The Open-Borders Libertarians Make a Real Argument. Here Is Where It Breaks

Here is an uncomfortable fact for anyone who likes to argue: some of the sharpest people on your own side of the aisle disagree with you about the border. They are not bleeding hearts. They read Hayek for fun. They have charts. And their argument is better than the one most progressives make, because it starts from principles conservatives claim to hold.

So let us do this properly. I am going to state the open-borders case the way its best defenders would state it, with no straw, and then I am going to tell you where I think it breaks. You will not get a sneer from me. You will get an argument.

Define the claim

By "open borders" I mean the position that people should be free to move to and work in any country, subject at most to narrow exceptions such as criminals and demonstrable security threats. It is the position that national immigration quotas are, in the main, a restriction on liberty and on trade that the state has no good reason to impose.

The people who hold it are not fools, and they come to it from two directions. One is economic. The other is moral. Let me give you both.

The steelman, part one: the economics

The economic case runs like this.

Labor is a factor of production, and a worker is worth far more in a country with capital, institutions and the rule of law than in a country without them. A construction worker who earns a few dollars a day in one economy can earn many times that in another, doing exactly the same work. That gap is not a difference in the worker; it is a difference in the place. Economists who study it have described the gap as among the largest unexploited opportunities in the world economy, and some published estimates of what removing barriers to labor movement would add to world output are enormous, far larger than the estimated gains from removing every remaining barrier to trade in goods and capital.

The free-market logic follows without strain. We believe in free trade because letting people exchange what they make makes both sides richer. We believe in free movement of capital for the same reason. If it is a gain to let a car cross a border, why is it a loss to let the man who would assemble the car cross it? A conservative who says the market allocates resources better than a planner is, on this view, being inconsistent if he supports a planner's quota for labor.

Add the point about dynamism. Immigrants start businesses at high rates, fill gaps in the labor market, take risks that settled people do not, and bring skills and ideas. The history of the United States seems to confirm it. Our economy grew up on newcomers.

The steelman, part two: the morality

Now the moral claim, which is the heart of it.

The argument says: A person born on the wrong side of a line did nothing to deserve poverty. Citizenship by birth is an accident of the womb, a kind of inherited privilege, and a border backed by force keeps one human being from selling his labor to a willing employer and living near a willing landlord. That is coercion, applied to the innocent. Libertarians oppose coercion in other settings, and the same principle should apply here.

It is a powerful argument because it appeals to a real moral intuition: that the line on the map is arbitrary, and that arbitrary lines should not decide who flourishes. Conservatives who believe in the dignity of the individual cannot simply wave this away. Anyone who has watched a family risk everything to cross a desert understands that the instinct behind the argument is not a cynical one.

That is the case at its strongest. Now to where I believe it breaks. I will answer in numbered points, because the argument deserves order.

One: the welfare state changes the arithmetic

The classic open-borders case was built on a world where the immigrant who arrived either worked or starved. That was the nineteenth-century United States, and the free-market argument fits it well.

Our world is different. We have a welfare state: means-tested programs, public schools, emergency medical care that hospitals must provide regardless of status or ability to pay, and a thick web of public services paid for by taxpayers. The economist Milton Friedman is remembered for the observation, which I will paraphrase rather than quote, that open immigration and a generous welfare state do not mix. He thought free immigration worked when the newcomer had no claim on the public purse, and worked badly when he did.

The point is not that immigrants are idle. Most come to work and do. The point is that when a country offers services at a price below their cost, a policy of unlimited entry creates a claim on the treasury that nobody has voted to fund, and that falls on the people already paying. You can see the pattern in the law. Congress restricted most federal means-tested benefits for newly arrived immigrants in the 1996 welfare reform, and the Supreme Court held in Plyler v. Doe in 1982 that a state may not deny a free public education to children on account of their unlawful status, a decision whose costs fall on the states, as Plyler v. Doe and the Bill States Pay for a Decision Congress Never Made explains.

Now, an open-borders libertarian has a ready reply: then cut the welfare state. Fine. I would like to see it cut, too. But that is a reply to a different question. The question on the table is what to do with the policy we actually have, in the country we actually live in. A reform that depends on first abolishing the welfare state is a reform that will not happen this decade, and in the meantime the border policy is not hypothetical. A principle that works only in an imaginary country is a principle for an imaginary country.

For a sober account of what the evidence says about fiscal effects, and where it is contested, see What the National Academies Found on Immigration's Fiscal Costs.

Two: a border is the precondition of the rule of law

Libertarians are the people who tell us, correctly, that the rule of law is the foundation of prosperity. Contracts enforced, property protected, courts that function, officials who obey the same rules as everyone else. The reason a worker is worth so much more in the United States than in the country he left is not the weather. It is the institutions.

Here is the question that the economic case tends to skip. Where do the institutions come from? They come from a particular people, over a particular history, who built them, maintained them and defended them. A country is not a patch of dirt with an airport. It is an inheritance, and a fragile one.

The policy implication is a modest one. A country has to be able to decide who joins its legal order, on what terms, and with what obligations, because those terms are how the order sustains itself. A law that anyone may break by walking across a line, without consequence, is a law that teaches everyone watching that it is optional. The man who enters lawfully, waits in line, pays the fees and learns the language is treated no better than the man who does not. That is not liberty. That is a tax on the people who followed the rules.

I would put it this way: the open-borders position treats the border as a restriction on the market. A conservative treats it as the edge of the legal order inside which the market works. You cannot have free exchange without enforceable contracts, and you cannot have enforceable contracts without a sovereign that decides whose law applies.

Three: social trust is an asset, and assets can be spent

This is the point I find hardest to put in a chart and most important to say.

A functioning free society runs on trust: trust that your neighbor will honor a handshake, that a stranger will obey the traffic rules, that a juror will take the oath seriously, that the person next to you in line shares enough of your assumptions to make a bargain possible. That trust is built over generations, and it is built faster when newcomers and natives share a language, a set of civic assumptions and a sense of a common future.

The honest observation is that assimilation takes time, and the pace of arrival matters. A country can absorb a steady stream of newcomers, as ours did for most of its history, and see them become Americans in a generation. It is harder to do when the number arriving in a short period outruns the institutions that do the assimilating, the schools, the churches, the workplaces, the civic associations. Open borders would not just raise the numbers. It would remove the possibility of managing the pace.

I do not offer this as a claim about any group's character. I offer it as a claim about rates. Almost anything is good in measure and harmful in a flood. A country that wants to remain a nation, and not a mere market, has to attend to the speed at which it grows its membership. The answer to "how fast?" is not "as fast as anyone can walk." Compare the argument in The Melting Pot Was a Good Idea and the Salad Bowl Is a Worse One.

Four: a people has a right to define itself

Now to the Founders and the thinkers they read.

John Locke's account of government begins with individuals in a state of nature who consent to form a political society and who authorize a government to protect their lives, liberty and property. That is the philosophy behind the Declaration of Independence, which says that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed." The word is consent. It means that the people who form a political community decide, together, the terms on which it will operate. Who belongs is one of the first terms.

Edmund Burke gave the same idea a more conservative cast. A nation, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, is a partnership not only among those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are yet to be born. That is not a market arrangement. It is an inheritance with obligations running in every direction, and the living generation is a steward, not an owner free to hand the keys to anyone who asks.

Neither thinker says a nation must be closed. Both would say that a nation has the right to decide. The open-borders argument, in its pure form, denies that right. It says the political community has no standing to set the terms of membership, because the individual's liberty to move trumps the community's liberty to choose. And that is where the moral claim breaks, because liberty is not the only value in a free society, and because the claim treats the absence of a decision by the community as neutral, when it is itself a decision, made on behalf of everyone who lives here, without their consent.

The Constitution is explicit on the point. Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 gives Congress the power "to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization." The Founders thought it was a power of the people's representatives, not of the individual who wished to move. If you doubt that they cared about the terms of membership, read the grievance against George III in the Declaration about obstructing the laws for the naturalization of foreigners, and consider the long fight over the subject in The Forgotten Immigration Grievance in the Declaration of Independence.

Five: the consent of the governed is not a rounding error

Let me connect the previous point to the political reality, because it is the practical center of the whole matter.

Immigration policy that the public regards as out of control destroys the legitimacy of immigration itself. The great waves of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were followed by a political reaction and by the restrictive laws of the 1920s. Every time a country loses the confidence of its citizens that it controls its own borders, the backlash comes, and it is often indiscriminate. The people who would be hurt are the ones the libertarians most want to help.

That is the paradox. The open-borders position, in a democracy, is self-defeating. A country that admits people only by consent can sustain a generous immigration program indefinitely, because the public trusts that the program is theirs. A country that cannot enforce its own rules will find that consent withdrawn. Control is not the enemy of generosity; it is the condition of generosity that lasts.

Where the libertarians are right

I promised a fair hearing, so here is what I concede.

They are right that the current system is a mess, full of delays, arbitrary categories and a legal path that is far too slow and costly for people who want to follow it. The answer is to fix the legal system, which is where How to Bring a Family Member to America the Legal Way, Step by Step begins. They are right that immigrants are, in large numbers, hardworking and entrepreneurial. They are right that a person's birthplace is a matter of luck. They are right that economic liberty matters and that restrictions should be justified, not assumed.

A conservative can agree with every one of those and still conclude that a managed immigration system, with numbers, selection by skill and family ties and a credible rule of law at the border, is the one that preserves the very prosperity the libertarians prize. The disagreement is not about whether newcomers add value. It is about whether the country gets to decide the terms on which they join.

The verdict

The open-borders libertarian has asked a real question: what justifies a restriction on a man's freedom to sell his labor? The answer is that the restriction is not the whole story. A border is also the edge of a legal order, the guardian of a welfare system funded by taxpayers, the boundary of a community built on trust and the expression of a people's consent to be governed. Strip those away and the freedom to move becomes the freedom to move into a place that is no longer the place you wanted to move to.

You can believe in markets and believe in borders. In fact, if you want the markets to last, I think you must.

The case in brief

1. The open-borders case is serious: labor is worth far more in countries with good institutions, free-market logic seems to favor free movement, and birth on the wrong side of a line is an accident no one earned.
2. The welfare state changes the arithmetic, because unlimited entry creates claims on public services that voters never approved, and "cut the welfare state first" is not a plan for this decade.
3. A border is the edge of the legal order that makes markets work, and a law that anyone may ignore without consequence punishes those who follow it.
4. Social trust is built over time, and a country must be able to manage the pace of arrival if it wants newcomers to become Americans.
5. Locke's consent of the governed, Burke's partnership across generations and Article I, Section 8's naturalization power all treat membership as a choice a political community makes, and controlled immigration is what keeps public consent for generous immigration alive.

What you can do: read Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 on the Constitution page, then write to your representative, through the my-representatives page, and ask what reforms to the legal system they would support so that the lawful path is faster and the border is real.