The case for open borders

by Dylan Matthews

"What would you think about a law that said that blacks couldn’t get a job without the government’s permission, or women couldn’t get a job without the government’s permission, or gays or Christians or anyone else?" George Mason economist Bryan Caplan asks. It's a pretty easy question. Obviously, such a law is discriminatory on its face, serves no rational purpose, and is unacceptable in a liberal democracy. But Caplan continues: "So why, exactly, is it that people who are born on the wrong side of the border have to get government permission just to get a job?"
This is Caplan's elevator pitch for open borders, an idea that for years was treated as deeply unserious, as an extreme straw man that nativists could beat up in the course of resisting more modest efforts to help immigrants. It had its defenders — philosopher Joseph Carens primary among them — but they were relatively lonely voices.
But in recent years, a small but devoted group of advocates have succeeded in turning open borders from a dirty word to a real movement with strong arguments backing it up. The team at OpenBorders.info — Vipul Naik, John Lee, Nathan Smith, Paul Crider — has led the charge, as Shaun Raviv wrote in an excellent profile of the group in the Atlantic. The University of Colorado's Michael Huemer honed Carens' moral case, while the Center for Global Development's Michael Clemens has been hugely influential in arguing that we're leaving trillions in potential economic growth on the table by enforcing border restrictions.
But few have been as prolific and forceful in their advocacy for the idea as Caplan. "The upside of open borders," he once wrote, "would be the rapid elimination of absolute poverty on earth." He is relentless at rebutting objections. It would take jobs away from native-born workers? It'd hurt growth in poor countries as more and more people leave? It'd leave us vulnerable to crime? No, no, and no.
Here's how Caplan lays out the case, step by step. For a full interview with Caplan, click on the toggle below.

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The basic appeal

People who emigrate from Haiti (a street from whose capital, Port-au-Prince, is pictured above) to the US see their incomes multiply several times over. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

The economic case that open borders would dramatically improve the well-being of the world is rock solid.
"Imagine that you’ve got a million people farming in Antarctica. They’re eking out this bare subsistence in agriculture in the snow," he says. "Obviously, if you let those farmers leave Antarctica and go someplace else to farm, the farmers are better off. But isn’t it also better for the world if you let people stop eking out this existence, contributing nothing to the world, and go someplace where they could actually use their skills and not just feed themselves, but produce something for the world economy?"
Alternately, think about what happened in the 1960s and '70s as more and more women joined the workforce in the United States. Was the result mass unemployment for men, as women took all their jobs? Of course not — the economy adjusted, and we're all better off for it. "Would we really be a richer society if we kept half the population stuck at home?" Caplan asks. "Isn’t it better to take people who have useful skills and let them do something with it, than to just keep them locked up someplace where their skills go to waste?"
That's the basic argument for open borders: that you're "moving productive resources" — people — "from places where they’re next to useless to places where they can contribute a lot." The size of the numbers involved makes the case even more compelling. "You might think that moving from Haiti to the United States would cause a 20 percent increase in wages, but no. It’s more like a 2,000 percent increase in wages," Caplan notes. "The difference between the productivity of labor in poor countries and rich countries is so vast, it’s hard to wrap your mind around it."
If you’re a real nationalist who cares about all Americans, then you should favor immigration because only like 5 or 10 percent of Americans are losing
With numbers that big, the potential gains are enormous. A doubling of world GDP is a reasonable estimate. "This isn’t just trickle-down economics. It’s Niagara Falls economics," he says. "If production in the world were to double, almost everyone is going to get enough of that doubling that they’re going to, in the end, be better off as a result. You can’t double the output of the world and leave a lot of people poor as a result."

What's in it for rich countries

Homeowners benefit indirectly from immigration, as it tends to raise property values. (Shutterstock)

Opponents of open borders often grant that it would grow the economy. The problem, they say, is that most of those benefits presumably accrue to migrants. What about the workers who are already there? Don't they lose out, in particular low-skilled workers who are already struggling and would face increased competition from low-skilled immigrants?
Not necessarily. "Low-skilled" is actually kind of a misleading term here. Even American high school dropouts have at least one key skill that immigrants generally don't: the ability to speak English. That makes it possible for immigrants to complement the labor of low-skilled, native-born workers, rather than replacing it. "Low-skilled Americans who are fluent in English in a place like New York City wind up supervising the low-skilled immigrants," Caplan says. "They wind up being the bridge, or the people who train immigrants in jobs that they wouldn’t even know about from their home countries."
Think about it this way. Low-skilled immigrants increase the supply of people who can do janitorial work or wash dishes or whatnot, which you'd expect to reduce wages for Americans in those jobs. But they also decrease, relatively speaking, the supply of people who can speak English. That raises wages for Americans who can speak English. "When you put that together, it’s at least unclear whether most Americans lose," Caplan surmises. "Furthermore, you can change your occupation. You could move to a job that does less of what is worth less after immigration, and move into a job that does more of what’s valued more."
Immigration also has a well-documented, positive effect on housing prices. Most Americans own homes at some point in their life, so even if they lose out from immigration in the labor market, they could make up the loss in the housing market. "The Americans who lose from immigration are those who are very low-skilled, who also don’t speak very good English to begin with, and also don’t own real estate," Caplan concludes. "It's a quite small group. If you’re a real nationalist who cares about all Americans, then you should favor immigration, because only like 5 or 10 percent of Americans are losing." And in any case, whatever losses that 5 or 10 percent incurs are swamped by the gains to the rest of the world, and in particular the migrants themselves.

Who's left behind

Never change, Shutterstock. (Shutterstock)

Even if open borders would be economically beneficial for recipient countries, it's worth asking if it benefits the countries people are leaving. A common worry is that open borders would cause a "brain drain," taking talent away from developing countries and hurting them, even as it helps their (former) residents.
The idea here is a little confused; we should care about making life better for people, whether or not they stay in their home country. But it's wrong even on its own terms. If we're worried about brain drain, we should really be concerned about the current immigration system, in which high-skilled immigrants are privileged over low-skilled ones, ensuring that what migration does occur disproportionately takes the former out of their home countries.
In any case, emigration actually helps home countries in a wide variety of ways. Emigrants typically send back money, which can be hugely consequential for their home country's economy. They can create social networks in host countries, and later come home and use those connections to advance their home country's development. Caplan points to the Chinese diaspora as a prime example: "A lot of what’s going on in the development of China is there is this huge, disparate community of ethnic Chinese all over the place, and they have relatives in China. This makes it very easy for them to do business with each other."
Moreover, actual examples we have of open borders suggest that migrants' home countries actually benefit. Take Puerto Rico. Shortly after the US conquered it in the Spanish American War, the Supreme Court established that it was illegal to restrict migration between the island and the rest of the United States. The result was open borders between the US and a much poorer territory, imposed more or less randomly by a court. It made for a good test of the policy's effect: since then, Puerto Rico has far surpassed neighboring countries like the Dominican Republic economically.
The kind of things that Republicans accuse Obama of secretly plotting to do are what I think should be done
"In terms of brain drain, it seems like there has been a lot less than for any other Latin American country, because from Puerto Rico, you can come regardless of your skill level, whereas, for every other country in Latin America, it is much easier for the skilled workers to get in," Caplan notes. "Over half the population has left, but Puerto Rico, by the standards of Caribbean island nations, is a paradise."

Can it ever happen?

The Schengen agreement establishes open borders not just between most of the EU (Ireland and the UK are the two exceptions) but between EU countries that are non-members like Norway and Switzerland. Note that Lichtenstein has joined the Schengen zone since this map was made. (Gibey Anthony & Flaherty LLP)

Today, open borders sounds like a radical position, and you'll never hear a politician of any consequence endorsing it. Most people believe that the United States government should pursue policies that benefit its own residents, even if those policies impose enormous human costs on people from other countries, as border restrictions of any kind do.
So what's an open borders advocate to do? One tack Caplan takes is advocating "keyhole solutions" to common objections raised by open borders opponents — say, responding to claims immigration hurts American workers by charging immigrants admissions fees and redistributing them to US-born workers. As he put it in the paper "Why Should We Restrict Immigration?":

If immigrants hurt American workers, we can charge immigrants higher taxes or admission fees, and use the revenue to compensate the losers. If immigrants burden American taxpayers, we can make immigrants ineligible for benefits. If immigrants hurt American culture, we can impose tests of English fluency and cultural literacy. If immigrants hurt American liberty, we can refuse to give them the right to vote. Whatever your complaint happens to be, immigration restrictions are a needlessly draconian remedy.

Caplan doesn't support any of these policies on their own; if he had his druthers, he'd just open the borders. "I think you should let immigrants become citizens because they’ve been so sorely abused by American citizens for so many years," he says. But any of them is superior to the current system, in which the presumption is that people can't come and work in the United States unless they demonstrate otherwise.
More incrementally, he wants Obama to take as expansive a view of executive power as possible for the sake of benefiting immigrants. "I think my first step would be, if not legislative amnesty, then presidential fiat amnesty," he says. "Essentially, the kind of things that Republicans accuse Obama of secretly plotting to do are what I think should be done."
Same goes for the Central American migrant crisis. "I would be against any effort to curtail what’s going on with the child migrant crisis," he says. "This is a loophole, and I believe in pushing loopholes as far as you can possibly can." He also wants Obama to fill the asylum quota — bafflingly, something that hasn't been done in most years. "You’re telling me there aren’t 100,000 people on earth who are going to be horribly persecuted by their governments and who want to come here?" he asks. "Come on."
In the long run, he predicts we'll get open borders once countries are bunched more closely together economically. Hell, we might even get open borders between rich countries in coming years; it's already happened within the EU. The lack of such a setup between the US and Canada is "the one that surprises me the most, actually … Maybe Canadians would have some issue with it, or Canadian nationalists would have some issue, because this plausibly could be the decisive blow to Canadian national identity. That still seems like paranoia to me."
But the point is there's no reason to wait that long. "To me," Caplan says, "a big point of open borders is just to fast-forward to the world of the future where everyone can enjoy a First-World standard of living rather than making people wait 100 years."