nl open borders faq v2

# Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free!

* economic reasons

    * [open borders (i.e. complete elimination of barriers to labor mobility) is estimated to increase global GDP by 50-100%](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.25.3.83)

    * [even unauthorized immigration is good fiscally](https://news.rice.edu/news/2020/economic-benefits-illegal-immigration-outweigh-costs-baker-institute-study-shows)

    * [even low-skill immigrants have a "significant" positive economic impact and fears of their possible negative impact on wages and employment of low-skill natives are "largely misplaced"](https://carnegieendowment.org/files/Effect-of-Low-Skilled-Labor-Working-Paper-1.pdf)

    * [immigration increases productivity through improved specialization of labor](https://www.nber.org/papers/w15507)

    * [there is little evidence that immigration has "large or systematic" effects on the unemployment rates of low-skill natives](https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/natives.pdf)

    * [if you take into account immigrant entrepreneurship, immigrants create more jobs than they take](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27778/w27778.pdf)

    * [immigration doesn't decrease wages long-term, it actually increases them](https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/doi/10.1162/rest_a_01380/117901/Migrants-Trade-and-Market-Access)

    * [the short-term decrease of wages due to immigration is small, possibly zero (specifically, the wage elasticity of immigration is probably between 0 and 0.1), and mostly affects other immigrants](https://wol.iza.org/articles/do-immigrant-workers-depress-the-wages-of-native-workers)

    * [open borders would increase annual wages of those from developing countries, both migrants and non-migrants, by about double; this is accompanied by only a minor, temporary reduction in real wages of those in developing countries that disappears as the capital-labor ratio adjusts over time](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18307/w18307.pdf)

* sociological reasons

    * [immigration doesn't degrade institutions](https://www.cato.org/books/wretched-refuse)

    * [even immigrants from very different cultures integrate well and the integration of their descendants accelerates with each passing generation](https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-soc-073117-041335)

    * unauthorized immigrants aren't any more likely to be [terrorists](https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/nowrasteh-testimony.pdf) or [drug smugglers](https://www.cato.org/blog/fentanyl-smuggled-us-citizens-us-citizens-not-asylum-seekers) or [even regular criminals](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/undocumented-immigrants-are-half-as-likely-to-be-arrested-for-violent-crimes-as-u-s-born-citizens/) than citizens are and by some estimates are actually less likely

    * [our population growth is declining and we need future workers to support future retirees](https://bipartisanpolicy.org/download/?file=/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Immigrations-Effect-on-the-Social-Security-System.pdf)

* ethical reasons

    * [freedom of movement is a human right](https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/immigration.htm)

    * [restrictive border policies put migrants at increased risk of human rights abuses and other forms of harm](https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/07/26/statement-human-rights-watch-human-cost-harsh-us-immigration-deterrence-policies)

    * [immigration has a net positive impact on the sending country](https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR244.html)

    * [the children of even poor immigrants have high economic mobility](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/1/20942642/study-paper-american-dream-economic-mobility-immigrant-income-boustan-abramitzky-jacome-perez)

* practical reasons

    * [it's not clear that harsher border enforcement policies have been effective in deterring unauthorized immigration and there is some evidence they've been ineffective](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5049707/)

    * [it appears that the political, social, and economic environments are much more significant factors in determining unauthorized immigration levels than border policies are](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2013.00613.x)

    * the US essentially had open borders for its first century, ending when federal immigration restrictions were placed on Chinese immigrants in 1875 (the Page Act) and 1882 (the Chinese Exclusion Act), so there is historical evidence that an open border is practical

        * incidentally, [these restrictions were commonly evaded and their passage was preceded by widespread fearmongering about nonwhite "hordes"](https://uncpress.org/book/9780807854488/at-americas-gates/)

* there is another defense of open borders available in the /r/neoliberal sidebar [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/wiki/openborders)

* further reading

    * Kwame Anthony Appiah's [*Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers*](https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393329339) (2006)

    * Alex Sager's [*Against Borders: Why the World Needs Free Movement of People*](https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786606297/Against-Borders-Why-the-World-Needs-Free-Movement-of-People) (2020)

    * Alex Nowrasteh's [*Wretched Refuse: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions*](https://www.cato.org/books/wretched-refuse) (2020)

    * Johan Norberg's [*Open: How Collaboration and Curiosity Shaped Humankind*](https://www.boswellbooks.com/book/9781786497192) (2021)