Does the current pandemic seal the case against open borders? Though I foresee many readers’ incredulity, the correct answer is: no way. Why not? Key point: Borders are already about 98% closed to immigration. As I’ve explained before:
Let C=total number of immigrants – legal and illegal – who annually enter the U.S. under existing laws.
Let F=the total number of immigrants who would annually enter the U.S. under open borders.
Under perfectly open borders, C=F. Under perfectly closed borders, C=0. Where does the status quo fall on this continuum? The obvious metric:
Open Borders Index=C/F
With closed borders, the Open Borders Index=0. With open borders, the Open Borders Index=1.
Regardless of your views on immigration, it’s hard to see how your estimate of the actually existing Open Borders Index could exceed .05. After all, there are hundreds of millions of people who would love to move to the U.S. just to shine our shoes…
Which brings us to the crucial question: How much protection have 98% closed borders given us against the pandemic? The answer: Virtually none.
To successfully prevent the spread of infection, you would have to do vastly more than permanently stop immigration. You would also have to permanently stop both trade and tourism. As long as foreigners can fly over for a visit, or unload their goods on our docks, foreigners can and will infect us with their diseases. Indeed, as long as natives can fly away for a visit, or unload our goods on other country’s docks, natives can and will infect us with their diseases. The sad fact is that even very low absolute levels of international contact have been more than sufficient to spread infection almost everywhere on Earth. The marginal cost of higher levels of contact is therefore minimal. Do you really think any countries in Europe would be much safer for long if they had merely “stayed out of the EU”?
In fact, if you’re focused solely on preventing the spread of infectious disease, immigrants are plainly better than tourists and sailors. Few would-be immigrants would be deterred by a mandatory health inspection prior to entry, because they expect large long-run gains. For tourists and sailors, in contrast, a mandatory health inspection would often be a deal-breaker. Remember: Even a simple visa requirement reduces tourism by an estimated 70%. Just imagine the effects of a serious medical exam for every entering or returning international traveler.
Admittedly, you could bite the bullet of full isolation, but that’s crazy. Hoxha’s Albania and Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea were awful for many reasons, but autarchy was plainly high up the list. And to repeat, to make this work you can’t simply keep foreigners out. You must also keep natives in – or at least tell them, “Once you leave, you can never come back.”
What about temporary travel restrictions to quarantine a severe international disease? As I’ve explained many times, I am not an absolutist. Given strong evidence that modest restrictions on mobility have dramatic benefits, such restrictions are justifiable – intranationally as well as internationally. But that is – and should be – a high bar indeed. The freedom of movement that we have lost is the freedom of movement that we have denied to non-citizens for a century.
READER COMMENTS
JS Denain
Mar 24 2020 at 10:15am
also relevant: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31056047
more travel can lead to more cross-immunity, which can *decrease* the probability of a global pandemic (of course, this is not very pertinent in the case of an immediate pandemic risk).
jens
Mar 24 2020 at 11:33am
Spot on. Footnote: Mandatory health checks (for tourists and travelers) could also be anonymized. In the event of a pandemic, this would not help directly for containment purposes, but it would be helpful for general monitoring. Alternatively, you could also think about carrying out the health check via a kind of trustee – e.g. an international organization or the country of origin of the traveler – who is only obliged to provide further information in specific well-defined cases.
Amos
Mar 25 2020 at 11:39am
Given that the world’s borders are roughly 98% closed, wouldn’t it follow that the open borders world analysed in “Trillion Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk” would be hit with a roughly 98% higher infection rate during the beginning stages of COVID-19? Of course, the pandemic wouldn’t continue to spread at such a rate once mandatory health checks and social distancing measures were implemented. but the initial damage would still have been done. The natural response to this would be to argue that given the rarity of global pandemics and the fact that globalization has probably prevented a large number of potential pandemics, and given the ethical and economic benefits of open borders, the pros of open borders outweigh the cons of a COVID-like pandemic. However, the recorded benefits of globalization on public immunity are calculated in a world whose borders are 98% closed. and, given that humans are becoming steadily more resistant to our own medicine, surely the risks imposed by a pandemic in an open borders utopia would be so astronomical (both in terms of economic collapse and the loss of human lives) that it would outweigh the ethical and economic benefits of hypothetical open borders. After all, didn’t the framers of the American constitution write “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in that order for a reason? Life exists ontologically prior to liberty and so is a greater priority for the state. Perhaps the risk of the death of a large fraction of the human population is so terrible, that it warrants curtailing the liberty of free movement and association by 98%.
Matthew
Mar 25 2020 at 11:50am
Your metric isn’t doing the work you want it to, though. Analogize with laws against, say, murder. With no laws preventing murder we’d see more murders, with our current laws we see some. Does it follow that our current laws, allowing as they do for some murders, are effectively useless and should be repealed?
To prevent all murders we would have to be brutally repressive, just as we would need to be to prevent all illegal immigration. It does not follow from that, though, that our current level of legal prohibition is wrong or should be removed.
Matthias Görgens
Mar 25 2020 at 12:03pm
The analogy holds. Effective laws against murder prevent, say, 98% of murders. And that’s good.
Murders don’t usually grow exponentially from an initial handful of cases. And allowing murders doesn’t double world GDP.
Brian Holtz
Mar 25 2020 at 2:46pm
What seals the case against open borders is your admission that hundreds of millions of impoverished people would flood across America’s open borders.
Does anyone recall how long Bryan has been on record with that prediction?
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