Open Borders

This is a debate about morality, but one with real world consequences. I strongly believe some moral systems are superior to others.

In the moral system of the mid-19th century U.S. South, it was moral and right to have slaves. Human beings could be property. Similarly, in the communist and some socialist moral systems, it is evil and immoral for me to, say, start a company, and make millions of dollars of wealth. I have to share the fruit of my labor with other citizens of my country who did not work hard, and who might have spent the time I was toiling on my startup, playing video games and watching Netflix.

> you'll have to convince us it's not in our interest to do so

Absolutely not. As long as your self-interest doesn't violate the rights of others, I fully respect. But the moment you want to oppress my freedom, for the sake of your self-interest, I say fuck you self-interest. I don't need to convince you of anything. Why?

* Your same repugnant self-interest argument was used by slave owners. It wasn't in their self-interest to lose their free labor. It was economic disaster to relinquish slave labor. To quote, the Mississippi Declaration of Secession, it was "the greatest material interest of the world", c.f. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp

* You have no right to dictate to me that I can only associate with you (i.e. whether in employment, friendship, marriage etc). I should be free to hire any one from any country as I see fit. Immigration…

"It's fairly hilarious that he claims the current situation is "closed borders"."

Most of the people who want to migrate are prevented from doing so by law. That's close to "closed borders". And he makes it pretty clear in the first paragraph that he's talking about restrictive immigration policies (including current ones), so the semantics on "open" vs. "closed" borders aren't the most relevant point.

Regarding suppression of research: Richwine didn't have tenure. Prof. George Borjas hasn't been fired (or censured), but he has numerous influential publications on immigration and he calls for more restrictive policies. There are a lot of studies on the fiscal impact of immigration, and while many are positive or near zero, some are negative. If there's strong evidence of publication bias, I would be genuinely interested in seeing it.

For what it's worth, I don't think Richwine should have been fired just for anti-PC stuff on IQ. But that's just Heritage's PR decision.

IMO a more likely explanation is that economists have a consensus in favor of immigration liberalization as a pro-market policy. There is plenty of research on the issue that does indicate positive effects of immigration:

http://openborders.info/economist-consensus/

Re favelas: Okay, it depends what you prefer, to be honest. If you care a lot about avoiding visible poverty in the First World, having open borders is a bad idea. If you care about reducing absolute global poverty, it's probably a very, very…

I've thought about this for a long time, as an American who twice lived overseas as a bona-fide long-term resident of another country. My wife, a first-generation immigrant to the United States, is just one of many examples of first-generation immigrants to the United States I know, from many countries.

From the article: "George Mason economist Bryan Caplan, whose writing at EconLog inspired Naik's interest in open borders, has offered 'keyhole' solutions as a substitute for black and white, yes-or-no questions on immigration. 'If immigrants hurt American workers, we can charge immigrants higher taxes or admission fees, and use the revenue to compensate the losers,' Caplan wrote last year. 'If immigrants burden American taxpayers, we can make immigrants ineligible for benefits. If immigrants hurt American culture, we can impose tests of English fluency and cultural literacy. If immigrants hurt American liberty, we can refuse to give them the right to vote. Whatever your complaint happens to be, immigration restrictions are a needlessly draconian remedy.'"

Further along in the article, what is to me the scariest possible outcome of huge immigration is mentioned: "Naik points out that 'political externalities' may be a major drawback of allowing anyone who wants to move to stable, wealthy nations to do so. Gallup polls have found that 700 million people would like to permanently move to another country, many of them from developing nations with failed political systems. If…

"I have two Ivy League degrees. And I am on the verge of deportation."

So you obviously deserve to come here, while the people living on $1 a day in extreme poverty and under oppressive regimes, they should be kept out? No, you didn't say all that, but I'm passionate about the cause of open borders (http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/08/the_efficient_e.html, http://www.openborders.info), and I can tell you a lot of Americans think exactly that way - they have a poor understanding of economics and they imagine that importing relatively unskilled laborers into our country would somehow 'taint' or bring down our economy toward their levels of poverty. (See here: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/02/always_keep_you.html if you have yet to be disabused of this fallacy.) And your suggestion that you should be allowed in because of your degrees is suggestive of that kind of broken thinking. Productivity is the root of societal prosperity. And labor, whether skilled or unskilled -- in fact, especially unskilled labor -- is able to be much more productive when allowed to move to the first world. That extra productivity benefits everyone. Economists estimate, on average, that a move from the status quo to fully liberalized migration (open borders) would result in a DOUBLING OF GLOBAL GDP. That's an INSANE silver bullet.

And most of those gains would go to the extreme poor: in fact, it would be by far the most effective step we could take to reduce extreme poverty -…

I agree with your second paragraph, but not your first. We all agree that the fact that a legal restriction was democratically approved absolutely does not make it moral (e.g., slavery). A nation doesn't have collective rights to do anything; the individual citizens have rights. And if a minority of citizens wants to welcome and employ immigrants in their home or town, there is a burden on the majority provide the same kind of overwhelming justification we require for other restrictions on rights (free-speech, taking of property, etc.) In particular, your suggestion that nations have rights to control immigration suggests it would be OK if nations had explicitly racist immigration policies; indeed we allow individual citizens to have racist policies for who they let into their home on account of that citizen's individual rights (even though we may strongly disapprove of those individuals).

https://openborders.info/

I explicitly want all three things you list. I also would like to see Open Borders ;) https://openborders.info

For psychedelic drug decriminalization: the alternative is status quo, which results in tremendous amount of suffering (thousands of people in jail who are then disenfranchised by their "criminal" record).

You vaguely gesture at the possible good outcomes people like me want, but then boldly claim "that isn't the outcome [we] will get". I'm puzzled why you have such a pessimistic view of it all.

Portugal decriminalized all drugs 20 years ago and they are doing great (by comparison to surrounding countries that have not). Assisted suicide has become legal in several countries with presumably no negative outcomes you are warning us against. UBI has been successful and loved by Alaskans for decades. What problems are you worried about?