Abolish Borders

You’ve probably moved across state lines at some point in your life. Maybe it was to attend college or take a higher-paying job. Maybe you wanted to live closer to friends and family after having kids or to join a new religious or political community. It could even be as simple as deciding to move from Dallas to Philadelphia because you prefer attending the home games of a successful football team.

No right-minded person would have the government interfere with any of this. If a business offers you a job and you accept, that’s between you and the business—not you, the business, and the state. The same goes for buying a house from a willing seller or joining a welcoming religious congregation. To borrow from Robert Nozick, these are “capitalist acts between consenting adults.” Granted, these capitalist acts took place across state borders, but so what? The rights to offer and take jobs, buy and sell property, and assemble freely don’t depend on your location relative to a government-drawn line.

If government-drawn lines within your country don’t possess some sort of moral magic that voids your rights, why would government-drawn lines between countries?

Maybe you think the difference is that free movement within the United States is legal but free movement intothe United States is not. As some say, they support legal immigration but not illegal immigration. I’m not convinced by that. Did you know it’s illegal to leave New York with a used burlap bag? I’ve never heard someone say they support legal used burlap bag transport but oppose illegal used burlap bag transport. Why not? Because it’s a bad law. Simply establishing that something is illegal, then, doesn’t establish that it’s wrong.

Some worry newcomers might have objectionable views, and so allowing free movement into the U.S. could push the country toward worse policies.

For one, there’s evidence that increased immigration actually slows the growth of government. But even setting that point aside, you probably don’t endorse the general idea of violating rights to reduce the chances of rights violations in the future. You could burglarize your neighbor’s house for the money needed to buy a security system that would prevent two burglaries at your home, but most libertarians would balk at this—you’d be violating property rights to protect property rights. Immigrants don’t always have libertarian views, but neither do natural-born citizens, so there’s no reason to expect this coercive push to promote particular political outcomes to stop at the border.

An increasingly popular objection to open borders starts with the observation that the state may regulate how public property such as roads can be used. So if the state decides to restrict immigrants’ access to the roads they need to move about the country, it’s within its rights to do so. Even if you’re in favor of road privatization, you should still think the state can impose some regulations on the use of public roads in the world we actually live in—for instance, you can’t drive the wrong way down a street. That said, the state may not impose whatever regulations it wants; for instance, the regulations shouldn’t be needlessly restrictive. Imagine that voters elect leaders so hostile to poetry that they empower the police to stop any car that’s found to be transporting a poet on a public road. This policy would be obviously unjust, because it violates private property rights and freedom of association—and the same would be true of state interference with your choice to transport an immigrant in your car on a public road.

Perhaps the most common objection to open borders is that immigrants who consume state benefits will increase citizens’ taxes. In short, they say, we can’t have open borders with a welfare state.

In fact, the various estimates of the net fiscal impact of immigration are, as the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh once put it, “clustered around zero.” In any event, we shouldn’t authorize the government to restrict someone’s freedom simply because respecting their freedom is costly. We allow people to climb mountains, ride motorcycles, and go BASE jumping. Needless to say, these activities are hazardous and could put someone in a tax-funded hospital. But here we still live and let live. Even if it were the case that respecting your freedom to associate and exchange with immigrants creates a fiscal burden, freedom doesn’t end where the welfare state begins.

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