The Case for Open Borders

by John Washington

There is convincing evidence that the modern term “territory” does not, as widely assumed, find its etymological roots in the word “terra,” but rather derives from the Latin “terreor”—to frighten, via “territor”—one who frightens, to “territorium”—that is, a place from which people are frightened off.

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?

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.

Even legal immigrants with green cards can’t receive most benefits during the first five years they are in the country: the idea is that they first have to “pay in”. For Medicare and Social Security, legal permanent residents (green card holders) need to pay in for forty quarters, or ten years, before they are eligible to receive any benefits.

From 2005 to 2014, the study found that the US refugee and asylee population paid $63 billion more in taxes than they received in benefits. And the per capita annual net effect of each refugee or asylee was positive by $2,205, compared to a national average of $1,848 over the same time period.

But how does a closed border legitimize a country? The US border is wide open to goods, money, the well connected, and the wealthy—so why is keeping poor people out important for maintaining a nation state?

Compare the triple fencing, watch towers, paramilitary Border Patrol, ground sensors, drones, and billions of dollars spent keeping people out of Southern California to the Derby Line in Vermont at the northern US border, where an opera house is literally divided down the middle between United States and Canada, where the international divide is marked by a strip of black on the floor of the town library’s reading room.

But while the globe is certainly losing species to extinction, blaming migration—or vagility, the term of art—is missing the mark, buoying up what Shah calls the “myth of a sedentary planet.”

Zebra mussels, for example, were not the only, or even the greatest, threat to native clams in the Great Lakes. Besides disrupting the local ecosystems, the mussels filtered water and became a new source of food for native fish and fowl. One surprising statistic is that since the introduction of European species to the Americas four hundred years ago, biodiversity has actually increased by 18 percent. As Shah puts it, “Nature transgresses borders all the time.”

Within the first six months of the pandemic, as I reported at the time for The Intercept, almost 5.5 percent of total US cases were attributable to spread from ICE detention centers.

Meanwhile, a doctor contracted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement who serviced that same facility was credibly accused of performing dozens of nonconsensual gynecological procedures, including hysterectomies, on detained women, sterilizing them.

But, you might ask, what about immigrants who commit violent crimes—shouldn’t they be given the boot? It’s a common counterargument, and one that needs to be addressed. You might answer that an unauthorized immigrant convicted of such a crime should be treated as would any other person convicted of a crime; but in the United States, especially, any considerate or thinking person would hesitate to subject them, or anybody, to the dysfunctional, discriminatory, and wildly abusive criminal justice system. Mass criminalization and incarceration, especially of Black and Brown people, is a horribly failed national experiment, has not made society safer, and does a lot to make families, communities, and especially the people thrown into the system, miserable. Indeed, in the United States, prison does more to provoke crime and violence than it does to prevent it.

the general point is that deflection of criminal justice across a border isn’t a productive response to violent acts. Offshoring society’s problems, or offshoring people who commit crimes, is not a long-term or sustainable solution. Assessing and addressing how society pushes people toward addiction, violent actions, and instability would be more beneficial than the superficial and ad hoc responses of locking up and deporting offenders.

Criminalization and punishment of people who migrate doesn’t work as a deterrent. No study has been able to demonstrate that threats of punishment stop people from crossing or recrossing the border. In fact, “illegal reentry” prosecutions have gone up over the last decades, and show no signs of flagging.

Again, it’s critical here to dispel fears that your country, whichever it is, would be overrun. The United States, currently clocking a fertility rate far below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman necessary to maintain a stable population, needs migrants. Preliminary data suggests the birth rate fell to 1.7 births per woman in 2020, meaning that without migration, the US population will begin to shrink and the average age rise—straining tax bases, health care systems, and all benefit programs. Any American who plans to get old should advocate for more immigration.

We can lose the fortress mentality, the extremes of nationalism, and the human filtering and still keep—even restore—democratic governance.

1.Borders have not always been 2.Immigrants Don’t Steal Jobs—They Create Them 3.Immigrants Don’t Drain Government Coffers 4.Borders Don’t Stop Crime and Violence; They Engender Crime and Violence 5.Immigrants Don’t Threaten Communities; They Revitalize Them 6.Migrants Rejuvenate 7.Open Borders Doesn’t Mean a Rush to Migrate 8.The Nonsense of Nationalism 9.Closed Borders Are Unethical 10.Brain Drain Ain’t a Thing 11.The Libertarian Case 12.Dehumanizing Border Machinery Targets Native Residents Too

13.Opening Borders Is Economically Smart 14.Open Borders Are an Urgent Response to the Climate Crisis 15.Open Borders As Reparations 16.World Religions Agree: Open the Borders 17.Closed Borders Are Racist 18.Walls Don’t Work 19.“Smart” Walls Are Stupid 20.The Right to Migrate / The Right to Remain

of the 180 people arrested for plotting terrorist attacks in the United States in the two decades following 9/11, only four were found to have illegally crossed US borders. Three crossed the US–Mexico border, but when they were children younger than five—one wasn’t even a year old. Their radicalization (though they did not commit any actual attacks) took place in the United States.

The real problem with resources or services isn’t that migrants are consuming them but that much of the world wastes so damn much. The best estimate is that Americans waste between 30 and 40 percent of the food supply, or over one hundred billion pounds of food every single year.

As researcher Linda Semu summarized, “We need to view migration not in terms of brain drain or brain gain, but in terms of brain circulation that allows for exchange of knowledge and experience between places of origin and places of residence.”

Closed borders is a win only for the corporations, which use the border as a wedge to lower wages, undercut worker protections, and keep the assembly line zipping.