This page gives a full detailed list of all pages on the main site. Blog posts are not included.

In addition to the list below, there is the Welcome to Open Borders front entry and the blog home page.

View Open Borders blog coverage map in a full screen map

The case for open borders

• Moral case:
  • Libertarian case: Includes right to migrate, obligations to strangers, and self-ownership versus state ownership.
  • Utilitarian case: Includes double world GDP and end of poverty.
  • Egalilitarian case: Includes end of poverty, Rawlsian case, equal opportunity, and global apartheid.
  • Bleeding-heart libertarian case
  • Conservative and small-government case
  • Human capabilities case
• Practical case:
  • Benefits to migrants: Includes stated and revealed preferences of migrants and potential migrants and concrete benefits to migrants.
  • Benefits to immigrant-receiving countries
  • Benefits to immigrant-sending countries: Includes ghosts versus zombies, incentives for human capital development, remittances, and exit and competitive government.
  • Global benefits: Includes double world GDP, end of poverty, one world, innovation case, and peace case.
• Second-order case:
  • Keyhole solutions: Includes immigration tariffs, guest worker programs, and linguistic and cultural fluency requirements.
  • Arguments from authority: Includes economist consensus, legal and political scholarly consensus, and smart and more informed opinion.
• Country-specific pro-immigration arguments includes US-specific pro-immigration arguments.

The case against open borders

• Harms to immigrant-receiving 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
• Other objections:
  • Harms to immigrant-sending countries: Includes brain drain and delay of political reform.
  • Global harms: Includes cheap labor leading to a technological slowdown, increased footprint, and killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, and animal welfare.
  • Precautionary principle: Includes swamped.
• Theoretical objections
  • Philosophical bases for anti-immigration arguments: Includes citizenism, territorialism, local inequality aversion, and nation as family.
  • Objections to libertarian case: Includes killing versus letting die, citizenism, collective property rights, and anarcho-capitalist counterfactual.
  • Restrictionist metaphors: Includes alien invasion metaphor.
• Attacks on advocates
  • Ideological blindness and stupidity: Includes elite conscience salve, leftist agenda, libertarian pipedream, economist blind spot, and sentimentalism.
  • Self-interest accusations: Includes corporatist agenda, herd-building, and potential immigrant.

Thought triggers, distinctions, concepts, and related ideas

• Thought triggers:
  • Analogies: Includes infants versus immigrants, immigration restrictions as Jim Crow, immigration restrictions as affirmative action, bloggers as illegal immigrants, immigration restrictions and gun control, statist generation, women versus immigrants, save Fairfax, and deportation to Africa.
  • Hypotheticals: Includes starving Marvin, Haiti ICE, the master race, John and Julio, no blacks need apply, and drowning child.
  • Personal anecdotes: Includes Robert Higgs’ life story and Jose Antonio Vargas’ life story.
  • Controversial statements: Includes Friedman on immigration and the welfare state and Krugman on immigration: small gain for natives, giant leap for immigrants.
  • Uncharitable satires of restrictionist positions: Includes Texas to Americans: stay in America and US immigrants despoiling Mexico.
• Distinctions: Includes legal versus illegal (related: nomenclature for illegal immigrants, morality of violating restrictive immigration laws, and get in line), high versus low skill, then versus now, numbers-based versus characteristics-based restrictionism, USA versus Europe, short versus long run, moderate versus radical open borders, open borders versus no borders.
• Concepts: Includes place premium, income per natural, labor market convergence, and compositional effects.
• Related ideas: Includes immigration and trade, immigration and charter cities, intranational and international migration, emigration as disaster relief, emigration: escaping communism, and immigration policy and principle of subsidiarity.

Resources of various sorts: reading, video, people, web resources

• Reading: Includes pro-open borders reading list, anti-open borders reading list, and miscellaneous reading list.
• Video:
  • Short video
  • Long individual video: Includes Michael Clemens’ video: The Biggest Idea in Development That No One Really Tried, Lant Pritchett’s interview video on education, migration, and development, and Bryan Caplan’s video: Immigration Restrictions: A Solution in Search of a Problem.
  • Debate video
  • Panel, discussion video.
• People:
  • Pro-open borders people: : Includes Bryan Caplan, Benjamin Powell, Donald Boudreaux, Walter Block, David Henderson, Michael Huemer, Nathanael Smith, Will Wilkinson, Joseph Carens, Jacqueline Stevens, Jerry Bowyer, Michael Clemens, Lant Pritchett, Robert Guest, Philippe Legrain, Alex Tabarrok, Alex Nowrasteh, Jason Riley, Shikha Dalmia, and Adam Ozimek.
  • Anti-open borders people: Includes Peter Brimelow, Steve Sailer, George Borjas, Mark Krikorian, Roy Beck, Michelle Malkin, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Tino Sanandaji, and Pat Buchanan.
  • Views by area of expertise: Includes libertarians’ views of immigration, IQ researchers’ views of immigration, Christian views of immigration, activists’ views of immigration.
• Web resources:
  • Pro-immigration and migration information web resources: Lists many resources. Resources that currently have separate pages describing them include Center for Global Development (CGD), Immigration Policy Center (IPC), and Define American.
  • Anti-immigration web resources: Lists many resources. Resources that currently have separate pages describing them include VDARE, Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and NumbersUSA.
  • Polling data on migration

Miscellaneous

• Topical issues: Includes emigration as a solution to Haiti’s woes, US federal immigration policy (Obama de facto DREAM Act, Startup Visa), US state immigration crackdowns (Arizona immigration crackdown, Alabama immigration crackdown, Mississippi immigration crackdown.
• US-specific: Includes US-specific pro-immigration arguments, US immigration policy disconnect, migrant labor in the US agricultural sector, Hispanic crime and illegal immigration in the United States, US-specific suppression of wages of natives, terrorism and illegal immigration in the United States, US-specific emergency medical care for immigrants, and Mexican Reconquista.

Site-specific

• Feedback: Includes error report and effect on you.
• About: Includes authors, site story, copyright, and external coverage.
• Sitemap