Tag Archives: Open Borders Day

Open Borders Day 2014 roundup

What happened on Open Borders Day 2014? We round up content devoted to announcing and discussing open borders specifically for the occasion.

We’ll be archiving all Open Borders Days on the site’s Open Borders Day background page.

For Open Borders Day: My Top 30

In honor of Open Borders Day, I looked over my writings here at Open Borders: The Case, and recommend those I think most worth reading. It might be of interest to someone who has read my writing in snippets, and wants to get a more comprehensive understanding of my worldview. See also my book, Principles of a Free Society, my writings at The American, TCS Daily, The Daily Good, The Freeman, and my old blog The Free Thinker. I recently wrote a political essay for Wielding Power which was chosen as the winning entry for the question “Should Nations Restrict Immigration?” Open borders may be my oldest belief. I’ve believed in it since I was a teenager, and I’ve been publishing as an open borders advocate for a decade. Open borders is the most important cause in the world today, after the Christian faith itself.

Without further ado, my top 30, arranged thematically. First, on Christianity and open borders:

1. The Coming Catholic Movement for Freedom of Migration

2. The Old Testament on Immigration. This might be the post that influenced me most, of everything I’ve written on open borders. I hadn’t realized, before consulting the Bible, just how strongly God is on our side.

On the Irish migration experience:

3. Ireland as a Counter-Example to the “Ghost Nations” Myth

4. “No Irish Need Apply” (about private discrimination against immigration, which should be tolerated, since it eases the transition for some natives and doesn’t hurt immigrants much)

Historical posts would include the above Old Testament post and the posts about Ireland, but also:

5. Hospitality in the Odyssey

6. In Defense of the Pilgrims

A bit more abstractly, at a “theory of history” level:

7. In Defense of the Nation-State

8. The Progress of Freedom. It was particularly fun to rediscover this one, in which I argue that “much of the history of the progress of freedom is summarized in three general patterns: (1) accountability vs. sovereignty, (2) the separation of solidarity from violence, (3) rights flow from insiders to outsiders.”

Continuing a somewhat communitarian theme, there are:

9. Immigration, Identity, Nationality, Citizenship, and Democracy

10. Nations as Marriages

11. Robert Putnam, Social Capital, and Immigration

Some of my favorite posts might be called “high theory,” and these can to some extent be distinguished into (a) ethics and (b) political and economic theory:

12. All Ethical Roads Lead to Open Borders

13. A Meta-Ethics to Keep in Your Back Pocket [NOTE: The word “meta-ethics” in the title of this post is used in what is unfortunately a slightly nonstandard way. There’s no better way to say it though, and the language would be better off if “meta-ethics” meant what I mean by it here.]

14. The Border as Blindfold. In which I suggest that the chief function of borders today may be to keep poverty out of sight of citizens of affluent nations to protect their moral complacency.

15. The Inequality of Nations. In which I argue that no claim that is indexical with respect to countries is valid.

Aside from “In Defense of the Nation-State,” mentioned above, economic and political theory include:

16. The Great Land Value Windfall from Open Borders

17. International Tiebout Competition

18. Nonexcludable but Rival Goods

19. The Tendency of Economic Activity to Concentrate Itself

20. The Conservative Social Welfare Function

21. The Citizenist Case for Open Borders

22. Innovation and Open Borders

23. Open Borders and the Justification for the Welfare State

24. Rawlsian Locational Choice (a highly abstract open borders metric)

25. Open Borders and the Economic Frontier, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

The best summary of my case for open borders in one place is probably:

26. Open Borders Questionnaire: Nathan Smith’s Answers

But on civil disobedience in particular:

27. Why Jose Antonio Vargas Matters: Making Human Rights Real

And…

28. The Right to Invite

29. Auctions, Tariffs, and Taxes

… might shed some light on one way to get from the status quo a little closer to open borders. Finally…

30. World Poverty

… may capture, more than any other post, what my motivation is. I’ve devoted a lot of hours to this over the years, and I haven’t got much to show for it other than the moral benefit of having served a good cause. (I have made a little money freelance writing, and my book probably helped me get my current job.) I hope my efforts have been pleasing to God, and may help, in some small way, in the building up of His kingdom.

Two years of Open Borders

Open Borders Day will be held on Sunday, March 16. Given the global nature of the website, celebration starts at the beginning of Sunday, March 16, GMT+12, and ends at the end of Sunday, March 16, GMT-12. That gives us 48 hours to celebrate the day.

We’ve collected a link of stuff to give people an idea of how the site has evolved over the years.

If you’re new to the site …

Begin with:

Tracing the site’s growth

The most popular site content

This stuff has been popular in the past, so it’s a good place if you’re looking for stuff to share. The stuff is not necessarily representative of the rest of our site.

Other stuff to check out

PS: If you’re interested in writing for Open Borders, check out our potential guest blogger contact form (you might want to read this blog post for some context).

Reminder: Open Borders Day on March 16

This is a reminder that Open Borders Day will be held on Sunday, March 16, 2014. Due to the international nature of the site, and the real-time nature of discussion on Twitter and other forms of social media, we invite people to start celebrating the day starting from the beginning of Sunday, March 16 in New Zealand (the earliest timezone, GMT+12) and ending at the end of Sunday, March 16 in the latest timezone (GMT-12, followed by some Pacific islands).

Possible actions:

  • Use the #OpenBordersDay tag while sharing open borders-related stuff on Twitter, Facebook, or Google Plus. The Open Borders Twitter account (which you might want to follow and tweet to) is @OpenBordersInfo. Open Borders regular bloggers and some occasional and guest bloggers will be active on Twitter throughout the day participating in the Twitter conversations.
  • Use Facebook to show your commitment to open borders. You could share the Open Borders logo, make it your profile picture or cover photo, or share links on Facebook related to open borders.
  • Organize physical meetups: Feel free to post about possible meetups on the Open Borders Action Group or send messages to people who’ve liked Open Borders: The Case and live in your city (you can find them using Facebook Graph Search).
  • If you’re attending the 2014 European Students for Liberty conference (14-16 March 2014), that would be a great venue to advertise Open Borders Day.

Keep in mind: the goal of the day is to raise the stature of open borders as a topic of discussion. It’s not possible or desirable to make instant converts by posting extraordinarily convincing tweets or posts for open borders (if somebody changes their mind completely after reading one tweet, their conversion is likely to be shallow). But it is possible to shift people’s views at the margin from “open borders is a crazy strawman” to “open borders is an out-there proposal that has a few good arguments for it that at least some people take seriously” — as Bryan Caplan has managed to do.

Open Borders Day on March 16

Open Borders, the website, launched officially (with a launch announcement by Bryan Caplan on EconLog) on March 16, 2012 (check out this page to learn more about the site’s history and evolution).

Starting this year, we’ll be celebrating the launch anniversary as Open Borders Day. The first officially celebrated Open Borders Day will be on Sunday, March 16, 2014. Things we’d encourage supporters to do:

  • Tweet thoughts and links related to open borders. Use the hashtag #OpenBordersDay so that people interested in finding your tweets and contributions to the conversation can do so. You can write and publish the posts on that day, or just use the day to tweet links to stuff you or somebody else wrote. Open Borders regular bloggers and some occasional and guest bloggers will be active on Twitter throughout the day participating in the Twitter conversations.
  • Use Facebook to show your commitment to open borders. You could share the Open Borders logo, make it your profile picture or cover photo, or share links on Facebook related to open borders.
  • Organize Open Borders meetups in your area. It’s a Sunday, so a meetup should be easy to arrange. Of course, you don’t have to wait till March 16 to organize a meetup — we already organized one in the Bay Area. But an Open Borders Day might be a good Schelling point to overcome the problem of finding a date to agree upon.

If you have other suggestions for how to celebrate Open Borders Day, please provide them in the comments.