Tag Archives: open borders advocacy

Social conservatism and attitudes to immigration

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A little while ago, I got into a debate with Vipul Naik over the link between social conservatism and open borders. My hypothesis was that social conservatives would oppose open borders because they are defending in-group privilege. Also, being socially conservative correlates with Republican party identification, which correlates with negative views of immigrants. In contrast, Vipul thought that the opposite might be true. Social conservative ideas (e.g., anti-abortion) do not logically entail anti-immigrant views. Immigration attitudes might be decoupled from social attitudes.

Here is what I found out when I used the General Social Survey to explore this issue. First, you have to identify an immigration question. The GSS has a few. The most general is “527. Do you think the number of immigrants from foreign countries who are permitted to come to the United States to live should be increased a lot, increased a little, left the same as it is now, decreased a little, or decreased a lot?” 1 – increased a lot. 5 – Decreased a lot. Roughly speaking, 8% increase, 37% stay the same, 54% decrease immigration.

Ok, let’s crank through some measures of social conservatism:

* Ideology: “66 A. We hear a lot of talk these days about liberals and conservatives. I’m going to show you a seven-point scale on which the political views that people might hold are arranged from extremely liberal–point 1–to extremely conservative– point 7. Where would you place yourself on this scale?” Correlation? .094 – p-value <.001. n=2598.
* Abortion attitudes: “251. Do you think abortions should be legal under any circumstances, legal only under certain circumstances, or never legal under any circumstance?” 1 – Always. 3 – Never. Correlation? .016, not significant. N=1497.
* Gay Rights: “219. What about sexual relations between two adults of the same sex–do you think it is always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all?” 1- Always wrong, 4 – not wrong at all. Correlation? -.138, p <.001. N=1702.
* Affirmative action for blacks/women: “153/552. A. Some people say that because of past discrimination, blacks/women should be given preference in hiring and promotion. Others say that such preference in hiring and promotion of blacks is wrong because it discriminates against whites. What about your opinion — are you for or against preferential hiring and promotion of blacks?” 1. strong support to 4 strong oppose. Correlations? .198/.091 . p<.001/p =.07. N= 383 (each).
* Biblical literalism: “120A. Which of these statements comes closest to describing your feelings about the Bible? a. The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word. b. The Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally, word for word. c. The Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by men.” 1 – word of God, 3 – book of fables. Correlation? .071, p=.16. N=383.

Bottom line: Anti-immigration views are always positively correlated with what we’d consider indicators of being socially conservative. In some cases, the correlation is strong, in other cases not significant. However, there are no cases where being conservative is correlated with having pro-immigration views.

Open Borders editorial note: You might also be interested in Nathan Smith’s post Who favors open borders?, that examines World Values Survey (WVS) data comparing attitudes to immigration in 48 countries around the world.

Forget not the temporary migrants

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There are many different ways to think about migration; when we discuss the subject, often people’s vision seems to be of someone moving with intentions of permanently settling and acquiring citizenship in their new country. Occasionally, they might give some passing thought to explicitly temporary guest workers on the side. The popular “permanent migrant” characterisation might accurately describe a lot of people, but I am skeptical that it captures the full picture. Here are some other broadly-painted immigration stories that don’t often come to mind:

  • The tourist who falls in love with a country she visits. One day while browsing job postings, she finds and applies for a job in that country.
  • The student who decides to apply for a university abroad on a whim. He finds he enjoys life there, and seeks to work afterward there.
  • The manual labourer who decides to look for construction work in a country with a better economy than his own.

These people could all follow the typically-envisioned track, and stay permanently in their new country. But they could well not: perhaps the tourist finds life in her new country is not all it’s chalked up to be. She moves on to another country, or returns home. Maybe the student and manual labourer are happy to stay and work for years, or even a few decades, but later move home to take care of aging parents and raise a family.

Common discourse around migration tends to assume two paths. Either you are:

  1. A permanent migrant, and once your visa is approved, you are on a one-way path to citizenship
  2. A temporary migrant, and you should be a seasonal commuter (working in a foreign country for one or two seasons, returning home for the rest of the time)

(Less sophisticated discussions sometimes even forget the second category. More sophisticated ones might include in the second category guest workers whose seasonal commutes are a little longer, working for the span of a few years at a time.)

But this common discourse is incapable of fitting real human beings into its shoehorned categories. Realistically, new immigrants don’t know whether they want to commit to a new country, and if so, for how long they’ll want to make that commitment. Maybe they’ll commit to it for a career, but not for family. (Or maybe it’s the other way round: I know some people who have migrated primarily for family reasons, but maintain jobs or businesses in their home country.) Maybe you commit to one country for the harvest season, but not for the rest of the year. Maybe you commit to it for only as long as construction work is available, or only until you’ve saved enough to buy what you want at home.

You might consider these trivial or rare scenarios, but I would argue they’re more common than you think. I consider myself one of these amorphous immigrants: I am a Malaysian who is currently a permanent resident in the US, but I’m not sure how long I’ll live here. The range of possibilities for how long I live and work here in my opinion range from 5 years to 50 or more. They are contingent a great deal on my career path in the US, whether my significant other is allowed by the government to live and work in the US (she is also a Malaysian), the political and economic climate back home, and what opportunities I might find in other countries.

(Speaking of countries I’ve fallen in love with as a tourist, I’ve often thought it would be fun to work in London or in another Western European city. My girlfriend thinks it might be interesting to work in Hong Kong, where she studied for a few years. If we do migrate to one of these places, who’s to say whether we’ll live and work there for 1 year or 10? Or our lifetimes?)

If you prefer hard numbers, consider the polling data: over 1 billion people (over 25% of the world’s population) say they desire to temporarily move to another country in search of work. This is about double the number of people who say they desire to permanently move to another country. I find these numbers a bit dicey for two reasons:

  1. A lot of people might not even be bothered to think of moving, permanently or temporarily, when they know that our system of global apartheid makes it impossible for most people to live and work outside their country of birth — this would artificially depress these numbers.
  2. Some people might not be sure whether they want to move temporarily or permanently. If you ask me whether I am a temporary or permanent migrant, I would honestly answer that I don’t know.

But these numbers are definitely directional. If when you think of migration and when you think of open borders, you only think of permanent settlement, you’ve erased 2/3rds of all the people who would like to migrate. You’ve written off the hopes, dreams, and futures of over 1 billion people. Open borders is not just about the permanent settler. It’s about ensuring people with all kinds of goals and motivations can make the most of themselves and contribute as much as they can.

Women and Open Borders

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TRIGGER WARNING: Some of the links contain graphic descriptions of rape, assault, and other forms of abuse.

In May, Christine Pelosi, chair of the California Democratic Party Women’s Caucus, urged feminists to support “immigrants’ rights as women’s rights” and “push for the most women-friendly immigration bill possible.”  She also observed that “many women’s rights advocates don’t see immigrants’ rights as a ‘women’s issue’ either out of privilege or unfamiliarity.”  Ms. Pelosi is correct about the overlap between immigration policy and the welfare of many women, although she doesn’t identify the best way to help women around the world: open borders policies in Western countries.

Before addressing how open borders could help women, I would like to observe that, just as many feminists may not concern themselves with “immigrants’ rights,” there is a dearth of women writing in support of open borders.  None of the contributors to this site are women.  Among those authors supporting open borders who don’t appear on this site, Vipul identifies only three women: Teresa Hayter, Jacqueline Stevens, and Aviva Chomsky.  (Harriet Grimsditch, a founding member of No One Is Illegal UK, can also be added.) (Ms. Chomsky’s support of open borders has to be inferred.  In her book  “They Take Our Jobs” and 20 Other Myths About Immigration (2007), she writes that “the decriminalization of border crossing would encourage almost all would-be immigrants to pass through established inspection stations…” (p. 190))  It is unclear why women are significantly underrepresented in authoring arguments in favor of open borders.  (It is interesting that a survey of global public opinion showed no gender differences in views on immigration policy.)

Open borders potentially could benefit women even more than men.  Like men, women would benefit from the economic opportunities made available by open borders and, conversely, be released from the various hardships imposed by restrictionism such as deportation, detention, separation from family, fear, exploitation, and being forced to remain in their home countries.

In addition, given the special plight of many women in many developing countries (and some wealthier countries, like Saudi Arabia) open borders would provide a crucial means of escaping their societies for the safety and freedom of the Western world.  In their book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity For Women Worldwide (2009), Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn write that “in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality in the developing world.” (p. xvii)  They ask, “Why is acid thrown in women’s faces, but not in men’s?  Why are women so much more likely to be stripped naked and sexually humiliated than men?  Why is it that in many cultures, old men are respected as patriarchs, while old women are taken outside the village to die of thirst or to be eaten by wild animals?  Granted, in the societies where these abuses take place, men also suffer more violence than males do in America–but the brutality inflicted on women is particularly widespread, cruel, and lethal.” (p. 67)

As Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn suggest, many women around the world face widespread violence.  Some of the perpetrators are family members.  While domestic violence certainly exists in the U.S. and other Western countries, it is more pronounced and more tolerated in certain societies.  A Guatemalan lawyer claims that over a decade in her country, more than 4,000 women were killed in domestic violence, and only 2 percent of these cases had been solved.  Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn describe the case of Zoya Najabi, an Afghan who was married at age twelve to a sixteen year old boy and who reported that “‘Not only my husband, but his brother, his mother, and her sister–they all beat me…’”  Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn note that “the worst moment came when Zoya’s mother-in-law was beating her and Zoya unthinkingly kicked back.  Resisting a mother-in-law is an outrageous sin.  First, Zoya’s husband dug out an electric cable and flogged his wife until she fell unconscious.  Then, the next day, her father-in-law strapped Zoya’s feet together, tied her down, and gave a stick to the mother-in-law, who whipped the soles of Zoya’s feet.  ‘My feet were beaten until they were like yogurt,’ Zoya said.” (pp. 68-69)  Two other Afghan women were beaten each day for a week by their uncle and cousins, under their father’s supervision, for refusing to marry cousins. (pp. 156-157) Another form of domestic violence in parts of the world involves “honor” killings.  Sometimes, write Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn,  “… a family kills one of its own girls because she has behaved immodestly or has fallen in love with a man…” (p. 82)  They estimate that there are at least 6,000 honor killings each year.

Women are threatened by strangers as well, with little protection from law enforcement.  In the Ethiopian countryside, according to the Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn, “…if a young man has an eye on a girl but doesn’t have a bride price (the equivalent of a dowry, but paid by the man), or if he doubts that the girl’s family will accept him, then he and several friends kidnap the girl, and he rapes her.  That immediately improves his bargaining position, because she is ruined and will have difficulty marrying anyone else.  The risks to the boy are minimal, since the girl’s parents never prosecute the rapist–that would aggravate the harm to their daughter’s reputation and would be resented in the community as a breach of tradition.”  Until 2005, the authors note that “Ethiopian law explicitly provided that a man could not be prosecuted for violating a woman or girl he later married.” (62)   Similarly, a Mexican woman related how a man “… made her live with him, and forced her to have sex with him by putting a gun or a machete to her head, by breaking her nose and by threatening to kill the small children of her sister.  Once when she became pregnant, she said, she barely escaped alive after he had poured kerosene on the bed where she was sleeping and ignited it…  Local police dismissed her reports of violence as a ‘private matter,’ the court documents said, and a judge she turned to for help tried to seduce her.  ‘In Mexico, men believe they have a right to abuse their women because they are like a possession,’ she said.”   Mr. Kristof and Ms. DuWunn report that in Pakistan authorities are indifferent  “to injustices suffered by the poor and uneducated.”  They quote a gynecologist in Karachi who treats poor young girls who have been raped, usually by wealthy perpetrators: “‘When I treat rape victims, I tell the girls not to go to the police… Because if a girl goes to the police, the police will rape her.’” (pp. 83-84)

Mr. Kristof and Ms. DuWunn note that some recent conflicts, including those in Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Congo, have involved mass rapes. (p. 83) Even after the conflict ended in Liberia, the predation against women persisted.  According to Mr. Kristof, the war there “seems to have shattered norms and trained some men to think that when they want sex, they need simply to overpower a girl.  Or at school, girls sometimes find that to get good grades, they must have sex with their teachers.”  During the war it was estimated that 75 percent of the country’s women had been raped.  “The incidence of rape has dropped since then but is still numbingly high.  An International Rescue Committee survey in 2007 found that about 12 percent of girls aged 17 and under acknowledged having been sexually abused in some way in the previous 18 months.”

Another harm women face in some societies is genital mutilation.  According to a U.S. court ruling, “The practice of genital cutting, a tradition throughout sub-Saharan Africa, has long been criticized by human rights groups and the United Nations and frequently takes place under unsanitary conditions, with tools like knives, scissors, razor blades and shards of glass…”  Alima Traore, who is from Mali, had endured this mutilation as a child  and applied for asylum in the U.S.  She said this about the U.S.:  “’It is a better place for women than Mali, because in Mali women don’t have any voice… Because it is the men who control.’”  Other African women who were victims of genital mutilation have also sought asylum in the U.S.

Governments severely restrict women’s freedoms in some countries.  In the Sudan, women are prohibited from wearing pants and are flogged for doing so.  In Saudi Arabia, women “need permission from their husbands or fathers to work, travel, study or even receive health care.  They cannot drive.  While more than half of the university students are women, their job prospects are severely limited.”    A woman can be whipped for being alone with a man to whom she is not married.  In Iran, the government in 2007 cracked down on “un-Islamic dress” and detained 150,000 women for violating the dress code.

Ending oppressive laws and the violence inflicted upon women in many countries is a formidable undertaking and a goal that could take a long time to realize, if ever.  A way Western countries could relatively quickly help women in these harsh situations is to open up their borders.  This probably would not mean a mass exodus of mistreated women to Western countries, since, as Mr. Kristof and Ms. DuWunn suggest, some of these women may be comfortable with the status quo: “… women themselves absorb and transmit misogynistic values, just as men do.  This is not a tidy world of tyrannical men and victimized women, but a messier realm of oppressive social customs adhered to by men and women alike.” (p. 69)  And obtaining the resources and arranging the logistics for those who wish to leave would be a challenge.  This is where those in the West concerned about the situation of women in these countries could help by providing shelters and financial help to women seeking to emigrate.  In some situations in which societies and families would be hostile to such interventions, a kind of modern day Underground Railroad system could be established to help women flee.  But first an open borders policy needs to be established to guarantee that those women who want to escape from their societies could find refuge in countries that respect them as women and people.  (Open borders would also allow victimizers to enter Western countries, but Western laws and institutions would better protect immigrant women than those in their home countries.)

Currently, for women seeking refugee in the U.S., the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies notes that U.S. immigration law has often been unfriendly to women seeking asylum based on gender related harm. “Decision-makers often fail to recognize that harms unique to women — such as forced marriage or honor killings — may constitute persecution.”  In 2009, a Mexican woman was killed by a former boyfriend shortly after being forced to return to Mexico by U.S. agents.  In an article in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, the author relates the case of an asylum seeker from Guinea:  “… a woman was told that she would marry her uncle’s friend, who was fifty years older and already had four wives. When she objected, her uncle beat her. She escaped briefly, but upon her return was again beaten before the imam and then before the tribal elders, all of whom instructed her to proceed with the marriage. In addition, her uncle threatened to kill her should she persist in her refusal. The woman was finally able to escape and apply for asylum in the United States. Despite her credible testimony, the immigration judge denied the woman’s claim… He did not address the various forms of coercion being brought to bear upon her, or whether a marriage entered under such duress would constitute future persecution.” (p. 91)

The realization of open borders would benefit numerous women economically and/or enable them to escape from oppressive situations in their home countries.  To help make open borders a reality, more men and women in the West need to join this effort.

Martin Luther King Jr and Open Borders

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Since I believe one of the best strategies for the opening of the world’s borders is to cast it as a civil rights issue, I thought it would be a good idea to go back to some of the classical rhetorical pieces of the American Civil Rights Movement and read them in the light of free migration. There is one readily apparent similarity between racial segregation and immigration restrictions. Racial segregation limits the mobility of certain persons on the morally arbitrary basis of the color of their skin, and this is done regardless of whether people on the “other side” of the segregation are willing to interact peacefully. A closed border restricts mobility and voluntary, peaceful interaction on the morally arbitrary basis of which side of the border a person happened to be born on.

The work and rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jr seems like the obvious place to begin. In April 1963, King organized marches and sit-ins of public spaces in Birmingham, Alabama, intentionally violating the segregation laws of the time that proscribed blacks from sharing certain public and private spaces with whites. King was arrested and jailed, and from his cell he wrote what became known as his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. In the letter King responds to critics who have urged him to pursue his goals of racial equality with patience and through legal channels, rather than violating the laws of the land. There is already a parallel here to the demands of immigration restrictionists that aspiring migrants “wait in line” despite the fact that there is no real “line” for many migrants.

King begins his letter defending himself against charges of being an “outside agitator” stirring up trouble in a place where he isn’t welcome. The following doesn’t really relate to open borders in an obvious way, but it’s a beautiful statement of the kind of cosmopolitanism that underpins the call to open borders.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

He moves on to defend the timing of his nonviolent activism and his decision to act directly rather than wait for political negotiations to bear fruit.

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

The connection I’d like to draw here is that aspiring migrants who are scared or otherwise hesitant to migrate through unofficial channels have no political voice with which to negotiate for their rights to enter the land of their choosing. Migrants who are willing to brave the move without legal authorization of the host country gain no political voice by doing so, but by acting directly, seizing their rights in spite of the law, they raise the probability of reform just by virtue of their presence. Without the legal tension created by the presence of illegal immigrants, there would likely never be any movement toward opening borders, regardless of how powerful the arguments for open borders might be. Such arguments would be hopelessly academic.

My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

For years now we have heard the words “Wait in line!” It rings in the ear of every migrant with piercing familiarity. This “Wait in line” has almost always meant “Never.”

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

One of the most powerful paragraphs in the letter. When I read this I thought of the environment of uncertainty in which immigrants in the US live, especially in places like Joe Arpaio’s Arizona, where immigrants and suspected immigrants have suffered popularly lauded degradations like forced marches in pink underwear, meals of moldy bread and rotten fruit, and childbirth given in shackles. While in the rest of America, undocumented immigrants live constantly at tiptoe stance, lest some traffic violation result in their deportation following indefinite detention in a jail cell. And this is all for the equivalent of a cup of coffee at the lunch counter: the right to live and work peacefully among those born within the border.

Meanwhile millions of our brothers and sisters in the undeveloped world smother in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of the affluent societies of the developed world, their tongues twisted and speech stammering, explaining to their children why they can’t move to the places where work is plentiful, water is clean, and wages are high.

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.

The last line speaks to one of the less savory arguments against open borders: that the global poor suffer their lots because they are less intelligent or lack the work ethic of the citizens of the rich world or some other failing. After more discussion of the differences between just and unjust laws, King sets up one of his chief foils: the white moderate.

[I] must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

It isn’t the racists or the committed nativists and nationalists who are the biggest roadblocks in the way of open borders. We will never win them over and it’s barely worth the effort of trying beyond countering their arguments for the benefit of observers. The great roadblock consists of basically sympathetic people who are nonetheless wary of the apparent radicalism of open borders; or people who simply do not realize the scale of humanitarian benefits on the table; or those who have no problem with immigrants personally, but assume that immigration must be zero-sum, with jobs gained by foreigners equaling jobs lost to natives.

The point of this post is not to twist Dr King’s eloquence to favor open borders. I have no idea if he believed in open borders or if he gave the matter much thought either way. The point is to take the words of this celebrated moral leader and use them to show how the civil rights for which he struggled parallel the rights of international immigration. At root, these rights are expressions of the universal moral equality of human beings. King’s sphere of concern certainly extended beyond African-Americans and far beyond America’s national borders. In a speech against US involvement in the Vietnam War, he made this call to cosmopolitan compassion:

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

 

A Biblical Frame for Immigration Liberalization

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This is a repost from Paul’s blog Quitting Providence. The original post is here.

I was reading this Atlantic write-up of the excellent website Open Borders: The Case and I was surprised when the article concluded that what was really needed was Mark Zuckerberg to ride in to the rescue. Zuckerberg has started deploying resources to make it easier for skilled workers to immigrate to America, but this is small potatoes compared to what he could be doing:

Lobbying his unparalleled audience, the largest online community the world has ever known, to create an army of open borders supporters–that is the kind of connect-the-world change that Zuckerberg has already created with Facebook. Perhaps not this year, or even five years down the line, but Zuckerberg might eventually use his clout to start a global debate about the borders that keep Marvin from the marketplace. The lure of trillions of dollars for all, the potential elimination of world poverty, and a solid moral footing preached by Naik and Clemens probably won’t convince a majority without backing from major business leaders.

Don’t get me wrong. I am in favor of fabulously rich individuals devoting their wealth to advance worthy causes, but my awake-at-4AM mind jumped to “Why doesn’t the Catholic Church devote (a lot) more energy to pushing for liberal migration policies around the world?”
The Catholic Church, as a large, well-funded, and international institution with a vested interest in removing barriers to movement seems particularly well placed to press for open borders in an effective way. Unlike most things I would like the Catholic Church to do (like accept women’s reproductive rights, contraception, and some facts of human sexual diversity), this would not require the Church to radically rethink any theology or rewrite any catechisms. The Church already acknowledges the human right of migration and has some powerful rhetoric it can deploy in its favor. The following was taken from the website of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (it was one of the first pages to come up when I asked the Internet what Catholics think of immigration):

Both the Old and New Testaments tell compelling stories of refugees forced to flee because of oppression. Exodus tells the story of the Chosen People, Israel, who were victims of bitter slavery in Egypt. They were utterly helpless by themselves, but with God’s powerful intervention they were able to escape and take refuge in the desert. For forty years they lived as wanderers with no homeland of their own. Finally, God fulfilled his ancient promise and settled them on the land that they could finally call home.

The Israelites’ experience of living as homeless aliens was so painful and frightening that God ordered his people for all time to have special care for the alien: “You shall treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you; have the same love for him as for yourself; for you too were once aliens in the land of Egypt” (Lv 19:33-34).

The New Testament begins with Matthew’s story of Joseph and Mary’s escape to Egypt with their newborn son, Jesus, because the paranoid and jealous King Herod wanted to kill the infant. Our Savior himself lived as a refugee because his own land was not safe.

Jesus reiterates the Old Testament command to love and care for the stranger, a criterion by which we shall be judged: “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me” (Mt 25:35).

The Apostle Paul asserts the absolute equality of all people before God: “There is neither Jew nor Greek . . . for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28). In Christ, the human race is one before God, equal in dignity and rights.

This is powerful stuff, and it made me think how different this language is from the usual rhetorical framework for the immigration debate. In the US at least, the focus is always on economics, with the burden of proof lying on the immigration advocates to show that there are huge economic gains to be had and high school drop-outs won’t be hurt too badly, and of course that migrants aren’t terrorists by nature. These are all silly arguments, and Catholic thinkers somehow manage to cut to the moral heart of the matter, powerfully asserting what most of us seem too embarrassed to declare outright: All human beings are morally equal. We are all worthy of the same ethical consideration. And if we can do something to help a fellow human being in need, that is, all else equal, a fine thing. We shouldwant to help even if we decide for some practical reasons that we can’t. Wanting to help is the starting point.Getting bogged down in technical debates about whether and exactly how much immigration benefits natives risks an ethical blunder, ceding the terms of the debate to restrictionists who will focus on economic minutiae that would be absurd in other contexts. (If a new invention were predicted to perhaps cause a 1% decrease in the wages of 6% of the population while everyone else benefited from the productivity gains, no one would blink). Of course we all want pareto-optimal policy changes, where absolutely everyone benefits by the departure from the status quo. Yet this happy congruence is clearly not always either possible or even relevant.The granddaddy example of this is slavery. In the early nineteenth century, the debate over abolition was colored by the fact that entire economies were built on the peculiar institution. If slaves were freed, a lot of plantation owners would suffer severe economic setbacks. Abolition of slavery, possibly the greatest moral victory the world has ever seen, did not happen because slave owners were persuaded they would be made better off by the deal. Abolition was achieved because the abolitionists persuaded enough free people of the moral truth that slaves are human beings and are therefore should be accorded basic human rights.

The civil rights victories over the Jim Crow regime were likewise not achieved by sophisticated economic arguments about how integration and human capital development among blacks would ultimately benefit even white supremacists. No, it was Martin Luther King Jr and other Civil Rights leaders appealing to the sense of fairness among the empowered.

Women did not win their suffrage and the rights to work and own property by convincing the contemporary enfranchized that men would stand to gain materially from women’s empowerment. No, feminists persuaded enough men in power that the radical notion that women are people was simply true. The injustice of enforcing power structures based on amoral accidents of birth was laid bare.

Expanding empathy played a role in each case above, getting the privileged parts of society to see that, but for a roll of the dice, they could have been born with a different color of skin, or a different gender, or in chains, or on the wrong side of a border. Even a morally perfect being or a divinely chosen people could find themselves with the short ends of these sorts of sticks.

At its most basic articulation, the policy of open borders asserts the individual’s presumptive human right to move freely about the world, and live where she wishes to live. The status quo global policy of constraining an individual to live where she was born, for the morally arbitrary fact that she just happened to be born there, is a transparently unjust institution. The only relevant economics is that this injustice is magnified by the poverty it inflicts on hundreds of millions of people.