Open Borders Day

Today is Open Borders Day. This doesn't mean much because I just blog for my own enjoyment, nobody reads it, and I have no expertise in any of the relevant fields. But... from what little I have learned and thought about ethical philosophy, politics, and economics, I believe that open borders, or at least moving in that direction, is the most important change we should be pushing for in our government(s). And I believe it is something people of nearly all political persuasions have good reasons to support. It's natural to support the status quo until we come across strong reasons to prefer otherwise. And for that reason, I didn't think much of existing immigration laws for a long time. But when you really think about it, strict immigration laws are strange and hard to justify.

Consider the following fundamental reasons people often provide as justification for the laws our government should or should not make, which span the whole political spectrum:

1. People have natural rights/freedoms, which the government should protect, not obstruct. What does it mean to allow someone to immigrate here? It doesn't mean granting special privileges, or making everyone a citizen. It is merely a person working for an employer at a wage agreed to by both parties, and buying or renting property to live in at a price agreed to with the seller/renter. These are things we all view as very basic rights, which the government should not infringe on without very good reason. Does the location on our earth in which a person was born qualify as a good reason for this?
2. The government should follow the Constitution and its founding principles. The U.S. Constitution only explicitly granted the federal government the power to regulate naturalization (i.e. citizenship), not immigration. And we didn't have a single federal law restricting immigration until 1875. Even then, that only restricted immigration specifically for Chinese people. General immigration restrictions came in the 20th century.
3. The government should alleviate wealth inequality to bring more fairness to the world. However bad you believe inequality is in our country, global inequality is far worse. The median U.S. household earns more than 93% of the world's households, while the bottom 5% of U.S. households earns more than 68% of global households.
4. The government should reduce its debt. The main difficulty for our federal budgets going forward is the retirement of the baby boomer generation. Our entitlement programs mainly go toward the elderly with Medicare, Social Security, and even much of Medicaid. Even beyond the cost of public projects, there's a fundamental problem when too large a percentage of our population is too old to work. Allowing more working-age immigrants helps alleviate this. This is why the CBO estimate of the latest immigration reform bill predicts lower deficits as a result.
5. The government should do what increases human well-being / makes the world a better place. Presumably you think it's good to donate money to people stuck in poverty in developing nations? We can help such people much more by simply getting our government to stop prohibiting their ability to move to more stable nations like ours. This isn't just for helping poverty. Some people live in countries in which they lack basic rights. There may be high violence, war, rape, slavery, child soldiers. By what reason can we prohibit people from fleeing those situations into safer countries?
6. The government should do what grows the economy. One of the things economists across the political spectrum actually agree on is that immigration is good for the economy. A study on open borders estimated that it would double world GDP. Think of people whose innovations have greatly benefited the world, such as Bill Gates (insert another name if you disagree with that example). Notice that almost all of them had the benefit of being in developed nations. How many potential geniuses, inventors, etc were never able to benefit the world with their abilities simply because they were stuck in places where they had no chance to develop them?

"Open borders" doesn't necessarily mean that we should let anyone go anywhere no matter what with no oversight. We probably don't want to allow suspected terrorists to come and go as they please, for instance. But denying someone's basic free movement should be the exception which requires the burden of proof, not the rule.