Tag Archives: open borders advocacy

Jason Riley makes the case for half-opening the US borders, but not a case for true open borders

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A year ago, co-blogger Vipul briefly reviewed Mark Krikorian’s The New Case Against Immigration and Jason Riley’s Let Them In. I have not yet read Krikorian’s book, but I have finished Riley’s. Overall, I second Vipul’s sentiment that despite the radical book cover (the book’s full title is Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders), Riley’s book is incredibly weak because:

  1. It is overly focused on the US (I cannot think of a special reason why the US should be the only or first country to open its borders)
  2. It is overly focused on citizenist and territorialist arguments for immigration (while I think one can make a case for open borders using a citizenist or even nationalist worldview with appropriate moral side-constraints, the book does a poor job of confronting the inherently unethical tensions of these philosophies when they are used to justify closed borders)
  3. It really does not consider more than briefly the tremendous economic harm or moral injustice created by closed borders (Riley trots out the usual arguments about how immigrants benefit the US economy, but there is no reference to the true size of the closed borders problem — when closed borders is halving world GDP, this is a glaring weakness, although to be fair to Riley, I don’t think these estimates were available when he wrote this)

I don’t want to sound overly harsh; I actually would recommend Riley’s book if someone has already exhausted the most basic open borders literature. So if you’ve finished Lant Pritchett’s Let Their People Come (I would say that if you can only read one book about open borders, you need to make it Pritchett’s), maybe consider reading Let Them In. The main selling points for Riley:

  1. He comprehensively covers all the problems with current US immigration policy (its injustice from even citizenist and territorialist standpoints, its economic inefficiency, etc.)
  2. He does an excellent job of laying out the history of US anti-immigration activism (it will probably be news to many that Benjamin Franklin was complaining almost 250 years ago that low-quality German immigrants were refusing to assimilate and destroying the US)
  3. He uncovers some interesting historical facts about US immigration policy which really need to be widely known (for instance, he reveals that the problem of Mexican “illegal immigrants” in the US was virtually non-existent prior to the mid-20th century, because many immigration laws simply didn’t apply to Western hemisphere nationals until 1965 onwards)

In his conclusion, Riley states:

My primary goal in writing this book was to offer a rebuttal to some of the more common anti-immigrant arguments that I’ve come across while covering the issue as a Wall Street Journal editorialist.

Once I read this, I understood why Vipul and I felt the book had oversold itself as a case for open borders. Riley’s true intention was never to make such a broad case in this book. (In fact, Vipul goes as far as to characterise Riley as a political moderate — this is true of the book’s tone, but from its content, I would say Riley probably is pretty close to the liberal extreme on immigration.) If you’re looking for some good rebuttals to common mainstream anti-immigration US-specific arguments, I highly recommend Let Them In. But if you’re looking for the case for open borders, I would without hesitation point you to Lant Pritchett’s Let Their People Come.

Welcome Atlantic readers! (And, how you can help)

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This morning, Shaun Raviv published an article about open borders in The Atlantic, one of the finest magazines in the world, entitled “If People Could Immigrate Anywhere, Would Poverty Be Eliminated?” Atlantic readers: welcome. If you want to give us money to support the cause, sorry, you can’t. As far as I know, we don’t have an infrastructure for that. What you can do is comment on our posts. We love to get thoughtful, high-quality comments, so as to see what kind of impression our arguments make on outsiders. We adapt what we write about considerably in response to thoughtful criticism. In particular, see here, here, and here. We’re good listeners here. We’re Socratic and inquisitive.

Here’s Shaun’s description of Open Borders: The Case.

Vipul Naik is the face, or at least the voice, of open borders on the Internet. In March 2012, he launched  Open Borders: The Case, a website dedicated to the idea. Naik, a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, is striving for “a world where there is a strong presumption in favor of allowing people to migrate and where this presumption can be overridden or curtailed only under exceptional circumstances.” Naik and his two primary co-writers, Nathan Smith and John Lee, parse research into    immigration impacts, answering claims by those they call “restrictionists”–people who argue against open borders–and deconstructing writings on migration    by economists, politicians, journalists, and philosophers.

My favorite part:

In 2008, Clemens and his frequent co-writer, Harvard economist Lant Pritchett, came up with a new statistic called “income per natural.” Their goal was to show “the mean annual income of persons born in a given country, regardless of where that person now resides.” They found that large percentages of people from Haiti, Mexico, and India who live above international poverty lines don’t actually reside in their home countries. “For example, among Haitians who live either in the United States or Haiti and live on more than $10 per day–about a third of the U.S. ‘poverty’ line–four out of five live in the United States,” Clemens wrote. “Emigration from Haiti, as a force for Haitians’ poverty reduction, may be at least as important as any economic change that has occurred within Haiti.”

Getting this kind of coverage makes me think again about a question that’s sometimes come to us: What can I do to help? For example, Bryan Caplan blegged: “Suppose you wanted to spend your charitable dollars to increase the total number of people who migrate from the Third World to the First World.  What approach would give you the biggest bang for your buck?  Are any specific countries, organizations, or loopholes especially promising?”

A rather staid, cautious answer is that you might be able to join the list of sponsors of the IMPALA data project. They didn’t ask me to solicit money for them and I don’t even know whether they’d accept it, but I assume a large project like theirs would have things to do with financial support, and we could definitely use better data on migration policies around the world. If you want to learn about trade policy, you can go the WITS database hosted by the World Bank, and get very detailed information about volumes of trade around the world, broken down into very specific categories, as well as about tariff rates and other restrictions. There is nothing close to that for immigration law, but the IMPALA data, when available, should help. See this talk for more about IMPALA’s data project.

IMPALA is not agitating for open borders, of course. But as I argued a while back, good indices measuring the openness of all the world’s borders could be quite useful for advocacy: Continue reading Welcome Atlantic readers! (And, how you can help) →

Open borders artwork bleg

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Post by Vipul Naik (regular blogger and site founder, launched site and started blogging March 2012). See:

A comment by John Lee on a guest post by Fabio Rojas got me thinking: what are some possibilities for artwork related to open borders? John writes:

“Bumper stickers might also be a cheap way to spread the word. Maybe Open Borders: The Case should start a bumper sticker campaign?”

This should be easy to do; cafepress.com allows you to order almost any design on almost any type of souvenir (T-shirt, mug, bumper sticker, you name it). BTW, I did a quick search and found that virtually every open borders-related accessory on CafePress is restrictionist.

This was in response to another comment which in turn was in response to ideas mooted in the original post. Fabio’s original suggestion:

[W]e should develop a symbol, like the pink triangle for gay rights, that represents our view that people should be free to move as they wish between countries.

Does anybody know of any existing artwork related to open borders? Is anybody interested in creating artwork? A symbol as suggested by Fabio Rojas would probably be the most high-value item, but other pieces of art (T-shirt and coffee mug designs) may be easier to create and could also be highly valuable.

If you either know of or are interested in creating artwork related to open borders, please elaborate in the comments with links to the artwork. Representative artwork will be featured on the site.

PS: Also mentioned in the comments is the “human passport” YouTube video from the No One Is Illegal group:

I blogged about another YouTube video from No One Is Illegal a while back here.

Vindictiveness versus indifference in the open borders debate

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People on both sides of the open borders debate believe that their opponents often discount, or perhaps give zero weight to, the welfare of certain groups of people:

  • Open borders advocates believe, with some justification, that the citizenist and territorialist perspectives used to justify restrictionism discount the rights and interests of non-citizens (respectively, non-residents) compared to citizens (respectively, residents).
  • Restrictionists believe, again with some justification, that those on the open borders side discount the interests of less fortunate natives who are most hurt by competition from immigrants (see here for more).

Still, there’s something potentially worse than indifference — vindictiveness. Indifference is about placing a zero or small positive weight on the rights, interests, or utility of specific people or groups of people. Vindictiveness is about placing a negative weight on their interests. In other words, it is about deriving positive utility from doing things that hurt or injure those other people.

The vindictiveness analogues of the above claims would be things like:

  • Some open borders advocates believe that a non-negligible minority of restrictionists are motivated by animus or vindictiveness towards current and/or potential immigrants. In most cases, this would not be a “first-principle” animus but rather, would be justified in terms of the immigrant having done something to deserve the animus. For instance, a restrictionist may argue that the bad behavior of certain immigrants (like taking natives’ jobs, going on welfare, or crossing borders illegally) means that they are evil and deserve to be hurt (this and this seem to be interesting blogs/websites that use similar rhetorical styles). Certainly, the claim is not that all restrictionist objections to these behaviors are motivated by animus, but rather, that some people are influenced to take restrictionist positions due to animus and vindictiveness towards immigrants for behavior that they disapprove of.
  • Symmetrically, some restrictionists have argued that open borders advocates are motivated by animus towards low-skilled natives. In one narrative, open borders is a “revenge of the nerds” against the jocks who stole their lunches and bullied them at school. In another narrative, open borders is a way for natives (particularly conservatives) to stick it to low-skilled blacks and low-skilled whites by getting cheaper and more compliant Hispanic labor instead. Another narrative is that people dissatisfied with the status quo (including libertarians, anti-imperialists, anarchists) want to use mass immigration to “heighten the contradictions” in the existing system and destroy it from within to get a blank slate to create a new utopia. (This last claim isn’t necessarily an indication of vindictiveness, but it could be). I believe I’ve encountered variants of these arguments made by Steve Sailer and also by others in EconLog comments, but I can’t locate a comprehensive list of sources. Here is one: Sailer commenting on a Caplan post:

    Dr. Caplan’s views on immigration differ only marginally from those of the editorial boards of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Barack Obama George W. Bush, John McCain, or Ted Kennedy. We should thank him for making explicit the hostility toward the American citizenry that motivates much of today’s conventional wisdom on immigration.

    Here is another:

    Indeed, much of current white conservative support for illegal immigration is a covert way of sticking it to African-Americans and their liberal supporters by importing harder-working Hispanics to drive blacks out of the workforce.

There is a key difference between indifference and vindictiveness. The former leaves a much wider door open for “win-win” keyhole solutions that work out to be Pareto improvements for all sides concerned. Restrictionists who don’t care about non-citizens can find common meeting ground with open borders advocates who are indifferent to the welfare of some subset of natives, by agreeing to a compromise keyhole solution that makes everybody better off. There are of course issues of feasibility and stability, but at least the possibility is there.

If either side is motivated by vindictiveness, however, the situation gets more complicated. Keyhole solutions may still be possible, but they’d be much harder to achieve. Continue reading Vindictiveness versus indifference in the open borders debate →

Open borders: what to do about it (part 3)

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This is a guest post by Fabio Rojas, a professor of sociology at Indiana University. Rojas maintains his personal webpage here and is one of the bloggers at the orgtheory.net blog.

This guest post is the third in a three-post series on how one could achieve open borders. The series focuses on public opinion and immigration policy in the United States, but its insights may apply to other nations as well. The first two post of the series can be found here and here.

This is the last installment of a three part series on open borders. My initial post offered some personal thoughts on why I believe in free movement between countries. The second and third posts focus on how open borders might happen. While there is much to be gained in discussing the merits of open borders, it is just as important to think how we can pursue change in concrete terms. I argued that open borders proponents should think more carefully about how we frame, or talk about, open borders. Free migration will require massive social change and advocates should develop ways of presenting their ideas that would appeal to many people, as well as more specific groups, such as jurists, who influence how laws are made and enacted.

Even more important than framing is politics, which simply means the effort that we expend to influence other people and reform our institutions. In writing this post, I do not assume that there is a single way to promote change. History shows us that change happens in many ways and that it is impossible to know in advance how things will change. What we can know for certain, though, is that history favors those who are prepared. The purpose of this post is to describe what open borders advocates might have to do if they want to see their ideas turn into practice.

My discussion is drawn from a recent book, The Making of Pro-Life Activists by Ziad Munson. This scholarly book contains a succinct analysis of the different branches of that movement. Munson notes that most activists focus on one of three activities: public outreach, electoral politics/lobbying and “direct action,” which denotes protest and other actions designed to prevent abortions from being performed in medical clinics. Similarly, the “political” side of open borders will have to address public opinion, elected officials, and forms of protest. Each has an important role that I discuss below.

Public Outreach

I’ll begin with “public outreach” because it is important and relatively easy to do. Public opinion is extremely important because politicians in a democracy won’t promote a policy if they know that the public opposes it. Academic research on social changes has often found that public opinion often changes before the government enacts major new legislation. For example, see Taeku Lee’s book on the civil rights movement. Savvy politicians know that they exploit shifting cultural currents and rarely initiate major change by themselves. That is why open borders advocates should think about the ways to change hearts and minds.

We should look to other movements for ideas about promoting open border to the public. The gay rights movement, for example, found that if enough people “come out of the closet,” then everybody will recognize that gay people are a group, even those that dislike them. Eventually, the presence of this group may be viewed as normal. If the hidden group can achieve some degree of “normality,” then they can become part of a broader social conversation. If enough gay people come out of the closet, then others will realize that their children, or parents, or friends might be gay. It is very difficult to sustain open bigotry if your relatives are openly gay. The lesson is that there is safety in numbers.

Open borders advocates should consider some version of this strategy. At the very least, we should develop a symbol, like the pink triangle for gay rights, that represents our view that people should be free to move as they wish between countries. This is a form of branding and it is important. Continue reading Open borders: what to do about it (part 3) →