21 Arguments for Open Borders - John Washington

TWENTY-ONE ARGUMENTS FOR OPEN BORDERS

“The right of locomotion; the right of migration; the right which belongs to no particular race, but belongs to all and all alike. It is the right you assert by staying here, and your fathers asserted by coming here. It is this great right that I assert for the Chinese and Japanese, and for all other varieties of men equally with yourselves, now and forever.”
—Frederick Douglass, in 1869 speech, “On Composite Nationality”

“Of all the specific liberties which may come into our minds when we hear the word ‘freedom,’ freedom of movement is historically the oldest and also the most elementary.”
—Hannah Arendt

1. Borders have not always been
2. Immigrants Don’t Steal Jobs—They Create Them
3. Immigrants Don’t Drain Government Coffers
4. Borders Don’t Stop Crime and Violence; They Engender Crime and Violence
5. Immigrants Don’t Threaten Communities; They Revitalize Them
6. Migrants Rejuvenate
7. Open Borders Doesn’t Mean a Rush to Migrate
8. The Nonsense of Nationalism
9. Closed Borders Are Unethical
10. Brain Drain Ain’t a Thing
11. The Libertarian Case
12. Dehumanizing Border Machinery Targets Native Residents Too
13. Opening Borders Is Economically Smart
14. Open Borders Are an Urgent Response to the Climate Crisis
15. Open Borders As Reparations
16. World Religions Agree: Open the Borders
17. Closed Borders Are Racist
18. Walls Don’t Work
19. “Smart” Walls Are Stupid
20. The Right to Migrate / The Right to Remain
21. The Simple Argument

Most arguments for open borders begin by addressing counterarguments, trying to assuage fears of overcrowding, overrun public services, tanking economies, or generalized chaos. It’s important work to do, as careful counterarguments easily deflate nativist fear-mongering. However, the case for open borders must ultimately be a positive one, explaining why the freedom to move—coupled with the freedom and possibility to remain—is a necessary good, and why a world not divided into exclusive nation states with militarized borders would be more egalitarian, would promote and cultivate diversity instead of fear, and would help form a world where sustainability and justice take precedence over extraction and exploitation.

When we open borders, there won’t be an overwhelming influx of migrants, wages won’t plummet, there won’t be a paralyzing run on government services, and crime won’t increase. All true—but policies are rarely won by defining what they won’t do. In fact, allaying imagined fears can, paradoxically, solidify them. As Harsha Walia notes, “All movements need an anchor in a shared positive vision, not a homogeneous or exact or perfect condition, but one that will nonetheless dismantle hierarchies, disarm concentrations of power, guide just relations, and nurture individual autonomy alongside collective responsibility.”

Why is the fundamental right of movement lagging, even backsliding, throughout the world? Why do states decry and prosecute impingements on the right to free speech, the free press, or the right to freedom from government oppression throughout the world, and yet so enthusiastically impinge on the right to free movement? Is the right to freedom of movement somehow different from the right to free speech, or the right to liberty? Why is the fundamental right to leave your country enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, but not the right to enter another country? In a world (almost) completely carved into nation states, the right to leave is only a half right without the concomitant right to enter.

Unauthorized migration, whether it is asylum seekers fleeing for their lives or the poor for better opportunity, should be understood as a radical political act. It is an individual act, and often driven by necessity, but it is also an affront and subversion of a violent system of colonial subordination. Colonizers in the United States saw themselves, and were celebrated, as subjects bucking oppressive rule. Today’s migrants, exercising their fundamental right of mobility, are migrating in a much more peaceful manner than the settlers and colonizers of yore. Today’s migrants are not threats to freedom, but much-needed threats to a global system of oppression. In their mere movement, they are freedom fighters.

Just as courageous activists sat at lunch counters, stood down tanks, refused to pick up weapons, or raised their voices against and toppled oppressive institutions, it is time to call forth such courage and turn the system of closed borders into a relic of backwardness, to shove it into history’s dustbin.

Opening borders is possible. We just need to find out how to get there. A necessary step toward guaranteeing and exercising the right to free movement includes understanding its implications and promises. Below is a short and far from exhaustive list of some of the simple arguments about why open borders would be an economic, environmental, and ethical boon.

1. Borders Have Not Always Been

In the nineteenth-century United States, many couldn’t imagine beyond the strictures of slavery, with even most abolitionists advocating to let the “peculiar” institution wither into history. The problem with the gradual lapse of slavery, however, was that even as the abolition movement grew, slavery, in what would be its dying years, became both more entrenched and more profitable. Slavery-driven cotton production and cotton exports in the South nearly doubled during the 1850s. The market value of an enslaved person increased from around $1,000 in 1850 to $2,250 by 1860—more than a 100 percent leap in ten years. Then, by the middle of the next decade, slavery was legally abolished.

To get a sense of the moral certainty and presumed durability of slavery—even in its last years—consider a few lines of this 1860 editorial from the Atlanta Confederacy: “We regard every man in our midst an enemy to the institutions of the South, who does not boldly declare that he believes African slavery to be a social, moral, and political blessing.” If a man didn’t declare slavery to be such a blessing, the editorial continued, he “should be requested to leave the country.”

The political volte-face came five years later, upending an entrenched status quo and profoundly altering the lives of millions of people. (Of course, slavery was effectively reinstituted in different forms in subsequent years.) Radical change may seem a distant dream, but all political institutions are constructs only kept functioning by concerted human will and bureaucratic inertia. Redirect or nix that will, dismantle the bureaucracy, and the institutions, one day to the next, may come tumbling down. In the open space, in the sunlight, new and more just institutions can be built. “No one in the twelfth century foresaw capitalism,” Jacqueline Stevens writes. “Naysayers in the sphere of social change, those who extrapolate the future from the present, are the ones whom history has repeatedly defeated.”

Today, perhaps only support for late-stage capitalism stands as more of a mainstream given, practically a shibboleth, than support for border restrictions. Ironically, borders also hark back to capital’s predecessor—feudalism—in that they divide and deny based merely on the happenstance of birth.

Some scholars see nations’ push to close and hypermilitarize borders over the last decades as a last-gasp effort to restore the slipping grip of nationalism. As political theorist Wendy Brown writes, “Walls do not merely index, but accelerate waning state sovereignty: they blur the policing and military functions of states; they generate new vigilantisms at borders; they expand the transnationalist identifications that in turn spur demands for greater exercises of state sovereignty, more effective walling, and less flexibility in responding to globalization’s vicissitudes and volatilities.” As global trade and connectivity continue to increase, as climate change pushes people from their homes, walled-off nations are dead-duck efforts to hoard increasingly diffuse geopolitical power.

Historically speaking, closed borders are still in short pants. For the first century of the United States’ existence, there were zero federal immigration laws, and there were no substantial fences or walls along the US–Mexico border until the late 1990s. Immigration scholar Reece Jones calculates that as recently as 1990 there were only fifteen international border walls throughout the world. That number today is in the eighties. But change works in both directions, and the number may soon fall back to fifteen, or to zero.

Borders haven’t always been. And they certainly haven’t always been as they are now—militarized zones where human beings are stripped of their rights merely for crossing an imaginary line. Nor will borders, as they are now, always be.

2. Immigrants Don’t Steal Jobs—They Create Them

Economic studies across the political spectrum tell us that immigrants create more jobs than they take, and that the ones they do snag are essential for the basic functioning of much of Western society. A US Department of Labor study conducted under the Bush administration noted that the perception that immigrants take native jobs is “the most persistent fallacy about immigration in popular thought.” A comprehensive 2016 report from Cornell University found that migration resulted in “little to no negative effects on overall wages and employment of native-born workers in the longer term.”

Much of the confusion comes from the “lump of labor” fallacy, which the Cato Institute defines as the “fundamental misconception that there is a fixed amount of work in a society.” As economist Jonathan Portes explains, “It’s true that, if an immigrant takes a job, then a British worker can’t take that job—but it doesn’t mean he or she won’t find another one that may have been created, directly or indirectly, as a result of immigration.”

British Revenue and Customs figures show that from 2013 to 2014, recent arrivals to the UK paid £2.54 billion more in income tax and national insurance than they received in tax credits or child benefits. The UK’s Office of Budget Responsibility has estimated that migrants’ labor contribution is helping to grow the economy by an additional 0.6 percent a year. That economic growth equals more jobs all around.

No matter which way you crack it or where you conduct your study, migrants boost labor markets. Even in times of downturn or crisis, migrant workers remain critical in keeping economies revving. Shortly after the 1929 stock market crash, the United States launched the Mexican Repatriation Act, in which as many as two million people were deported from the United States, many of them US citizens. The logic was that jobs were scarce, and getting rid of a big chunk of the labor supply would help. Studies later showed, however, that, especially in rural areas from which a lot of Mexicans and Mexican Americans were deported, wages for natives actually decreased. Production levels also went down, farmers struggled with harvests, and shops had fewer patrons. As one labor economist noted, each migrant farmworker “creates three jobs in the surrounding economy—in equipment and sales and processing and packaging.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a congressional study concluded that “foreign-born workers are key contributors to the US economy, making up more than 17 percent of the labor force and creating about one-fourth of new businesses.” Immigrants, that is, provide the labor power and innovation that fuels economic growth, working in both service sector jobs and in health care and research.1

In 2021, the Center for Migration Studies counted that 19.8 million foreign-born workers qualified as essential workers (69 percent of all such immigrant workers), which is a higher percentage than native-born workers. These foreign-born workers are also overrepresented in key occupations in health care and the food supply chain. The same congressional report found that immigrants make up 22 percent of all workers in the US food supply chain, even though they comprise only 17 percent of the labor force. A separate study found that young Hispanic males work more than native born men of the same age.

According to the Migration Policy Institute, foreign-born workers are even more concentrated in specific areas of the supply chain, comprising more than three in ten workers in agriculture, crop production, meat processing, and commercial bakeries. Among agricultural laborers, graders, and sorters, the share of foreign-born workers is over half. In California alone, immigrants make up 69 percent of the state’s agricultural workers. In Alaska, immigrants constitute 70 percent of the seafood processing workers, and in Nebraska 66 percent of the meat-processing workers are immigrants. Many of them are undocumented, pay into the welfare pot far more than they can take out, and are ostracized and sometimes hunted down and deported as they work jobs essential to the basic functioning of society.2 In short, the economy, as well as food production and health care systems—in the United States and elsewhere—existentially depends on migrants.

And those essential jobs the immigrants are working beget more jobs—which, as long as labor rights are upheld, can be good for everyone.

3. Immigrants Don’t Drain Government Coffers

In 2016, immigrants contributed an estimated $2 trillion to the US GDP. Two years later, economists tabulated that immigrants added over $450 billion to state, local, and federal taxes. The same year, immigrants wielded more than $1.2 trillion in spending power in the United States, by which they purchased groceries, clothes, cars, homes, appliances, and all sorts of useful and useless goods from both local and big businesses. Meanwhile, proposed cuts to US legal immigration, economists estimate, could tank the GDP by 2 percent over twenty years, shrink growth by over 12 percent, and flush more than 4.5 million jobs. American Rust Belt states would be hit particularly hard, as they rely on immigration to stabilize populations and revive economies.

For all they pour in, immigrants can’t collect on a lot of public services and tend to use the ones to which they do have access much less than natives. For instance, according to a 2015 study, immigrants use emergency room services at half the rate of native residents.

In the UK, one study calculated that the average European migrant arriving to the UK will contribute £78,000 more than they take out in public services and benefits. The average non-European migrant will make a positive net contribution of £28,000 while living in the UK. The average UK citizen, meanwhile, takes out about as much as they pay in across their lifetime.

Such studies repeat themselves across the globe. In the United States, authorized migrants have to pay into the welfare system for at least five years before they can draw any benefits. Studies have estimated that migrants to the United States pay tens of billions more in payroll taxes than they receive in social security benefits. Unauthorized migrants, meanwhile, almost exclusively pay into the pot—unable to draw much of anything out.

As Wall Street Journal editorial board member Jason Riley poses: “What does it mean to cite welfare costs as a reason to restrict immigration? Those who do are suggesting that a person’s worth to society is nothing more than the sum of his tax payments. By that standard, however, most natives are ‘worthless,’ since some 60 percent collect more in government services than they pay in taxes.”

Native residents don’t have to guard their wallets because of migration. Immigrants don’t hurt the economy, though they are often hurt by the economy.

4. Borders Don’t Stop Crime and Violence; They Engender Crime and Violence

In 1917, as some of the first lengths of wall and fence were being raised along the US–Mexico border, and as emergency measures were put in place to limit migration, a new law increased the head tax at the border to eight dollars (equivalent to $162 today) and, for the first time, expanded the tax to Mexican citizens. As Reece Jones notes, “[T]he result was the emergence of smuggling networks, which would take people across the border for half that amount, saving the laborers money.” For over a century, increased immigration enforcement and border militarization have led to expanded and more profitable smuggling networks. Prohibitions against drugs (including alcohol) and anti-immigration crackdowns created the ultraviolent transnational paramilitary networks (or cartels) that have plagued large parts of Mexico, Central and South America, and border regions throughout the hemisphere for decades. State forces and politicians criminalize drugs and migration even as they back and create criminal networks (which traffic drugs and migrants), accept bribes, and contribute to a spiral of violence that has, in Mexico alone in the last twenty years, resulted in the deaths of nearly half a million people and the disappearance of almost one hundred thousand more. The border has not kept the crisis at bay; it has helped create it.

In 1994, just over five thousand noncitizens were held in US federal prisons. By 2011, over 30 percent of all federal prison sentences were for immigration violations alone. Arrests of noncitizens for immigration offenses rose 440 percent from 1998 to 2018—from 19,556 a year to 105,748 people locked behind bars because they moved. This was a policy choice. These migrants don’t have to be criminalized and imprisoned. We can eliminate these “crimes” by simply not deeming them crimes. (Recall that immigrants commit violent crimes at far lower rates than natives.)

Legalizing migration and drugs would—overnight—eliminate nearly all the profits on which transnational criminal groups rely and free up the piggish immigration and drug-enforcement budgets to address the root causes of addiction and forced migration.

In 1925, as historian Rachel St. John reports, the head of the Los Angeles Immigration District explained, “each added restrictive measure increased the incentive to illegal entry and to smuggling.”

That tight relationship between restriction and illegal profiteering extends throughout history and throughout the world, with criminal networks, human traffickers, and corrupt politicians gaining power and enacting violence as they navigate and make use of borders to plunder, upsell, exploit, and stash the pickings.

The rich, meanwhile, cross borders at their leisure. Just glance at the footloose escapades of the super-wealthy, or the multiplying financial scandals of opulent globetrotters parking their stores of loot practically wherever they please—jurisdiction shopping, as it’s known—in order to avoid paying taxes. Journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian notes that “ultra-high-net-worth individuals” need nation states with closed borders to dodge taxes and keep their money “encased and concealed.” In other words, the border system works both ways: it criminalizes migrants and spurs violence among the poor at the same time as it protects the criminal activity of the rich.

Borders also foment crime among their defenders, as border enforcement agencies around the world are some of the most opaque and abusive agencies operating today. In the United States, hundreds of Border Patrol agents are arrested every year for crimes and corruption. The arrest rate within the ranks of Customs and Border Protection is 0.5 percent of the overall force of about sixty thousand people, which may seem small but is five times higher than the arrest rate for any other federal law enforcement agency. CBP officers also use excessive force, threaten, and sexually abuse those they detain at a higher rate than other law enforcement agencies. And they are rarely held responsible for any of it. Frequently operating in the far reaches of the desert and outside of public view, Border Patrol culture can be summed up, as one whistleblower put it to me, “kick ass and ask questions later.” (Those questions are hardly ever asked.)

In the EU, agents of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, known as Frontex, don dark clothes and beat, render, and disappear migrants. In 2021, Der Spiegel reported on Europe’s “violent shadow army” that was beating up refugees and pushing their boats back to sea. Journalists captured a pack of over twenty men guarding the border with Croatia who began beating a group of migrants with clubs and yelling at them to “Go! Go to Bosnia!” The thuggish shadow army receives indirect funding—filtered through the national governments—from the European Commission. In 2015, I reported on Mexican border agents basically using Central American migrants riding on a northbound train for target practice—killing one Honduran teenager. It is such heinous acts, not the peaceful crossing of concocted border lines or the “crime” of a family moving toward safety, that constitute the actual threat to society.

5. Immigrants Don’t Threaten Communities; They Revitalize Them

When migrants arrive to a community, crime rates drop, property values jump, and neighborhoods get a shot of cultural energy and economic vitality. There are exceptions, of course, and xenophobes have made much hay out of particular cases when, for example, an unauthorized migrant commits a violent crime. After the 9/11 attacks, the United States specifically targeted and criminalized Muslim migrants, reframing immigration as a national security issue. But of the 180 people arrested for plotting terrorist attacks in the United States in the two decades following 9/11, only four were found to have illegally crossed US borders. Three crossed the US–Mexico border, but when they were children younger than five—one wasn’t even a year old. Their radicalization (though they did not commit any actual attacks) took place in the United States. No one has ever been killed in a terrorist attack on US soil by anyone who illegally crossed the US–Mexico border.

One study calculated the chance of an American being killed in a terrorist attack by a refugee is about 1 in 3.86 billion.3

It’s not just about national security, but neighborhood security as well: researchers found that first-generation Mexican immigrants are 45 percent less likely to commit a violent offense than third-generation Americans. “For every ethnic group without exception,” write Rubén Rumbaut and Walter Ewing in a 2007 study that has been replicated many times since, “incarceration rates among young men are lowest for immigrants, even those who are the least educated.” According to the same study, even while the undocumented population in the United States doubled from 1994 to 2007, the violent crime rate declined 34.2 percent—and the property crime rate dropped 26.4 percent. Since 2007, the undocumented population has gone down, and crime has inched back up. A 2021 Axios study found that while crime rates shot up in many cities throughout the country, violent crime rates in eleven of the largest communities along the US–Mexico border stayed below the national average. A 2018 study in the journal Criminology found that “increases in the undocumented immigrant population within states are associated with significant decreases in the prevalence of violence.”

The pattern holds in Europe. One study found that when workers from Eastern European states came to the UK, the impact on crime was minimal. (Some research, however, does indicate that the increase in asylum seekers to the UK in the 1990s—mainly from war-torn Middle Eastern countries—coincided with a slight increase in the total number of property crimes. Causation in this research is not clear, and some speculate that the rise in property crime had to do with lower employment rates for immigrants.)

A study in Germany found no “evidence for a systematic link between the scale of refugee immigration and the risk of Germans becoming victims of a crime in which refugees are suspects.” A 2015 report, also from Germany, found that on average, refugees commit just as many crimes as the local population. Despite a relatively large influx of refugees to Germany in 2014 and 2015—and despite high profile stories about refugees committing crimes—by 2018, when the number of refugees in Germany was at a record high, the crime rate in Germany was at its lowest level since 1992.

6. Migrants Rejuvenate

Many US cities—St. Louis, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Baltimore, Buffalo, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Newark, Milwaukee—have been emptying out in recent decades. In his book One Billion Americans, journalist Matthew Yglesias calls for repopulating the “hard-core depopulation belt composing about a third of rural counties that currently have fewer residents than they had in 1950.” These cities, suburbs, and rural areas could use new workers, more taxpayers, and the revitalizing spirit immigrants bring everywhere they go.

Not only does the United States need more migrants—the current US fertility rate is below the number of births per woman needed to maintain a steady population—but it has more than enough room to welcome them. With an average of 86 people per square mile, the United States is far less densely populated than many other countries throughout the world. And only about 5 percent of US land is developed. The country could quadruple the population and still be less dense than France. The country also has enough essential resources to provide a growing population.

The United States provides 8,800 cubic meters of freshwater per person. If the US population tripled, the country would still provide 2,900. For comparison, Spain only has 2,400 cubic meters of freshwater per person; the UK has 2,200; Germany has 1,300; and the Netherlands has 650. It’s harder to calculate the total amount of water wasted, but in the United States alone, it’s easily over 1 trillion gallons a year. Despite worrying droughts and unconscionable waste, there remains—if we are mindful—water enough.

The real problem with resources or services isn’t that migrants are consuming them but that much of the world wastes so damn much. The best estimate is that Americans waste between 30 and 40 percent of the food supply, or over one hundred billion pounds of food every single year. Other nations in the global North don’t do quite as badly, but they still throw out food by the billions of tons.

None of this is to promise unwavering homogeneity. If more migrants came, your city would change, but that’s what cities do. In 1920, New York City’s population was 44 percent immigrant. The same year, Cleveland was 41 percent immigrant. (Today those numbers are about 36 and 6 percent, respectively.) Those cities thrived in subsequent decades, and when people today pine for those cities’ heydays, they are pining for immigrant cities.

7. Open Borders Doesn’t Mean a Rush to Migrate

Across the globe, about 14 percent of the global population—around seven hundred million people—would, according to recent Gallup polls, like to migrate. Financial burdens, family ties, and fear of the unknown, however, keep a lot of them at home. Plus, many of those potential migrants wouldn’t migrate in the same direction. Despite the lure of the Hollywood-baked American dream and economic and political pressures in “sending countries,” most people want to stay at home.

Puerto Ricans have enjoyed the unimpeded right to migrate to the far wealthier mainland United States since 1904, but they haven’t left the island empty. Similarly, Eastern European countries added to the EU free-migration zone did not swarm Western European countries with their citizens. Absent lethal climactic or political threats, most people tend to want to stay where they are.

Despite the United States being the top desired destination country, according to a recent Gallup poll, its total potential population gain—if borders were opened and respondents to the poll actually followed through—would be far below a number of other countries, including Singapore, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Canada, and Australia. And while 31 percent of sub-Saharan Africans said they would like to migrate, 21 percent of European Union citizens responded similarly. Twenty-seven percent of Europeans outside the EU also claimed they wanted to migrate. Migration is not a one-way street but a back-and-forth shuffle. (Walls and strict immigration enforcement are partially changing that, turning would-be temporary migrants into permanent and precarious denizens.)

A recent study of Central Americans who participated in a poll asking whether or not they want to migrate to the United States found that only 3 percent of those who responded positively actually made preparations to head north. (It is unclear how many, in the end, ventured from their homes.) This means, if we return to the polls cited above of total potential migrants worldwide, probably only about twenty-one million of those seven hundred million people who want to migrate actually would, which is a much more absorbable quantity, especially when spread throughout receiving countries. And even given that the closed-border regime may have convinced many of those people to stay at home—and some of them may, with open borders, venture forth—migration is still expensive and uprooting, and many people don’t want to leave their homes, jobs, families, language, and community.

8. The Nonsense of Nationalism

The modern concept of sovereignty is based on the idea of collective self-rule: that a nation of people has the authority to determine how they will be organized and governed, as well as who can be a member of the sovereign body. According to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a United Nations resolution signed and ratified by almost every country on earth, “All peoples have the right of self-determination.” It’s frequently assumed that such self-determination includes the right to exclude. That presumed right, however, especially in regard to forcibly displaced people, bars migrants from their own self-determination. If people are pushed out of one place and denied access to another, their self-determination is reduced to a figment.

And the manner in which most populations have gained the power to exercise such self-determination is by violently wresting it from others, namely the Indigenous or natives. The call for national self-determination thus typically turns out to be a euphemism for something much more pernicious: class-and race-based domination and oppression.

And yet, political thinkers and ethicists have long leaned on this problematic crutch of national self-determination to advocate for closed borders. Much-cited political theorist Michael Walzer claimed that nations must maintain a “community of character,” and thus be allowed to deny entry to migrants. Otherwise, he fears, citizens will become “radically deracinated” from their territory and culture. Sarah Song, in her book, Immigration and Democracy, similarly claimed that “the right to control immigration derives from the right of the demos to rule itself.”

But the “character” of those violently forged communities—nation states—is typically formed by oppressive majority rule: those in power dehumanizing and killing the Indigenous and minorities, forcibly assimilating intractable subjects, or establishing an esprit national through erasure and selective historical celebration and mythical heroization. There is little more nationalistically binding than a shared antagonist. As Georgy Arbatov, policy advisor and Soviet representative in the United States, put it in 1987: “This time we will deal you a fatal blow by depriving you of an enemy.”

So to deny entrance to migrants in order to determine the character of a nation is to forge ethnically exclusive states. And if it’s character change you fear, there are more responsible targets than immigrants. As journalist Jeremy Harding points out in Border Vigils, it would take decades of immigration to “bring about the degree of ‘cultural difference’ that such a bad patch of international trading, a brisk downsizing, or a decision by a large corporation to start outsourcing can inject into a social landscape in a year.”

Another problem with relying on the concept of national self-determination to drive immigration policies is that it’s a slippery slope. If you can determine who is let in, what is to stop a country from determining who must be put out, or banished? Or, as legal scholar Ilya Somin writes, the right of national self-determination “would imply the power to coerce even currently existing residents to keep them from changing their cultural practices.” If the majority or ruling party is permitted to determine that a culture or demographic sector be static, what impositions might they levy against current residents? Could laws be passed to restrict how people talk, act, celebrate, make or engage with art, how many children they have? Such regulations would certainly be nationally deterministic.

The reality is that humans don’t group into tidy and geographically distinguishable communities. Rather, we all bear multiple identities and cycle through various overlapping communities. The actual borders of the United States do not trace neatly onto the legal territory of the United States, nor France onto territorial France, nor China on China. Rather, the United States has outsourced its border-enforcement regime to Mexico, Central America, and elsewhere, reaching far beyond its territory with economic and cultural breaches, thus extending its effective borders beyond the standard logo map. As legal scholar E. Tendayi Achiume puts it, such imperial overreach extra-territorializes “the demos beyond nation-state borders such that its boundaries are contiguous with those of neocolonial empire.” The national self-determination of the United States, in other words—through martial, cultural, and economic conquest—determined the character of many foreign communities. Even within the United States, sovereignty waxes and wanes, and culture dramatically morphs from location to location.

To submit to the hoky fiction of national self-determination is to open the door to government imposition and control, laying out the mat to the thought or culture police.

9. Closed Borders Are Unethical

In The Ethics of Immigration, political theorist Joseph Carens writes that birthright privileges, or jus solis—unearned preferential access to wealth, freedom, quality health care, and myriad other benefits—are akin to feudal class privileges, in that they grant “great advantages on the basis of birth but also entrench these advantages by legally restricting mobility, making it extremely difficult for those born into a socially disadvantaged position to overcome that disadvantage, no matter how talented they are or how hard they work.”

We are all dependent on others, and that dependency today bleeds across borderlines. We all have developed into who we are, as both individuals and communities, because of this interdependence. As such—so goes the ethical argument—we are morally obligated to show compassion and offer care to each other. Closed borders interrupt this reciprocal nature of care and mutual responsibility. Politicians and nativists (as well as “the border” itself, which takes on its own weight and influence) dissuade people from caring for the other, induce fears of consequence for expressing or extending such care, and create conditions that make it impossible to care.

Besides bestowing or withholding privileges and interrupting reciprocity, closed borders also dehumanize people, make them suffer, and kill them. Closed borders subject some people, based on where they were born and what visas or passports they are granted, to prolonged detention, torture, isolation, removal from family, and deportation—all for an act that is quintessentially human: moving toward safety, freedom, or opportunity. It is hard to see an iota of ethics in such a setup.

As British philosopher Maurice Cranston has it:

One of the things that is meant by saying that men have a natural right to freedom of movement is to assert that the desire to move is a natural, universal, and reasonable one; and hence that it is not so much a man’s desire to move that needs to be justified as any attempt to frustrate the satisfaction of that desire.

The justifications, however, fall short.

Consider how 9-1-1 calls are handled in the wilderness of the US Southwestern borderlands. The humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths has extensively documented how emergency response to presumed citizens who call 9-1-1 when they are lost or in distress in the desert is rapid, robust, and usually results in rescue. When the emergency call comes from a suspected noncitizen or recent border crosser, however, there is typically no response. If any agency reacts to an emergency distress call from a noncitizen, it is the Border Patrol, the same people charged with hunting down border crossers and whose response often amounts to little or no medical treatment—even when desperately needed—and a swift deportation.4

The same applies in the Mediterranean, where despite the ancient and revered practice of rescue at sea, as well as long-established maritime law that obligates nearby ships to respond to distress calls, SOS calls from migrant rafts or boats are routinely ignored. And when some people do respond and try to rescue migrants adrift at sea, they are sometimes prosecuted as human smugglers. As these examples show, when it comes to the tradition of the Good Samaritan, migrants are officially exempt.

How is it that we can so readily turn our backs on fellow humans in desperate need? No More Deaths, for whom I have been a volunteer, has also extensively documented Border Patrol agents and anti-immigrant zealots dumping out, shooting, stabbing, or poisoning water bottles left for migrants, many of whom die of dehydration in this same crossing corridor. The nonresponse may come from “motives of policy, rather than from a hardened nature, or from innate brutality,” as Frederick Douglass explained the cruel acts committed by a slaveholder. It is the policy (in this case closed borders) that drives the malice.

Much of the world, since Douglass’s time, has learned that racism is an unmitigated evil, and yet many still openly embrace or excuse dehumanizing and deadly discrimination based on birth location. Further examples of the incalculable harms of that discrimination abound, but here’s one stat that drives it home with particular force: in 2012, under the Obama administration, the parents of around 150,000 US-citizen children were deported. Many of those parents were handcuffed and removed in front of their children. Whatever the reason they were unauthorized to be in the country (which is a civil, not a criminal offense) the cruelty and lasting generational trauma inflicted by such arrests and deportations is undeniable. Such are the miseries the border drives into people, the pain it draws—loss, deprivation, imprisonment—as punishment for seeking life, security, dignity.

Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz asks a pointed question about the asymmetry of ethics between the state and migrants: given that “the United States has not acted lawfully with other nations, including the Native American nations on its soil, through most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. . . how can it now expect the human victims of that enormous illegality to obey the laws of the United States and stay home or wait thirty years for a visa to rejoin their families?” Her answer is “reparations or migration: choose.”

(Both is also an option.)

10. Brain Drain Ain’t a Thing

“Brain Drain” is the false assumption that there is a fixed and limited amount of “skilled” labor, and therefore that professionals from poorer countries should not be allowed to migrate.

Those who assume that the emigration of doctors and nurses harms countries with underdeveloped health systems fail to consider the impact of other factors unrelated to migration—such as the lack of medical resources, low wages for public health workers, paltry education, or little promise of career advancement—all of which both hold back access to adequate care and push workers to seek opportunity elsewhere. Many studies have shown that skilled emigration does not slow down economic growth (or higher-quality care in terms of public health) but, on the contrary, speeds it up.

A 2015 study on physicians who migrated from Romania found that more than half of the participants “collaborated with the country of origin during their stay abroad.” As researcher Linda Semu summarized, “We need to view migration not in terms of brain drain or brain gain, but in terms of brain circulation that allows for exchange of knowledge and experience between places of origin and places of residence.”

Meanwhile, “brain drain” certainly exists within countries, including the United States, as rural medical workers can’t find jobs in their home counties and flock to the cities. For the same reasons, Nairobi, the largest city of Kenya, is home to just 8 percent of Kenya’s population but 66 percent of its physicians. As serious as the issue is, such rural-to-urban skilled migration goes largely uncriticized.

Many skilled migrants who were “drained” away from their countries of origin return with newly acquired education and experience, as well as money. One study shows that “a 10 percent increase in the proportion of a nation’s population that emigrates leads to a 2 percent decline in the proportion of people living on less than $1 per day.” The same study found that a “10 percent increase in remittances is sufficient to reduce a country’s poverty rate by 3.5 percent.” Remittances currently make up 29 percent of Haiti’s GDP and 17 percent of El Salvador’s—to name two countries that heavily rely on their compatriots abroad. Halting “brain drain” would devastate both of these economies.

Remittances, of course, aren’t the only means by which a skilled or “unskilled” immigrant can help their country of origin. Professional migrants of all skill levels form networks abroad that create opportunities for those remaining at home, as well as help foster the trade of technology, ideas, goods, and services.

And if we were to forbid migration for the good of the home or sending community, what would stop us from forbidding native professionals from merely changing careers? Could we forbid nurses, for example, from leaving their profession and taking up novel writing or landscaping for fear of a shortage of health care workers?

“The brains in question,” as Ilya Somin puts it, “do not belong to the government.”

11. The Libertarian Case

Libertarians have their idiomatic vision of open borders—based on letting people engage in free and mutually consensual activity, wherever that may be. Theirs is an appealing case (though it may come packaged along with other less palatable policies) for anyone interested in protecting basic individual freedoms.

The line of thinking also questions the distinction between migration within national borders and migration across them: Why is internal migration readily allowed and international migration subject to apoplectic crackdown?

As capital is allowed to freely flow, libertarians argue, people should be allowed the same.

Libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick argues for a minimal state whose only legitimate function is the protection of people’s natural rights. Barring migration, thus, is not within the state’s bailiwick. “Individuals have the right to enter into voluntary exchanges with other individuals,” Joseph Carens writes. “They possess this right as individuals, not as citizens.” If an American farmer wants to contract a Mexican laborer, the thinking goes, the government shouldn’t intervene in this voluntary and mutually beneficial agreement.

Border checkpoints, whether at the borderline or in the interior of the country, which slow down, stop, and regularly inspect both citizens and noncitizens are a point of particular ire for libertarians.

Eminent domain is also a clear violation of libertarian principles: the government taking people’s property by force to impose a major infrastructure project, a move that has been used to construct border walls from Texas to Poland. Border enforcement and immigration restrictions are major and invasive impediments to individual liberties, no matter what side of the line you are on.

Libertarians, however, also claim that our obligation to strangers is minimal, amounting to little more than leaving them alone (a dubious presumption, in my view). Denying strangers the freedom to migrate violates that laissez faire et laissez passer (let be and let pass) obligation. As Jason Riley summarizes: “No self-respecting free-market adherent would ever dream of supporting laws that interrupt the free movement of goods and services across borders.” Nor should they, then, dream of interrupting the free movement of people.

12. Dehumanizing Border Machinery Targets Native Residents Too

The technology of borders is not exclusive to the borderlands. The US Border Patrol has been deployed against uprisings from Los Angeles to Portland to Miami, with agents roaming Amtrak trains and inspecting Greyhound buses, flying helicopters over the Super Bowl, and buzzing drones over protests in the Dakotas.

Between 2017 and 2019, Border Patrol’s secretive Tactical Terrorism Response Teams detained and interrogated more than six hundred thousand travelers—about a third of them US citizens. Besides invasive tech surveillance, the increasing use of interior checkpoints in the United States has also shifted the target from noncitizens to just about everybody, though particularly to people of color.

Arivaca, a small town in southern Arizona, suffered the installation of two Border Patrol checkpoints blocking the only exits from town. A local watchdog organization, People Helping People, noted that the agency engaged in a pattern of racial profiling of Latino motorists at the Arivaca Road checkpoint. Their study found white drivers passed through the checkpoint almost ten times more than nonwhite drivers, though white drivers were rarely asked to show identification or stopped for further inspection. Overall, approximately 16 percent of Latino drivers had to show identification—for merely driving down the road—while only 0.6 percent of white-occupied vehicles had to, meaning that Latinos were scrutinized twenty-six times more frequently than whites. There are nearly two hundred such checkpoints throughout the US Southwest, and similar tales of discrimination, harassment, and abuse prevail.

Such internal policing is not limited to the United States. In 2019, Mexican immigration authorities faced severe criticism when agents attacked four Indigenous Mexican citizens, accusing them of being migrants, beating, and even tasing one young Tzeltal Maya man (a Mexican citizen) and forcing him to sign a deportation document that falsely stated that he was Guatemalan. In 2022, Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled immigration checks on buses racist and discriminatory, and therefore unconstitutional, though the practice continues.

In Kenya, citizens have been placed under biometric surveillance and sent to refugee camps in their own country. And in North Korea, border guards have shot residents crossing into the Chinese–North Korean border’s “buffer zones”—spaces over a kilometer from the border lockdown line, where guards are ordered to open fire on anyone who enters. In one incident border guards shot and killed a resident who had trailed after his escaped goat.

Border guards the world over are looking to obtain and maintain “full operational control” of the ever-expanding borderlands. The danger, for all of us, is that the border is inching ever closer and ever deeper into our daily lives (and “inch” is not an adequate verb to capture the pace of the threat). Ankle bracelets and apps increasingly restrict and monitor mobility. When US Border Patrol agents apprehend someone, they now typically collect DNA samples as well as take fingerprints, photographs, and, increasingly, an iris image and sometimes voice prints—all to be stored in a massive Department of Homeland Security biometric database. At this point, the repository holds biometric data on a quarter billion people.

As political philosopher Thomas Nail points out, the US Border Patrol’s mobile surveillance towers (previously named “Cerberus,” after the three-headed hound of Greek mythology that prevented people from escaping the underworld) are attached to trucks and can be positioned at any point along the border. In 2016, DHS worked with a data-mining project that is also called Cerberus. Yet a third company of the same name, Cerberus, operated a surveillance flight that, together with the Arizona National Guard, flew reconnaissance missions over a Phoenix protest in 2020. Guarding people from escaping the underworld seems to be a fitting analogue for border security technologies. The reach of bordering has gone so deep that in one town in Maryland, after a series of fights at the local high school, administrators reached out to Homeland Security officials to monitor students’ social media accounts.

Following the law of the hammer, these globally proliferating tools of border enforcement are looking for nails, which could be any of us. As Jacqueline Stevens estimates, the federal government detained or deported around twenty thousand US citizens between 2003 and 2010, and between 1 and 2 percent of all people detained for deportation are estimated to be US citizens.

Closed borders mean less freedom for everyone, not just those on the “other” side of them. As Tohono O’odham activist and scholar Nellie Jo David put it, about her experience living in the southern Arizona borderlands, “We live in war, we live with these planes and if we’re stopped out there on the reservation or in and around Ajo”—the nearby former mining town on traditional Indigenous land—“how many Border Patrol will show up? They treat it like it’s a war scenario.” Open the door to a data-collection or surveillance-tech corporation (or government agency), and they’ll take your whole home.

13. Opening Borders Is Economically Smart

“When it comes to policies that restrict emigration, there appear to be trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk,” economist Michael Clemens famously wrote in 2011. “For eliminating labor mobility barriers, the estimated gains range from 50 to 150 percent of global GDP.” As of late 2021, the global GDP is over $80 trillion, which means open borders would, according to his reckoning, add $40–100 trillion in total global wealth.

Clemens’s estimated potential windfall is almost certainly overblown, mostly because it assumes a much higher rate of migration that would likely occur, and it also likely undercounts downstream changes to productivity rates, as well as the basic costs of massive migration. But his point still stands: opening borders would both increase wealth and distribute wealth more equally. With open borders, hunger, homelessness, and other forms of poverty, privation, and precarity would decrease.

In 2017, the nonprofit ProPublica found that for every 1 percent increase in US immigrant population, GDP rises 1.15 percent. The immigrant-sparked increase doesn’t just take place at the national level: a Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation report from 2007 about Latino immigrants’ impact on Arkansas’s economy found they “have a small but positive net fiscal impact on the Arkansas state budget.” Overall, immigrants “cost” the state of Arkansas $237 million in 2004 but made direct and indirect tax contributions of $257 million. More convincing is the fact that immigrant Arkansans generated around $3 billion in business revenues. The report also estimated that without immigrants, “the output of the state’s manufacturing industry would likely be lowered by about $1.4 billion—or about 8 percent of the industry’s $16.2 billion total contribution to the gross state product in 2004.”

That’s migrants’ clear positive effect on state and national economies. We also need to consider the effect (of both bordering and crossing borders) on the migrants themselves.

Economists have observed up to 1,000 percent wage gaps for workers doing nearly identical jobs between the United States and Haiti, Nigeria, or Guatemala. It’s hard to argue against the decision to go from earning less than five dollars a day to fifteen dollars an hour for doing the same labor, and yet the Haitian, Nigerian, or Guatemalan worker is forced to risk their life to do so. Such wage gaps are not an unfortunate and inevitable part of the economic order. Rather, they are intentionally enforced and exploited.

Analyzing the effect of imposed austerity measures and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, which reinforced a growing trend to shift jobs from the American Midwest and southern, rural Mexico to the northern Mexican border) on manual labor jobs in northern Mexico, Justin Akers Chacón, in his book The Border Crossed Us, calculates that in 1992 the bottom 29 percent of workers in the maquila industry earned 64 percent less in wages than they made in 1976. By 2002, wages for those same workers fell 14 percent below what they were in 1983. Over the same period, productivity rates doubled.

In the first decade of the implementation of NAFTA, the wage gap between the United States and Mexico grew by more than 10 percent. This same period saw the first substantial wall infrastructure go up, dovetailing with the exploitative economic policies just mentioned. As writer Suketu Mehta summarizes: “Between 1970 and 2010, Mexico lost $872 billion in illicit financial outflows, and most of the money ended up in American banks. Roughly over the same period, 16 million Mexicans immigrated to the United States. “They weren’t doing anything wrong,” Mehta concludes, “they were just following the money.”

Simultaneously, 50,000 midwestern auto workers, mostly in the midwest, lost their jobs. Many of those jobs went to Mexico, where, Akers Chacón reports, productivity rates increased over 66 percent between 1990 and 1999. During the same period, however, real wages fell by about 20 percent. Unionization rates also dropped over the same period. In other words, the open-borders-for-capital and closed-borders-for-people schema is a lose-lose for both American and Mexican workers. Closed borders is a win only for the corporations, which use the border as a wedge to lower wages, undercut worker protections, and keep the assembly line zipping.

Opening borders would immediately strip corporations of a key tool of exploitation, offering workers easier access to decent wages and facilitating collaboration and collective organization.

Akers Chacón notes that in Nicaragua, more than 120,000 garment workers produce clothing for major US companies, while an estimated 600,000 people make auto parts in Mexico, a huge share of which end up in GM, Chrysler, and Ford factories in the United States. Those foreign workers are employed by the same corporations as workers in the US, but, Akers Chacón writes, are “divided by borders and subject to more intensive (and US-abetted) degrees of labor repression in their home countries.”

Of the hundreds of free-trade agreements recorded by the World Trade Organization (depending on how you count, there are between 360 and 800 of them), only 40 contain provisions that allow for some migration of workers, typically reserved for highly specialized professions.

14. Open Borders Are an Urgent Response to the Climate Crisis

According to prevailing estimates, as many as half a billion people will be forced from their homes by climate crises in the coming decades. Consigning them to refugee camps or slums will not only be dangerous for them—and a disgraceful mark of ignominy on the world—but a grave and politically volatile abdication of basic human decency. Tens of millions of people amassed behind border walls will push us closer to political despair and explosive violence. Borders are as much a solution to the radical changes to come as an umbrella is to a hurricane. As we work toward sustainability, as we work toward survivability, opening borders is an essential step not only toward keeping people safer from the accumulating disasters, but to finding a collective solution.

People currently enjoying relative luxury in the global North will also be forced to move because of climate change. In 2020 alone, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, thirty million people were displaced by climate disasters—more than three times as many as were displaced by conflict. In the United States alone, Hurricanes Katrina, Harvey, Maria, and Irma have pushed millions to leave their homes, in some cases forever. In 2021, more than 40 percent of Americans lived in counties hit by climate disasters.

The United States, Germany, Japan, the UK, Canada, France, and Australia collectively spent more than twice as much on border and immigration enforcement (over $33.1 billion) as on climate finance ($14.4 billion) between 2013 and 2018. Despite the major world powers spending significantly more on border enforcement than decarbonization or mitigation efforts, any hope for a solution continues to recede. Closed doors don’t cool or calm an increasingly hot and erratic climate. Nor do they lock in place an upheaved global population.

As we tilt toward and beyond eight billion people on this warming planet, nobody will be able to stave off or hunker away from the effects of climate change.

Rising populations throughout the world, and especially in the global South, will burn more oil and coal to power their cities, use massive amounts of nitrogen-based fertilizers to grow their food, and continue to desire the luxuries and comforts some have already attained. It is almost certainly impossible that we will slow that massive energy need enough to achieve current targets for mitigating climate change. But, working with developing countries and breaking out of zero-sum power competitions that sacrifice responsible reform and blow past treaty obligations as nations strive for world hegemony5 —as well as embracing denser living, planet-healthier diets, and different forms of mobility—is the only path toward sustainable human existence. Borders are an impediment to that goal.

15. Open Borders As Reparations and Decolonization

The United States has what could be termed “an imperial debt” to a number of countries throughout the world. “US responsibility for helping to create the conditions that drive much of the out-migration from Honduras,” Joseph Nevins writes, “should negate any justification by the US government to deport and deny rights of residence to people of Honduran origin.” Given that Honduras is less exception to and more exemplar of the destabilizing effects of US imperialistic intervention, the same argument could be made for dozens of other countries, including but not remotely limited to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Congo, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Indonesia, the Philippines, Laos, and Cambodia.

Sri Lankan novelist and activist A. Sivanandan’s famous and succinct line explains why migrants move to countries that had colonized their homes: “We are here because you were there.”

And it’s not just the United States that has such an imperial debt: many European countries—Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, Spain—played lead roles in genocidal invasions and ignored borders in the Americas and Africa to snatch up land and smuggle away riches. To go back to Nevins’s analysis on the US role in Honduras, the same calculus can easily be applied to Belgium and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Germany and Cameroon, as well as France and huge swaths of Africa.

Western countries have also run up what could be termed a “climate debt”—as they are responsible for the overwhelming majority of carbon dioxide emissions, while poorer countries overwhelmingly suffer the destabilizing effects.

Given the failures of independence movements in Africa and the Americas to undo ongoing effects of colonial violence, migration remains a needed mitigating process that, as E. Tendayi Achiume writes, “enhances individual self-determination within neocolonial empire.” For a citizen of a Global South country to assert political equality with a Global North citizen, and to cross the border to change or improve their economic situation, Achiume claims, “is migration as decolonization.” A formal recognition of that right would be open borders.

Researchers Sara Amighetti and Alasia Nuti argue that “postcolonial migrants,” or people from former colonies, are “essential contributors” to the colonizing nation’s identity (in fact, the economic prosperity and freedom that citizens of the colonizing nation enjoy are, in many regards, predicated on the colonial relationship between the countries) and thus they should be able to migrate to the colonizing state they are effectively already a part of.

According to international law (as stipulated by the United Nations–appointed International Law Commission), countries are required “to make full reparation” for internationally wrongful acts. Such full reparation includes “restitution, compensation, and satisfaction,” which means reestablishing the conditions before the act was committed, paying money, as well as acknowledging and apologizing for the committed harms. Given the impossibility of the first form of remediation, the unlikelihood of the second, and the important but not completely satisfying nature of the third facet of reparation, opening the doors and offering citizenship to colonialism’s victims (both direct and generational) is a worthy form of both reparative justice and recompense.

How can a country that has so disrupted and dispossessed a population presume to deny that population the right to seek security and dignity? One ready and simple form of expiation for colonial and neocolonial disruptive meddling would be, rather than the torture and imprisonment of those fleeing political or climactic conflagrations, to offer them welcome.

16. World Religions Agree: Open the Borders

“And if a stranger dwells with you in your land, you shall not mistreat him,” Yahweh tells Moses in the Book of Leviticus. “The stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Many of the world’s religions proclaim and promote—at least rhetorically—principles of welcoming the stranger, offering succor, aid, water, and honor to those in need. Many of the world’s religions also venerate the wanderer, pilgrim, or migrant—all those driven from their homes. It is a wonder, then, that so many practitioners of the major religions rebuke the figure of the migrant, calling for walls to block them out or immigration agents to send them home.

“Hospitality begins at the gate, in the doorway, on the bridges between public and private space,” writes social ethics scholar Christine D. Pohl in Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition. Hospitality, that is, begins at the border.

Sanctuary, the practice of offering protective welcome to the migrant, is part of America’s prophetic tradition, harking back to the slavery abolitionists, whose spirit was rooted in their own legacy of religious, political, and economic persecution. In Europe, too, some Christians have long leaned on their faith to welcome and protect the persecuted. But such tradition and spirit are today, more than ever, running up against a wall of anti-immigrant policies.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus articulates one of the religion’s foundational maxims that speaks, or should speak, to how we treat migrants today: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” Love, even tough love, does not abide a deportation.

Jewish history and tradition is, in many ways, a history of migration. According to one count, the Torah commands hospitable and just treatment to the migrant thirty-six times. In just the last century, Jews have been stripped of rights, persecuted, deported, and slaughtered, suffering some of the most heinous crimes in human history. Their plight, and countries’ hard-hearted refusal to offer them welcome, gave rise to the basic standards of international human rights, including international accords on refugee and asylum law. With a long history of near-constant displacement, Judaic tradition, in its ideal, is devoted to honoring and welcoming the stranger. This tradition is reflected in the Talmud, where, for instance, Rabbi Yosie says, “Let your home be open always to those who suffer and seek relief.”

One of Buddhism’s first and central precepts is respecting life, with a committed focus on compassion and nonviolence. Karuna (compassion) and mudita (empathetic joy) call one to care for and to delight in the security and happiness of others, whatever form they take and wherever they may be from.

With Islam, welcome and hospitality form the cornerstone of both the religion and, more broadly, Islamic culture. Scholar Tahir Zaman writes that “matters pertaining to protection and assistance are referred to 396 times in the Qur’an . . . 20 make specific reference to hijra (flight) and aman (asylum).” In Surah 4: 36 of the Quran, the prophet Muhammad writes, “Do good unto your parents, and near of kin, and unto orphans, and the needy, and the neighbor from among your own people, and the neighbor who is a stranger, and the friend by your side, the wayfarer, and your servants.”

The Hindu Tradition, in the Taitiriya Upanishad 1.11.2, similarly importunes: “Let a person never turn away a stranger from his house, that is the rule. Therefore a man should, by all means, acquire much food, for good people say to the stranger: ‘There is enough food for you.’”

Living to the standard of any of the world’s major religions requires an openness, a welcome, and a hospitality that closed borders do not permit. As Rabbi Y’hudah said in the Talmud, “Hospitality to wayfarers is greater than welcoming the presence of the Divine.”

17. Closed Borders Are Racist

The nationality granted to you at birth determines whether you are free to move across international borders or are blocked by them. Not only border walls, but a web of multilateral visa agreements privilege certain passport holders and allow their free movement, while denying and immobilizing others. Such discrimination, while based in nationality, overlaps with both class and race. Citizens of Global North nations, made up of predominantly white citizens, are generally able to cross borders with ease. Citizens of the Global South, predominantly Black or Brown, are denied that same freedom.

The logic of apartheid and Jim Crow lives on when applied to migrants. “Looking at the data, it becomes apparent,” writes sociologist Steffen Mau, that “most countries with either black or Islamic majorities are exempted from visa-free travel on a large scale.” Even within Third World countries, whiter citizens have the wealth and connections to obtain passports and authorization for international travel. The pattern holds for nonauthorized migration as well: Black and Brown people are more readily denied, suspected, detained, and deported.

In an investigation I cowrote for Business Insider, journalist José Olivares and I teased out commonly overlooked statistics and patterns, finding that in the United States the specific mistreatment of Black migrants in the immigration detention system rears its head in myriad ways. Detention center officials and guards offer Black migrants less food, frequently enact retaliatory violence against Black migrants, submit them to longer periods of detention than white migrants, demand of Black migrants significantly higher bond rates, send Black detainees to solitary confinement for longer periods, and disproportionately shackle Black migrants with electronic ankle monitors.

In the two-year period from 2018 to 2020, the average bond paid by the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) to get immigrants out of detention was $10,500. During that same period, bonds for Haitian immigrants averaged $16,700—54 percent higher than for other immigrants. While asylum statistics are not categorized by race, patterns show that bond prices are higher for migrants coming from majority Black nations.

According to other statistics—also compiled by RAICES—among the ten nationalities with the most asylum decisions from 2012 to 2017, Haitians had the second-highest denial rate at 87 percent, despite coming from an extremely politically unstable country beset by persistent violence (often enabled or provoked by US policy). Previously, Jamaicans and then Somalians had the highest asylum denial rates, as well the highest rates of deportation over the same time period.

While only 7 percent of noncitizens in the United States are Black, Black immigrants make up 20 percent of those facing deportation on criminal grounds. And while African and Caribbean immigrants made up only 4 percent of people in immigration detention centers between 2013 and 2017, they represented 24 percent of all people subjected to solitary confinement.

“The modern day immigration system is a modern day Jim Crow,” Allen Morris, a researcher with RAICES, told me. “The whole system is rooted in white supremacy. It’s not built to let Black immigrants come here.”

18. Walls Don’t Work

Whether or not walls “work” in fact depends on how you define the latter: because walls do work to endanger, strip rights, marginalize, and kill migrants. Walls may also work politically, even as they fail practically. Border walls successfully function as nationalist symbols, spur the border industrial complex, and line the pockets of international security companies. What they don’t do very well is keep people on one side or the other.

Scores of reports pepper local news channels about migrants quickly shimmying up and over wall segments along the US–Mexico border, even the latest and tallest barrier designs. I’ve personally witnessed border crossers scale a segment of an eighteen-foot wall between Nogales and Nogales, slip down the other side, and vanish into the city, all in about fifteen seconds.

As early as 1951, a Border Patrol report noted that just four days after holes in the Calexico fence were repaired, eleven of the newly patched panels had been torn out, fourteen new holes had been cut in the wall, and at least seven new breaches were counted in barbed wire portions of the fence.

Newly raised walls are quickly crossed by cut-out doors, rope-ladders, grappling hooks, drones, tunnels, or even makeshift wall-bridges. Barring moats of fire or minefields, or the permanent, hyper-militarized infrastructure of the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea,6 walls—no matter how “smart” or brutally medieval—don’t keep people out. As fast as a wall can be built, it can be breached. Hence the simplicity of former DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano’s quip: “Show me a 50-foot wall, I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder.”

Draconian immigration enforcement measures don’t do much better than walls. In one of the most drastically anti-human immigration policies in recent years, the Trump administration ripped thousands of children away from their parents in an attempt to punish them and dissuade more families from trying to cross the border. And yet, in the immediately following months of implementing that heinously cruel policy, more families crossed the border than in the preceding months. That’s because they were fleeing crushing poverty, deadly violence, and utter hopelessness in their home countries. They were doing what anybody would do—seek dignity and safety—and neither the wall nor Trump’s anti-immigrant barking kept them at home.

As poet Warsan Shire writes in “Home”:
no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark …
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land

19. “Smart” Walls Are Stupid

Steel walls aren’t the only kind that kill. Geographer Samuel Norton Chambers found a “significant correlation between the location of border surveillance technology, the routes taken by migrants, and the locations of recovered human remains in the southern Arizona desert.” In other words, “smart walls” drive migrants into the dangers of the remote desert just as much as dumb walls do.

The surveillance technology Chambers was studying is proliferating throughout the world’s borderlands. Along the US–Mexico border alone, there are nearly four hundred permanent surveillance towers with high-powered multispectrum cameras tracking movement along huge swaths of land. Beyond these permanent towers, there are hundreds more mobile surveillance units mounted on or dragged behind trucks, as well as unmanned drones, surveillance blimps, automated license plate readers, facial recognition and phone-hacking technology, vehicle forensic kits (used to obtain information from vehicles’ “infotainment” systems, which can include geographical data, cell phone metadata, text messages, and even when and which doors have been opened), as well as sprawlingly massive and constantly bloating databases to collect and filter the petabytes of information.

Decades of anti-migrant policies have weaponized the landscape, both physically and digitally. And while these tech-walls cost billions and successfully function to push migrants into the more forbidding and dangerous reaches of the desert (or into the sea if heading to Europe), they don’t do so well at stopping migration. In 2006, tech giant Boeing was awarded a multi-billion-dollar contract by DHS to install surveillance towers (the initial plan was to build 1,800 100-plus-foot towers), radar equipment, and ground sensors, and to integrate lots of data on border crossers. After five years of reining in expectations, the government concluded that the terrain was too varied, the technology insufficient, and the project an absolute failure.

In the UK, a faulty algorithm in an immigration database incorrectly flagged seven thousand students for deportation—and then the government deported them. A report from Migration and Technology Monitor called such efforts at automating immigration enforcement “a human laboratory of high risk experiments.” At a refugee camp in Jordan, people aren’t allowed to access food until they are identified using an optic scanner. Refugees consigned to the camp are not only worried about the management of their personal biometric data, but they also complain that their family members are restricted by mistakes in the system. As typically only a single member is allowed to purchase food with their eye scan, if they’re sick, poked in the eye, or, more frequently, the technology doesn’t work, people go hungry.

European countries are experimenting with voice prints and, increasingly, using electronic ankle shackles for monitoring, a process referred to as “tagging” migrants. Laws in Austria, Germany, Denmark, Norway, the United Kingdom, and Belgium allow governments to seize asylum seekers’ mobile phones, from which data is extracted and used as part of asylum procedures. Privacy concerns abound.

Meanwhile, the European Commission is exploring a complex new border militarization plan that includes the ROBORDER Project, which sounds as scary as it is—combining militaristic unmanned aircraft, boats, and sensors to guard Europe’s borders. There was also the proposed “wall of drones” that the Trump administration explored: “smart” drones meant to monitor the US– Mexico border and interrogate people referred to as “intruders” in a promotional video. The trial drones had the capacity to tase border crossers.

And, in both the United States and Europe, border bots are being installed at border crossing kiosks in order to read people’s faces and determine if they are lying. Such technology has, unsurprisingly, misidentified and wrongfully criminalized people.

The invasive and dystopian use of tech to surveil migrants and restrict their mobility is also increasingly being outsourced by governments to the private sector, which presents a host of ethical and human rights issues.

“Smart walls” function in much the same way standard walls do: they don’t stop migrants but, rather, slow or divert them into more dangerous routes. At the same time, these high-tech efforts fail in novel ways by misreading, misidentifying, invasively collecting, perpetually hoarding, and over-sharing personal data—malfunctioning in new, consequential, discriminatory, and potentially deadly ways.

20. The Right to Migrate / The Right to Remain

You are where you are right now because either you, your parents, or your ancestors migrated there.

A 2018 genetic analysis of human specimens from the Neolithic period, Copper Age, and Bronze Age revealed that nearly every population on earth has moved in the last ten thousand years. “The orthodoxy, the assumption that present-day people are directly descended from the people who always lived in that same area,” one of the study’s authors wrote, “is wrong almost everywhere.”

While Indigenous populations rightly claim long and rich histories in the territories they inhabit, many of them, too, have long been on the move. Humans are a mobile species. We are also a nostalgic species, forging ties and identities based on place. The two truths can conflict, but they don’t have to. Showing respect, addressing injustices, and offering welcome can help guide us toward a more just and less violent future.

Decolonization is a key step, but it’s not just about giving the land back. Who the land “belongs” to is, always has been, and always will be a source of contention. Indigenous people deserve apology and compensation for the massive and murderous robbery of the past centuries, but that doesn’t necessarily mean drawing and enforcing new borders. Rather, we need to wholly reconsider our relationship to land, embracing the spirit of a shared commons—commons, that is, in the sense proffered by scholar-activist Silvia Federici: “not as a gated reality, a grouping of people joined by exclusive interests separating them from others, as with communities formed on the basis of religion or ethnicity, but rather as a quality of relations, a principle of cooperation and of responsibility to each other and to the earth, the forests, the seas, the animals.” Workers and anyone who cares for rather than exploits or destroys the land should be permitted to enjoy and live on and in the land.

Humans have always been roaming, curious, and on the run. It is only modern nation states and the machinery of borders that have turned our innate and natural mobility into migration, into something visa-stamped and permitted, or deemed illegal and punished. As migration scholar Nicholas de Genova has put it, “If there were no borders, there would be no migrants—only mobility.” A surprisingly easy way to eliminate illegal migration would be to—simply—eliminate closed borders.

But the appeal for open borders rings empty without the attending fight to improve conditions in the countries migrants flee. Nobody should be forced to migrate—whether it be due to state violence or oppression, climate change or the inability to find employment. One of the essential aspects of the push for open borders is the push for a more just and safer world, a world in which nobody is driven out of their homes because of fear or want.

The best policies are those that force nobody to migrate, affording people the right and the means to live in, cultivate, and enjoy their home and community. An open-borders vision is one where such a life is not constrained by where that community lies, or where one is able to seek or find such a community. An open-borders world is a world in which “this” and “that” side of the border are not distinguished by violence on this side and safety on that side, by prosperity and opportunity spatially juxtaposed by poverty and choicelessness.

It is a world of greater freedoms and less oppression, where opportunity and safety are, when needed, available. At the same time, it is a world in which we fight to help basic needs be met before anyone is uprooted. To this end, Reece Jones has recommended the creation of a Department of Human Rights and Free Movement as a replacement to the Department of Homeland Security. In comparison to the zones of death and rightlessness that militarized borders foster, such a department would offer more security—both personal and national.

21. The Simple Argument

Barring small island nations, all countries’ borders have been drawn in blood. Genocidal slaughter and ruthless imperialism helped form the United States and bottom-lined the wealth of France, the UK, Spain, Germany, Israel, and other countries in the global North. To claim the right to stop a migrant from crossing a line that was previously and flagrantly trespassed by the controlling elite (or their ancestors) is absurd and, in the most basic sense, unfair.

The 1884 Berlin Conference, in which imperial European powers slashed lines across a map of Africa and divvied up territorial claims, is only the most blatant example of how borders are violently imposed onto people and landscapes. The source of some of history’s most destructive episodes is the claim that only certain people belong on certain tracts of land, and that others are interlopers who must be denied or deported. Doing away with such brattish selfishness and blinkered xenophobia would ease, not exacerbate, geopolitical tension.

A country is not a house. Locking your doors at night is not the same as barring a migrant from a country’s territory. When we deny the migrant welcome, we are exposing and dishonoring our own home—forgetting the history of the land and conquest, or the traditions of freedom and hospitality practiced there. Paradoxically, we deracinate ourselves by claiming exclusive attachment to space. We lose our own home by denying it to others.

The Spanish word querencia, with a taproot in the verb querer—to desire or to love—refers to the place one feels at home, from where we draw our strength and spirit. Querer itself has origins in Proto-Indo-European: to seek, to ask. To establish or reestablish querencia, our home anchor and spirit, is to drop a root. But the lurking question in that root, that seeking—the desirous nature of both roots and humans—also reveals our inherent transience, the itch to seek, to ask, and the constant motion of being itself.

Roots are on the move. In our increasingly mobile world, for those who are uprooted and unroofed, as well as for those who feel firmly planted, we are all always still seeking and asking, queriendo, always building and finding home, whether we have one now or not.

The way to go home, the way to stay home, is to welcome the migrant.

• 1Notably, it was a Turkish couple who migrated to Germany who invented the Pfizer vaccine for COVID-19.
• 2According to a withering 2023 investigation from The New York Times, many of them are also children, too young to legally work but nonetheless toiling away—and sometimes even dying on the job—at major American companies.
• 3More protection is generally needed within the state, and even from the state, than from people crossing state borders. As Rudolph J. Rummel calculates in Death by Government, in the twentieth century, there were 35 million direct victims of wars between states, while 165 to 170 million people were massacred by their own states.
• 4In northern Mexico, I interviewed and spent a long afternoon with a man who, after living for almost four decades in Los Angeles, where his whole family still resided, tried crossing the desert to reunite with them after being caught up in an immigration raid. He was caught by the Border Patrol, pushed into the back of a truck (“dog-catchers,” they sometimes call them), where, after the truck slipped off the road and flipped, the man broke his back—luckily avoiding serious spinal damage. Border Patrol agents gave him a back brace and a bottle of pain pills, and then swiftly deported him. I remember him shaking his pill bottle like a maraca, somehow finding the strength to joke about the pain waiting for him after he’d swallow the last of the pills. Less than a week later, still planning his next move, he died. The cause of death was deemed a heart attack, though it’s hard to imagine the stress and the recent severe injury weren’t a factor. I spoke with his daughter in LA a few days later: she wanted to hear about her father’s last days. I didn’t have much to report, but explained that despite his intense pain and confusion, he was exceedingly polite with me, and that he lamented the fact that he had no money treat me to a Coke.
• 5The US Department of Defense is, by far, the world’s largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gasses, according to a study from Brown University. In 2017, the Pentagon’s total greenhouse gas emissions were not only higher than emissions from all US iron and steel production, but were larger than many industrialized countries, including Sweden, Denmark, and Portugal. A lot of those emissions are, like the self-devouring snake, gassed into the atmosphere to protect oil reserves. Russia, China, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other countries don’t do much better. Militaries throughout the world are estimated to account for up to 5 percent of all global emissions: more than civilian aviation and shipping combined.
• 6Although it’s rare for people to cross the DMZ itself, it does happen, and about a thousand North Koreans defect every year by other means.