When I first started advocating for open borders back in 2005 or 2006, and then in my 2010 book Principles of a Free Society, I was a bit starry-eyed. I was zealous. I felt sure I discerned what justice demanded. I was advocating for a better world. Above all, I wanted to help the billions of people in this world whose lives, by American standards, are desperately poor and deprived, or who live in fear, or both. I knew that open borders was the best way to do it. I didn’t think my odds of bringing that about were good. Not at all. One in a million maybe. But the stakes were so high that the gamble (of my time) still seemed worth the effort. At any rate, I could escape my own guilt for being part of the system of exclusion through paying my taxes and thereby funding deportations. American democracy would march on unperturbed either way. It was rock solid, eternal, almost a law of nature.

Eighteen years later, the stakes look very different. 

On November 5, 2024, a majority of Americans cast their votes for president for Donald Trump, a convicted felon and adulterer, who had embezzled money from his businesses to pay hush money to a porn star he had slept with, who stole classified documents from the White House, twice impeached, but above all, who had incited an insurrection to try to hold onto the presidency after he was defeated in the 2020 election, and then persisted for four years in poisoning Americans’ minds with outrageous lies about the election having been stolen. 

The miracle of democracy lies in the way ruling parties let themselves lose elections and then voluntarily relinquish power. The loyal opposition opposes the ruling party, but supports the constitution, and trusts the ruling party to adhere to the constitution, submit to a fair election, and then yield power when the time comes. The strong norm of accepting election outcomes, and then allowing free speech and all the rest of the supporting practices that undergird electoral competition, is what ensures the maintenance of democracy, and even people who care less about democracy than about something else, like personal ambition or wealth or some policy issue like abortion, are incentivized to work within the democratic system because it’s too strong to be overcome. 

No longer. All that’s gone. It’s been proved that you can refuse to accept elections and the American people will still support you, maybe even more than before. Ambitious people will take note. Idealistic movements will take note. The rules of the game are now to play for. Will Trump declare himself dictator for life? Will his supporters stand by him if he does? If not he, how about the next celebrity sleazeball? What if Elon Musk has some really swell ideas for what he could do as dictator of America, and he thinks he can use Trump as a figurehead for a few years and then just cancel the 2028 election and take over? Should he try it? Why not? If it’s not his preference, should he do it defensively? He’ll be around for a while. If Elon doesn’t set himself up as dictator-for-life, will someone else do it, and then bump off Elon Musk, on the principle of cutting the tall poppies? Maybe he should do it unto others before they do it unto him. All the calculations change. It’s hard to put the Humpty Dumpty of democratic norms back together again. Even if there are honest elections in 2026 and the Democrats get a majority back, everyone has been put on notice that the center may not hold. The ceremonies of political innocence are being drowned, and mere anarchy is waiting to be loosed upon the world. 

Where did things go so wrong? There are a lot of answers to that question, but perhaps the most important of them all is that American democracy is well on its way to destroying itself through the cult of total immigration sovereignty, or what its supporters prefer to call, in misleadingly innocuous language, democratic control of immigration. 

The American politicians, under pressure from voters, who on this issue are rather simple-minded, sowed the seeds of the fall of democracy by promising to control immigration and appease a tidy, unreflective old preference for total immigration sovereignty. Lots of people reside on the territory of the United States without permission, but don’t do any harm. We could have chosen to be relaxed about that. Instead, we made a crisis out of it, not a real, practical crisis, but a crisis in public opinion, in the social imaginary. 

The state of public opinion made it a consistent course of least resistance for ambitious politicians to claim that they would “enforce the law.” In one sense, of course, they did. Passport controls were in place. Illegal entry was sometimes addressed through deportation. But there were still a lot of illegal immigrants on US soil, and some crossing the border. And illegal immigrants regularly mingled with law-abiding people and were treated with sympathy and respect, not like criminals. Even burdened with illegality, most of them seem to be better off than they would have been at home. In that sense, illegal immigration paid. So it didn’t seem like the law was being enforced. And it was always available as a cheap grievance for demagogues to exploit. 

Why did Americans blunder like this? Why weren’t they able to sensibly recognize the limits of immigration enforcement, and avoid letting themselves be scared into an imaginary crisis, to the point where all political morality got turned on its head, and bad became good, and the majority chose a demagogue who had built his brand precisely on loathsome thuggishness and an apparent lack of any scruples, seemingly in hopes that he might do the nasty things to immigrants that decent, law-abiding politicians couldn’t do?

What makes it odd is that Americans are able to form sensible views with respect to other victimless crimes. As I discussed on my Substack recently, in “The Limits of Immigration Enforcement,” illegal immigration is a victimless crime, and the peculiar difficulties of enforcement arise from that and resemble those of enforcing other victimless crimes. Americans’ laws prohibit some recreational drugs, underage drinking, prostitution, speeding on highways even in situations where it’s objectively safe, and many other activities that are victimless. They have their reasons, good and bad, for keeping these laws on the books. But they understand that enforcement has its limits, and a pretty sizable amount of law breaking is normal when there is no victim to claim redress, and law forbids what conscience does not forbid and may, depending on a variety of circumstances, require. Americans lost their heads about alcohol a century ago, and enacted a constitutional amendment that criminalized a victimless behavior. But it is now generally recognized as a mistake and a cautionary tale. People have rights, and the government derives its legitimate powers from consent of the governed, so laws against victimless crimes are anomalous and can’t be fully enforced. We’re used to it.

In general, Americans can understand that not everything is under democratic control. They understand that speech and religion are not under democratic control, on principle. Government has no right to legislate them. Family, too, must be voluntary and not governmentally mandated. The government can wish for a higher birth rate, but it must not try to compel one. Culture, too, must be free. No matter how much you dislike the latest fashions, you can’t command people what movies to like or what songs to sing. Again, you can influence prices through monetary policy, but it has to be, by and large, up to businesses to decide the price at which they sell their products. Americans have long possessed a healthy dose of libertarian common sense, and there are a lot of things that they don’t expect the government to be able to control. 

Why can’t they have the same insight about immigration? 

I think the heart of the matter is that immigration restrictions can’t be sensible because they have to be completely undemocratic, in a particularly important sense of that word. A general problem with democracy is the rational ignorance of the voters. They couldn’t possibly get informed about all the issues that depend on elections. And they don’t have an incentive even to really try. They know that no single vote will tip the election, so where does the personal ROI come from for doing the research you need in order to vote wisely? There may be some. Politics can become a form of entertainment, for better or worse, causing people to get informed in a certain way. And being knowledgeable might impress your friends, though again, that may be good or bad. It promotes both information and factionalism. But the most honest and unbiased reason to find out what the law is, is that as a subject of the government, you have to obey it. Citizens-as-subjects get first hand experience of the law, which they can then apply when they are wearing their citizen-as-voter hats. That’s why democracy works. That’s why partisan misinformation doesn’t have everything its own way. Citizens know why other victimless crimes are imperfectly enforced, because they know what it’s like to break the laws against them when they’re unreasonable. 

But citizens don’t have to find out what the immigration laws are because they’re not subject to them. So they never find out by experience how unjust and stupid the immigration laws are, and how often breaking them is the right thing to do. And voter opinion forms and festers in a bubble of ignorance.

Trump may not really lack any moral scruples. But he certainly acts the part on stage! Among thousands of other disgraceful obscenities, he told a crowd in Colorado that mass deportation would be “bloody.” Trump often lies. And I suspect that he’s lying that mass deportation will take place. It would take hard work. And it would be dangerous for him personally. Americans might just come to their senses and overthrow him. And some idealist might deliver him an assassin’s bullet in exchange for the crimes against humanity. He certainly didn’t seem overly keen to fulfill his promises during his first term. “Lock her up,” he said of his opponent Hillary Clinton. He didn’t lock her up. “Build the wall and make Mexico pay for it,” he said, but he didn’t even try. Oddly enough, his supporters didn’t seem to care. There’s something weird going on here, some kind of performance art that consists in playing a James Bond villain character all the time, for which this decadent country seems to have a perverse taste. I don’t understand it. But anyway, there’s at least some reason to think they want the evil act but not the evil deeds. Maybe his supporters really do want mass deportations. I don’t see why they’d say they do to pollsters, if they really don’t. But maybe they want it to be somehow immaculate, and if it started turning bloody, they’d actually turn against it. Here’s hoping that’s how they feel. And here’s hoping that Trump fears that’s how they feel, and would be afraid to test it. It’s not clear what he’d gain by carrying out his promises of mass deportation, personally. It would probably be a lot easier to take some token actions and then declare victory to his easily bamboozled followers. 

Anyway, the point is that I agree with Trump on one thing: if there are to be mass deportations, they’ll have to be bloody. Many of these people have roots here. Many have families here. Many have nothing to go back to. They’re from countries where they don’t speak the language. Some have no memories of their countries of origin. They may fear death by gang violence. If they go home. They may fear death as opponents of the regime. They may have no jobs to go back to, no homes. Some are never going to leave, no matter how bad things get. For others, a life of being dragged through air-conditioned courtrooms and brutality-free jail cells where food and water are provided will be pretty appealing compared to what they would face if driven back to their countries of legal nationality. No threat short of immediate, gruesome death will tip the cost-benefit analysis in favor of going back. 

So yes, Trump, if there are to be mass deportations, they’ll be bloody. Maybe they’ll be too bloody even to be mass deportations. Dead bodies can’t emigrate. In the Bible, King Herod ordered all the young babies killed so that the prophesied king would not live to supplant him. Pharaoh killed the babes of the Hebrews so that they wouldn’t become too numerous. It’s possible. We haven’t fallen quite that far morally, yet. But we’ve fallen very far, very fast.

That’s why no other politician in America has been quite wicked enough to convince voters he’s ready to perpetrate that. When a great democracy lets its whole public discourse be permeated by a lie, the biggest liar wins. Mainstream politicians collaborated in the lie that illegal immigration could be stopped. Now we’re reaping the terrible harvest of that lie, and American democracy may already be past the point of no return.

And so, while I’m still much concerned with the plight of the world’s poor, and I’m very eager to welcome as many of them as possible into the United States and other rich countries because that’s by far the most effective way to alleviate world poverty, I now have another objective, which is as important to me, and somewhat more acute, namely, to save American democracy. American democracy is critically ill right now, and I think its best hope of a cure is a nice medical injection of Open Borders Thought.

What do I mean by “open borders?” There was a time, a few years back, when in a certain very niche community, it could begin to be expected that people’s understanding of the term “open borders” would not be nearly the random outcome of an encounter between a thinking mind and a natural language phrase, but would be informed by a body of thought developed in a variety of places but especially on this blog. Activity has slackened since, although Bryan Caplan still bravely carries the torch as an influential public intellectual thoroughly schooled in the way of thinking. His book Open Borders, which for better or worse is in the format of a graphic novel, is probably the best introduction to it for the general reader.

But let me summarize it here in my own way:

1. People have a right to go where they need to go, and live where they need to live, in order to live according to the dictates of their conscience, and to support themselves and their families.
2. Also, people have a right to be with relatives and friends and others that they love, and to stay in the midst of communities where they are deeply rooted and have a strong network of social ties.
3. Governments do wrong to interfere with the rights in (1) and (2) except in exigent circumstances for narrow, compelling motives, principally the prevention of terrorism and contagious disease.
4. When governments violate the rights in (1) and (2) except in narrow circumstances as described in (3), they act unjustly.
5. Immigration policies that respect the rights described in (1) and (2), and that accept the constraints described in (3) and (4), comprise “open borders.”
6. Open borders do not imply that the crossing of borders should be free of any checkpoints or constraints. Rather, any such checkpoints and constraints should be administered with due regard to the right to migrate.
7. Open borders in no way imply that foreign-born persons residing in a democracy should enjoy the right to vote at any stage of their residency. 
8. Open borders do not, in general, imply equal treatment under the law for native-born persons or citizens and for foreigners. However, insofar as administrative law reflects understandings of basic justice and natural rights, a community may be required to provide similar justice services to the foreign-born, on pain of violating their rights.
9. Open borders are compatible with migration taxes.
10. Open borders are compatible with allowing or incentivizing labor market discrimination in favor of the native-born or citizens.

The above list answers many questions and raises more. To the long-running “problem” of illegal immigration, the answer is simply: stop. Stop fighting it. Stop worrying about it. Stop the deportations. We don’t necessarily have to grant all illegal immigrants citizenship, but let them live without fear and work and trade on a normal basis, more or less. 

But it’s a radical policy. Like abolishing slavery or communism or polygamy, abolishing migration restrictions points to dramatic changes which can’t be thoroughly foreseen. There’s good reason to think the changes will be mostly good. For example, it will raise world GDP dramatically, increase the manpower of liberal democracies relative to aggressive autocracies, and probably accelerate innovation. I believe, although it’s controversial, that many low-skill native-born Americans will see wages fall due to immigrant competition, but migration taxes can compensate them so that the large efficiency gains from open borders can benefit those on whom the first order impacts are negative. 

But to hash out all those debates is not my purpose here. Rather, I want to remind people that there’s an alternative to the self-destructive pursuit of total immigration sovereignty. I want people of good will to stop giving hostages to MAGA and other fascist-adjacent political cults by conceding that we need to “enforce the law,” “control the borders,” or whatever. We actually don’t. Total immigration sovereignty is not an indispensable condition of national survival. We don’t have to sacrifice every principle on the altar of an unattainable total control of who is present on the national territory. Some people are here without permission. That’s okay. We should be relaxed about that. We don’t have to keep pretending that it’s some kind of crisis. 

And if we’re really smart, we will institutionalize the truth that it’s okay. We’ll rethink the insistent prerogative of democratic control of immigration. We’ll learn to start our arguments about the subject from what is a nice, fair, decent way to treat people who want or need to be in this country for one reason or another. We’ll accept that whether to come here or not should mostly be up to them, not us. We’ll evolve towards open borders. We’ll get stronger, create a huge amount of opportunity for people from all over the world, and increase the wealth and freedom of the human race. And then we can elect nice, honest, democratic politicians again.

Finally, let me end by responding to a question from a friend about what Democrats should do now. I’m not a political consultant, and I’m not a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. But if my advice to relax about illegal immigration is to impact policy, someone will need to run on it and win. That someone would presumably, for now, be the Democrats. So it’s a fair question. 

It’s tricky to answer because the Democrats pay a heavy political price for advocating a large policy and social agenda growing out of the Sexual Revolution, to which I’m totally unsympathetic. It would be easy for me to say to jettison all that, but not quite fair advice, since their priorities are different from mine. It would also stray too far from the current topic. Democrats could also try more of the same and hope to win, when Trump’s plans fail or fall short, or a better candidate comes along. But that feels like unsatisfying advice.

So I’ll offer a substantive concession: build the wall. That’s the compromise I’d suggest for the sake of political expediency on the path to the larger goal.

It might seem like a fatal concession to make, even as a tactical compromise. What could be more antithetical to open borders than a giant chain of concrete and wires marring the like southern border? 

But the moral significance of a physical barrier is slight, and it would be a small price to pay for many other things, such as a path to citizenship for current illegal immigrants, or more visas. The main goal isn’t a physically open border but an own society that respects immigrants’ rights, recognizes a right to migrate, and abjures the conceit that it can and should completely control entry and insist on total immigration sovereignty. 

And anyway, there are other ways to get here. Boats. Small planes. Tunnels. Shipping containers. So physical prevention of all illegal immigration isn’t realistic. What we need to do instead is overhaul public opinion and the social contract so that we can live and thrive with it.