
Four Ways Open Borders Advocates can Improve their Rhetoric
I’m skeptical about the wisdom of open border policy. I think writers on the subject typically do a weak job of arguing for this position, in part because of the following mistakes and omissions.
1. Stop talking about ‘Immigrantland’
Immigrants cause less crime than natives. Immigration does not cause unemployment. Immigrants don’t consume more public benefits than natives; in fact, they use fewer. Indeed, they have kept Social Security afloat, even though they will never get a dime from the system. They don’t love liberty less: they poll in as more libertarian
Passages like this read as if the most relevant question about immigration is ‘Do we throw open the borders or retreat to radical nativism?’ It’s a false dichotomy. Critics of open borders are very unlikely to be opposed to all immigration. They are likely to be fearful of the effects of admitting certain demographics.
Immigrants do not come from “Immigrantland”. Population differences related to entrepreneurial and earning potential are real, and significant, and difficult to bridge.
So the open borders advocate ought to be mindful of the mistake of implicitly attacking a nativist weak man.
Instead of talking about the benefits of immigration in total, open borders advocates should be presenting statistics related to the groups that are causing the most worry among their critics.
2. Acknowledge that not all claims to a state’s public property carry equal weight
I first wrote about this idea in two posts addressed to anarcho-capitalists. If I change that language slightly it becomes relevant to supporters of state democracy too.
Immigration means gaining the legal right to use the public property and services of a host state.
Who is the public who owns this property? I think it makes sense to consider those who pay taxes used to maintain that property as part owners at least. What about those in a country far away with no contact with the state in question? I see no reason to consider those people owners of the local public property by default. The far-away group has no right, by default, to access the public property of the local state we’re considering.
I believe justice demands that public property be used in accordance with the wishes of its owners, as closely as possible.
So as long as public property as we know it exists, and if we’re concerned about justice, the preferences of the taxed (as part of what I call the state’s broader ‘victim population’) matter when it comes to determining border policy. These preferences matter even if elites believe they are held for poor reasons. If the summed preferences of the victim population lean more towards border restrictions, this is a consideration in favour of such restrictions being used.
I’ve yet to see a moral case for open borders that attempts to address this objection.
3. Talk frankly about cases like Israel
Is the case for open borders strong enough that we need make no exceptions, ‘open borders absolutism’? Or is the rallying cry really shorthand for Open Borders! (assuming certain starting conditions)?
This distinction might allow the conversation to move on to specifying what those necessary starting conditions might to be.
Open borders critics like bionic mosquito use the example of Israel. Ought Israel to open its borders? Specifically ought Israel to allow free entry to Palestinians?
OpenBorders.info acknowledges the difficulties here.
4. Acknowledge that fears about value conflicts are legitimate
Some opponents of open borders fear the spread of ‘Muslim ghettos’ like the ones in Paris, Brussels and the UK. They fear the growth of a voting demographic holding the views found in a survey conducted for Channel 4.
52 per cent believed homosexuality should not be legal in Britain, 39 per cent agreed “wives should always obey their husbands”, and 31 per cent said it was acceptable for a man to have more than one wife.
Others fear that the cultural tension concomitant with these (what I’m euphemistically calling) value conflicts will fuel the rise of the populist right.
I fear that even our ability to honestly talk about these things is threatened by the way the slur of racism is so carelessly employed when these subjects come up.
