Here are some alleged detrimental effects of immigration or open borders that are specific to destination countries:

• Suppression of wages of natives (see also immigrants do jobs natives won’t do and US-specific suppression of wages of natives).
• Welfare state/fiscal burden objection: Includes means-tested welfare benefits for poor immigrants, public schools for immigrant children, and emergency medical care for immigrants.
• Assimilation problems: Includes linguistic assimilation and emotional assimilation and patriotism.
• Physical harms: Includes crime, terrorism, and disease.
• Overpopulation and environment
• Heterogeneity: Includes social capital decline, nativist backlash, and culture clash.
• Immigrant characteristics: Includes dysfunctional immigrant culture, IQ deficit, and skills mismatch.
• Second-order harms: Includes second-order welfare objection, second-order crime, nativist backlash, and contraction of welfare state.
• Political externalities
• Citizen preference for reduced immigration
• Foreign control and loss of sovereignty

Different ways of defining “immigrant-receiving countries”

• The citizenist approach is to measure the benefits and/or harms of immigration to the current citizens of the immigrant-receiving countries. The welfare of the immigrants themselves is not of direct importance, even though they may eventually become citizens.
• The “analytical nationalism” approach is to compare the totals and averages of the “with immigration” scenario against the “without immigration” scenario. Here, the totals and averages do include the immigrants for some purposes. This gives rise to interesting paradoxes arising from compositional effects. For instance, a poor person may move into the country and increase his standard of living but pull the “average” income of the country down if his new income is still less than the income of the country he migrated to.

For more on the philosophical issues, see theoretical objections and in particular philosophical bases for anti-immigration arguments.

The objections are primarily discussed in a citizenist framing, because of the relative immunity of citizenist framing to statistical paradoxes.

General strategies behind counter-arguments to claims of harm

There are three general strategies:

• Questioning the empirical claims about harms: This questioning can be both in terms of magnitude and direction of net effects. Strategies include pointing out offsetting gains to immigrant-receiving countries, using hisorical comparisons, and careful analysis of the data.
• Suggesting cheaper ways of mitigating the harms than closing borders: This includes developing proposals for keyhole solutions to the specific problems that have been identified.
• Reiterating the overall case for open borders: Even if the claims of harm are empirically correct and cannot be cheaply mitigated, they need to be considered in the overall context of a very strong case for open borders. The libertarian version stresses that the harms do not overcome the presumption of the right to migrate. The utilitarian version stresses that the harms are small in magnitude compared to the massive welfare gains from migration. The egalitarian version stresses that the harms are not sufficient to override the case for open borders as a way to create global equality of opportunity and improve the standard of living for the world’s poorest.