Migration and Human Rights (49): Rights and Non-Rights Based Reasons to Favor Open Borders

It’s fairly easy to make a rights-based case for open borders – or, more realistically, for reduced immigration restrictions: human beings have

• a right to free movement (yes, also internationally, just as people can speak to me from another country)
• a right to associate
• a right to work
• a right to be with their family members
• a right to escape injustice
• a right to not be poor etc.

All of these rights depend, in some cases, on the possibility to migrate. And there’s no reason to believe that the actionability of these rights stops at the border (maybe the legal actionability stops there, but not the moral one).

Sure, you can have rights-based reasons to limit immigration, but those are relatively weak. People have a right to private property and to exclude others from their property, but it’s a stretch to argue that a nation of people has a “property” right to a territory. It’s also true that people have a right to democratic self-government, but again this is not a good reason to limit immigration (you can allow immigration and refuse to grant immigrants the right to vote, although you probably shouldn’t). What about the right to cultural identity? Relax. A culture that can’t survive the presence of neighbors is probably not worth saving.

The best right-based reason to limit immigration is perhaps freedom of association: although this right can be used to argue in favor of immigration – when a native and an immigrant decide to associate in, for example, a business relationship, then who are we to stop them? – it can also be interpreted as a right to exclude. A right to associate includes the right not to associate with certain people. One can make the case that allowing people to live in a country is a form of association that people who already live there can accept or refuse. However, is a nation really an association? Anti-patriots and cosmopolitans exist, and yet they are not excluded from the nation. Hence, it’s doubtful whether a nation is an association in the relevant sense. If it’s not, then it doesn’t have a right to exclude, at least not a right to exclude that is similar or equal to the right of proper associations.

So, we do have robust rights-based reasons in favor of open borders, but these aren’t the only reasons. Here’s a list of some types of people who normally don’t use rights as the basis for their thinking but who nevertheless have good reasons to favor open borders (or at least reduced immigration restrictions):

• Hayekians: In most current immigration systems, governments exclude “bad” immigrants and admit “good” ones. E.g. they exclude criminals, terrorists and economic refugees but try to attract high skilled geniuses. However, Hayekians should doubt that governments have the knowhow that is necessary to do this. Better to remove immigration regulations and leave it to the market – i.e. immigrants and their employers – to sort this out. The government should then focus on keeping out the criminals and the terrorist.
• Christians/Jews/Muslims: The Abrahamic religions remember the Exodus. If some children of God suffer an injustice for the simple reason of living somewhere rather than somewhere else (a present-day example of such an injustice would be the place premium) then the adherents of one of the Abrahamic religions have a moral obligation to rectify this. Charity can be one option, but open borders seem to be a much more effective remedy.
• Economists: All those who favor GDP growth should favor open borders which could lead to a one-time boost in world GDP by an estimated 50 to 150%.
• Law-and-order people: The average immigrant is less likely to commit crime than the average native-born person.
• Socialists/Social-democrats: Left-leaning folks are primarily concerned with the poorest social classes. Hence, they also should favor immigration because there’s evidence that low-skilled native workers may be able to move up the job ladder when low-skilled immigrants arrive (some low-skilled natives will lose the wage competition but can then be compensated by the welfare state to which a lot of migrants contribute through the taxes that they pay).
• Etc.

More posts in this series are here.