A Defense of Open Immigration
Think for a moment about what it means for a person to move from their home to another, far distance place. We could be talking about an intra-country move or emigration to a different country, it doesn’t matter. The person making such a move has surely gotten several people to vouch for them in various ways. They’ve secured housing, which means either a landlord has vetted them to rent an apartment or a homeowner has sold them a home. They’ve secured employment, meaning a company or boss has evaluated them and approves. These conditions aren’t always met. Someone may move to a different place in hopes that opportunities will materialize, without securing housing and employment. But the median immigrant is presumably not moving to joblessness and homelessness. If those were the prospects, most wouldn’t make the move in the first place.
In other words, immigrants are usually making the current residents better off. The new employer wants them, the new landlord wants them, and the immigrant finds the conditions favorable. Everybody who is party to these arrangements is better off, by their own estimation. That should be the end of the story. There might be some irrelevant third parties who don’t like the new resident/employee. Maybe someone is resentful, as in “I should have gotten that job and apartment!” But it’s hard to imagine why these people’s resentment should count for anything. The landlord or current homeowner should be able to decide how to use or sell their property. Neighbors shouldn’t have a veto because they disapprove of their new neighbor. Other tenants or home buyers shouldn’t be able to restrict competition, bending the rules to favor themselves over outsiders. Employers should have the final say in who to employ. Resentful rejects who don’t want to compete with outsiders shouldn’t have a say.
With this in mind, the presumption should be that you need a really strong reason to tell an immigrant “No.” A would-be immigrant should be able to take a job anywhere, assuming the employer wants them. To block immigration is to severely restrict the rights of current residents. We have the right to associate with whomever we choose and the right to transfer property to whomever we wish, barring a compelling and specific reason to the contrary. If we’re worried about immigrants flooding the border and forming shanty towns or becoming vagrants, then I think it’s fine to have an immigration policy that checks why they’re coming. Even in the case of basically open borders, it makes sense for a government to take note of who is coming into the country, if merely for the sake of counting and trend forecasting. If someone has secured a job and housing, though, then the presumption should be we let them come, barring something like a serious criminal record or communicable disease.
Another obstacle that should not block an immigrant’s passage is a bureaucratic bottleneck. People get turned away, or maybe it’s more precise to say they’re never granted permission to enter, because there is too much arbitrary paperwork and too few bureaucrats to process it. That should never be the case. If someone wants to defend restrictive immigration policies, they should do so on the “merits” of restricting immigration. What we’ve done is to block perfectly good applicants who would make fine Americans through bureaucratic slog. It’s not a policy that anyone asked for, and it’s not a rational way to stem the flow of immigrants. We should be far more deliberate in deciding who gets to come here for how long and under what conditions. It’s fine to have an immigration policy that says “No.” But it should be an immediate “No,” not “You’re in the queue for processing, we’ll get back to you in 13 years.” And they should get some kind of indication as to why they’re rejected. This isn’t hard. If someone has a criminal record and we’re turning them down for that reason, we should say so. We should feel compelled to give a reason to say “No.” If a particular immigrant would be moving to a job and housing, that means someone, an American, wants them here. Telling that immigrant “No” for no reason, or telling them “Not yet” with an indefinite waiting period, violates the rights of those Americans who would associate with them. We need to set very clear rules and give swift responses to would-be immigrants. If this means we need to 10x the immigration bureaucracy, so be it, let’s do that. But the status quo is irrational and nobody wants it.
I feel the need to address the perspective that “This is not ideal, but I’ll take it.” Almost everyone wants a more rational immigration policy, but maybe they see the existing kludge is an acceptable compromise. People who want low levels of immigration might not love the fact that the level is kept down by bureaucratic morass. But if an efficient bureaucracy would simply permit more immigrants and say “Yes” more quickly to more people, they’re happy to keep the status quo. People who want higher levels of immigration might be perfectly happy to see people flood across the border. Those people might be breaking our immigration laws, but the just outcome is that they should be allowed to come here. It’s being achieved through unsanctioned channels, but justice is being done.
I’m usually happy to take a second-best policy or an outcome that’s not achieved through the proper channels. I think unjust laws should be flouted. When the government flexes illegitimate power, it should be defied and resisted. But in the case of immigration this is short-sighted and could lead to a backlash. There are overblown fears that immigrants and asylum seekers will commit crimes, possibly substantial acts of terrorism. I think this is really not a big deal, and people who dislike immigrants for other reasons (cultural, political, racial) are just demagoguing. But such crimes have traction politically. The illegal immigrants who aren’t criminals, who are fleeing genuine oppression or who wish to work an honest job, deserve full, legal status through a transparent process. If I’m looking such a person in the eye and judging them for breaking the law, in most cases I’d tell them “I’d rather have you here than not.” But I’m certainly not happy about this unsanctioned version of “expanded immigration.” I don’t think it’s sustainable, and it does lead Americans to resent illegal immigrants for bending the rules.
To the restrictionists, who are happy to have stifling bureaucracy serve as an unintended brake on immigration flows, I would likewise implore you to have your preferred policy codified. If the right answer is to say “No” sooner and more frequently to would-be immigrants, let’s have that drafted into law. Many such restrictionists rhetorically strike a “rule of law” posture, as in “We must enforce all laws.” Well, an immigration policy that nobody intended and nobody wants is a violation of the rule of law. The phrase doesn’t mean “robotically enforce all rules and regulations on the books,” it actually means that the law is predictable, rational and fair. I think both restrictionists and proponents of open immigration have an obligation to clarify exactly what they’re asking for. Present a proposal that can be critiqued, and the public can decide if they like it or not.
I don’t have a strong opinion as to how many immigrants we should permit. I think that’s the wrong question, and it’s basically indefensible to set strict quotas. The admission of each immigrant is an individual decision. Does this individual wish to come here? Do we have a compelling reason to say “No” to them? If they add value to our society, we admit them. Then the next one. Then the next, until no more wish to come here. People worry about getting “swamped”, as in we’ll be swarmed by 100 million immigrants in the space of a year or two. Such a flood would overwhelm public services and cause housing costs to skyrocket, the thinking goes. I think this is extremely unlikely and self-limiting, in a negative feedback sense. Housing costs serve as a ballast, naturally stemming immigration flows. If the cost of housing is too high, it ceases to be worthwhile to move here. Within the US, we see enormous differences in median income by geography. Tech hubs like San Francisco and finance hubs like New York have very high incomes, but they also have bad policies that severely restrict housing supply. Americans from rural Mississippi don’t flood into New York or California to take advantage of these big income differentials. I doubt if they would even if these states and cities liberalized zoning policies and built a ton of new housing. Again, I think it’s okay to insist that an immigrant secures housing before moving here, or insist they do so in short order after arriving. I think shanty towns or tent encampments filled with homeless immigrants would be legitimately concerning and create a backlash against immigration. (At the same time, I think it’s fine if immigrants live tightly packed in small apartments. We’ve criminalized poverty, even when it’s better than what the immigrants are used to.)
I also think there is a limit to the rate at which the labor market can absorb immigrants. I’m not making the “lump of labor” fallacy, that there’s a fixed number of jobs. Nor am I one of those growth pessimists who doesn’t realize we find new kinds of jobs all the time (for expanding populations, or for those former buggy whip makers and video store clerks whose jobs have gone away). Adding 100 million people in one year would probably suck. But over 20 years? Or maybe 10? This would be another self-limiting process. If “too many” immigrants came too quickly, the marginal immigrant would see a saturated labor market and be indifferent between moving and staying home.
The “open borders” folks mostly agree with the analysis in the previous two paragraphs, but I’d like to hear them say explicitly what they’d do if this turns out to be wrong. These are empirical questions. They are predictions about how we would absorb new immigrants, which could be mistaken. I think they ought to say something like: Supposing I’m wrong, supposing we get flooded by hundreds of millions of immigrants within a few years, and housing costs skyrocket and wages are bid low and unemployment is a problem. Okay, then it would be fine to set national restrictions on immigration.
“Open borders” is really terrible branding for the folks who would like to expand immigration. It needlessly scares the shit out of people who are hostile to immigrants. Those people will vote for more restrictive policies than they otherwise would, knowing that certain commentators are grinning wolfishly at them while biting a bullet. It’s really hard for folks who adopts this slogan to dissociate themselves from the recent border chaos. I don’t think they want large caravans of people crossing the border with no processing and no official sanction. They ought to say so. The slogan, taken literally, close off the option of securing borders under any circumstances. What if one nation literally sent an invading army into another, but dressed as civilians rather than soldiers? Israel faces such a threat, and its immigration policy wisely guards against it. (Or put the shoe on the other foot in a historic counterfactual. Suppose the Palestinians had a state prior to 1948, and they took notice of a large influx of Jewish immigrants who had designs on creating their own state on their territory. Abstract away from the particular example, ask: Does a nation in such a position have a right to restrict immigration? Hell yes!) These kinds of military threats are overblown and almost never materialize. During the recent border chaos, I heard many idiotic references to “military age males”. (Read “prime working-age males”. Historically, immigration to better economic opportunity is usually spearheaded by working men, who are followed by their families at a later time.) Still, in principle it’s a good idea to check or have safeguards against such military threats.
I think “open borders” is the wrong framing and the wrong slogan. I don’t have a punchy slogan for my perspective, but I think it’s more compelling. Immigration restrictionists shouldn’t be told they have no right to regulate the border of their nation under any circumstances. But they should be told that they require (and usually lack) a good, specific reason to tell an immigrant “No.” They should be told that they are violating the rights of Americans who would associate with these immigrants, commercially, professionally, and socially. I think my desired policy leads to a massive increase in immigration, and I think that increase is both morally just and economically beneficial to the US broadly. (Even to the folks who resent immigrants. Despite their best efforts, they would benefit as well.) I share the desire for vastly liberalized policy and substantial increases in levels of immigration. I share the view that restrictionists employ misguided and disingenuous reasons for wanting to restrict immigration. That is why I don’t want to hand them a rhetorical cudgel with which to abuse us.
I sometimes hear restrictionists say silly things that imply that our property is collectivized. It’s an odd kind of argument, because the implication is that they are outright communists, or perhaps they are proposing a concept that applies only to immigration without setting a limiting principle. They say things like “You lock your doors at night, don’t you?” The doors on your home are protecting your private property. The irony is that they (the restrictionists) are violating my property rights by denying me permission to sell my home to someone who lives abroad, or allowing them to visit me, without securing their permission. I’ve seen even more brazen examples, analogizing the United States to a “private club” whose current members can admit or deny new members. The correct analogy is that businesses and residences are private clubs. People who aren’t even members of my “club” (a business that would employ an immigrant, or a landlord who wants to rent or sell to that immigrant) are placing limits on who can join. If you think all property is collective property, and the government of the United States owns all the property within it’s borders, say so. But be clear about what you are.