No defensible moral framework regards foreigners as less deserving of
rights than people born in the right place at the right time.
To paraphrase Rousseau, man is born free, yet everywhere he is caged.
Barbed-wire, concrete walls, and gun-toting guards confine people to the
nation-state of their birth. But why? The argument for open borders is both
economic and moral. All people should be free to move about the earth,
uncaged by the arbitrary lines known as borders.
Not every place in the world is equally well-suited to mass economic
activity. Nature’s bounty is divided unevenly. Variations in wealth and
income created by these differences are magnified by governments that
suppress entrepreneurship and promote religious intolerance, gender
discrimination, or other bigotry. Closed borders compound these injustices,
cementing inequality into place and sentencing their victims to a life of
penury.
The overwhelming majority of would-be immigrants want little more than to
make a better life for themselves and their families by moving to economic
opportunity and participating in peaceful, voluntary trade. But lawmakers
and heads of state quash these dreams with state-sanctioned
violence—forced repatriation, involuntary detention, or worse—often while
paying lip service to “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Wage differences are a revealing metric of border discrimination. When a
worker from a poorer country moves to a richer one, her wages might
double, triple, or rise even tenfold. These extreme wage differences reflect
restrictions as stifling as the laws that separated white and black South
Africans at the height of Apartheid. Geographical differences in wages also
signal opportunity—for financially empowering the migrants, of course, but
also for increasing total world output. On the other side of discrimination
lies untapped potential. Economists have estimated that a world of open
borders would double world GDP.
Immigration is the greatest anti-poverty program ever devised.
Even relatively small increases in immigration flows can have enormous
benefits. If the developed world were to take in enough immigrants
to enlarge its labor force by a mere one percent, it is estimated that the
additional economic value created would be worth more to the migrants than
all of the world’s official foreign aid combined. Immigration is the greatest
anti-poverty program ever devised.
And while the benefits of cross-border movements are tremendous for the
immigrants, they are also significant for those born in destination countries.
Immigration unleashes economic forces that raise real wages throughout an
economy. New immigrants possess skills different from those of their hosts,
and these differences enable workers in both groups to better exploit their
special talents and leverage their comparative advantages. The effect is to
improve the welfare of newcomers and natives alike. The immigrant who
mows the lawn of the nuclear physicist indirectly helps to unlock the secrets
of the universe.
What moral theory justifies using wire, wall, and weapon to prevent people
from moving to opportunity? What moral theory justifies using tools of
exclusion to prevent people from exercising their right to vote with their
feet?
No standard moral framework, be it utilitarian, libertarian, egalitarian,
Rawlsian, Christian, or any other well-developed perspective, regards
people from foreign lands as less entitled to exercise their rights—or as
inherently possessing less moral worth—than people lucky to have been
born in the right place at the right time. Nationalism, of course, discounts
the rights, interests, and moral value of “the Other”, but this disposition is
inconsistent with our fundamental moral teachings and beliefs.
Freedom of movement is a basic human right. Thus the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights belies its name when it proclaims this right
only “within the borders of each state.” Human rights do not stop at the
border.Today, we treat as pariahs those governments that refuse to let their
people exit. I look forward to the day when we treat as pariahs those
governments that refuse to let people enter.
Is there hope for the future? Closed borders are one of the world’s greatest
moral failings but the opening of borders is the world’s greatest economic
opportunity. The grandest moral revolutions in history—the abolition of
slavery, the securing of religious freedom, the recognition of the rights of
women—yielded a world in which virtually everyone was better off. They
also demonstrated that the fears that had perpetuated these injustices were
unfounded. Similarly, a planet unscarred by iron curtains is not only a world
of greater equality and justice. It is a world unafraid of itself.