Do You Favor 'Open Borders'?

Short Answer: Yes. Longer Answer: The Problem Isn't That the 'Border' Is 'Open'; Read On ...

Let’s start by picking some very low-hanging fruit.

A government that regulates industries, plays favorites among market participants, requires licensing for occupations, and manipulates interest rates and the value of currency isn’t allowing a “free market” or an “open market” to operate.

An astute observer would more properly realize that it’s more accurate to call such a scenario a “subsidized market” or “crony market.”

The same holds true for freedom of speech and freedom of the press. A government-regulated environment for expression is hardly free, especially if the government is also playing favorites and suppressing some people’s rights. It can happen with social media, or with books, or with any medium of expression.

And when it does happen, careful observers know that it indicates a lack of open debate and free speech/press. It’s more accurate to call it “favored/disfavored speech” or outright “censorship.”

The benefits of truly open markets and open debate

I spoke with Bryan Hyde for his daily broadcast, “The Bryan Hyde Show,” published Friday, Feb. 2 (he’s also a fellow Substack creator) about the evils of violence-based interactions — so, everything done by governments! — but also about healthy competition.

Bryan opened his show talking about solving problems “without government as the primary ‘problem solver.’ ” Later in the episode, we discussed how government drives negativity and obscures healthy social interactions. I said:

People should express their ideas and goals, and compete for influence, as long as it’s nonviolent. … So we are going to jostle, we are going to compete, we are going to throw our ideas at each other.  We’re going to scaffold on them.  Hopefully, we’re active listeners, so we’re hearing the other person out, reading fairly, comprehending. …

But as long as you’re involved with a coercive civil authority, which is what your government is — an institution that claims a monopoly on violence — your politics will always be evil.

Key to advocating for free and open interactions is to recognize what they are and what they aren’t.

Which brings us to another important and newsworthy topic, and some confusion I’ve heard and read in framing the issue.

Image by brushpiquetr via iStock

‘Open border’?

There’s so much talk about “open border” and “open immigration” to describe current U.S. government migration policy. Really, do a search on Twitter/X for those terms and you’ll see plenty of people who know better than to call cronyism a “free/open market” or censorship a “free/open debate” nevertheless talking about an “open border.”

The U.S. border with Mexico is hardly an open border, even as thousands of migrants cross it daily, because both the federal government and lower levels of government are intruding upon the process of migration.

The Diversity Visa Program effectively plays favorites with ethnic groups and countries of origin on an annual basis, while immigration quotas can “drive individuals to come to the U.S. without documentation, since people who would have otherwise immigrated legally face a substantial and unrealistic backlog.”

The bloated welfare state effectively subsidizes migration, along with distorting labor and resource markets for citizens and other “legal” residents.

And globalist government agencies like the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration (IOM) loudly and expensively manipulate migration.

None of this represents a truly free or open immigration process.

And that’s a shame, because migration is a natural human right. Discriminating against people based on the imaginary lines drawn by sociopaths (more commonly known as “political borders”) inevitably interferes with voluntary interactions. Furthermore, government immigration policy usurps the private-property rights of people who live near the political borders. And since all natural human rights spring from human dignity, these intrusive policies run afoul of both anarchism/voluntarism and genuine Christianity.

I support truly open immigration — the same way I support truly open markets and truly open speech and press — uninfected by coercive civil authority. In doing so, I have to be honest about the terminology and the fallacy of looking to the manipulative government to be the “problem solver” when manipulative government is a terribly evil part of the problem.

The Comments are ‘open’ …

Let me know your thoughts on this hot-button topic.

There are no subsidies nor other crony favoritism for leaving a comment, though I promise to read all of them and respond in kind :-)