The Case for Open Borders

by John Washington

Membership is not a token of which there is a limited supply. Rather, national membership is a method, a way of being in the world, an approach toward others. Membership in a small group may indeed be limited, but on a national scale, membership is better understood as simply acknowledging someone’s humanity and basic human rights, of which there is no limit.

Abstract membership has unlimited supply. But practical membership has resource implications. Citizenship in the United States, for example, is unlimited, but practically it has to be limited by the fact that it will imply a dwindling supply of both material and service resources. This does not mean that all those who wish to exclude immigrants do so on these grounds. What it means is that no state can make citizenship infinitely open without paying huge resource costs. We are all citizens of the world. It costs us nothing and this is unlimited as every child born today automatically is a citizen of the world. But real decisions are not made globally. We do not have a global fire service or a global police force. We have bordred units where political decisions are made.

But the “character” of those violently forged communities—nation states—is typically formed by oppressive majority rule: those in power dehumanizing and/or killing Indigenous and minority populations, forcibly assimilating intractable subjects, or establishing an esprit national through erasure and selective historical celebration and idolization. Historically, the demos (the “we” of “we the people”) has been forged through some groups’ exclusion of others. Another gaping blind spot in liberal thinking about borders is the presumption of who already belongs in the community. Walzer writes about membership: “We don’t distribute it among ourselves; it is already ours. We give it out to strangers.” But how is it “already ours”? Why does Walzer get to count himself amongst those who have the authority to bestow—or not—that invitation?

Because Walzer is a member of a particular political unit. Because he cannot presume to participate in the political decision of a political unit of which he is not a member. Because borders reflect the reality of a world where we cannot govern ourselves on the grand abstract stage called the the global community. We all recognize ourselves as global citizens, but we restrict ourselves to zones where we can make meaningful decisions.

Even in “desolate” stretches of Australia’s inland desert, a stone, a bush, and a water hole could be regarded and remembered. Every trail had its own caretaker and sacred significance. “Our history,” Nganyinytja, a Pitjantjara Aborigine woman explained, “is in the land, the footprints of our Creation Ancestors are on the rocks.”4 But in the eyes of the English and the Dutch who first came across this land in the seventeenth century—at least forty-three thousand years after the Aboriginal people first inhabited it—this meticulously cared-for land was empty. The European invaders claimed that they had discovered it. And not only did they bandy this blatant falsehood; they vehemently espoused that lie and, over the following centuries, wielded it to justify their violent conquest.

This is one of those examples where an author has to assume what he is trying to debunk. Very few people can look at what the English and Dutch did to the aboriginal peoples and claim it was a good thing. But why is it a bad thing? It was bad precisely because the English and Dutch claimed lands that did not belong to them and forced out or oppressed the original owners of the land.

The Discovery Doctrine was easier to justify legally, and apply practically, when lands that were being “discovered” were seen and described as empty, even if they obviously weren’t.

And this we consider bad today because the land indeed was not empty but occupied by people with an ancient historical claim to it.

Nation building, in other words, is not the cohesive realization of a people inside a territory as a political force, but the setting apart and setting above of a select group of people over another or other groups. The domination and extermination of the other creates a limit—inside of which “the nation” continues to dispossess and define itself against the minority or outsider. (To return to the line from Hegel cited in the preface, “Something only is what it is in its limit and through its limit.”) Historically, nations target and seek to eliminate what they are not. Even the United States, which rhetorically—and sometimes actually—celebrates its diversity, has never been without an other who is severely oppressed, excluded, or worse.

Is this true of all countries? Or only of the countries whose borders you wish to throw open?

The king’s demarcation of the border was one of the principal but often-overlooked sparks of the Revolutionary War: the colonists’ desire—their “destiny”—to push west and fill the land with white people (“populate or perish”)—their refusal to be hemmed in, to be beholden to any border. Indeed, one of the charges against the British in the Declaration of Independence was that the king was restricting immigration: “He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”13 The colonists valued freedom (for some) over and against the idea of borders and territorial limits.

This seeming paradox can be untangled once you ask yourself who benefitted from the westward push and who lost? But it also points out something often overlooked by those advocating for open borders. People want open borders when it benefits them and closed borders when it stops benefiting them. The trick is to find out who is benefitting. To the indigenious people who were pushed out by westward expansion, the influx of more Europeans and greater immigration was terrible. To the Europeans it was a good thing. As soon as the Europeans settled and made the land their own, they wanted the border closed. An open border cannot be perpetually open.

In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, as the invaders crept mile by mile across the continent, they drew the borders closed behind them, like ashamed ne’er-do-wells drawing curtains on their misdeeds. They built forts that served as borderland security, demonstrating and insisting on their control: they would remain and expel any who were here before them, and any—depending on their race and provenance—who came after them.

Exactly! People who benefit from an open border eventually want to retain that benefit by closing it behind them. And that is why you can find lots and lots of immigrants supporting closed borders. Because open borders dissipate benefits which citizens and residents wish to retain.

The motivation behind the Indian removal campaigns of the nineteenth century was not only hatred and fear of the natives (though it was also abundantly that) but a ravenous greed that saw natives’ ancestral land as an opportunity to expand the slave-driven cotton industry. Especially in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, white farmers and their mostly Northern financiers were desperate to plant more acres of the white gold. Politicians—local, state, and national, including President Andrew Jackson—did all they could to break through the recently established borders surrounding Indigenous lands and flood their territory with both slave drivers and their enslaved Black people. To clear those lands, they either outright killed or deported the natives across yet another concocted border, newly conceived just west of the Mississippi River.

Good. Keep your eyes on the real victims of the open borders of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The indigenious peoples.

By the mid-1830s, US troops were force-marching Indigenous people in chains across Alabama, hunting starving families from camp to camp in the swamps of Florida, with private mercenaries flocking into the dispossession business, turning—to paraphrase Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz—sacred land into real estate. Much of the speculation and plenty of the political will was sparked by businessmen in New York investing in the clearing of Indian territory to make way for slave-driven cotton farming. Though the infamous Trail of Tears, and much of the rest of the mass deportation and murder, took place in the South, Native Americans were also similarly driven out of states in the North. In Ohio, curious white colonizers watched the forced deportation as if it were a spectacle, gathering around makeshift camps to sightsee as Indians limped past, carrying what few possessions they were permitted to take. (Sometimes they weren’t allowed to take anything.) And it wasn’t only entertainment: as the Seneca Indians were pushed west from Ohio, Saunt writes, “their white neighbors rushed in to dismantle their lodgings, carrying away windows and doors, disassembling and carting off brick and stone chimneys, and prying up and hauling away flooring and fencing. Some simply moved into the freshly vacated houses.” As Dunbar-Ortiz puts it in her book Not a “Nation of Immigrants,” “Only with unlimited counterinsurgent war—destroying Indigenous towns, burning crops and food storage, driving inhabitants into...

The real victims

Let’s return to the idea of terra nullius. Imagine a subaltern subject—a poor migrant, an asylum seeker, an Indigenous person looking to walk freely through the land—making such a claim. Imagine them saying, “Well, the border isn’t really a fixed thing. It’s selectively permeable, and this land you are now living in, where your families and homes and lives and dreams all dwell, we see as empty, uninhabited. And we’re going to decide to move the border a few miles away, and now we will claim, by decree—because we value our own legal, religious, and cultural institutions and practices more than yours—who is allowed to stay, who is permitted to cross, and where the boundaries are and how they will be enforced.” Imagine them saying, as did the government of Australia, that they must populate or perish. Imagine a Nigerien migrant landing on Italy’s Lampedusa Island and claiming that she had discovered it. Imagine her spouting off the requerimiento. Imagine a Guatemalan woman saying that if the residents of Texas don’t readily and completely submit to her ruler and become their subject, she will kill them, rape their wives, take their land by force, and enslave them. Imagine a Hazara refugee docking on one of Australia’s islands, firing off three volleys, and saying the land is now his. Imagine the full power of the government’s response. But we don’t have to imagine it. Every day we see the enormous anti-migrant and anti-human machinery of Italy, the European Union, Australia, ...

Yeah. We get it. It was wrong in the past. It will be wrong today. What argument are we getting from this?

“Where does the authority to draw or enforce a border come from?” we asked. The authority invoked to enforce the borders of Australia and the United States (or any other nation) is by no means “natural,” morally justifiable, or historical. Such authority is, rather, based on and upheld by the gun of the border guard and the black robe of the immigration judge.

Now that we have crawled through the history of violence in the past, is the conclusion that since the borders we have in most rich countries today were violently acquired that their should be no borders today? Since white people came in violently and closed the borders violently, we should open the borders to everyone now? So no country today has the right to enforce border control because their fathers came in here violently? Is this a valid argument?

In 2016, the United States took in over 1.1 million legal migrants. The number of unauthorized migrants that year was also high, though harder to pinpoint. It was a big year for immigration, but no aberration. Indeed, the wage trends that year, and the subsequent years, were normal: that is, even as productivity continued to rise, wages barely eked upward. Unemployment soon dropped to near-record lows, and GDP rose more than it had in almost a decade. In other words, with near-record highs of immigration, the country saw no negative effects on job markets and wages. In 2022, after a five-year dip, another million-plus immigrants moved to the United States, most of them working-age adults. Despite fears of rising inflation and recession, the labor market continued to perform beyond expectations, adding more jobs than pre-pandemic forecasts. As economist and New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman put it: “It’s an exaggeration, but one with some truth, to say that immigrants are saving the U.S. economy.”

Now, to be fair, this argument is not entirely without merit. Immigration can improve the economy, but this is where common sense has to be applied. Salt can bring out the flavor of your meal, but that does not mean that you should empty a bag of flour into your meal. You can cook your meal with a measured amount of heat. But if you turn the heat all the way up and leave it up, your meal will burn. I do not intend by this to instrumentalize immigrants, but merely to show that something can be good to a certain extent and bad beyond that level.

Studies show that migrants moving from Mexico to the United States increase their wages by a factor of two to six, while migrants from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe increase their wages by even more. Someone from Yemen moving to the United States would increase their wages for doing nearly identical work by a factor of fourteen. From Haiti, it would be a factor of more than twenty-three. If you could double, triple, quadruple, or quattuordecimuple your wages for comparable work, would you move? Besides the clear wage benefits—significantly more money for similar work—migrants typically move to places with better labor rights, more worker protections, better infrastructure, and more freedom, security, and opportunity. Moving somewhere where you can earn more and better protect your earnings is part of what is referred to as a “place premium”: according to the Center for Global Development, in societies with greater resources and better political and economic institutions, workers can be as much as several times more productive. One of the clear takeaways is that labor mobility, more than almost any other policy or fiscal intervention, is the best way to reduce household poverty in many countries around the world.

Good. Migration helps immigrants. Who would have thought?

Communities establishing themselves across borders is basically the inverse of outsourcing. Companies like Ford, Nike, and Apple migrate their production facilities and send home the profits to their CEOs. If we can accept those transnational corporations, why can’t we imagine other such loose and creative figurations of identity and belonging that transcend legal international divides?

Because one is profitable. Duh.

Despite the sharp economic downturn at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020 remittances sent from the United States to Mexico actually increased. Remittances nearly doubled in two years, according to a report from the Inter-American Dialogue, to over $3.5 billion, emphasizing the strength of supra-national ties. So-called brain drain—when people with high levels of education emigrate, allegedly leaving their home countries drained of intelligence—is less a reality than an unfounded xenophobic riposte. The most commonly cited example of brain drain is that opening doors to more immigrants from poor countries would empty those countries of essential doctors and health care professionals. While the argument is reductive, and health care workers’ experience abroad can be hugely beneficial to their native countries’ healthcare, there is cause for concern. As one study noted, “Africa bears over 24 percent of the global disease burden with only 3 percent of health workers to take care of the sick.” But walls won’t solve the problem.

No. It's not a xenophobic riposte. In Nigeria, for instance, almost everyone who studies nursing today does it with the intention of taking advantage of USA's generous work visa for nurses. Only very smart nurses from relatively rich families can afford to pass the NCLEX and travel to the United States. What does it leave over there? Well. Why don't you ask Nigerians the state of their healthcare. Doctors are leaving Nigeria and a lot of other poor countries to work as nurses in the US. If that is not a brain drain, I wonder what it is. Now, I don't think people who oppose immigration do it to avoid brain drains in poorer nations. But that doesn't mean that those who advocate open borders should deny that there is a brain drain.

Migrants pay taxes, and elimination of barriers to migration would let them pay more. A 2016 study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that undocumented immigrants in the United States annually pay over $11.7 billion in state and local taxes. Undocumented immigrants pay on average about 8 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes. The top 1 percent of taxpayers, meanwhile, pay an average effective tax rate of 5.4 percent. In other words, super-rich Americans typically pay a lower percentage of their incomes in taxes than do undocumented migrants.

1% of Jeff Bezos' money is bigger than 1005 of my money. What is your point?

Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman famously said, “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.” Smart guy, but wrong on this point. Michael Clemens, a leading immigration economist, estimates that completely opening borders would double the global GDP, adding literally trillions of dollars into the global economy. Clemens writes in a 2011 peer reviewed article that estimates in how much money is lost due to immigration barriers “should make economists’ jaws hit their desks.” Clemens surveyed a host of studies that look at efficiency gains from eliminating barriers to trade, capital flow, and human mobility. Taking away all policy barriers to trade would increase GDP between 0.3 and 4.1 percent, he estimates. Opening up capital flow would bump GDP by between 0.1 and 1.7 percent. And allowing free migration would boost overall GDP by between 67 and 147.3 percent. Taking his calculations for granted, a welfare state, and even a largely expanded welfare state, is more than doable with open borders.

Modern economics has a problem. It looks only at numbers and graphs and COMPLETELY ignores the human element. By looking only at numbers, Michael Clemens' argument seems to make sense. Immigrants come in and buy things and produce things so the economy expands. Immigrants don't take away jobs from people who are already in the country so what is there to be worried about? But the problem is that modern economics does not know how to deal with things it cannot see. I have worked in places where people are fired and replaced by either illegal immigrants or recent immigrants. The pay of the new hires are considerably greater. Those people who would have been hired at the previous rates will probably settle for jobs paying lower. An economist reporting on the salary trends will say somehing like 'There is a wage stagnation'. But it will never occur to him (because there is no way to measure it) that one of the reasons for the stagnation in wages is because employers have figured out how to replace one group of persons with another group of persons at a lower age for the same work. A person living here is accustomed to a particular quality of life. A recent immigrant from a poor country or an illegal immigrant is not. Who benefits? The employer and the immigrants? Who loses? The non-immigrant. Will the GDP reflect this? Nope. The GDP will show an aggregate increase, but not the particular exploitations. Those who doubt this should ask the myriad immigrants in San Francisco doing tech work. The valuations of the companies are increasing along with GDP. But the workers are increasingly unable to live on what they are paid. This is not necessarily an argument against immigration, but just to show that the gains of immigration are not widespread. You can only find it in aggregate measures.

One example that disturbingly captures the destabilizing nature of guest worker programs is the backwards and bizarre disruption of the tomato industries between Italy and Ghana. One-third of Italian farmworkers are now migrant workers, most of them recruited through the caporalato, or “gangmaster” system, under which, Harsha Walia explains in Border and Rule, “their wages are often withheld, they are coerced to take performance-enhancing drugs, and they experience routine violence by employers and labor brokers.” Moreover, they often live in segregated clusters of shacks outside of towns where they have limited or no access to running water, electricity, or health care. Many of those recruited to toil on Italian farms are poor Africans. In Ghana, which has become one of the world’s largest importers of tomato paste, the tomato industry—once a staple of employment and producer of a key ingredient of Ghanian cuisine—has vanished. Many of the out-of-work Ghanian farmers are now harvesting tomatoes in Italy, then sending them back to their home country.

Another good example that it is the very rich who benefit from open borders. Who is losing in this instance? 1. The Ghanian tomato industry. 2. The previous Italians working here who had the protection of worker rights.

Michael Clemens, who, like Borjas, has dedicated much of his career to the economics of migration, re-reevaluated Card’s initial study and concluded: “The evidence from the Mariel Boatlift remains as found in David Card’s seminal research: there is no evidence that wages fell, or unemployment rose, among the least-skilled workers in Miami even after a sudden refugee wave raised the size of that workforce by 20 percent.” The dispute lingers, but even if Borjas is right, and, after adjusting for the different statistical models, Black male high school dropouts were negatively impacted by the enormous labor shock, the precarious position they hold in the first place is due not to immigration trends but domestic discrimination. They should—and could—be treated better, and be more fairly compensated, by both employers and the government.

Of course. What do you expect from an economist? Economics ignores the phone calls to politicians by their constituents. Modern Economics ONLY looks to aggregate numbers. Lived reality, you must remember, does not appear on graphs.

To understand why things wouldn’t necessarily look that different, why open borders between nation states could look like the open borders within nation states (as within the United States),

Is there a country where the income distribution within its states is as large as the disparity between US and, say, Guatamela? If so, there are internal immigration controls. e.g. China.