Open Borders and International Migration Policy

The Effects of Unrestricted Immigration in the United States, France, and Ireland

J. Fetzer

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137513915
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137513922
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Although philosophers debate the morality of open borders, few social scientists have explored what would happen if immigration were no longer limited. This book looks at three examples of temporarily unrestricted migration in Miami, Marseille, and Dublin and finds that the effects were much less catastrophic than opponents of immigration claim.

1

Theories of Open Borders

Abstract: Political philosophers such as Joseph Carens, Catherine Wihtol de Wenden, and Will Kymlicka have argued for the morality of an open-borders immigration policy, yet other social theorists such as Michael Walzer, Stephen Macedo, and John Isbister dismiss this approach because of the supposed harm that unrestricted immigration would cause to natives. After exploring the normative arguments for and against open borders, the chapter concludes that the crux of many theoretical objections to unrestricted immigration is empirical. Unfortunately, however, many of the factual assumptions that immigration restrictionists make have not been fully or rigorously tested. This monograph therefore aims to see if unregulated immigration actually hurts natives. In testing this hypothesis, the book focuses on three natural experiments: Mariel Cubans in Miami; Algerian “Repatriates” in Marseille; and Eastern Europeans in Dublin.

Keywords: Algerians; Cubans; Dublin, Ireland; Eastern Europeans; immigration policy; Joseph Carens, Catherine Wihtol de Wenden, Will Kymlicka, Michael Walzer, Stephen Macedo, John Isbister; Marseille, France; Miami, Florida, United States; natural experiments; open borders

Fetzer, Joel S. Open Borders and International Migration Policy: The Effects of Unrestricted Immigration in the United States, France, and Ireland. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137513922.0005.

What happens when massive numbers of immigrants – say a hundred thousand – show up almost overnight in a city? One way to approach this question is by looking at three contrasting films illustrating three distinct scenarios, one in Miami, Florida, a second in Marseille, France, and the third in Dublin, Ireland. The worst-case example is Scarface (Bregman 2003), an immigrant-gangster movie so horrifically violent that even Kurt Vonnegut walked out of its preview in revulsion at its gruesomeness (McMurran et al. 1983). Set in a public housing project in Marseille, the French film Samia (Faucon 2000) portrays an intermediate outcome where the young female protagonist struggles to escape her Algerian immigrant family’s sexist norms. And the most optimistic work of cinematography is Once (Carney 2007), a musical love story about a Dublin busker and a flower vendor from the Czech Republic. Like these films, this book examines the socioeconomic effects of temporarily unrestricted immigration into these three cities and generally supports a similar overall ranking, with Dublin being the “most benevolent situation that there can be” (Wickham 2011). To set the stage for my later empirical analysis, Chapter 1 begins by summarizing the theoretical arguments for and against unlimited immigration, often referred to as “open borders,” and detailing the history of migration into the three cities.

Theories of open borders

The most widely read articulation of the ethics of free migration is probably Joseph Carens’ article “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders” (1987; see also Carens 2013). In it, he uses the frameworks of John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Utilitarianism to create an argument for abolishing state restrictions on immigration. Employing the first schema, Carens believes that someone in Rawls’ “original position” behind the “veil of ignorance” would naturally choose a world of open borders over one where national frontiers are impermeable. Who knows if one might happen to be born as a poor person in a war-torn or underdeveloped country and need to migrate to a peaceful, affluent region for survival?

Second, following Nozick’s emphasis on Lockean property rights, Carens contends that immigration restrictions would violate one’s “right to enter into voluntary exchanges with other individuals.” If, for example, “a farmer from the United States wanted to hire workers from Mexico,” the state would have no right to ban such employment since the government has no moral authority to interfere with consensual exchanges of labor and money. “So long as the Mexicans were peaceful and did not steal, trespass on private property, or otherwise violate the rights of other individuals,” Nozick’s theory implies, “their entry and their actions would be none of the state’s business.”

Third, Carens rests his case on Utilitarianism. Because this philosophy aims to “maximize utility” and assumes the moral equality of individuals, an ideal immigration policy should be “the one that maximize[s] overall economic gains.” To achieve this prosperity, however, most classical economists recommend the “free mobility of capital and labor.” The latter policy, of course, requires open borders.

A forcefully articulated but more implicit argument is that closed or restricted borders would have to overcome the very (or prohibitively?) high moral hurdle required to justify the use of violence against innocent people:

To Haitians in small, leaky boats confronted by armed Coast Guard cutters, to Salvadorans dying from heat and lack of air after being smuggled into the Arizona desert, to Guatemalans crawling through rat-infested sewer pipes from Mexico to California – to these people the borders, guards and guns are all too apparent. What justifies the use of force against such people? ... They are ordinary, peaceful people, seeking only the opportunity to build decent, secure lives for themselves and their families. On what moral grounds can these sorts of people be kept out? What gives anyone the right to point guns at them?

On the basis of both philosophical reasoning and moral intuition, then, he concludes that “the current restrictions on immigration in Western democracies – even in the most open ones like Canada and the United States – are not justifiable.”

Writing in French and with different philosophical underpinnings, Catherine Wihtol de Wenden (2013a, 2013b) reaches a similar understanding. Because of increasing global interdependence, technological progress, and ideological diffusion, nation-states are no longer, if they ever were, capable of controlling the political transformations caused by widespread migration. Thus, the new generation of human rights, such as the right to migrate, can only be conceived of transnationally. Even under current laws, states have no right to bar the entry of legitimate refugees, the victims of child abuse, and the close family members of citizens. Since restricting migration ultimately produces violence in both source and host countries, she believes, states should come to recognize that their long-term stability depends on allowing individuals to cross their borders freely. For migrants, opening up borders would eliminate a major cause of popular racism against them and would help guarantee their right to decide freely where to reside and earn a living as well as their prerogative to avoid second-class citizenship and slavery-like working conditions (2013b:87–89). Finally, to demonstrate that such ideas are not merely an unrealizable utopia, she documents the current open-borders regimes of MERCOSUR, the Nordic Union, and Schengen (2013b:81–86 & 91–92).

Canadian philosopher Will Kymlicka (2001; see also Oberman 2015), meanwhile, justifies his conditional support for open borders on the existence of global economic inequality. Immigration restriction might be justified if all humans, who are inherently of equal moral worth, had a reasonable chance of obtaining enough material goods to lead a “decent life.” Instead, however, the “grossly unequal international distribution of resources between states ... condemns some people to abject poverty while allowing others a life of privilege.” Like Carens, Kymlicka borrows from Rawls and argues that a rational person in the original position would prefer to remedy this problem using some kind of global redistributive tax over purely open borders; unrestricted immigration would supposedly not help the most destitute and might “undermine or inhibit the benefits from creating cohesive national communities.” In reality, however, the affluent North is not sending enough foreign aid to poor countries to allow their needy citizens to sustain a humane existence without emigrating. Thus, Kymlicka concludes, “rich countries who are unwilling to share their wealth in this way ... forfeit the right to restrict admission into their borders.” Liberal egalitarian principles rightly condemn immigration restriction as a means of “hoarding an unfair share of resources.”

Besides these three noted political theorists, other scholars or activists have also made the case for something like open borders in one way or another. Teresa Hayter (2000:149–166), for instance, contends that border controls violate fundamental human rights, are ineffective, do not promote economic prosperity, and are “inherently racist.” Howard Chang (2011) argues that immigration restrictions are “morally suspect” because they violate the norm of “equal concern for all persons,” or what he labels a “cosmopolitan theory of distributive justice.” Chandran Kukathas (2011) bases his defense of open borders on arguments for individual freedom, world prosperity, justice for the poor, and humanity toward refugees. Rainer Bauböck (2011) roots his support of freedom of movement in a broad conception of citizenship. Aviva Chomsky (2007) discredits the myths that bolster popular anti-immigration sentiment. Kevin Johnson (2007) argues that open borders would increase the government’s respect for the civil rights of racial minorities and allow law-enforcement authorities to focus on true threats to public safety. Nigel Harris (2007; see also 2002) claims that unrestricted immigration would allow migrants to contribute fully toward economic progress. And still other thinkers have rooted their arguments for open borders in free-market conservatism (Riley 2008), cultural claims (Lenard 2010), natural law (Dummett 1992; see also Yuengert 2003; Rabkin 2001), individuals’ equal moral worth (Whelan 1988), Christianity (Miller 2001), economic efficiency (Kennan 2012), and the logic of unregulated trade (Ebeling and Hornberger 1995).

Empirical arguments in theories of immigration restriction

Many scholarly opponents of open borders, on the other hand, often seem to base their policy preferences less on abstract moral precepts than on empirical claims about the real-life effects of open borders. Michael Walzer (1983), for example, is one of the most prominent critics of free migration. In Spheres of Justice, he asserts that unlimited immigration would cause several problems. First, something like ethnic conflict and “culture wars” would presumably increase, at least at the local level (1983:39):

The politics and the culture of a modern democracy probably require the kind of largeness, and also the kind of boundedness, that states provide. I don’t mean to deny the value of sectional cultures and ethnic communities; I mean only to suggest the rigidities that would be forced upon both in the absence of inclusive and protective states. ... The distinctiveness of cultures and groups depends upon closure and, without it, cannot be conceived as a stable feature of human life. ... At some level of political organization, something like the sovereign state must take shape and claim the authority to make its own admissions policy, to control and sometime to restrain the flow of immigrants.

Next, Walzer (1983:47–48) suggests that unrestricted migration would harm preexisting residents economically. He first asks rhetorically, “Are those inhabitants [of a prosperous country] morally bound to admit immigrants from poorer countries for as long as superfluous resources exist?” His conclusion: “there must be some limit [to immigration ... ], else communal wealth will be subject to indefinite drainage.” In Walzer’s view, rich states of course have the right to keep out poor immigrants. Critics would respond that such “rich states” are very often the principal cause of the desperate poverty of the migrants, but for my argument the key point is that Walzer assumes less-well-off newcomers would take economic resources away from the citizens of the First World country instead of further contributing to natives’ wealth.

In his essay in support of immigration restriction, political philosopher Stephen Macedo (2011; see also 2007) likewise points to what he views as the negative economic effects of migration on poor Americans. Citing George Borjas, he claims that the newcomers “may have a downward effect on wages overall” and substantially reduced “the wages of high school dropouts.” Furthermore, Macedo suggests that the inflow of people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds may undermine support for the welfare state or other redistributive policies, programs he seems to favor, and so foster conflict among different ethnic groups and classes: “immigration’s contribution to increased ethnic and racial heterogeneity may also weaken social solidarity and undermine support for the provision of public goods, including those to help the poor.”

Finally, in his direct critique of Carens’ justification for open borders, John Isbister (2000; see also 1996:225–237) maintains that “border controls in rich countries can be justified by liberals on the grounds that they protect the most disadvantaged residents of those countries.” He then goes on to elaborate the various ways that immigration may supposedly harm less well-off natives: “An uncontrolled influx of poor people from the third world might well make the condition of the poor in rich countries much worse. The immigrants might compete for jobs, take jobs away, [and] lower wages” of the native-born poor. By causing such negative effects in the labor market, Isbister contends, “open immigration would likely make the American rich richer and the American poor poorer,” another result that he dislikes. Of course, other academic writers have critiqued one or another aspect of Carens’ rationale for open borders (Higgins 2008; Bloom 2009; Bartram 2010; Pevnick 2011; see also Schuck and Smith 1985), but I have focused on Walzer, Macedo, and Isbister to illustrate how opponents of free migration frequently imbed empirical claims in their philosophical arguments.

The main purpose of the present volume, in contrast, is to test such empirical claims, not simply to assert them. Surprisingly enough, book-length, systematic studies of this issue are rare. The scholarly work closest to what I am proposing here is probably Migration without Borders: Essays on the Free Movement of People, edited by Antoine Pécoud and Paul de Guchteneire (2007). It does try to envision what the socioeconomic effects of open borders would be, but as an edited volume, it emphasizes certain aspects of migration much more than others and lacks the cohesiveness of a single-authored book. Although not addressing unrestricted immigration per se, the National Research Council’s The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration (1997) does provide an excellent, relatively neutral review of the scientific literature on the consequences of migration, though it is almost two decades old now. As each chapter of my monograph will document, some journal articles and book chapters have also addressed particular aspects of this question. Yet even on perhaps the most-studied dependent variable, effects on the labor market, economists continue to disagree vehemently (see Chapter 2). This book will thus help fill in this gap in the social-scientific literature by investigating how massive, unrestricted immigration affected the politics, economies, and societies in three representative metropolises: Miami, Marseille, and Dublin.

History of migration into the three cities

Dissatisfied with life in Communist Cuba, several Havana residents used public busses to crash through the gates of the Peruvian embassy on March 28 and April 1, 1980. Soon, thousands of Cubans crowded onto the embassy grounds seeking asylum. The situation in Havana deteriorated rapidly until April 19, when the official newspaper Granma began publishing Fidel Castro’s statements about such “scum [escoria]” being allowed to leave the country via the port of Mariel (Castro Ruz 1980; Engstrom 1997:54–56 & 62; Unzueta 2011).

Beginning on April 21, a flood of refugees (and, apparently, some former prisoners, patients from mental hospitals, gay men, disabled children, and perhaps even Communist spies) suddenly began arriving in South Florida. Miami-based Cuban exile groups facilitated the migration by sponsoring boats for the round trip from Florida to Mariel and back. Beginning with “thousands” of smaller, “slow boats,” the Cuban-American relatives from Miami eventually resorted to chartering larger shrimping and fishing craft to accommodate even more refugees. In the end, close to 100,000 migrants from Cuba would move to Miami for good during a six-month period in 1980, representing an increase in the labor force of around 7 percent (Silva 1985:23; Card 1990; Engstrom 1997:62; Arenas 2010:283; Nijman 2011:54–55; Chao 2012:258–259; Díaz G. 2013; Visiedo 2013). As Miami-Dade College President Eduardo Padrón (2013) emphasizes, “the migration took place in a very short period of time ... in weeks,” which “in itself caused some disruption of life in Miami.” A volunteer at the refugee camps at the time, Padrón notes that matching migrants to their family, who typically did not even know that they had left Cuba, was logistically challenging.

Relations among local, state, and federal governments during the Mariel boatlift varied from highly cooperative to conflictual. As the governor at the time, Bob Graham (2013), puts it, both President Jimmy Carter (who was running for reelection) and he had a “common interest in trying to deal with this problem with the least amount of social disruption.” He remembers “some tension between the two” governments over “the effectiveness” of the other’s efforts and over “who was going to pay for all this.” Graham nevertheless feels the “overall effort was more collaborative th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Theories of Open Borders
• 2  The Effect of Unrestricted Immigration on Labor Markets
• 3  The Effect of Unrestricted Immigration on Public Finances
• 4  The Effect of Unrestricted Immigration on the Housing Market
• 5  The Effect of Unrestricted Immigration on Schools
• 6  The Effect of Unrestricted Immigration on Crime
• 7  The Effect of Unrestricted Immigration on Ethnic Voting and Racial Violence
• 8  How Harmful Is Unrestricted Immigration?
• Bibliography
• Index