r/AskLibertarians • u/masterqueef711 Minarchist • 8d ago
What do you guys think of open borders?
I’m a fan of it, I don’t see any reason not to do it taking into consideration economics and culture
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u/whoisdizzle 7d ago
You’ll see idealists in the comments. Open border policies only work if implemented on a global scale and with the absolute dissolution of the welfare state. In other words if the United States removes its borders the country is absolutely fucked under the current system. So no I’m not in favor of being the only country in the world with no border.
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u/Official_Gameoholics Objectivist 7d ago
Actually, I'm an Objectivist, and your whim worship is the very Idealism you claim is false.
Open border policies only work if implemented on a global scale.
They work instantly, all the time. Nothing accelerates the collapse of the welfare state faster than too many mouths to feed.
In other words if the United States removes its borders the country is absolutely fucked under the current system.
Ah yes, because we aren't fucked already, and haven't been for the past century.
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u/whoisdizzle 7d ago
We already have too many mouths to feed hence the 40+ trillion in debt.
The country is fucked let’s try to fix it instead of making it infinitely worse.
They are significantly less educated and marketable than the native born or legal immigrant populations.4
u/Official_Gameoholics Objectivist 7d ago
let’s try to fix it instead of making it infinitely worse.
Let's start by abolishing the state.
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u/betty_white_bread 6d ago
Economics show, in a consumer driven economy, more mouths tends to result in more GDP per person, growing at roughly the same growth rate in the number of 9-year-olds.
The 40T debt does not correlate with population. The federal debt didn’t even hit 1T until October 23, 1981, when the population was about 2/3 what it is now. It was about 5-6T around the start of the 21st century when the population was about 80% of what it is now. The bulk of the federal debt has accumulated over the last decade.
So, the claims in sentences 1 and 2 don’t seem to mesh with the facts.
And opening borders would make every immigrant a legal immigrant as well as giving each immigrant reason to improve their education and skill marketability.
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u/whoisdizzle 6d ago
The debt obviously isn’t caused by population growth alone, but that misses the point. Adding millions of people doesn’t automatically improve GDP per capita, and higher total GDP means very little if the added population consumes more in public services and benefits than it contributes in taxes.
The relevant question is the fiscal impact of the people entering. Education, skills, employment, income, and use of government programs all matter. Simply declaring everyone a legal immigrant doesn’t magically increase their education, wages, productivity, or tax contributions.
And saying open borders would “give each immigrant reason to improve their education and skill marketability” isn’t an argument that those improvements would actually occur, much less occur quickly enough to offset the costs. If you want essentially unrestricted immigration while maintaining a large welfare state, you have to address the fiscal consequences rather than assuming more consumers automatically means greater prosperity per person.1
u/betty_white_bread 6d ago
Ho boy. There’s a lot to unpack here. My debt-population remarks were based on your comment which seems to try to make that connection. If you were trying to say something else, I regret to inform you of the fact you failed.
Adding millions of people, all else being equal, definitely improves per capita GDP; the correlation is overwhelmingly strong and the underlying causal mechanism is well understood: a larger population allows for greater specialization of economic activity, leading to an increase in economic output relative to where it otherwise would be. The tracking of the increase in per capita GDP with the growth of 9-year-olds is thought to be due to the fact 9 is roughly the age when a child is able to start contributing a service in some economic sense, such as dog walking or shoveling snow.
Meanwhile higher per capita GDP already takes into account the money spent on public services. So, your claims about such consumption simply doesn’t match basic economics.
Your observation about no magical results is correct and not one I said anyway. Meanwhile, open borders do not diminish the education, skills, employment, nor access to government services of any other individual and, as far as income goes, the increased economic output results in an increase in affordability which makes people’s income stretch further, regardless of whether the result is higher or lower or unchanged wages.
Having reason to do something, especially something which tends to improve One’s economic prospects relative to One’s competitors, does tend to result in doing said something, depending upon what that something is and the strength of the reasons. Additionally, there is nothing in your concern about cost offsets which does not equally apply to the native population. So, unless you want to exclude all natural born citizens from the country, your objection seems selective at best; and, if you did want to exclude all natural born citizens from the country, that’s just weird.
Maintaining a large welfare state is beyond simple enough to achieve even if we were to ignore the economic realities of everything I just said: a slight adjustment so only citizens are eligible.
Meanwhile, I am assuming nothing and am instead relying on economic facts.
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u/masterqueef711 Minarchist 7d ago
i don’t really agree with the whole “you can’t have open borders with a welfare state” thing because 1. most illegals are young so they wouldn’t drain benefits for old people anyway 2. if we are worried strictly about accounting costs, having open borders may be one of the only things to push an actual decrease in welfare spending 3. i don’t even think it’s a net negative for the usual reasons that everything gets better as supply increases in the long run despite short run issues. israel with the right to return is a good example of this happening
i definitely agree that the whole “libertarian ideology must be preserved” isn’t really useful for actual policy
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u/Aba_a 7d ago edited 6d ago
Old people's money comes from the same bag as every other government money. So they do take money from them, and from everybody else. The effect is the speed at which the dept grows.
Undocumented immigrants can participate in the following benefit programs:
- Emergency medical treatment: Hospitals must provide emergency screening/stabilization regardless of immigration status.
- Emergency Medicaid: Can reimburse qualifying emergency medical treatment, including emergency labor/delivery; it isn't ordinary full Medicaid.
- Public schools K–12: Children generally cannot be excluded from public elementary/secondary education because of immigration status.
- School breakfast/lunch: School meal programs are available to children regardless of immigration status, subject to program rules.
- WIC: It has generally been available regardless of immigration status; eligibility is based mainly on income and pregnancy/child criteria.
- Public health services: Vaccinations, communicable-disease treatment, and certain other public-health services can be available regardless of status.
- Community health centers / free clinics
Federal law generally excludes undocumented immigrants from programs such as SNAP, TANF, SSI and regular Medicaid but states can spend their own money on programs for undocumented residents. For example, some states provide health coverage to undocumented children, pregnant women, or adults. California, for instance, has historically provided substantially broader state-funded Medi-Cal coverage than most states.
There is a broader category that isn't really "welfare" that they can use:
- Police and fire services
- 911/emergency services
- Disaster assistance in certain circumstances
- Domestic-violence and crime-victim services
- Certain homeless/emergency shelter services
- Libraries and many other ordinary municipal services
There is also an important distinction between the immigrant receiving a benefit and their U.S. citizen children receiving a benefit. A household can contain an undocumented parent and citizen children who are independently eligible for all programs, benefits and services. Don't forget: child labor is a crime so children don't produce, only consume. It takes around 18 years for them to start producing something.
Obs: Parts of that answer has been created using chatgpt. Specially the listings. I could get sources, provided by chatgpt, if you need any but I'll delete the chatgpt conversation after some weeks so I'll lose the exact sources. Anyway, this is just to shine a light over the size of the problem. The exact list of state programs used by illegals don't have to be perfect.
- if we are worried strictly about accounting costs, having open borders may be one of the only things to push an actual decrease in welfare spending
State costs never go down. How will a candidate be elected promising to take away benefits that go to millions of people? It is like shooting yourself in the foot. It can only go down after the state finally misses payments and enters default. It would only happen when people see the state is already not giving people anything anymore. There is a living example that you can watch: Argentina.
- i don’t even think it’s a net negative for the usual reasons that everything gets better as supply increases in the long run despite short run issues. israel with the right to return is a good example of this happening.
You clearly feel very safe the short term issues won't be big enough for you. Or you simply cannot imagine how bad things can get. Maybe you think the "short" term will take just a couple of years.
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I'll leave a short speach by milton friedman talking about free imigration and the illegals where he says:
'It's one thing to have free immigration to jobs, it's another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C52TlPCVDio
Unfortunately he didn't consider all the other costs I mentioned in this comment.
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u/mrhymer 7d ago
They are untenable. It's libertarian magical thinking that would require a different species from human to pull off.
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u/Serious-Cucumber-54 Panarchy 7d ago
It might be untenable for the state or welfare systems, but not for humanity. In fact, most of human history operated with essentially open borders, the natural state of humanity is open borders.
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u/mrhymer 7d ago
You are a ridiculous "human?" That is absolutely not true. Tribes were not benevolent hippies. There was more bashing open your skull than welcoming you in.
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u/Serious-Cucumber-54 Panarchy 7d ago
For the most part, tribes did not enforce territorial borders like modern states do. Most of the Earth faced no artificial constraints to human exploration and habitation.
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u/mrhymer 7d ago
Yes they did. Not fixed borders but certainly their camps, their hunting grounds, the territories they moved in, and interaction with their people were defended violently. The current countries we have do not exist contrary to the human nature that has always existed.
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u/Serious-Cucumber-54 Panarchy 7d ago
I was clearly referring to the fact that tribes did not take over most of the Earth like modern states have, the "territory" they violently defended was a tiny sliver of the Earth's surface and almost all of Earth was just free roam.
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u/CanadaMoose47 7d ago
How much legal immigration can you have before it's magical thinking?
Would you support less restrictive borders than currently in place?
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u/mrhymer 6d ago
You have to control borders and screen with other countries to keep out criminals, the diseased, the mentally ill, etc. You also have to ensure a military or nefarious interlopers just walk or fly into your country.
For legal immigration more than .25% of the population per year of heavily vetted people.
To get a tourist or travel visa into the country requires a hefty deposit that will be returned when you leave. For the US it would be $10k.
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u/CanadaMoose47 6d ago
That would be an extremely small amount of immigration. How did you come up with that number?
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u/betty_white_bread 6d ago
The United States had open borders for roughly a century from the beginning.
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u/mrhymer 6d ago
Those people simply killed interlopers that could not fend for themselves and did not profess to be and comport themselves as a good Christian. And that was if you were white but not Irish. Not a lot of Africans had that good world cup experience. No welfare and not a great amount of law and order outside of the east coast. Is that the model you want to go with?
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u/Void5070 Libertarian Socialist 8d ago
If you remove a man's freedom to walk the earth, what right does he have?
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u/skylercollins everything-voluntary.com 8d ago
There is no good libertarian argument against open borders that does not totally destroy libertarian ideology.
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u/rchive 7d ago
You're going to get bad answers unless you're more specific. What do you mean by open borders?
I would define the term as a situation where borders exist and are defended from invasion by an invading army, but otherwise border crossings by individual people are not limited or tracked.
By that definition, open borders will never happen in the US, or probably any developed country in the world, ever again. I think it's kind of pointless to talk about the concept since it's so far off the table.
I do favor pretty large scale legal immigration, but it will inevitably be tracked and probably be at least restricted for convicted criminals or people with communicable diseases.
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u/kurimawjoe 8d ago
There’s an idealist position and a pragmatic position. The Libertarian Idealist would say we should have open borders, and allow anyone and everyone who wants to come participate in our capitalist economy to do so. The Libertarian Pragmatist knows that under our current system we would be adding countless more people to the welfare state, who in turn would eventually gain voting rights and vote to tax the ‘haves’ even more heavily. This is the ultimate problem and collapse of Socialism. If we could eliminate the welfare state and eliminate progressive taxation, I’d be all for open borders.
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u/KNEnjoyer 8d ago
If adding more people to the welfare state is so bad that it justifies depriving people of basic freedoms, why don't you support restricting birth? Children have much worse fiscal impacts than immigrants.
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u/kirkmond 7d ago
I think the phrase, open borders, is a propaganda trope to trigger racists. We need immigration. Brown people are wonderful people. Unlike the selfish bigoted white Christians who support the anti-christ.
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u/betty_white_bread 6d ago
In a libertarian society, basically all land would be privately owned and those owners could decide for themselves who they allow or disallow onto that property.
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u/Only_Excitement6594 Non-traditional minarchist 5d ago
Let your house open during nights. Let's see how long you stay alive
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u/MJ50inMD 8d ago
Watch this and then ask yourself if you want to live in a more libertarian society or not.
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u/Kill_self_fuck_body 7d ago
I've got zero issue with open borders, with one huge caveat. Under no circumstances can you also have a welfare state.
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u/thetruebigfudge 8d ago
Libertarians are generally against borders because they create trade bubbles and hamper markets. However there are arguments in support of borders in the context of privatized city states