Two views on borders

2025-06-21T19:00:00.000Z

The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy offers two interesting articles on the topic of borders: "A Defense of Open Borders," and "Immigration Enforcement and Fairness to Would-Be Immigrants." They made two completely different conclusions on two closely related matters.

Christopher Freiman, "A Defense of Open Borders"

This article talks about border policies. Freiman offers two arguments that favours "open borders," which they define to be one "with very few restrictions on entry."

The first argument, as they call "the right to immigrate," can be summarized as follows:

(1a) If forcibly preventing A from peacefully crossing the border will harm A, then the government should not forcibly prevent A from peacefully crossing the border.
(1b) Forcibly preventing people from peacefully crossing the border will harm them.
(1c) Thus, the government should not forcibly prevent people from peacefully crossing the border.

The second argument is about economic benefits:

(2a) If opening borders can significantly raise the living standards of the poorest people, then the government should have open borders.
(2b) Opening borders can significantly raise the living standards of the poorest people.
(2c) Thus, the government should have open borders.

To me, both arguments seem plausible. Both focus on the well-being of people -- the "would-be" immigrants, and the author thinks the government should adopt the kind of policy that promotes the well-being of people (no matter where they are!).

Freiman then offers 4 counter-arguments. The first two of them relates to the cost of other people. They are:

(3a) The government should forcibly prevent A if A results in increased cost of other people.
(3b) Immigrants entering results in increased cost of other people.
(3c) Thus, the government should forcibly prevent immigrants entering.

and

(4a) The government should forcibly prevent A if A results in lowered wages of other people.
(4b) Immigrants entering results in lowered wages of other people.
(4c) Thus, the government should forcibly prevent immigrants entering.

The author claims (3a) cannot be true. And the reason is that, in my words, people have "the downward freedom" -- they are free to do certain self-harm actions which may result in them needing more social assistence. If such actions are permitted even if they result in increased cost, then increased cost cannot be justified as a reason to restrict immigration. For (4), they say that (4b) is at best questionable, and even if (4b) is true, (4a) cannot be true. They raised several examples, one of them being that if a company's thriving results in employees of one of its competitor earning lower wages, it would be unreasonable to think government should forcibly prevent that from happening.

Again, this still focuses on the well-being. The author thinks that even if an open border will decrease the well-being of other people than immigrants, it is not justified to not have it. Rather, the government should find other methods to make-up the potential decrease in others' well-being.

The next counter-argument is about what the author calls "partiality." It boils down to the following:

(5a) If citizens of country A owes more to citizens of country A than to non-citizens of country A, and the government of country A doing B benefits citizens of country A, then the government of country A should do B.
(5b) Citizens of country A owes more to citizens of country A than to non-citizens of country A.
(5c) the government of country A restricting its borders benefits citizens of country A.
(5d) Thus, the government of country A should restrict its borders.

The author thinks (5b) is questionable. It cannot be taken for granted that citizenship by itself determines whether one owes more to another. It needs justification. And the author presents one possible justification:

(5b1) If X benefits Y more, then Y owes more to X than to non-X.
(5b2) Citizens of country A benefits citizens of country A more.
(5b3) Thus, citizens of country A owes more to citizens of country A than to non-citizens of country A.

In this one, the author thinks (5b2) is unplausible. In today's world, people may well be using things made by those who are non-citizens of their country. But on the other hand, there are some citizens who might be benefiting others less.

It then continues with another possible justification:

(5b'1) If X shares a common culture, then X has special obligation to X.
(5b'2) Citizens of country A shares a common culture.
(5b'3) Thus, citizens of country A has special obligation to citizens of country A.

The author rejects (5b'2), because citizenship does not necessarily imply shared culture. This is easy to understand as we see many border towns where people on the two sides have more in common in terms of culture than other parts of their country.

Furthermore, the author thinks even if (5b) holds, the argument is still not successful. And this time, another reason of well-being comes in: they say that having an open border will hugely increase the well-being of those who have the least of it, and only slightly, if at all, decrease the well-being of those who have a lot. And the justification is that, those who desire the most to migrate tend to be much poorer than the people in their desired country of destination.

The last counter-argument the author considers in this article is about "self-determination" of membership. In this argument, citizenship is compared to membership of a club: if club members can decide who can become a member, so can citizens of a country. It is summarized to:

(6a) Members of an organization A can determine who can become a member of A.
(6b) Thus, citizens of a country can determine who can become a citizen of it.

The author rejects (6a), because they think the power of deciding who can join is usually put together with the power of deciding who must leave. Yet, it would be unreasonable to think someone's citizenship can be deprived of just because citizens want it.

In general, this article successfully addresses why an open-border policy is favourable in terms of well-being. Its main point is that, the government should make policies that are condusive to people's well-being, no matter where they are, and that if the well-being of some interferes with some others, and a policy can significantly increase the well-being of those who have the least while slightly decrease that of those who have the most, then the government should make that policy.

Of course, this article is not without its limitations. One of them is that this theory suits well to the borders of the more developed countries, but it does not explain that well for the borders of the less developed ones. In more developed countries, immigrants (economic immigrants that this article is mainly talking about) mainly seek job opportunities in exchange of a better salary. However, people who migrate to less developed countries may not have the same kind of profile. Maybe they go there to provide technical or medical support. In this case, the immigrants' well-being might not be increasing, but rather decreasing, and thus argument (1) may need adjustments -- because here preventing their entry might benefit them more than harm. Furthermore, some who go to less developed countries are investors, with the intent of exploiting the workers there. Depending on other local policies, this may lead to the decrease of well-being of those who have the least -- the people who are already in the less developed countries, while increasing the well-being of those who have the most -- the rich investors. By saying this, I am not implying that less developed countries are justified to have closed borders. Rather, I mean to say that this particular article itself does not suffice to prove otherwise. We will need further justification for that.

Also, the reasoning provided by the article presupposes the existence of a government (that functions well), which can lead to problems when we are examining border policies in areas that do not match this description, for example, in war zones. In Palestine, it is usually not their government that decides the border policies -- it is the Israeli government that does so. Imagine the most extreme situation, would the Israeli government be justified to disallow humanitarian aids into Gaza, even if, let's suppose, allowing it will cause every single Israeli citizen's well-being to decrease so much that every one of them would rather die? This article does not answer this question, and yet I think such action cannot be justified. Therefore, there must be some other, deeper reasons on why borders, or at least, closed borders, are unjust. For advocates for total border abolishment, this article does not provide sufficient support.

Hrishikesh Joshi, "Immigration Enforcement and Fairness to Would-Be Immigrants"

This article, unlike the previous one, covers a different though similar topic: the execution of border policies, rather the making of it. The main idea of it is: If a border policy grants entry to and only to X, then the government should take reasonable precautions to prevent non-X from entering.

The argument is as follows:

(7a) If a border policy grants entry to and only to X, and the government fails to take reasonable precautions to prevent non-X from entering, then it will be unfair to other non-X who also want to enter.
(7b) The government should not be unfair to other non-X who also want to enter.
(7c) Thus, if a border policy grants entry to and only to X, then the government should take reasonable precautions to prevent non-X from entering.

Apparently, this argument prioritizes fairness over well-being. This is different from the reasoning in the previous article, where fairness only comes to rescue when the well-being of two groups interfere with eath other.

In this article, the author does carve out some exceptions, i.e. what they call "refugees," whose definition is restricted to those who would otherwise die or be persecuted. This means that well-being can sometimes play a role here, but the bar is very high. The author suggests that the decrease of well-being of some person should not take precedence over fairness, unless the decrease is to the extent where they will die or be persecuted.

No matter how I dislike the conclusion of the article, I have to agree on the thing that it will be indeed unfair to, for example, those living in Asia but want to migrate to the US but lacks the opportunity to do so, if those living in Mexico does go into the US without being turned back. (Note that this is slightly different from (7a). I say it is unfair, but I am not saying it is the US government who is doing an unfair thing.)

What is weak in this argument, however, is that there exists another choice for the government on the execution of its immigration policy -- to not execute it at all. Would it be fairer in this case, for those people who live in a place that cannot go to the US only by land transportation?

Let's assume that it is still the airlines, not the US government, that does the check of immigration documents, and it is done before boarding, so people in Asia usually cannot board a flight directly to the US. But, if it happens that for people in some Asian countries, there are some countries in South America that allows them to fly there without a visa. These people can potentially board a flight there, and then travel by land to the US. Moreover, the methods of unofficial border crossings are not limited to land transportation. Immigrants in Asia can still potentially arrive by sea. It seems to me that no execution of border policy would be fairer than full execution. And if I am right, then the author should predict that the government should not execute the border policy at all.

Another problem is that different people will likely have different view on the priority between well-being and fairness. Joshi illustrates this by an anology, where a late-hand-in rule must be fairly executed even if it does not make anyone better-off. The author of the previous article will probably think this is a poor anology, citing that in these two cases, the effect on well-being is significantly different, and in the case of immigration enforcement, the immigrant's well-being can be decreased so hugely that fairness will have to yield priority. After all, if the student who hand in the assignment late really needs to not receive a deduction in points in order to get a good score, which will pave way for their scholarship, without which they will have to drop out of college due to poverty, what decision is to be made here?

Even if I am wrong in here somehow, and we must grant the soundness of the argument, the larger problem of this article lies in its applicability in real life. "Reasonable precautions" is still vague, in terms of how much is considered "reasonable." We have seen that the US government is already doing a lot to prevent people from entering via unofficial means from the US-Mexico border, and it is becoming harder and harder, more and more dangerous to do so. We will need to ask the question: is this too much, or too little? From my point of view, this is too much.

Moreover, even if the US government has the responsibility to prevent unofficial crossing of the (land) border, it does not mean that it has the responsibility, or even the right, to do other things that can harm the well-being of people. This is reflected in the conclusion of the author, where they say such action should be "humane." Yet, in No Wall They Can Build, one thing that the organization "No More Deaths" does is putting survival equipment and resources in the desert area along the border, in order that those who do cross here can survive with it. They report that a lot of the time, US government agents intentionally destroy the supplies they put, which in turn results in deaths. The argument of this article by no means justify such act.

In the end, the article presupposes that the execution and the making of a policy are two different processes that can be easily separated. However, in many places of the world, a way to grant some kind of human rights is not through the abolishment of a policy that takes away such rights, but rather, through not allocating funds for its execution. In other words, people have the rights not because there is a policy protecting it, but rather because of the absence of execution of a policy that forbids such rights. For example, capital punishment is de-facto abolished in some areas -- while there are still some laws that allows or requires it, it is not actually executed. Joshi's article cannot explain this kind of phenomena.

borders - 何事西风不待人

Two views on borders

Christopher Freiman, "A Defense of Open Borders"

Hrishikesh Joshi, "Immigration Enforcement and Fairness to Would-Be Immigrants"