The Nobel Peace Prize was recently awarded to two individuals working to improve the lives of children in South Asia. The winners are Malala Yousafzai, a teenage girl from Pakistan who is an advocate for girls’ education, and Kailash Satyarthi  of India, who has worked against child slavery in his country.

These are undoubtably amazing individuals worthy of acclamation, including the Nobel Peace Prize, but if Open Borders: The Case plays a major role in achieving its objective of realizing universal open borders, it will be even more worthy. The magnitude of the improvement in the lives of people around the world under open borders would surpass the accomplishments of Ms. Yousafzai, Mr. Satyarthi, and other winners of the prize.

Let’s begin by examining the potential impact of open borders on the cause of eliminating child labor compared to the impact Mr. Satyarthi has had. Mr. Satyarthi’s organization has reportedly freed about 70,000 child laborers in India, which is impressive.  However, there are more than 150 million child laborers worldwide, so his accomplishments are dwarfed by the magnitude of the problem.

Open borders, on the other hand, offers a way to pull millions of child laborers out of their predicaments. Child labor appears to be largely a function of poverty.  The United Nations notes that “poverty emerges as the most compelling reason why children work. Poor households spend the bulk of their income on food and the income provided by working children is often critical to their survival.”  Open borders would allow these families to migrate to countries with more prosperous economies where the adults could earn enough to sustain the family, while well-funded educational systems could provide the children with an education. By enabling families to escape the conditions which lead to child labor, open borders may be the best way to transform the lives of a large portion of child laborers.

In the case of girls’ education, notwithstanding Ms. Yousafzai’s incredible story and worthy efforts, it is not clear how much of an increase in the number of girls receiving an education can be realized through her and others’ advocacy and charitable work. According to the Malala Fund, 66 million girls worldwide are not in school. The recently established Fund provides resources at the local level for girls’ education in developing countries. Hopefully over time it will have a great impact, but that remains to be seen. Open borders, by providing families in developing countries access to countries that provide education equally to both genders, would allow girls to quickly acquire schooling without waiting for changes to be made in their home countries. The increase in remittances through open borders could have a similar effect in home countries.(See my previous post on how open borders could benefit women more generally.)

Similarly, in the struggle against global poverty more generally, open borders would likely surpass the accomplishments of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winners Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank. Mr. Yunus won the prize for developing micro-credit, involving loans to poor people in developing countries, “into an ever more important instrument in the struggle against poverty.”  However, as the BBC states, “the evidence for microcredit lifting people out of poverty remains highly contested.” While the BBC notes a report that found that 10 million Bangladeshis got out of poverty through microcredit over about a 20 year period, the poverty threshold was remarkably low: $1.25 a day.  Similarly, the New York Times reported that “most borrowers do not appear to be climbing out of poverty, and a sizable minority is getting trapped in a spiral of debt, according to studies and analysts.”

While the benefits of micro-credit are contested, open borders is potentially, in the words of Bryan Caplan, “the greatest remedy for poverty ever discovered.” One study suggests that under open borders, “there would be a 46% increase in wages for those who stayed in poor countries, and migrants to rich countries would see their wages rise by 157%.”  Another study suggests that open borders would increase world GDP by 50-150%, presumably with much of the increase flowing to migrants.  Migration helps migrants earn a higher income in developed countries than what they would earn in developing countries, even without a change of skills, and remittances also help.

Lant Pritchett makes a similar point when he compares microcredit and migration (as noted by Robert Guest):  “… as Mr. Pritchett points out, the average gain from a lifetime of microcredit in Bangladesh is about the same as the gain from eight weeks working in the United States.  After doing a quick calculation of the total benefit that Grameen Bank confers on its clients, he asks, mischievously: ‘If I get 3,000 Bangladeshi workers into the US, do I get the Nobel Peace Prize?'”

Open borders might also contribute to the “peace” part of the Peace Prize. Nathan Smith has argued that “open borders would facilitate world peace, by giving each nation a stake in the prosperity of other countries, where some of their own relatives live, by letting people from estranged nations meet on the territory of third countries and find out that they are not devils, and by reducing a bit the importance of just who controls what territory.”

If (hopefully when) open borders are realized, it certainly will have been the result of efforts by individuals and groups throughout the world, making assigning credit to one or two entities difficult. However, at this point in time, Open Borders: The Case is playing an important role as a repository of ideas for achieving open borders. If its work creates a chain reaction leading to open borders, it will be worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.

How much do human beings differ from each other? I am not sure that either answer to this question– people differ a lot or people are fairly similar— systematically favors either answer to the question of open borders, but it affects how the case for or against open borders should best be made. Thus, one might plausibly argue any of the following:

1. Large Human Differences => Pro Open Borders. People are very different, so they have a lot to gain by trading with and learning from each other. Immigrants bring very different habits and cultural outlooks, which enables them to see entrepreneurial opportunities that natives miss, enjoy jobs that natives hate, and make art, cuisine, and music that will surprise and fascinate natives. Competition from immigrants is an overrated problem because immigrants won’t like the same things or have the same skills as natives do.

2. Large Human Differences => Anti Open Borders. People are very different, and cooperation works best in fairly homogeneous cultures. Cultural differences make it hard for people to understand each other, leading to conflict and/or alienation. A lack of trust will lead to higher transactions costs, weaken institutions, and make political order hard to sustain.

3. Small Human Differences => Pro Open Borders. People aren’t that different, so a developed country that embraces open borders will find it fairly easy to assimilate people from all over the world. They’ll find the local rules and protocols understandable and easy to adapt to, and other than there being a greater variety of skin colors on the street, countries will look pretty much the same after as before open borders.

4. Small Human Differences => Anti Open Borders. People aren’t that different, so open borders won’t really give rise to a rich diversity, because foreigners are basically just more of the same. The fun of learning about foreigners’ art, music, cuisine, ideas, etc. will be quickly exhausted, because the differences just aren’t that important. They’ll like the same things we do, and have or quickly acquire similar skills, so the main effect of open borders will be more competition for scarce resources, such as spots in Harvard’s entering class, or California beachfront land.

Those are just a few examples to illustrate why views of human differences should not be expected to map into views on open borders in any straightforward way. But views on human differences will tacitly or explicitly condition the open borders debate, so I want to offer an answer of sorts to this important question.

My answer takes the form of a mnemonic metaphor, summarizing a wide variety of impressions, which I think– though of course I can’t prove it, or even propose a way to test it– gives a pretty good idea of just how much human beings differ, namely: Human souls differ about as much as dogs’ bodies do. Which is to say, a lot, but we can still recognize a common human nature in all human souls, just as we can recognize canine features in all sorts of dogs, from the tiny Chihuahua…

… to the enormous Newfoundland…

Dogs come in colors from white to rust to grey to yellow to chocolate to black, but they all have four paws, nose, two ears, two eyes, and a mouth with sharp teeth. All dog breeds have tails and fur, though both of these vary in length. It’s really rather incredible that canis lupus familiaris is one species, and that such potential for phenomic diversity turned out to inhere in a certain European wolf a few thousand years back. What would the originals of that species think of the enormously varied descendants they would have, as a result of befriending a certain clever primate? Yet no one doubts that “dog” refers to a coherent category of things, or has much trouble distinguishing a dog from a cat. Likewise, one can recognize a common humanity in its manifold and extremely diverse manifestations.

Human appearances differ, I think, much less than those of dogs. No race of human beings is 10+ times larger than another race, as Newfoundlands are 10+ times larger than Chihuahuas. Facial features, e.g., nose length and ear shape, vary less. But these surface similarities mislead, and between the mild, celibate scholar and the swaggering pirate; the ascetic saint and the sultan in his harem; the decadent poet and the toiling Christian peasant; the Wahhabist fanatic and the urbane atheist; the illiterate Somali farmer and the Norwegian petroleum engineer and the Japanese salaryman; Achilles and Socrates; Genghis Khan and Samuel Johnson; King Tut and Saint Peter; Queen Victoria and Lady Gaga; the spiritual differences are, I think, roughly as great as the physical differences between a Chihuahua and a Newfoundland.

The classical list of seven virtues– courage, justice, temperance, prudence, faith, hope, and love– provides a useful key to both the unity of human nature, and the diversity of its expressions. I am not such a cultural anthropologist as to have checked the following claims against every human culture (nor is anyone else) but I’ll nonetheless assert the following without much fear of informed and convincing contradiction:

1) Every culture admires people who can face peril or pain when they believe it is right, and disdains those who always give way to their fears. (Courage)

2) Every culture has some form of the notion of rights and/or property, of what is due to each individual, and distinguishes deserved from undeserved suffering. (Justice)

3) Every culture is familiar with the experiences of addiction and short-sighted pleasure-seeking, and encourages and applauds the willpower and self-control that enables some people to govern their passions and appetites. (Temperance)

4) Every culture respects thinking, planning, weighing evidence, and careful determination of the best means to pursue a given end. (Prudence)

5) People in every culture project certain desires onto the future, aim at them, and labor with a view to bringing them about, while regarding despondency and despair with aversion and disapproval. (Hope)

6) People in every culture hold and value beliefs not logically provable, and feel loyalties related to their own past or that of their family, their country, and/or some other community to which they (feel they) belong. (Faith)

7) People in every culture delight in contemplating, and will the good of, certain other people, as well as many other things, such as mountains, stars, trees, hearth and home, food, songs, stories, holidays and festivals, and/or God. (Love)

While all humans share courage, justice, temperance, prudence, faith, hope, and love, they clearly differ greatly in the degree to which they possess these virtues, and in the ways they express them. One man has the courage to frame a bold new theory; another to speak to a crowd; another to charge into battle; another to scale the rocky face of El Capitan. Some, perhaps, are brave in all these respects; some, certainly, are brave in none of them. Some people are cynics and skeptics, and some have fewer loyalties than others, while among those who have strong faith, it often happens that what one holds sacred, another abhors, and one man’s dogma is another’s absurdity. One man thinks it just to execute the king’s orders, another to execute the king; one, that property is nine-tenths of the law, another that it is theft. Self-control might mean no sex, but a little wine and plenty of beer, to a medieval monk; no alcohol, but plenty of sex, albeit within marriage, to a modern Mormon; and free love and booze, but no animal products, to a contemporary vegetarian leftie.

While mortals ought not to judge particular cases, experience probably has made us all vaguely aware that some people are just rather deficient in virtue, not accomplishing much or even really trying, stewing in petty resentments, without many scruples about sex or money or lying, full of baseless pride and easily offended. Beware: there but for the grace of God go we, and we are probably much closer to that wretched state than we suppose. Others have more solidity about them, and can be relied on to tell the truth, to face dangers, to think clearly, to admit faults, to be fair, to give the largest share to others, to enjoy and to praise, to resist discouragement in difficulties, and/or to work hard. Virtue shines most in the course of stories and in the face of challenges. Virtue– this is the heart of the matter– makes us more real, and it is through the exercise of virtue that we become most characteristically ourselves. The saints are gloriously different, the tyrants tediously alike. Yet while virtue brings out what is uniquely valuable in each of us and makes it shine, it also makes us converge, grow more like, make contact, and understand each other. This point is so subtle– indeed it is a kind of pinnacle of wisdom, and I would never have seen it on my own, but am borrowing it from others like David Bentley Hart and C.S. Lewis and Alasdair MacIntyre and my sister Rachel Lu, the Catholic philosopher— that I am hardly up to the challenge of giving an example. But suppose the greatest jurists from the ends of the earth were brought together: wouldn’t they be able to explain and understand one another’s systems with a degree of ease and profundity that would baffle less wise and more dogmatic minds schooled in those systems? And wouldn’t the great minds across the ages, the John Lockes and the Aristotles, understand one another better than the myriad “Aristotelians” and “Lockeans” who fill in the gaps?

Now, there are two opposite errors into which people can fall with respect to human differences. On the one hand, one may exaggerate them, and become a cultural relativist like Clifford Geertz or Margaret Mead, or in a different vein Jean-Paul Sartre, denying that there is any essential human nature, and insisting that everything we take to be fundamentally natural or true or right is simply the artifact of a particular symbolic environment, and ultimately arbitrary. No. People have much more in common than that, and human nature and virtue are objective realities.

The other error is the one I think Bryan Caplan and Michael Huemer make in trying to found a political philosophy on “common-sense morality.” The problem with this project, in a nutshell, is that common sense is not common. To elaborate on that, what the phrase “common sense” will mean to the kind of typical Westerner who is the target audience of Caplan’s blog and Huemer’s book, is not actually something that all human beings as such have in common, but is heavily informed by the historical experiences of the West, which have given rise to certain values, ideas, and assumptions. In some respects, for example in its ideas about freedom of conscience and human rights, the West really represents the best that man has been and done and thought, and Western common sense really represents a truer view of reality, including moral reality, and a fuller human flourishing, than other cultures have attained. But even then, as other cultures have not attained to Western common sense, an argument from Western common sense is premature, as it does not appeal to premises they accept, and a prior task must be to raise them to the level of Western common sense through instruction and exhortation.  In other respects, for example in much of what it says about “equality” and “democracy,” as well as in its weakness for philosophical materialism, Western common sense is a tangle of pious thinking and willful confusion that can’t stand up to serious critical scrutiny, and the modern West is inferior in wisdom and insight to the best pre-modern and non-Western thought.

If men’s souls are as varied as dogs’ bodies, and if one wishes to craft arguments that can appeal to all men, appeals to common sense morality are too local and facile. One must probe deeper and cast one’s net wider in order to learn better what human beings are, and what values and beliefs they really have in common. Only then will it be possible to make a truly universal case for open borders. I still have a doubtless very biased notion that a decent sketch of what that case would look like is contained in my book, Principles of a Free Society.

The article “The Global Citizen without a Country,” at Public Discourse, seemed worth linking to and quoting, as relevant to my friendly feud with Bryan Caplan, and to his long-running battles with Steve Sailer and Mark Krikorian. The article is about the “global citizen” movement, which I had never heard of, but which seems to be at least as significant a phenomenon as what Dylan Matthews (it takes an outsider to bestow such a label) calls the open borders “movement.” The scale of it is impressive:

Within a few years of the September 11 attacks, anyone on a university campus could observe the steady growth of programs and institutes promoting global citizenship. By 2009, a number of my students on a study-abroad trip to the Middle East preferred to be known as global citizens rather than Americans. President Obama, who had proclaimed himself a “citizen of the world” the previous summer, was inaugurated the night we climbed Mount Sinai, and even the brand of water we purchased at the summit— “Baraka”—seemed to proclaim a new world order.

Of the top fifty U.S. News & World Report national universities, 60 percent have programs that identify or describe themselves in terms of global citizenship. So do over half of the top twenty-five colleges. Nearly all of these programs were founded or re-branded since 2001. This is remarkable, but understandable: who would deny that we have responsibilities to the rest of the world, or that we have loyalties beyond our own country? Who doesn’t want our universities to teach more effectively about the rest of the world?

The promise of global citizenship is as expansive as the rhetoric at the opening of a new session at the UN.

Are these people we should be recruiting to the open borders movement? It seems logical: if there is to be global citizenship, surely it makes sense that there be global freedom of migration as well. Also, what is the relationship between “global citizenship” and Bryan Caplan’s “cosmopolitanism?” Cosmopolitan  roughly means “the world is my city” in Greek, so the ideas ought to be nearly synonymous, but I’m guessing Caplan would prefer to opt out of citizenship altogether. Anyway, the author is somewhat dismissive of “global citizenship”:

To re-phrase H. Richard Niebuhr, this movement often imagines that citizens without countries will bring humans without a nature into society without culture through laws without foundation…

Actual citizenship entails formal membership in a particular political community with legally defined rights and duties. We quarrel over what citizenship means in the US because we have a common vocabulary to describe that membership. By contrast, you can easily lose your path upon entering the thicket of theory that marks the language of the global citizenship movement…

The global citizen who gets the highest praise typically works for a secular nongovernmental organization (NGO) such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International, or Doctors Without Borders. But the definition would also apply to the adherents of any world religion and to many employees of multinational corporations.

Still, none of these people has actual political membership in a global community where he must “rule and be ruled,” as Aristotle described the citizen. Religions and NGOs are not self-sufficient. Their members don’t have to debate policies that radically affect everyone in the community where they live. Above all, members’ participation is voluntary, unlike that of a citizen. Their loyalties may be “dissolved by the fancy of the parties,” to quote Edmund Burke’s critique of the revolutionary notion of citizenship in France. In short, they may contribute to the civil society of one nation, or several, but they are not “citizens” of any global entity—and some of the theorists admit as much.

The problem is not that the movement uses the term “citizenship” loosely. The problem comes from its view that citizenship in an actual country is merely arbitrary or contingent.

I agree that for citizenship to be meaningful and substantive, it must be broadly understood by the people concerned. In other words, it must be embedded in tradition, not in jargon and a “thicket of theory.”

But what are we to make of this sentence: “Above all, members’ participation is voluntary, unlike that of a citizen.” Ritchie seems to assume that voluntariness is inconsistent with citizenship. This isn’t the status quo even today. Many people are citizens because they chose to be, e.g., naturalized citizens of the USA. True, most people get their citizenship by birth and keep it, but why should this be an essential criterion of citizenship? On the contrary, the Declaration of Independence states that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights… [and] to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” In other words, the Declaration of Independence seems to insist precisely on the voluntariness of citizenship, the consent of the governed. It is an ideal doubtless difficult to implement and perhaps even naïve, but surely, to the extent that membership in an organized community is voluntary, any duties associated with membership are rendered more legitimate thereby. As for “the view that citizenship in an actual country is merely arbitrary or contingent,” this isn’t so much a “view” as a plain fact. I’m a US citizen because, by accident of birth, I was born a US citizen.

I agree with Ritchie is that to build global citizenship on “humans without a nature” is to build on sand, but from there on we part ways, and I sometimes find myself impressed by how well he articulates an obviously false view, as if he’s a volunteer straw man. As Thomas Jefferson understood, there is such a thing as human nature, and human rights are entailed by that nature. States are legitimate in virtue of their services as protectors of human rights.

As for “ruling and being ruled” and “debating policies that radically affect the community in which [one] lives,” non-states often have those features in a much greater degree than even the most democratic states. My family and my church are real communities in a way that the USA isn’t, and I have a real say in how they are run, while I’ve surely never significantly influenced the policies of the USA, and probably never could. Meanwhile, many of this world’s states don’t even pretend to let their peoples “rule” as well as be ruled, or to let them freely debate and have a say in policymaking. Again, Ritchie seems to be a volunteer straw man, making arguments that obviously fail for his side and cannot help being turned to his opponents’ advantage.

I am more sympathetic with Ritchie when he argues that “global citizens”…

place little value on the legal, social, and cultural histories of the countries that have protected the rights and established the social benefits they champion. Instead, their faith is in lists of principles that will be carried out sometime in the future.

Yes, “lists of principles that will be carried out sometime in the future” are no substitute for the “legal, social, and cultural histories of the countries that have protected… rights.” Real progress and prosperity depend on good institutions and traditions. I wrote, I think, quite a good defense of tradition in Chapter 2 of The Verdict of Reason. It’s too long to quote in full (here’s an ungated link), but I make a forceful argument that “tradition is the lifeblood of free societies,” because “tradition has epistemic value as society’s repository of knowledge about what works and does not work,” and “tradition is an indispensable medium for people to understand each other.”

That’s part of the reason why I resist Bryan Caplan’s “cosmopolitanism.” He breezily defines cosmopolitanism as “focusing on people’s common humanity rather than superficial differences.” The reality is that what is most superficial about us is not our differences but our similarities. We all (almost) have two legs and two arms and two eyes and walk and talk and eat and vary in weight by a factor of 3:1 or 4:1 at most, and less in height, but in our souls we are worlds apart. The Hindu and the Christian live on the same earth but in different cosmoses. What one man loves, another hates. The freedom Caplan prizes does have roots in “common sense,” though I’d prefer to say, in human nature. But it is also the specific heritage of the Christian West, and no one could have imagined modern Western freedom from the evidence of common sense alone, without the heritage of a hundred generations’ worth and more of tradition. Indeed, since Caplan sometimes seems to recognize this, perhaps we don’t really disagree.

Still, human rights are a moral reality, even if it takes a lot of tradition to inculcate in us a full appreciation of them. (Indeed, we still have a long way to go.) Ritchie praises the global citizens for their concern for human welfare…

It’s impossible to read the material on global citizenship without respecting its adherents’ commitment to human rights, peace, and global access to education, medicine, clean water, and food.

… but education, medicine, clean water, and food will be effectively secured for humanity only in the context of deep and well-grounded institutions. Now, part of the point of the open borders movement is that since it’s very difficult to build good institutions, people should be allowed to move freely to places where they are already in place. That does pose some risk that the good institutions will be degraded by changes in the underlying population, but we think the risk is manageable.

The article has a good deal about Edmund Burke, whose public career, as a defender of the rights of the Indian people against British imperialism, and of the American revolutionaries to make their own nation, but then as a critic of the French Revolution and a founder of intellectual conservatism, is an interesting case study in how rootedness and cosmopolitanism can be combined. Burke rightly believed in universal values, but understood that it is only through the customs, culture and institutions of particular communities that these can be realized, and it is on the building up of these, that most of our attention and effort should focus. That is citizenship, rightly understood.

That conclusion in no way implies that citizenism is necessary, advisable, or morally permissible. It isn’t. “Americans First” is a wanton denial of our responsibilities to our fellow man; one rarely encounters such a bluntly amoral doctrine, equally intolerable from a Kantian, utilitarian, or Christian perspective. But “global citizenship” is also a misconceived ideal, for at the end of the day, citizenship must be in a polity, and there is no global polity to be a citizen of, and we probably should not wish for one. Individualism is not enough; we need communities; and membership in communities, even when that membership is not wholly voluntary, can involve us in special duties. But real communities are more local than the whole globe.

Responsibilities to the communities one is a member of should never be an excuse for injustice, cruelty or indifference to the rest of our fellow men. In advocating open borders, I am first of all opposing an evil that is done on behalf of one form of community, the nation-state. But as open borders would transform people’s communities and identities, I am obliged to have at least vague answers to large questions about how human needs for community and identity will be met. My response is that the artificial concentration of loyalties that the nation-state has tried to force on us in the 20th century will be reversed, and that is probably a good thing. It is better for justice and imagination when membership is felt in many forms and at multiple levels, when communities overlap and interpenetrate one another, when identity is more complex and interesting than a mere titular nationality. I want, not to abolish the nation-state, but to limit its scope and power, and to reverse the stultification and flattening of identity, the eclipsing of a diverse ecology of communities by banal nationalistic pieties, and the substitution of openly coercive and arbitrary for at least notionally consensual community, that the monopolization of governance by the nation-state brought about.

See also my post “Immigration, Identity, Nationality, Citizenship, and Democracy.”