others should not focus only on securing visas for the wealthy, the highly educated, and corporate employees. And in the long-term, perhaps considering an alternative mantra – not “Open Borders”, but “Equal Borders” – might help to underline that if what we’re ultimately interested in is equality, greater freedom of movement is an important means of getting there – for migrants and citizens alike.

Open Borders editorial note: As described on our general blog and comments policies page: “The moral and intellectual responsibility for each blog post also lies with the individual author. Other bloggers are not responsible for the views expressed by any author in any individual blog post, and the views of bloggers expressed in individual blog posts should not be construed as views of the site per se.” The author of this post brings a perspective quite different from, though still overlapping significantly with, the perspectives espoused and discussed on the site.

Author Bio

Katy Long is the author of The Huddled Masses: Immigration and Inequality (Amazon/Thistle: 2014). Katy’s research and writings explore the causes and consequences of migration for migrants, citizens and communities. Katy is a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University and also teaches for the School of Advanced Study at the University of London.

Since completing her Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 2009, she has held faculty positions at the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics and the University of Edinburgh. Her first book, The Point of No Return: Refugees, Rights and Repatriation, was published in 2013 by Oxford University Press. Katy is also the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Katy has also worked extensively with policy-makers including the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, the Norwegian Refugee Council and the Migration Policy Institute. In addition, she is engaged in furthering public understanding and engagement on migration issues, speaking and writing for a number of media outlets including the BBC World Service, ITV Tonight, The Conversation and openDemocracy. Follow Katy on Twitter at @mobilitymuse.

Related Open Borders: The Case links

The author of the post brought a different perspective to the issue than that typically espoused in Open Borders: The Case content and blog posts. To minimize disruption to the flow, we didn’t include links to related content from the site in the main post. However, the site does explore some questions related to the content. A brief list of related site content is below. There might be response blog posts by Open Borders: The Case bloggers responding to the author’s points. These links were curated by Open Borders: The Case editors and are not the author’s responsibility.

Local inequality aversion: This page discusses the idea that local inequality is important in and of itself, and the tension between that and global inequality.
We have a number of pages discussing parochial (as opposed to universalistic) moral perspectives. For instance, see our page on communitarianism (the standard term in philosophy for the idea of giving a central place in moral deliberation to communities), citizenism (the idea that policy should favor the interests of current citizens as opposed to foreigners, including migrants and potential migrants who may eventually become citizens), and territorialism (the idea that policy should favor the interests of people within the geographic territory of the nation, rather than those not currently in the territory).
For more general background on egalitarian arguments for open borders, see our pages on the egalitarian case for open borders, Rawlsian arguments, and equal opportunity.
We have collected the economic literature on the global economic impact of open borders, the effect on receiving country wages, and the gains people can realize very quickly simply by crossing borders.
We have a lot of discussion on the site about the extent to which identifiable subsets of natives are likely to be hurt on net by free migration, and whether and how they should be compensated so that they are, at the very least, “held harmless” by changes to migration policy. Some good starting points are our keyhole solutions page, Nathan Smith’s Don’t Restrict Immigration, Tax It proposal, and Vipul Naik’s blog post on funding compensation for natives who lose out due to migration policy. At the same time, it’s important to note that the site does not blindly advocate any and all “keyhole” solutions, and many bloggers consider them a poor substitute for open borders. See, for instance, Paul Crider’s post against keyhole regimes.

A Skeptic’s Movement: Open Borders and Mistrust of Authority

February 4, 2015 Fabio Rojas 4 Comments

Open Borders is a skeptic’s movement. Advocates claim that one of the world’s most important, and fairly popular, public policies is immoral, inhumane, and inefficient. For some, even the concept of Open Borders is shocking. Aren’t governments supposed to control borders? Won’t Open Borders lead to chaos and disorder?

Open Borders is not the only movement to rely on mistrust of the state. For example, privacy advocates are concerned about the abuse of surveillance by law enforcement agencies. Not only should we be concerned that state officials might use surveillance for personal goals (tracking an ex-girlfriend, for example) but we should also be concerned with more systematic abuse. When state officials gain more access to our bank accounts, phone records, and emails, state repression is more likely.

Similarly, the recent anti-police movement in the United States expresses skepticism of government. These activists argue that police can’t be trusted to use force without supervision and that they should face consequences for their actions. While these activists wouldn’t identify themselves as anti-police, they do criticize the current US policy, which is that police officers are rarely sanctioned for use of force because the law makes it extremely difficult for prosecutors to show that police officers were not concerned about their safety.

An important question to consider about the skeptical movements is how Open Borders relates to mistrust in government as expressed by these other movements. To answer this question, it helps to distinguish between short term mistrust created by specific incidents and deeper distrust emerging from a more sustained criticism of policy.

Mistrust Emerging from Short Term Incidents

Sometimes, people become skeptical of government policy because of a specific incident or cluster of incidents. The reactions to the recent deaths of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown and other young Black men in the United State are examples of mistrust driven by incidents. At the time of this writing, there does not appear to be a whole sale criticism of police or the laws that make it easy for police to commit these acts. Yet, a movement has sprung up that seeks punishment for specific police officers or reform in certain places.

Incident-driven skepticism of government can still be useful for movements. They bring attention to an issue, people provide resources, and so forth. An industrious activist can make the connection to broader issues, but this is often hard. Perhaps the most important outcome of these incidents is to challenge local conditions. The killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri might lead to change in that city, even if it does not result in national reform of the police.

For Open Borders, I suggest the following. There are incidents that can erode the public’s views on migration restrictions and they can be useful, but do not expect them to transform the movement. Instead, use them as short term opportunities to build a movement. Use them to bring people together who might not otherwise interact. They can also be used to gather the resources needed for more systematic action. When incidents occur, Open Borders advocates may provide the intellectual heft that can be used to bolster and support a sustained reform effort in specific places.

Cultivating Deeper Skepticism about Migration Control

In general, it is not clear to me that the distrust around issues like mass surveillance or police violence can be immediately tranferred to migration because policy evaluation seems to depend a lot how people bundle issues. Currently, people bundle issues according to political party, which political scientists call “polarization.” I do not think it is wise to turn open borders into a Democratic or Republican issue just to curry favor from people in one party who might be skeptical of police violence (Democrats) or mass surveillance (libertarian leaning Republicans). Thus, unless we turn open borders into, say, a Democratic issue, it would be hard to bring all the “skeptics” together.

What do I suggest instead? I might avoid thinking about mistrust altogether and focus on showing how open borders is not consistent with popular values. This is a strategy of creating wide scale cognitive dissonance. There are many ways to do this. Incidents that create negative impressions of closed borders can be used to bring people together. But so can educational efforts, court cases, and other forms of action. This is more valuable because it is an alliance that exists independently of parties and of specific incidents, which have short term impacts.

One popular value is human rights. Nearly all democratic governments will base their laws on some form of basic human rights. In the US, the constitution focuses on the rights of speech and due process. In other nations, people may have citizenship rights. Regardless, Open Borders activists may erode support for migration controls by simply pointing out that human beings have a right to peacefully move across national borders as they would internal borders. Open Borders is a natural extension of the belief that people should be left to do as they please as long as they do not harm others.

Conclusion

We often see events that bring existing policy into question. The NSA revelations did this for our nation’s security agencies. Recent police shooting have triggered a similar process for local police departments. But these have not yielded wide scale reform and the attention given to these issues can be ephemeral. Instead, open borders is a movement that shouldn’t be attached to one specific issue, but instead to arguments that can hold together a wide group of people outside of the party system.

Is there a right to migrate to outer space?

February 3, 2015 Michelangelo Landgrave 1 Comment

During the height of the cold war a common fear among the west and Soviet blocs about the other side placing nuclear weapons in outer space. This was why Sputnik mattered so much – Americans weren’t angry that Soviets had proven their intellectual superiority. Americans were scared that the Soviets might use their artificial satellites to attack them.

The immediate reaction to Sputnik was sparking the space race, an unofficial competition between the Soviet and western blocs to show their mastery over navigation in outer space. Publicly the space race culminated with the American moon landing in 1969. The initial fear about nuclear weapons in space however was dealt a few years prior in 1967 with the passage of the Outer Space Treaty between the world powers.

The Outer Space Treaty today forms the base of international law regarding space and the celestial bodies. It not only barred the installation of weapons or military bases in space, but also set up the parameters regarding property rights in space. Of interest to us, it effectively recognized the right to migrate to outer space.

Article 1 of the treaty reads that:

Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be free for exploration and use by all States without discrimination of any kind, on a basis of equality and in accordance with international law, and there shall be free access to all areas of celestial bodies.

A plain reading of the treaty’s text appeals to the notion that anyone may migrate to outer space, so long as they do so peacefully. There are a few other catches, such as the need for non-governmental entities to follow the laws of their respective earth-bound government.

Article 6 reads:

The activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty.

Outer space does not have open borders as such. In order to initially arrive in outer space one must follow the rules of a state and continue to follow the rules of said state to remain in space. This is similar to existing maritime law, where a ship’s flag designates under which rules it sails. Despite these limitations outer space does enjoy a lite version of open borders.

Hopeful space migrants must follow the rules of a state, but it does not matter which state’s rules are followed. Spaceships marked with a Mexican or Madagascar flag have as much right to explore space as ships marked with an EU or USA flag. I suspect that future space explorers will make frequent use of flags of convenience in order to gain access into space.

Am I suggesting that the open borders movement shift its focus to getting people to migrate to outer space? Not at all. Outer space has countless artificial satellites but no permanent colonies at present. For the foreseeable future this will remain the case. Even when a serious effort is made to colonize outer space I would not recommend migration there to the greater number of mankind as the journey itself would be expensive and have little reward.

Some significant catalyst must occur before it becomes efficient for large numbers of humans to settle space. Migration to the new world occurred when large economic opportunities awaited at the other side and/or when domestic forces pushed a population toward migration. The same general forces will be at play in deciding when space is colonized. Perhaps early colonization will be lead by Patri Friedman’s great-grandson in an attempt to promote space-steading. Who can say?

All the same there is some comfort in knowing that when these catalysts occur mankind will have the right to migrate to outer space. They will still have to find a means to do so, but at minimum they will not be pulled over at a border check point outside Mars and present their visas.

In the present the right to migrate to outer space presents us with a rhetorical weapon. If as I argue there is a right to migrate to outer space, why is there not a right to migrate to the new world? Outer space is described as the common heritage of mankind, but does this definition not also apply to the new world? Christopher Columbus first set sail in 1492, a little over five hundred years ago. This is a small amount of time in historical terms. When first discovered the new lands had a negligible existing population and today most of its inhabitants are descended from European, African, and Asian migrants. There is no meaningful ‘American’ race.

A Spaniard had no lesser right than an Englishman to settle the new world back then. Under what justification then do modern American countries erect barriers to entry? Did the new world cease to be a common heritage of mankind? If so, when and under what conditions? Under those conditions would it be proper for future Lunians, the descendants of human colonizers on the Moon, to set a quota on the number of migrants from Earth?

Further Reading

Will technology make borders obsolete? by Chris Hendrix

Argentina and Open Borders by John Lee

Full text of the Outer Space Treaty via the US Department of State.

Full text of the Moon Treaty via Wikisource.

The Moon Treaty was a proposed follow-up agreement to the above mentioned Outer Space Treaty. The Moon Treaty would have handed governmental control over the Moon, outer space, and celestial bodies to the United Nations. The Moon Treaty is widely considered defunct as it failed to acquire the agreement of those nations actually capable of space exploration.

January 2015 in review

February 1, 2015 Open Borders Admin Leave a comment

January 2015 has been an interesting month for Open Borders: The Case, albeit a relatively laid back one.

Traffic patterns: overall summary

In November and December, we saw our highest traffic of all time. The trend began with a revival of interest in migration policy in the United States due to US President Obama’s November 2014 deferred action announcement, but continued due to interesting and timely content, and clever promotion strategies.

January, in contrast, was a relatively quiet month. A number of our posts did well, but we had no smashing hits, either on social media or on search. On days that we didn’t publish anything new, our traffic was largely search-driven. Since traffic was driven by enduring interest rather than current events, January’s traffic levels are likely a lower bound for traffic levels in the months to come.

Social media successes

No posts of ours matched the extraordinary performance of December’s social media successes. Nonetheless, we did quite well when compared year-on-year. Our top posts published this month:

Journalist Stephan Faris: Modern border regimes are apartheid by John Lee, January 30, 2015, received 171 Facebook engagements and 20 Twitter engagements.
My Summer in the Orchard: How I Came to Support Open Borders by Justin Merrill, January 20, 2015, received 126 Facebook engagements and 7 Twitter engagements. This is the first post in a series on the author’s personal experience with migration law. We anticipate future posts in the series being even bigger successes.
Literally refusing to rescue drowning people: your taxpayer funds at work, putting immigrants to death by John Lee, January 9, 2015, received 49 Facebook engagement and 16 Twitter engagements.
A rose by any other name: open borders, freedom of movement, and the right to migrate by John Lee, January 16, 2015, received 43 Facebook engagements and 15 Twitter engagements.
Bangladesh and India: move towards open borders by Vipul Naik, January 15, 2015, received 30 Facebook engagements and 14 Twitter engagements.

We had a much lower Facebook spend than the past two months. Of the posts published this month, we only spent a small amount of money promoting Lee’s interview of Stephan Faris, Merrill’s post, and Lee’s post on drowning people.

We also had some success posting and promoting some of our older content relevant to current events. Two of our older posts that we reposted to Facebook and Twitter in light of the attack on the Charlie Hebdo office:

Open Borders, Terrorism, and Islam by Joel Newman, May 7, 2013. The post received the bulk of its Facebook engagement in January. It currently has 7 Twitter engagements and 131 Facebook engagements.
Free speech absolutism versus viewpoint-based immigration restrictions by Vipul Naik, October 8, 2012. This post also received the bulk of its Facebook engagement in January. It currently has 5 Twitter engagements and 52 Facebook engagements.

Search interest

Our list of most visited pages that people arrive at via Google Search is fairly constant over time. Most of these are site content pages rather than blog posts. Of the blog posts, the top ones are:

Immigration and the US Constitution by Ilya Somin, March 18, 2013.
Why the Cuba “wet feet, dry feet” policy should continue by Vipul Naik, December 26, 2014. Published late in December, this post became a significant contributor to the site’s search traffic in January.
Lifting the Cuban Travel Ban Is Good for U.S. by Alex Nowrasteh, October 16, 2012.
Nepal and India: an open borders case study by Vipul Naik, March 21, 2014.

Economist appreciation

John Lee’s post Krugman and Cowen on immigration; or, rallying the economic profession around open borders, published December 12, 2014, received fresh attention when economist and blogger David Henderson blogged about it. Henderson wrote:

But the spirit of his analysis is correct. Welfare in the United States is unlikely to be a huge magnet for immigrants and what is likely to be a much stronger magnet is the chance for a much higher-paying job.

I recommend reading the whole long article. I recommend it for not only the content but also the respectful tone. Were I teaching a class in rhetoric, I would use this as a reading. Indeed, two economist friends were the ones who recommended the piece and both of them highlighted the tone.

Open Borders meetup

The third Bay Area meetup was held on Sunday, January 11. You can read the proceedings of the meetup here. The list of all past meetups, along with links to proceedings where available, is here.

Site traffic: details

Pageviews for Open Border: The Case:

Month and year	Pageview count (WordPress)	Pageview count (Google Analytics)
January 2015	28,149	25,702^*
December 2014	35,318	34,374
January 2014	17,521	17,709
December 2013	12,270	11,931

^*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:

Google Analytics traffic by day for January 2015 (note that Analytics wasn’t working for January 16 and parts of the previous and next day):

WordPress traffic by month, since September 2012 (earlier months don’t fit in the picture):

Google Analytics traffic (sessions and pageviews) by month, since March 2012:

As we can see, there was robust year-on-year growth, but a month-on-month decline, and the year-on-year growth was weaker than that for December. This is because of the unusually high traffic in December 2014 because of the topicality of migration.

We also turned on age/gender tracking on Google Analytics. Here are the results by age/gender combinations:

And here’s our distribution of traffic by geographical location:

Facebook and Twitter metrics

Facebook likes for our Facebook page stayed fairly steady over the month, increasing from about 4120 to about 4180. We did not spend any money on page promotion, and the slow growth this month suggests diminishing returns with respect to audience outreach.
The Open Borders Action Group expanded quite a bit, from 713 members to 867 members. Most of the new additions were passive members, though, and about half of them appear to have been added by Eric Schmidt. Controlling for that, the number of new members was similar to the number in December 2014.
Our Twitter account @OpenBordersInfo saw its follower count increased from 1014 at the beginning of the month to 1048.

Here’s a graph of our Facebook reach and likes, comments, and shares:

Journalist Stephan Faris: Modern border regimes are apartheid

January 30, 2015 John Lee 6 Comments

Border controls that prevent innocent foreigners from travelling peacefully are in every meaningful way identical to laws enshrining racial segregation and apartheid. Both aim to exclude people from peaceful participation in civilised society, not because of anything they have done wrong, but purely because of a circumstance of birth that they had no choice over.

Open borders advocates have long compared the modern border regime to apartheid and other forms of racial segregation. But American journalist Stephan Faris has done us one better: in his brief book Homelands: The Case for Open Immigration last year, he outlined exactly why and how we shouldn’t let artificially-drawn borders delude us into thinking our immigration laws don’t somehow constitute an arbitrary form of discrimination comparable to apartheid. Stephan was recently gracious enough to spare some time for an email interview with us, which we’ll be publishing next week.

In the mean time, I’d strongly urge you to head over to Amazon and buy the book; it’s currently listed for under 3 US dollars, and is only thirty pages. I finished the book in one sitting, and felt I got far more than my money’s worth. The intro blurb from the publisher:

As a child, Stephan Faris nearly failed to qualify for any country’s passport. Now, in a story that moves from South Africa to Italy to the United States, he looks at the arbitrariness of nationality. Framed by Faris’s meeting with a young orphan as a reporter in Liberia and their reencounter years later in Minnesota, Homelands makes the case for a complete rethinking of immigration policy. In a world where we’ve globalized capital, culture, and communications, are restrictions on the movement of people still morally tenable?

I’d say the book delivers on these claims. But rather than take my word for it, why not preview an excerpt and judge for yourself? Deca, the publisher of Homelands, has allowed us to publish an edited excerpt of the book — one that doesn’t give you the full colour of Stephan’s stories or arguments, but should whet your appetite for the full-length item:

After some 250 years of nationalism, the segregation of the world’s population into separate countries seems as natural as the division of the globe into continents. So it’s important to remember that restricting immigration is a political choice, one whose burden is carried largely by the less fortunate.

Joseph Carens, the philosopher, is right to describe nationality as a birthright reminiscent of medieval feudalism. But as I discovered during my time in Africa, you needn’t go back as far as the Middle Ages to find an unsettling analog to our closed borders. If I’ve come to the conclusion that our immigration policies are one of the great moral challenges of our time, it’s in part because they very much resemble one of the most clear-cut acts of injustice in recent history: an attempt by South Africa’s apartheid regime to preserve racial privileges in the face of worldwide opposition.

Apartheid was clearly becoming untenable, but they couldn’t contemplate giving up white privilege. So they settled on a different solution, one that would abolish overt discrimination but still allow them to retain their grip on social, economic, and political power: a partition of South Africa modeled explicitly on existing national borders, with the nation divided into rich and poor countries.

South Africa had already set aside land for the native population. Thirteen percent of the country was designated as native reserves, known as “homelands,” where black Africans had to live unless they could prove they were working for a white employer. Movement in and out of these homelands was restricted. The Pass Laws required nonwhite citizens to carry “passbooks” with their name, address, and photograph or risk imprisonment and expulsion back to the reserves. It didn’t seem like a big leap to go from “homelands” and “passbooks” to “countries” and “passports.”

The idea didn’t seem as crazy then as it might today. In the period after World War II, new countries were erupting out of disintegrating colonial empires all over the globe. The border between India, Pakistan, and what would later become Bangladesh wasn’t drawn until 1947, when a British administrator was given five weeks to decide where the division would run. All across Africa, new nations were hoisting new flags: Ghana in 1957, Guinea the year after. By 1960, the continent had seen the creation of sixteen new independent states, from Somalia to Senegal, from Mali to Madagascar.

At the same time, all around South Africa, new nations were coming into being. The Republic of Botswana, just to the north, elected its first government in 1966. Swaziland, in the east, declared independence from the United Kingdom in 1968. Most remarkable of all was the transformation of the British Protectorate of Basutoland, a tiny landlocked colony completely surrounded by South Africa. In 1966, it pulled down the Union Jack and joined the roster of nations as the Kingdom of Lesotho.

If such a miniscule patch of land could stand alone as an independent country, why not the 13 percent of South African territory set aside as native reserves? “The dream was: how do you get rid of the immorality of apartheid?” said [former South African Minister Roelof Frederik] Botha. “How do you get rid of the reprehensible suppression and racial discrimination? If a sufficient number of black people in their homelands—exactly like Swaziland, like Basutoland, like Botswana—if they could also become independent, then maybe the whites might not feel that much threatened anymore by the overwhelming majority of black people. And apartheid, in its nefarious sense, in its reprehensible sense, could be dismantled.”

“So the idea took root,” he said. “Let us make these nations independent. They can have their own parliaments, their own governments, their own courts, their own judges. Each one must have a capital and a parliament and a president and a prime minister and a cabinet. They will be sovereign, and they will be independent. And then you would have a sort of equality, a constellation of southern African states.”

Blacks could have their independence. But when they came to where the work was, they would have to do so as immigrants. “The problem was reality,” said Botha. “It did not resolve the issue of racial discrimination. So the dream was turned into a nightmare. It was a dream that was not based on reality.”

To be sure, there are differences between the global system of immigration restrictions and South Africa’s attempt to entrench white privilege through the partitioning of its territory. But it should give us pause to think that when the architects of one of history’s most recognized evils set out to codify their system of injustice, they looked at our borders and passports and saw a lot to like. Intentions aside, the biggest difference between the two is that the South Africans wanted to draw the boundaries and assign the nationalities. We make do with the existing ones.

What’s most striking about the story of South African apartheid is how similar it is to our efforts to restrict immigration today. Numerically, the parallels could hardly be more perfect. In 1994, there were six times as many nonwhite South Africans as white South Africans, according to data compiled by Michael Clemens. Whites earned roughly eight times as much as their black or mixed-race peers. Today, there are roughly six times as many people living in low- and middle-income countries as there are in high-income countries. Residents of rich countries typically earn about seven times the average income of the rest of the world. If numbers are anything to go by, ending economic and geographic—not to mention political—segregation in South Africa was a bigger challenge than dropping barriers to immigration would be today.

There are endless practical objections to allowing people to move where they can best profit from their willingness to work. But there were practical objections to ending apartheid as well, and practical objections to ending slavery in the United States. Few would argue that the practical objections outweighed the moral imperatives.

Again, the full 30 pages are worth buying. I think Stephan very concisely sums up the fundamental moral case for open borders, and in a very compelling way. Check back next week for our interview with Stephan!

The image featured at the top of this post is of a man crawling naked through the South African border fence near Beitbridge, Zimbabwe, making his way to South Africa. Originally published in the Cape Times, it was taken by Henk Kruger in 2008, and won the runner-up prize for World Press Photo of the year.

Open Borders: The Case