"most will be too politically apathetic even to vote, much less risk their lives". Correct, but the problem is it only takes a few. As per Taleb, the most intolerant win. And it only takes a small, belligerent political minority to impose its will on the relatively passive masses. Just look at how Muslims in the West have successfully created a veto on Islamic blasphemy.
I lived in Japan the past 8 years teaching. When they would have an election I tried to make jokes about which party was in my best interest as a foreigner. I lived there for quite a while and was invested in day to day in building a life. I promise you that I have no idea how to even begin to influence some other political system for my own gain. It's crazy to think other groups are organized like ants.
I support open borders but I still believe Caplan is underestimating the political effect. The perception of mass migration (which is distinct from whether it is actually happening in a country) seems to have contributed to a shift towards nationalism.
I think a case can be made that, in the U.S., the most prominent totalitarian -- or, at least, anti-liberal -- tendencies are present in the progressive left movement. My personal experience with U.S. immigrants from the former Soviet Union is that they are the least susceptible to these political impulses having seen first-hand where they lead. It seems to be true of the Cuban-American population as well. So, I am not so sure I would agree that "citizens of totalitarian countries will likely be relatively authoritarian", particularly compared to younger generations of home-grown, college educated Americans.
> be relatively authoritarian, but this hardly means they’re willing to actually act to advance the cause of unfreedom.
Ultimately this is an empirical question (how many immigrants believe something enough to sway a polity?) to which we don't even know what answers would be important (how many are necessary to sway a polity?).
I think that in Caplan's open borders book he makes the case that first generation immigrants are pretty politically apathetic. I suppose it would take a large number.
Maybe it's beyond purely empirical because in truth immigrants are coming for different reasons with different beliefs and goals. And like all human interaction, there's no separating it and no obvious ways to separate the good from the bad.
At the extreme, we can imagine, on one hand, admitting communists who are trying to escape from Nazi Germany. They might be politically motivated socialists who wish to escape persecution by the Nazis. Insofar as their goals are to avoid persecution, we should accept them. But... I'm not enthusiastic about welcoming large numbers of motivated socialists into my polity.
On the other end, maybe some Nazis themselves want to immigrate with the explicit goal of (secretly) promoting Nazism. Of course, they're not going to say that's what they're about, so we'd have to try and determine who was lying and who wasn't.
Our tools for collective action in such cases are really bad.
"I'm not enthusiastic about welcoming large numbers of motivated socialists into my polity."
If you don't want them to come in, then surely you would want to find the ones here already and kick them out, no?
"maybe some Nazis themselves want to immigrate with the explicit goal of (secretly) promoting Nazism."
The US has this little thing called the first amendment which protects this right. Also they don't really have to do it secretly, there are elected politicians in the country right now who are attending white nationalist conferences
> If you don't want them to come in, then surely you would want to find the ones here already and kick them out, no?
No.
> The US has this little thing called the first amendment which protects this right.
Like all rights, the first amendment rights are only protected to the extent the community decides to protect them. Which is why changing the nature of the community changes the nature of our rights.
Ultimately, this is what sovereignty and citizenship is. An ongoing recognition of rights and responsibilities. That's why introducing new people to the community should be analyzed carefully. Kicking out existing citizens, even if they're motivated socialists or nazis is generally a bad idea as well because it undercuts the foundation of our freedoms. We have obligations to fellow members of the polity that we do not have to non-members. The fact this distinction is seldom made doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I think this is seeking stasis that just doesn't and can't exist. What about people leaving the polity? Is that restricted? (and then where do they go if joining another group is restricted). What are the boundaries of this polity? Country? State? City? Neighborhood? I just don't see this as a sustainable principle.
It's not a principle, just an observation of the of how communities of all sizes work. In the long run, nothing is sustainable forever.
How sustainable a community is depends on how beneficial it is to its members and whether they commit to maintaining it. There's a tendency to overanalyze the importance of institutions and under analyze the people. What I'm pointing out and what is an eternal truth is that "institutions" endure or not because of the membership of a polity, and that is always changing.
1. The polity is the people, not the boundaries or institutions.
2. The people are always changing. An orderly changing of the people, in which new members are born or join and trained to believe similarly to the members who they replace through departure and death will be relatively sustainable. The more the new replacements have substantially different views, the less likely the institutions will be to endure.
I don't know about open marriages, but I don't understand how you can imply a country with open borders ceases to be a country. If you accept Caplan's argument that few immigrants would join fifth columns (which history indicates is true), then there is no reason to believe state functions would be compromised.
Your hypothesis also does not hold up to empirical scrutiny. The USA remained a country for 150 years with open borders. New York remained a state for not only those 150 years, but another 100 with open borders against the rest of the US. The EU nations remain separate and identifiable countries - Germany is still Germany, France is still France, etc - despite free and open immigration between them.
I guess open borders is incompatible with national sovereignty as you understand it.
You wrote: "because very much isn't a sovereign entity, precisely in part because it has no control over who is and is not a citizen or who is allowed to reside in its territory."
"Control over who is allowed to reside in the territory" can be exercised to allow everybody in, just as it can be exercised to exclude people. Would national sovereignty (as you understand it) be retained if the sovereign exercised its control to allow everyone in, so long as it doesn't also give up its control over what migration policy to apply in the future?
Hello again after long delay. :) Thanks for the clarification. I feel a bit *more* clueless about what your views are than I did before, but I suppose that constitutes a correction in my understanding.
I understand "I'm pro open borders" to mean "I'm for a maximally loose migration policy" or something like that. To me the phrase "open borders" actually seems reasonably self-explanatory. Borders are described as "open" to the extent that people aren't hindered in their attempts to cross them.
And I don't think saying "I'm pro open borders" commits the speaker to any views beyond the one directly expressed by this statement. A person can truthfully say that they're pro open borders and be in favour of achieving open borders by having the government lower migration restrictions to essentially zero while retaining the option of ramping them up again in the future. Another person can truthfully say "I'm pro open borders" and be in favour of achieving open borders by having a world government that forces national governments to keep their borders open. Those two people would presumably have important disagreements with each other, but, the way I would describe it, they would agree on the view that borders should be open. Does this seem like a strange use of language to you?
I'm surprised that you say that many libertarian philosophers support "a system wherein internationally the situation of states with regards to the US is recreated between nations". The way to recreate this situation would be by having a supranational organisation enforce open-borders policies among the national governments that it governs, no? (E.g. as in my above example of a world government doing this.) I'm surprised that you think that because that doesn't seem libertarian at all, or at least it seems very atypical of libertarians to me to want these sorts of supranational organisations.
Further, Bryan Caplan, for one, is not at all coy on his broader views on governments. He's an anarcho-capitalist, and that's by no means a secret. Presumably, you don't like that, since anarcho-capitalism seems incompatible with your notion of national sovereignty. That said, when Bryan defends open borders, he's not simultaneously surreptitiously defending anarcho-capitalism. Anarcho-capitalism is an even less realistic shortish-term goal than open borders, and anarcho-capitalism isn't necessary for achieving open borders. Merely having currently existing governments open their borders would be a massive improvement (in his and my view), and it seems wise to defend one thing at a time. No?
I can't think of any way in which national sovereignty would be compromised. I also again point out that there is no historical example of what you are describing.
"if you can't determine who is and is no allowed in your territory, this is how nation states have been understood since the beginning of modernity and the end of the 30 years war"
No, immigration restrictions is a much more recent invention. That said, if sovereignty is determining the laws in your territory, that contradicts what you said earlier about France and Germany. They very much still make the laws pertaining to their respective territories.
"If simply being in your territory gives a person functionally all the rights and protections of citizenship, you aren't a sovereign state."
I have no idea what you are talking about here. You seem to be conflating immigration with naturalization. I often see this. Open borders is about immigration, not naturalization.
You can think of the United States as a country that exists now with 99 percent closed borders. At what percent closed borders does it cease being a country? A country, as generally understood, is the government, which can exist even if there are a large number of immigrants.
I consider myself a libertarian, and I understand why libertarianism proposes that there is a universal human right to freedom of association. But that implies the freedom NOT to associate as well. So I don't really see the problem with a group of people (like a private club, or a country) choosing not to associate with every newcomer who wants in.
Just because somebody immigrates does not force you to associate with them.
If I live in an apartment building, I don't get to decide who the landlord can let the other apartments to. If I dine at a restaurant, I don't get to decide who the proprietor seats at the table next to me. If I live in a neighborhood, I don't get to decide who moves in next door. A country is more like those things than a private club.
You can choose to not associate with people that want to come in how you want. But you can't prevent them from immigrating because that infringes on their rights. A club and a country are very different. A private club can control what people say or do within the club, but a country has no such right.
The right to the association would extend to people who are born within a country as well. The implication would be that we can prevent people from entering our country via birth as well. But that can't be morally correct.
"most will be too politically apathetic even to vote, much less risk their lives". Correct, but the problem is it only takes a few. As per Taleb, the most intolerant win. And it only takes a small, belligerent political minority to impose its will on the relatively passive masses. Just look at how Muslims in the West have successfully created a veto on Islamic blasphemy.
I lived in Japan the past 8 years teaching. When they would have an election I tried to make jokes about which party was in my best interest as a foreigner. I lived there for quite a while and was invested in day to day in building a life. I promise you that I have no idea how to even begin to influence some other political system for my own gain. It's crazy to think other groups are organized like ants.
I support open borders but I still believe Caplan is underestimating the political effect. The perception of mass migration (which is distinct from whether it is actually happening in a country) seems to have contributed to a shift towards nationalism.
I think a case can be made that, in the U.S., the most prominent totalitarian -- or, at least, anti-liberal -- tendencies are present in the progressive left movement. My personal experience with U.S. immigrants from the former Soviet Union is that they are the least susceptible to these political impulses having seen first-hand where they lead. It seems to be true of the Cuban-American population as well. So, I am not so sure I would agree that "citizens of totalitarian countries will likely be relatively authoritarian", particularly compared to younger generations of home-grown, college educated Americans.
> be relatively authoritarian, but this hardly means they’re willing to actually act to advance the cause of unfreedom.
Ultimately this is an empirical question (how many immigrants believe something enough to sway a polity?) to which we don't even know what answers would be important (how many are necessary to sway a polity?).
I think that in Caplan's open borders book he makes the case that first generation immigrants are pretty politically apathetic. I suppose it would take a large number.
Maybe it's beyond purely empirical because in truth immigrants are coming for different reasons with different beliefs and goals. And like all human interaction, there's no separating it and no obvious ways to separate the good from the bad.
At the extreme, we can imagine, on one hand, admitting communists who are trying to escape from Nazi Germany. They might be politically motivated socialists who wish to escape persecution by the Nazis. Insofar as their goals are to avoid persecution, we should accept them. But... I'm not enthusiastic about welcoming large numbers of motivated socialists into my polity.
On the other end, maybe some Nazis themselves want to immigrate with the explicit goal of (secretly) promoting Nazism. Of course, they're not going to say that's what they're about, so we'd have to try and determine who was lying and who wasn't.
Our tools for collective action in such cases are really bad.
"I'm not enthusiastic about welcoming large numbers of motivated socialists into my polity."
If you don't want them to come in, then surely you would want to find the ones here already and kick them out, no?
"maybe some Nazis themselves want to immigrate with the explicit goal of (secretly) promoting Nazism."
The US has this little thing called the first amendment which protects this right. Also they don't really have to do it secretly, there are elected politicians in the country right now who are attending white nationalist conferences
> If you don't want them to come in, then surely you would want to find the ones here already and kick them out, no?
No.
> The US has this little thing called the first amendment which protects this right.
Like all rights, the first amendment rights are only protected to the extent the community decides to protect them. Which is why changing the nature of the community changes the nature of our rights.
Ultimately, this is what sovereignty and citizenship is. An ongoing recognition of rights and responsibilities. That's why introducing new people to the community should be analyzed carefully. Kicking out existing citizens, even if they're motivated socialists or nazis is generally a bad idea as well because it undercuts the foundation of our freedoms. We have obligations to fellow members of the polity that we do not have to non-members. The fact this distinction is seldom made doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I think this is seeking stasis that just doesn't and can't exist. What about people leaving the polity? Is that restricted? (and then where do they go if joining another group is restricted). What are the boundaries of this polity? Country? State? City? Neighborhood? I just don't see this as a sustainable principle.
It's not a principle, just an observation of the of how communities of all sizes work. In the long run, nothing is sustainable forever.
How sustainable a community is depends on how beneficial it is to its members and whether they commit to maintaining it. There's a tendency to overanalyze the importance of institutions and under analyze the people. What I'm pointing out and what is an eternal truth is that "institutions" endure or not because of the membership of a polity, and that is always changing.
1. The polity is the people, not the boundaries or institutions.
2. The people are always changing. An orderly changing of the people, in which new members are born or join and trained to believe similarly to the members who they replace through departure and death will be relatively sustainable. The more the new replacements have substantially different views, the less likely the institutions will be to endure.
I don't know about open marriages, but I don't understand how you can imply a country with open borders ceases to be a country. If you accept Caplan's argument that few immigrants would join fifth columns (which history indicates is true), then there is no reason to believe state functions would be compromised.
Your hypothesis also does not hold up to empirical scrutiny. The USA remained a country for 150 years with open borders. New York remained a state for not only those 150 years, but another 100 with open borders against the rest of the US. The EU nations remain separate and identifiable countries - Germany is still Germany, France is still France, etc - despite free and open immigration between them.
I guess open borders is incompatible with national sovereignty as you understand it.
You wrote: "because very much isn't a sovereign entity, precisely in part because it has no control over who is and is not a citizen or who is allowed to reside in its territory."
"Control over who is allowed to reside in the territory" can be exercised to allow everybody in, just as it can be exercised to exclude people. Would national sovereignty (as you understand it) be retained if the sovereign exercised its control to allow everyone in, so long as it doesn't also give up its control over what migration policy to apply in the future?
Hello again after long delay. :) Thanks for the clarification. I feel a bit *more* clueless about what your views are than I did before, but I suppose that constitutes a correction in my understanding.
I understand "I'm pro open borders" to mean "I'm for a maximally loose migration policy" or something like that. To me the phrase "open borders" actually seems reasonably self-explanatory. Borders are described as "open" to the extent that people aren't hindered in their attempts to cross them.
And I don't think saying "I'm pro open borders" commits the speaker to any views beyond the one directly expressed by this statement. A person can truthfully say that they're pro open borders and be in favour of achieving open borders by having the government lower migration restrictions to essentially zero while retaining the option of ramping them up again in the future. Another person can truthfully say "I'm pro open borders" and be in favour of achieving open borders by having a world government that forces national governments to keep their borders open. Those two people would presumably have important disagreements with each other, but, the way I would describe it, they would agree on the view that borders should be open. Does this seem like a strange use of language to you?
I'm surprised that you say that many libertarian philosophers support "a system wherein internationally the situation of states with regards to the US is recreated between nations". The way to recreate this situation would be by having a supranational organisation enforce open-borders policies among the national governments that it governs, no? (E.g. as in my above example of a world government doing this.) I'm surprised that you think that because that doesn't seem libertarian at all, or at least it seems very atypical of libertarians to me to want these sorts of supranational organisations.
Further, Bryan Caplan, for one, is not at all coy on his broader views on governments. He's an anarcho-capitalist, and that's by no means a secret. Presumably, you don't like that, since anarcho-capitalism seems incompatible with your notion of national sovereignty. That said, when Bryan defends open borders, he's not simultaneously surreptitiously defending anarcho-capitalism. Anarcho-capitalism is an even less realistic shortish-term goal than open borders, and anarcho-capitalism isn't necessary for achieving open borders. Merely having currently existing governments open their borders would be a massive improvement (in his and my view), and it seems wise to defend one thing at a time. No?
I can't think of any way in which national sovereignty would be compromised. I also again point out that there is no historical example of what you are describing.
"if you can't determine who is and is no allowed in your territory, this is how nation states have been understood since the beginning of modernity and the end of the 30 years war"
No, immigration restrictions is a much more recent invention. That said, if sovereignty is determining the laws in your territory, that contradicts what you said earlier about France and Germany. They very much still make the laws pertaining to their respective territories.
"If simply being in your territory gives a person functionally all the rights and protections of citizenship, you aren't a sovereign state."
I have no idea what you are talking about here. You seem to be conflating immigration with naturalization. I often see this. Open borders is about immigration, not naturalization.
Sovereignty resides with the individual, not with the state.
You can think of the United States as a country that exists now with 99 percent closed borders. At what percent closed borders does it cease being a country? A country, as generally understood, is the government, which can exist even if there are a large number of immigrants.
I consider myself a libertarian, and I understand why libertarianism proposes that there is a universal human right to freedom of association. But that implies the freedom NOT to associate as well. So I don't really see the problem with a group of people (like a private club, or a country) choosing not to associate with every newcomer who wants in.
Just because somebody immigrates does not force you to associate with them.
If I live in an apartment building, I don't get to decide who the landlord can let the other apartments to. If I dine at a restaurant, I don't get to decide who the proprietor seats at the table next to me. If I live in a neighborhood, I don't get to decide who moves in next door. A country is more like those things than a private club.
You can choose to not associate with people that want to come in how you want. But you can't prevent them from immigrating because that infringes on their rights. A club and a country are very different. A private club can control what people say or do within the club, but a country has no such right.
The right to the association would extend to people who are born within a country as well. The implication would be that we can prevent people from entering our country via birth as well. But that can't be morally correct.