Immigration in a Global Economy: Why the Left Should Embrace Open Borders

Abstract

My dissertation explores the implications of discretionary control over immigration policies, arguing that the class-based selection that it facilitates plays a vital role in constructing and maintaining issues of global and domestic injustice. High-income countries have the authority and power to decide, with few exceptions, who gets admitted, under what conditions, and for how long. The result is that poor nonwhite would-be immigrants are largely excluded and the skilled and affluent are confronted by relatively porous borders. While this is largely taken for granted—including within liberal political philosophy—I argue that discretionary control ought to be rejected. Global and domestic justice are best served by opening borders to the least advantaged. I argue for freedom of movement for the globally least advantaged for two related reasons. First, the power of high-income countries to regulate their movement plays a key role in constructing their proneness and precarity. It leads to the spatial segregation of negative externalities and undesirable opportunities in already marginalized communities. Second, the ability to exclude low-income and “unskilled” would-be immigrants harms low-socioeconomic status people in both sending and receiving countries. In addition to causing the brain drain, it contributes to status harms and failures of equal opportunity for low-socioeconomic status residents. In chapters 2 and 3 I develop the first argument. Chapter 2 explains how discretionary immigration control contributes to the domination-for-exploitation of low-income countries and their residents by global capital. The ability of transnational corporations to leverage their mobility and bargaining power as a way of pressuring down wages, tax policies, environmental protections, and workplace standards depends on a prone and powerless population. With open borders, by contrast, such policies would promote largescale immigration from low- to high-income countries. This would change the incentive structure of those actors with the power to regulate the behavior of transnational corporations. In chapter 3 I criticize the green border argument—the claim that we ought to restrict immigration into high-income countries as a way of fighting the climate crisis. In addition to exaggerating the emissions generated by immigration and requiring that we avoid all poverty reduction strategies, the green border argument is also counterproductive. By focusing blame on low-income immigrants, the green border argument prevents global coalitions between affected parties, undermines support for environmental movements, and allows high-income countries to avoid the perceived costs of climate migration, thus removing an incentive to pursue mitigation and global adaptation strategies. In chapter 4 I develop the second argument. Here I switch from the global to domestic justice, illustrating how skill-selective immigration policies have an unintended effect of exacerbating domestic status harms. The traits selected against—low education, low incomes, and “unskilled” labor track the markers of merit used to construct the social status of low-socioeconomic status residents. Finally, skill-selection undermines movement towards equal opportunity by providing high-income countries with an already trained and educated workforce.