politics - 何事西风不待人

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.

State-sponsored sanctions are state-sponsored racism

2024-10-24T19:00:00.000Z

You cannot do a thing unethically and claim you are being ethical at the same time.

Content warning: Apparently, this post talks extensively about discrimination, racism, politics, and ethics.

As you are probably already aware, a patch to remove a couple of Russian-identified people from the maintainers list has sneaked into the Linux kernel. With extremely very little explanation, this action quickly raises a huge amount of concerns among multiple kernel developers and GNU/ or musl/Linux users. Many question the legatimacy of this action, and wondering whether it is discriminative.

This action is racist (or: discriminative) in nature

In this article, I will use the word "racism" to mean discrimination based on ethnic identity, nationality, or country of origin. These are often interrelated and hard to disentangle.

First, my conclusion here: It is racist in nature. Why? First of all, all and only Russian-identified people (people with .ru email addresses) are removed. Without further explanation, this is clearly targeting people for being Russian. What could people think of it other than racism?

I asked the admin of social.kernel.org to comment. They claimed that all people that are removed are employed by companies that are sanctioned by US and EU, and have connections with the Russian military, thus supporting war crimes by the Russian government.

The people removed from maintainer positions were identified as employed by companies on the US and EU sanctions list. These companies are directly involved in the Russian military complex and therefore are directly complicit in war crimes being committed daily in Ukraine. If these maintainers want to think that they are "just techies helping improve the Linux kernel," or that "they are outside of politics," then they are fucking wrong.

Does this make the action any less racist? Let's be aware that the argument is composed of two parts. The first part is that the companies are sanctioned. The second part is that they are committing war crimes. The latter is easy to understand: war crimes are unethical, so it makes sense to remove people who does unethical things, and I totally agree that it is ethical in nature.

The former part, however, is much more complex. Being sanctioned is a state determined by a government. Can the attitude by some government be a proxy for whether something is ethical or not? The answer is no. We can easily find endless counter-examples. Companies like TikTok and Huawei are at large frowned upon by US governments (at the state level and at the federation level), often cited for reasons like "they are stealing personal information." The thing is, there are other companies, like Apple, Meta (Facebook) and Google, which are doing exactly the same thing, compromising people's privacy, but at the same time have not received much critics by the US governments. The reason? Because the former is from China, while the latter are from the US. At the same time, the US government frown upon the Russian government for "committing war crimes," while it supports the government of Israel, which is also committing a comparable level, or an even worse series, of war crimes. Different nationality, different treatment. This kind of double standard means that government attitudes can be inherently racist as well, and should not be used as a proxy for ethics.

Let's think about it. "Removing those who does unethical things" is ethical. "Removing those who are disliked by some government, who also happen to do unethical things," is that ethical? Because government attitudes cannot be a proxy for being ethical or not, this standard (using government "sanctions" as a proxy) is discriminative. Why? Because although it gets rid of some unethical people that does certain unethical things, there are always other unethical people that does the same kind of unethical things and are allowed to stay. When asked about whether the Linux Foundation should also be committed to removing other people that are involved in war crimes happening elsewhere, social.kernel.org's admin refused to answer, so I take it as the fact that they do not currently have plans to remove them.

This is a double standard, based only upon some government's attitude, which can largely be traced to racism. Therefore, the logic of this action can be traced to racism. Even if it is only a part of the logic, this still make the action count as racist.

Furthermore, Cryolitia told me that "only one of the removed people" can be confirmed to be employed by a company with connections to the Russian army, but all people with a .ru email are removed. Which leads to people thinking whether the admin of social.kernel.org is misinforming the public. Thus, the appearance that they are "removing those who are disliked by some government, who also happen to do unethical things" might well be inaccurate. The more accurate description might well be that they are "removing those who are disliked by some government, who cannot all be proved to be doing unethical things." This makes this action by the Linux Foundation even less ethical, and even more racist.

The attitude on the Linux side

Now that we have understand why the action to remove all Russian-identified people from the maintainers list is an unethical thing to do, we need to ask whether the Linux Foundation is being good. Yes, there is a way where someone does an unethical thing and still is being good. One can be threatened into doing unethical things, and in my opinion, it is totally okay if you had no other choice. What is not okay is that you do unethical things and at the same time claim you are being ethical.

First, the patch was badly phrased, only vaguely stating "compliance reasons." It has gone through little review, and the whole process is done untransparently. As doubted by some on the mailing list, this action makes people question the openness of the process, and brings less trust among the developers.

Second, Linus Torvalds not only did name-calling on the people who doubted the action by dismissing them as "Russian trolls," but also insulted the one who proposed a patch to revert it by saying they are not using their brains (full message). The latter turned out to be a member of AOSC OS, a Linux distribution that targets x86_64, aarch64, and LoongArch. After that reply, PeterCxy, a contributor to the kernel, explained that most emails are from legitimate people, and asked again to explain and to make things transparent, only to get dismissed and called a paid actor. PeterCxy commented:

When you can't think of a counterargument to someone, you resort to nationalism. You start to accuse people of being sponsored by the enemy state. That's what I used to say a lot back in China with the growth of extremist Chinese nationalism.

I didn't know I would get literally the same type of reaction from Linus Torvalds himself.

They are in a tone where they deny any wrongdoing, deny the fact that the action is racist in nature. They are happily conforming to a government policy that is unethical, unfair, and discriminative.

While I am writing this, I noticed another message, which comes from James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com, and claims the following:

If your company is on the U.S. OFAC SDN lists, subject to an OFAC sanctions program, or owned/controlled by a company on the list, our ability to collaborate with you will be subject to restrictions, and you cannot be in the MAINTAINERS file.

Anyone who wishes to can query the list here:

https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/

Judging from the email address, it does not seem that they represent the Linux Foundation in any way. Moreover, from the mail,

In your (Serge Semin's) specific case, the problem is your employer is on that list. If there's been a mistake and your employer isn't on the list, that's the documentation Greg is looking for.

This does not account for other cases of the removal. For example, there are a lot of occurrances of email addresses ending with msu.ru on the removal list, while msu.ru, Moscow State University, is not on said list. This somehow confirms Cryolitia's observation.

What should you do when a government threatens you to do something unethical? First, you should make clear to relevant parties that you are indeed doing unethical things. You explain clearly why this thing is unethical, and that you have no choice but to do it. You then condemn the government for threatening you to do it. Then you do the bare minimum that is threatened, never cooperating willingfully.

What could have been a much better response for the Linux Foundation? Imagine if they, instead, say the following: "We have received notices by relevant parties that we have to remove [list all people involved] from the maintainers list. All of them are identified to be [...] [list all the evidence for everyone]. We, however, recognize that this action is deeply unethical, and is a violation of our Code of Conduct, because we firmly believe that no one should be excluded solely because of who they are. We regret to tell you that we have no choice but to do it. While we cannot revert the removal now, what we can do is to call on everyone who can to protest the current situation. Please join us in [...] to make sure that everyone in our community feels safe and welcomed."