Klein's Rejoinder on Open Borders

Bryan graciously posted “Open Borders Is a Terrible Slogan,” and replied with “Open Borders Is a Fine Slogan.”

Bryan exemplifies frankness and openness. Adam Smith wrote: “Frankness and openness conciliate confidence.”  That is a good reason to oppose the governmentalization of social affairs.

Yet I oppose allowing everyone to immigrate into a country. There are cases where liberty should be sacrificed for the good, and some of those cases coincide with sacrificing liberty for liberty. That contrariety involves “liberty” polysemy, the distinction here being between the direct-liberty principle and the overall-liberty principle (see here and here).

Bryan espouses allowing everyone to immigrate — open borders. He writes that I should engage his arguments “instead of just dismissing the conclusion as ‘irresponsible.’” Dismissing suggests not making a fuss. I am making a fuss. I broadcast: Espousing open borders is irresponsible. If I had dismissed Bryan’s conclusion, I would not have written this.

My post elicited multiple comments that suggest that people know that ‘Open borders’ does not mean 100 percent open. Many other comments say, in effect, “Damned straight! 100 percent open!” As a slogan for that view, ‘Open borders’ is, I suppose, apt, but the view is wrongheaded.

As for Bryan, I glean that he maintains the following ranking:

1.      To everyone except ax murderers and such, the border should be utterly open.

2.      To everyone, even ax murderers, the border should be utterly open.

3.      Utterly open but with ‘keyhole’ (his term) ‘solutions’.

4.      Liberalizing somewhat from the current status quo.

5.      The status quo.

One could expand the list. But so far as those five options go, Bryan’s ordering seems to be: 1 > 2 > 3 > 4 > 5.

There is an importance to thought experiments. I do not think it is meaningless to suppose a world without a minimum wage. It is not meaningless to think about how that world would work, and differ from the world with the minimum wage as it exists. We do so on some notion that the rest of the world as we know it can be otherwise the same, but for the ramifications of the posited policy reform. But when we talk about big reforms, three problems tend to crop up:

1.      The distinction between what is posited and the ramifications of what is posited grows murky. For example, what if someone says that a ramification of the reform would be the immediate reversal of the reform. Another interlocutor might then say: “But the positing of the reform does not allow for that to happen.” Drawing a line between things posited and reactions to things posited, particularly in morals, culture, and politics, becomes murky. The question becomes: What are we talking about?

2.      Big changes have large and unknowable consequences, including critical consequences about basic political stability, functionality, and integrity. Liberal civilization is not entirely natural to man. Alexis de Tocqueville worried that despotism is.

3.      The buttons that Bryan and I push are nothing more than keys on a computer keyboard, making sentences in blog posts at Bet On It. That is what we actually do, and that is often what we are debating the ethics of: What sentences we write and do not write. What Bryan writes has consequences that do not map neatly to what Bryan proposes.

My accusation of irresponsibility concerns points 2 and 3. Point 3 speaks to the inverted commas I put around ‘keyhole’ and ‘solutions.’

But my accusation comes principally under point 2. Consider the ranking above. Maybe Bryan’s ranking is correct. I don’t deny that possibility. But how is Bryan so cocksure?

Suppose that, in Bryan’s reckoning, there are uncertainties that surround possible outcomes of each of the options in the ranking. Bryan (with Weinersmith, 189) endorses the precautionary principle. Worst-case scenarios should loom large in your ethics and dispose you against departing too far from business as usual. But in this case “it’s overrated”: “Annual gains could be trillions smaller than the top quants say and still be a godsend for all mankind,” and “The status quo is already a disaster for billions of people” (190). For me, those points do not much allay the concerns that Tocqueville reminds us of. Open Borders contains a chapter on culture (81-107), but in my judgment it does not delve seriously into the matter of how mass immigration would affect the country’s moral and political bearings, functionality, and integrity. I don’t see warrant for cocksureness. The issue is not simply Culture A versus Cultures B, C, and D. It is also about the tumult of mass immigration within the reality of today’s political structures, sentiments, machinations.

Now, about the ranking above, 1 > 2 > 3 > 4 > 5, I have a question for Bryan: Would such a ranking go for all countries? Or just the United States? My impression is that the book does not explicitly say. There is mention of the EU (p. 201), but it considers only movement within the EU.

Suppose—it is our thought experiment—Sweden could make its own policy. Would Bryan’s ranking also go for Sweden? Would Bryan call for Sweden to open its country of 10 million people to the world’s 8 billion people? (Listen to the UnHerd conversation with Swede Ivar Arpi here.)

Would he call for New Zealand to do so?

If the ranking shown above would not go for Sweden or New Zealand but would go for the United States, why the difference? What is there in the Swedish case that changes the ranking?

On the same premise: You’d think that open border advocates would confront that matter directly, telling us which countries should have open borders and which shouldn’t. Maybe they do this. A discussion of where open borders is/is not recommended would, I should think, also elaborate the basis for separating nations into those two bins.

I used to be a 100-percent-free-immigration supporter and a niche libertarian more generally. Now, my inclinations are toward liberalizing immigration, prudentially. I’m agnostic beyond that. I’m not trying to defend a particular position. I am suggesting an attitude against 100 percent free immigration. ‘Open borders’ is a terrible slogan because it communicates a position that is foolish, and it lends itself to characterization as such even if one does not intend to stake out the extreme positions that my friend Bryan does.