It’s now become a kind of axiom in American politics that “open borders” are an absurd idea. Even Analilia Mejia, the left-most candidate among New Jersey’s Democrats, is quick to disavow the idea. “How do you have a country without borders?” she asks. Since you can’t, we can’t have open borders. Open borders means no country; no country means chaos. We can’t have chaos, so we must disavow open borders.
Everyone regards this as obvious, but it’s not obvious. Consider capital. How freely can money or investment move into and out of the United States, e.g., foreign direct investment, financial flows, portfolio investment, and cross-border business operations? Distinguish the exception from the rule. The rule is that capital is free to cross borders without regulatory intervention; regulatory intervention is the exception, and outright prohibition is rare. In other words, at a basic level, when it comes to capital, we have open borders. Few find that controversial, and few ever think about it.
Now consider labor. How freely can workers cross our border? Here, exactly the reverse set of rules prevails. The free flow of labor is heavily regulated to the point of near prohibition; migration of labor is the exception, and outright prohibition on migration from certain countries has now become the accepted norm.
In other words, “open borders” is not an absurd idea at all. As far as capital is concerned, it’s the unnoticed and basically unquestioned norm. The reflexive rejection of open borders is really a rejection of open borders to labor. Put differently, it’s the acceptance of a double standard between capital and labor. The presumption is that capital can cross borders as “it” wants; labor can’t. This should strike us all as problematic, in fact as the central problem driving our “migrant crisis.” Yet amazingly, it’s not part of mainstream discourse at all.
One problem here is simply the double standard itself. Why should the border be open to capital, and closed to labor under an arrangement sold to us as a “free trade zone”? A free trade zone that bans the free flow of labor is a contradiction in terms, but far from being perceived as absurd, this contradiction has now become normalized over time. Questioning it is perceived as absurd. It’d be bad enough if the contradiction was candidly sold as a reversion to eighteenth-century mercantilism, but few have the candor (or in some cases, the historical literacy) to put it that way. A coercively segmented, arbitrarily restricted labor market is habitually equated with “free trade.” “Freedom is immobility.”
A deeper problem arises from the effects of double standard. When capital is free, it causes dislocations in the labor force in the remote places to which it migrates. “Dislocations in the labor force” is a euphemism for unemployment. When people are unemployed, they seek employment. It’s hard to predict where the best employment opportunities will arise, but they often tend to be correlated with the sources of capital. In those cases, you would expect unemployed laborers to migrate toward the sources of capital. Granted, there’s no necessity about that particular scenario. In general, you expect unemployed people to migrate to wherever the jobs are, in other words, where the demand for their labor is highest.
But what if they couldn’t? What if capital could traverse any distance “it” wanted, creating any dislocation it pleased, but labor was prevented from responding to the dislocations by an arbitrary, enforced boundary within what people otherwise called a “free trade zone”? Well, then you’d get a “migration crisis.”
I’ve presented all of this as though it was just one big hypothetical, but it isn’t. It’s a simplified version of the actual effects of NAFTA and CAFTA over the decades. The basic idea is that the United States and its other North American cronies created “free trade zones” in which capital was free to cross borders and render people unemployed, but where labor, largely Mexican (but of other nationalities as well), was confined to its country of origin, often coercively prevented from making seeking employment where the demand for labor was highest. We then imposed austerity schemes on these same immobilized workers while complaining in advance that they were coming north to steal our welfare benefits. We demanded that their countries remove protectionist barriers to trade while adopting protectionist barriers of our own.
Many of them came anyway, and those who came were trapped here for fear of never being able to go back home and return again. At the tail end of this decades-long process, we sat around wondering why there were tens of millions of “illegals” in this country, and without ever answering the question, decided that they had to be prevented from coming or else deported.
In the interests of simplicity and clarity, I’ve saved the academic bells and whistles for another time.* So I don’t expect this post to convert anyone from skepticism to belief. If you’re skeptical, just consider what you’ve read a just-so story. The deeper point is not so much whether the account I’ve given is true or false, but whether it’s a hypothesis worth entertaining. Put another way, the question is at the outset more important the answer: why is it that we have a “migrant crisis” in the first place?
Amazing how infrequently this question is posed in that stark fashion, but at some point in their grand quest to deport somewhere between ten and a hundred million people, Americans are going to have to ask: why exactly did so many millions of people, particularly from Latin America, leave their homes to come here illegally, given both the costs of leaving and the costs of entry? One possibility is that people so desperately needed to exit these foreign shitholes for the “land of opportunity” that they did so, trampling our laws and flouting our customs along the way. In other words, the fundamental variable is opportunism, namely theirs. Another possibility, however, is that we did something to them to induce them to flee their homes. The fundamental variable here is harm, grievous harm inflicted by us on them that made migration a necessity. I’ve described only one example of these harms. There are many others.
But the introduction of this one factor makes a gigantic difference to the way we think and talk about immigration. There’s a big difference between our refusing to absorb a population of people that’s merely coming here to grab at the opportunity that’s on offer, and our proscribing the in-migration of people who are fleeing their countries of origin and braving our punitive immigration system because we have put them in the position of having to flee the effects of our policies. It is ungenerous and (I would say) wrong to do the first thing, but evil to do the second. The first is like refusing to help someone whose house has burned down. The second is like helping to burn their house down and then, at gunpoint, forbidding their entry into a neighborhood where they might be housed.
America’s debate about immigration is structured by the dogmatic refusal to consider the second possibility–that our so-called migration crisis is the predictable blowback of our own policies, starting with trade policy. Americans have trouble considering the possibility that we crossed international borders, knowingly putting people out of work, then denied them the right to cross the same borders to find work, and then put them in cages when they took a gamble, crossed the border, and succeeded. But that’s literally what’s happened.
Discussion of immigration issues in American discourse often seems like a strenuous attempt to wish this possibility out of existence. We speak as though, as the superheroes of our own morality tale, we can’t be evil; “evil” is just an “emotional word” that over-simplifies “complexity.” “Complexity,” as usual, turns out to be a synonym for “exculpatory.” Yet the academic literature in economics, sociology, and Latin American Studies contains hundreds, maybe thousands of pages documenting that my just-so story is precisely what happened. All that’s missing from this rather dry and unemotional literature is the further verdict of evil. That’s mostly because social scientists either don’t believe in evil, or regard themselves as professionally duty-bound not to bring it up.
Most of us aren’t social scientists, so we don’t have that excuse. If I burned your house down and then demanded that you stay put because your entry into my neighborhood was undesirable, “evil” would really be the only word for me. Its use might be emotionally fraught. It might be unpleasant. It might abstract from a lot of complexity. But it would still fit.
I think Americans should try on the hypothesis that it does fit. You have a migration crisis because you created one. People want to leave their homes in foreign countries and risk incarceration and deportation not so much because the United States is such a great country, but because the United States has done such a great job at ruining their countries.
The theological problem of evil is how to reconcile the bad things in the world with the existence of a good God. The political problem of evil is how to reconcile the resentment America inspires with the fact that people so badly want to migrate here. The latter problem can be solved by putting 2 + 2 together. Maybe the things that inspire resentment are the very things that explain why people want to migrate here. It sounds like a paradox, unless you’re on the receiving end. Then it becomes a matter of survival.
*I rely here heavily on the work of Douglas Massey and Patricia Fernandez-Kelly of Princeton’s Department of Sociology. The classic source is their co-authored paper, “Borders for Whom? The Role of NAFTA in US-Mexico Migration,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 610:1 (March 2007), pp. 98-118, as well as Douglas Massey, Jorge Durand, and Karen A. Pren, “Why Border Enforcement Backfired,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 121 (2016), pp. 1557-1600. The literature has proliferated immensely beyond that without changing the basic outlines of the story.
