The Case for Open Borders

Amid ongoing congressional negotiations for a new immigration bill, a bipartisan effort is underway to deter migration through measures such as immediate detention and deportation, as well as more stringent restrictions on asylum-seekers. This week on Deconstructed, John Washington, a staff writer at Arizona Luminaria and contributor for The Intercept, argues the humane — and economically sound — solution is to open the border. Washington joins Ryan Grim to discuss his new book, “The Case for Open Borders,” which takes a historical look at migration and the current crisis. Washington asserts that free and unrestricted movement of people across borders strengthens security, fosters economic growth globally, and can address climate change challenges.

Ryan Grim: All right. Welcome back to Deconstructed.

I’m Ryan Grim, and today we’re going to be talking about the border. It’s a huge issue here in Washington, and I’ve been predicting for months that nothing is going to come from this, because nobody really has incentives to get it done. Or, I should say, Republicans don’t really have incentives to get it done. They would much rather continue to have Biden talk about a crisis — he used the word “crisis” this week — talk about a crisis on the border, run against that crisis and then maybe do something [or] maybe not do something when they take power, but power being the end goal there.

Donald Trump conveyed as much to Republican senators, and Mitch McConnell then conveyed it to his Republican conference that, look, we don’t actually want to fix this, quote-unquote, “problem.”

I’m joined today by John Washington, who’s the author of the new book, which is out on Tuesday, you can preorder it now. It’s called “The Case for Open Borders,” and that’s why I kind of put “problem” in quotes there, because I personally understand that, as a political matter in this political moment, it’s pretty untenable to be arguing in the mainstream for open borders.

On the other hand, open borders are basically what we had all throughout the 19th century. Europe has open borders, you can just drive right from France to Spain, you can drive from Poland all the way to France, and it doesn’t really seem to cause them a whole lot of problems.

But, setting all that aside for our later conversation with author John Washington, John, I wanted to first ask you about what you make of the facets of the deal that have been leaked into the press. Now, I call it a deal, it’s still in negotiations, and I don’t think it actually will become law for the reasons I said, but we have gotten some nuggets of what Democrats are willing to agree to. Does any of it jump out at you as particularly revealing?

John Washington: Thanks for having me, Ryan.

You mentioned the lack of incentives for the Republicans. I think there’s sort of a lack of incentive for the Democrats, as well. They’re in a corner on this. The only way that they have been trying to get out of the situation at the border is to implement further crackdowns, which is revealing, in that they are playing politics with this. They are trying to appease the Republicans, appease the right in order to gain some political points, and this is something that we have seen done repeatedly, from administration to administration.

Some of the more specific facets of this that have been leaked or that are allegedly on the table right now. Including things like, Biden has said that he would shut the border down — whatever that exactly means, as if there’s an on/off switch for a border — or that he could implement something like a rehash of the Title 42 authority, which he had, just less than a year ago, used extensively, he used it even more than Trump.

Just a little bit of background on that: Title 42 is an 80-year-old public health authority that allows the executive branch to effectively push people back across the border as soon as they come over. Just under 3 million people were pushed back across the border from early 2020, until last spring. And one of the really notable things here is that that didn’t work. It didn’t work to stop people from crossing the border. In fact, after Title 42 was implemented, more people started crossing the border. A lot of them were repeat crossings, but a lot of them were individual first-time crossings as well.

And here we see this trap, or this cycle, of thinking that deterrence is going to work to stop people from crossing the border, and Title 42 is one example. We go back just a couple of years earlier to an even more draconian policy, the Family Separation Policy, or the Zero Tolerance Policy, implemented under the Trump administration. And that is where we saw families separated, kids taken out of their parents arms, a lot of the parents got deported, detained, the kids were shipped elsewhere in the United States… One of the most inhumane policies we’ve seen on the border in a long time.

You would think, if you’re following the logic of what deterrence might work on the border, that that would stop people from coming. But we saw in the months immediately following that policy, even after it ended, that more and more families were coming to the border. So, that didn’t deter people from coming, that didn’t deter people from trying to find some sense of safety, or reunite with other family members, or economic security, or whatever the underlying motivations are.

And we could go back and back and back, and just go, administration by administration, and see that crackdowns don’t work in stopping crossings. What they do is they force people into more precarious situations. That is, the outer reaches of the desert, to dangerous river fjordings, and people suffer, drown, die of heat, environmental exposure, and it just implements more suffering, rather than actually stops them from crossing. 

RG: Yeah. You’ve got a cool appendix to your book called 21 Arguments for Open Borders, and I wanted to run through a couple of those with you. And I’ll see what a good job I can do, kind of arguing back at you, even though I don’t necessarily disagree with you, to see if I can pull that off.

But let’s start with number seven. It’s the one that has always been the most interesting to me, where you say, “open borders doesn’t mean a rush to migrate.” Because the running assumption among a lot of Americans is that everybody wants to be in America, everyone around the world, all 9 billion people. And then, if you just gave everyone a green card and a plane ticket, that, tomorrow, you’d have all 9 billion people on the planet here within the borders of the United States, and we’d have social collapse immediately.

You’ve actually got some interesting research on this. To me, that never scanned, because most people like the place that they grew up, it’s where they’re comfortable, it’s where their family is, it’s where their friends are, it’s what they know. But you’ve dug in a little deeper on that.

So, what did you find on this question, of mass migration being sparked by an open border policy?

JW: Well, I want to reframe two things here really quickly. One is, when people talk open borders, I don’t think folks mean a green card necessarily right away or a plane ticket. And the reason I’m harping on that for a second is because there have been so many claims about current asylum seekers getting gift cards, getting free plane tickets, and that’s just not the case.

RG: Five-thousand dollar is one of the myths circulating on the right. Just, you get, that you just get a card with $5,000 on it.

JW: Completely false. I’m in Arizona, we have one of our senate candidates here, Mark Lamb, who claims to have knowledge of this happening, and it’s just not true.

That’s not happening. No one is getting plane tickets, or vouchers for anything, who are crossing the border.

But the other reframe I want to do is something that I think a lot of folks in the United States see as an issue that affects the United States [uniquely]. And the current migration problem — and I agree that it’s a problem — is not a United States problem, it’s not an American problem. It’s a regional problem and it’s a global problem.

If you think about it in [terms of] just, where people are going currently, a lot of people are coming to the United States, a lot of people have always come to the United States. We can get into some numbers on that in a second, I think that’s really important work to do as well.

But look at, for example, the number of Venezuelans and the number of Nicaraguans who have resettled in neighboring countries, compared to how many have come to the United States. There are, approaching, 3 million Venezuelans in Colombia right now, and over the past 20-some years, the number of Venezuelans who have come to the United States hasn’t even topped 1 million.

Nicaraguans are largely resettling — or maybe temporarily resettling — in neighboring Costa Rica. Some of them are coming up through Central America, Mexico, and trying to get into the United States as well, there’s been a parole program. But people generally stay close to their home countries.

This is the same for Africa as well; there’s a number of African states who have become “receiving countries,” in immigration speak. Gabon, which is a country probably a lot of people never think of and couldn’t necessarily point to on a map, has been an enormous receiving country for a lot of African refugees right now. Same with Uganda, for people from other different countries in Africa. Turkey, as well, for Syrians, has welcomed far, far more people than some of the neighboring states in Europe that have complained and cried foul for supposedly being overrun.

So, I think, if you consider where people are going, they typically don’t want to go far. And there have been a number of examples of, when the border has been effectively open — you mentioned that in the 19th century — there was a lot of immigration in the 19th century in the United States. Something like 50 million Europeans went from different countries in Europe to the United States over a hundred-year period, ending in the late 19th century.

But there are a number of other examples where… I think Puerto Rico is a telling case. Puerto Ricans can move freely. They’re U.S. citizens, they can move to New York, to Miami, to wherever they want to go. And plenty of them have, but not all of them have. And you can look at even some of the economic differences between the island and different parts of the United States. You’d think, well, we have higher wages here, we have all these other things that people think would attract migrants, and sometimes does, but it doesn’t empty out, and hasn’t emptied out Puerto Rico.

You can go case by case and see that people want to stay where they are. If they can, they will. And if they can’t, they’ll often go to the next easiest place to get to. Of course, there are exceptions to this, and a lot of those exceptions are due to prior relationships.

But if you look at the history of colonialism, a lot of the states who have gone in and meddled with these so-called “developing nations” are now receiving citizens of those same countries, where the empires have destabilized, have engaged in conquest, have tried to exploit as much as possible. So, there is a connection, and so, some people will go further than their neighboring states, but it’s not an inevitability.

Migration costs money, it’s expensive, and opening the gates doesn’t necessarily mean people are going to rush, because it costs a lot, both monetarily and emotionally, professionally. They’re going to leave behind everything they knew, and folks don’t tend to do that.

RG: All right. So, to push back on that a little bit, you’re seeing record numbers of migrants approaching the U.S. border over the last months and year-plus. So, what does that tell us about how much kind of pressure there is on outward migration, and what we might see if you actually did just fully say, you know what? Come on in.

JW: Well, I think it’s too early to say if this is just another peak, and we’re going to drop down into a valley in terms of numbers of migration, or if this is going to be necessarily a steady upward trend.

If you look at the big picture, there are right now about 270 million international migrants; that was based on last year’s count by the U.N. That’s about 3.5 percent of the global population. That number, 3.5 percent, has held steady for about a hundred years. If you look at forced migration — so people who aren’t just migrating for economic or family reasons, but are actually forced out of the country — the count topped 110 million last year. And that, too, is about the average of the global population. It’s a little bit hard to count, because the tabulations weren’t done as thoroughly in the mid-last century, when we newly defined what a refugee was.

I’m going to give you another number, and then I want to get into that, what this means about the outward pressures of migration. The United States, too, a little bit less than 15 percent of all people living in the country are foreign born, and that number is almost identical to what it was 100 years ago.

So, there’s a number of things to think through that might imply that these numbers are going to increase. I mean, climate change is the biggest one of them. Large parts of the world are becoming less habitable because of all the reasons we know and, increasingly, strong storms, droughts, floods, heat, etc. So, we might be in a new era, but I think it’s so far a little bit too early to tell, going back to that 100-year perspective.

And then you can go further than that, too. There’s something that is true here, is that humans are moving, and humans have historically moved. That is how humans have always been, and that has been true before the rise of nation states, that has been true before the rise of empires.

So, I think the question is not how to stop migration, but how do we respond to migration? And if we can think through that, how we want to actually respond to migration, and if we understand the fact that … We were talking about this earlier, about these deterrence policies that don’t work. One of the other big things that we’ve found doesn’t work is a wall. Walls have never effectively worked to keep people out. They deter, or just make crossings more deadly.

So, when we think about responding, I think this, to me, gets to what are commonly called the root causes. So, it seems like, well, if we’re just going to think about how we’re going to settle folks, maybe we’re not really addressing those root causes. But I think, actually, when we think about how we respond to people who are moving, we can elaborate that or extrapolate that into addressing the root causes.

Because the root causes, really, are wrapped up in how we are to other people, how we are to other nations, how we decide to respect our environment or not. And if we start thinking about, well, we want to actually respect the humanity of folks who are forced to flee, then we might also be able to carry that approach over to … We might also want to respect people who live in so-called underdeveloped nations, and not just exploit them for their labor, being able to give them less worker protections or less wages, but we may actually be able to figure out some way to stop the exploitative relationship, and allow folks to move or stay as they please.

I think that thinking that there is an approach that will stop them is actually the first problem with the border crises around the globe right now. 

RG: When I was growing up, the way that our immigration system seemed to work was that you’d have a lot of seasonal workers who would cross into the United States, many of them with actual work permits and employers. They had fields that they were going to, and they had destinations, their families would stay back in Mexico, or wherever else. And then, when the seasonal work was done, they would go back home to their family.

As the anti-immigration sentiment grew, and we created a much tougher, firmer border, it became untenable for a lot of those people to make that journey twice a year, up and back. So, if the idea was that they would just never come, that was foiled immediately. Instead, they just sent for their families.

And so, instead of having one seasonal worker coming for the season, we now had that worker’s entire family, which then leads to some immigration reform, and then leads to three decades of nothing, and just kind of spiraling immigration policy out of control.

JW: Closed borders or policies towards closing borders have actually been shown to increase migration. And that can be understood in two ways.

One is that it traps people who would normally do that seasonal migration, or would maybe come and work for a couple years and then go back, they decide that it’s not worth it anymore. It also incentivizes people to make the trip before policies that are written into law actually are implemented, and we saw this with Brexit.

In the year after Brexit, there were more migrants that made it to the U.K. than the year before Brexit, which is ironic.

RG: So, they passed Brexit on an anti-immigration sentiment, and it actually produced a spike in immigration.

JW: Exactly. And there’s another example of this as well.

So, if you look, a lot of the border lockdowns at the beginning of the pandemic, the people who were able to migrate freely from Eastern Europe to Spain and Italy — Romanians, for example, some of my family members — they were able to get back, they left, and they went back to their home countries. Whereas some of the people who didn’t have papers, some of the undocumented populations in those countries, decided to stay, that it wasn’t going to be worth it to try to leave, because they didn’t know when they were going to get back in.

So, there are just a number of different ways that, actually, trying to implement lockdowns locks people in, or incentivizes a quick rush to get in, rather than do what they’re supposedly trying to do. And here, too, I think it’s important to talk about the perversity of thinking that we don’t want migrants, because — especially in the Western world or the Global North — we are hugely dependent on migrants. 

This came into sharp relief during the early days of the pandemic as well, when an enormous percentage of the so-called essential workers were migrants, were the ones who were still out there in the fields picking food, in the hospitals, tending to people who were getting sick and dying of COVID, who were doing all the other sorts of social services. I was in New York at the time, the people who were delivering food when folks were too scared to go out or couldn’t go to restaurants.

These are migrants, these are people who largely have come to the country recently. And if they were all kicked out, or if more people were not allowed in, the economy would collapse. And this is something that lawmakers know, but they just use the idea of a border, they use the fear that they themselves often spark as a political tool.

RG: And you talk about the 19th century in your 21 arguments in the back of the book, but you also point out that it was a lot more than just the 19th century. You had some statistics about, in 1990, there were something like four border walls, or maybe even fewer, in the entire world. Now there are dozens, scores; I don’t remember the exact number. You talked about how you thought that could possibly be representative of the death throes of nationalism.

I’m curious for you to unpack that a little bit, and then I want to talk about the history, what it was like when the border basically was open.

JW: Yeah. So, here I was leaning on scholar Wendy Brown, who has written about this a lot; also, Jacqueline Stevens. And some of the approach they take or the way that they understand what’s going on with the rise of bordering, the rise of immigration crackdowns, is that with the rise of globalism, with the increased interconnectivity of the world in the past 30 years, the rise of the internet — also the downfall of a number of long-entrenched institutions like organized religion — people falling back on nationalism as a key component of identity. And nationalism is the basis of nation states.

So, there’s this idea that we create this state — which is an organized political institution — and then we tie it to this idea of a nation, which is a much more ambiguous, almost amoebic concept, where we have this supposed common identity. But a number of people, even before those two scholars I mentioned — Benedict Anderson is one standout — who have described and gone into detail about what nationality really means and how it’s forged, and it’s forged artificially. Because you have as much in common with someone who may be your neighbor as you have in common with someone who is across a state line — or, rather, a national line — and yet you’re only supposedly in community with the people within your border nation state.

So, as that seems increasingly and obviously a false construction … I live in Arizona, as I already mentioned. There’s a divided city here on our southern border — Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora — [and] a lot of people who live in those two cities have family on either side. They have intense familial, cultural, linguistic, culinary, etc., connections. And yet, because of this dividing line, they are not co-nationals.

And so, you look at someone who’s living in Nogales, Arizona, and compare them to someone who’s living in, say, Seattle, or some other city in the country, and they have so much less in common. And yet, we try to create this tie through nationality.

And I think that politicians in particular are able to play on those concepts of identity and try to instill fear that this is something that your very identity is going to be lost. But, really, you understand identity, I think, truly, through community ties, through family ties, through who you know and interact with on a daily basis. And, though that is definitely changing with the rise of the internet, politicians want to try to make sure you do maintain those national ties, and scare you that they will be broken, and the bordering is one way to do that. Saying we’re going to maintain who we are as a nation but, you know, the United States is the most diverse country in the world — and there’s been many other very diverse countries as well — but really trying to border off who we are doesn’t make sense, because we’re so intersectional, poly-linguistic, poly-cultural, in many different ways, that really trying to draw lines around that would be drawing this frenetic scribbled border line, which doesn’t really make any sense.

So, I think it’s really based on fear. And, yeah, it’s increasing the number of border walls every year, [they are] increasing in length, increasing in number.

RG: It does feel like the internet, generally … But more specifically, the ease with which people can share video across borders has really made borders seem less relevant when it comes to common cultures. In the video game world — I’m too old, really, to be playing video games, but talking to people who do — they are playing with people who are in Korea, they’re playing with people who are in Gabon, they’re playing with people who are in France. And they’re all playing the same game, and they don’t see themselves as in distinct communities. They’re all in the Fortnite community, or whatever they’re playing at the time.

But, I’m curious. When did the United States start to have an actual immigration policy?

JW: Yeah, one other thought about that. So, we do have these cross-cultural ties. You’re basically describing open cultural borders right there. People playing Fortnite from Brooklyn to Gabon, or whatever. Think of everyone else who has open borders as well.

I mean, most people who are citizens of the United States effectively can waltz through the world as if there were completely open borders. And that is true, also, of the wealthy from many other countries in the world. Much of Western Europe could do basically the same. The ultra wealthy in many even so-called developing countries can do much the same.

The U.S. military. What border stops the U.S. military right now? Maybe a few are contested? But there’s, what, 800 bases, nearly, American bases spread throughout the world? 

RG: That reminds me of a moment that I’ve really never forgotten. A friend of mine, Christian Parenti, and I were down doing reporting in Bolivia, and we were able to tour a Bolivian military base, and interview military figures, and they were going to talk to us about the war on drugs and all this. And, while we’re waiting, there’s a couple soldiers, they’re kind of just sitting in the waiting room with us, and one of them says to us, “Why are you guys allowed to walk around our military base, when I’m not even allowed to come into your country?” And Christian said, “It’s called imperialism,” and he kind of nodded along.

But that was a moment that always stuck with me, because it did seem bizarre to me. That, well, what am I doing here? Like, why am I able to just wander around here and be welcomed onto this base?

JW: I think imperialism is a good answer. I have another one, too. I think it’s also just definitionally called apartheid. There’s different laws for different people, and when you zoom out from just within a nation, we are allowed to do things that other people are not. How is that fair?

RG: Like, global apartheid.

JW: Global apartheid. I mean, it seems like a silly question, or almost a juvenile framing, but I think fairness is actually key here. Some people are allowed to do and have the freedoms that others do not. That is the way that the global border system works right now.

RG: Right, based on where they’re born or their ethnicity. We understand that as apartheid inside the borders of a country like South Africa, but when we stretch it out to the entire globe, we say that’s just how it is.

JW: Right. So, you asked about the rise of federal immigration law. For the first hundred-plus years of the existence of the United States, there was no immigration law. There was maybe something like implicit understanding of who would be allowed in, based on tradition, based on just common practice, based on the definition of who a citizen could be, which was, you know, white men.

There were some state laws that go back, actually, to before there was a United States, that tried to keep poor people out of their states, or poor people out of their towns and cities. And then we really saw the rise of immigration law in the late 19th century, with anti-Chinese legislation that barred Chinese people from being allowed into the country. There was some version of these Chinese Exclusion Acts that were on the books well into the 20th century; it lasted a really long time. 

Those Laws were based on previous anti-Irish sentiment, and you can see, there’s sort of this idea, there’s almost this concept of whack-a-mole. The newest incomers are the ones that are going to be scapegoated, the ones who are going to be said to be un-American, impossible to assimilate.

I was doing some research about this situation in New York, the crying foul of Mayor Adams, and this idea that New York is existentially in peril is ridiculous, and ahistorical. And yet, that is the sort of rhetoric that has been used by politicians for a long time.

And so, going back to the 1850s, when a much larger percentage of new migrants were coming into New York City at that time, people were terrified. They were mostly Germans and Irish, and New Yorkers thought that they couldn’t handle it. But the percentage was like 30 percent of the population of New York arrived to New York City in a single year. Right now, it’s like 1 percent or something like that, the asylum seekers who have come to New York City in the past couple years.

And it is expensive, and it does change things, and there does need to be some, I think, help with resettling. But, that New York can’t absorb 160,000 people and be actually invigorated by them, by those new incomers, I think is just completely ahistorical, and betrays the very essence of New York City, which I think also stands in large part for how we can think about the United States as a whole, or any other country with immigration.

RG: Since your book is called “The Case For Open Borders,” rather than the case against closed borders, you make the point that there has to be a vision, a positive vision of what benefits this is going to bring to humanity, rather than just a knocking down of the arguments against it.

So, to you, what is the vision that makes the case for open borders?

JW: Yeah. I grapple with that a lot. You know, I’m not a policymaker. As a reporter, what I do is find, basically, malfeasance, or major traumas, and report on them. And I’ve documented for years now the problems that borders cause. And so, it was a stretch for me to start thinking about the benefits of this hypothetical future, of something with open borders, of a world with open borders.

But I think it comes down to looking at some examples that are already in existence. The United States of America is a good one. We transit freely from California to Virginia, from Florida to Nebraska, wherever, and it’s pretty seamless. People can move wherever they want. There are enormous economic and cultural differences between different places in the United States, and people kind of figure out where they want to settle, where they can settle, and do so. And it doesn’t upend the political system.

You mentioned previously, people also traveling freely within the Schengen zone in the European Union. And that, too, there was a lot of nerves about that, especially as they incorporated some more Eastern European states. But those Western states haven’t been overrun, despite the claims of the Brexiteers, and now the rise of the far right in the Netherlands, and France, and elsewhere. And people go back and forth with relative ease, and they settle where they want to settle.

And what incentivizes people to move are open jobs, that’s one of the major incentives. And when there are open jobs, it’s good that they’re filled. There are a lot of open jobs in the United States right now, and they need filling. And so, if there are not open jobs, I think they won’t be filled, and people won’t move as much.

So, I think that this also goes back to your question of, there won’t be a run, or will there be a run on the United States border if suddenly it was open? It doesn’t seem to be, because I think people are driven by the things we’re all driven by: opportunities. And, if they’re not there, they won’t go.

So, there’s a number of other free migration zones in the world. There’s a Nordic Passport area, there’s a Trans-Tasmanian area, there’s the Central America-4 region, and Mercosur in South America. There are so many that we don’t think of — also, there’s a couple in Africa — where people can cross borders easily. And expanding it, I think, seems to be a very doable thing, and that’s based on the evidence that we’ve seen with, as I was mentioning, the now past steady expansion of the E.U., or the incorporation of new states in the United States.

There’s a good quote that I think about a lot [by] Nicolas de Genova, who’s a researcher, and he says, “Without borders, there is no migration, there’s only human mobility.” And I think he’s absolutely right, but what’s interesting is that there’s human mobility no matter what. That people will move, as I’ve said before, and the way that we see it and term it, and the way that we designate it, whether it’s migration or just movement, I think is actually less important than people really realize.

RG: One interesting way to think about this — and I want to get your take on this thought experiment — would be, so, we had the Civil War here in the United States. So, imagine that at the end of the Civil War, the Union decides that there are going to be borders, hard borders.

And we can take that thought experiment in two different directions. One, you’re going to put hard borders around all of Mississippi, wherein every single southern state is going to have a hard border around it. Or you could say, it’s going to be a hard border at the Mason-Dixon line. And you can come up with all sorts of justifications for why that would be necessary for the reconstruction of these states, or whatever.

Now, when you think about the Great Migration that happened in the early 20th century. That was a movement of individuals, but it was also a political movement, and it was an organized political movement with civil rights leaders who had fought against Jim Crow for 50 years at this point, saying, we are not going to be able to defeat Jim Crow in the south, and we just need to move. And there is a process of industrialization going on in the North, there are jobs available to people, the largest Black newspapers in the North were flooding the South with polemics and advertisements and arguments — as the book “The Warmth of Other Suns” so deftly lays out — saying, look, come up here. Come to Los Angeles, come to Chicago, come to New York, come to Milwaukee, it’s better. 

And if you imagine a world in which that wasn’t possible, where Jim Crow was not able to be overthrown, and also the people subject to Jim Crow were not able to leave, you could very easily imagine situations like we’ve seen in Central and South America rising up. That people, organizing together violently, and saying, if we can’t vote, if we’re going to be lynched for trying to vote, and we can’t leave to make a better life for our families and build better communities, we’re going to take up arms. Like, we outnumber the ruling class here in Mississippi, in an organized militant fashion.

And, frankly, there’d be nothing wrong, they would have the right to do that. Would that make the world a better place, though? You may just have, then, cascading cycles of violence for a hundred years, with strongmen getting replaced by populist leaders. Then, you’ve got people up in the North who have their own interests, who might organize coups down in Mississippi, and put in a leader that they find to be pliant to them, assassinations of leaders.

Like, you could very easily imagine all of the crises that we’ve seen in Latin America developing in the American South, rather than what we got. Which is by no means perfect, but a much more organic path toward living together peacefully than we have elsewhere.

JW: It’s an interesting counterfactual. I think we can look at examples right now, and we can just try to ask how this plays out, if we try to maintain lockdowns, if we try to immobilize entire populations that are under threat of authoritarian governments, are under threat of devastating climate change. What do we do? How do we immobilize them? Do we wall them off into slums? Do we try to erect ever higher barriers? I think that is something that we are trying now, and I think what you create there is a political powder keg.

When people don’t have freedoms, and they don’t have security, and they don’t have any economic opportunity, they rise up. And they either rise up and they leave, or they rise up and they try to remake the societies that they’re in. And, either way, it’s going to be a tumultuous response.

So, yeah, I think you’re exactly right. Letting people move, and letting people try to find their way out of these untenable situations, rather than lock them into it, seems to be a pretty obvious approach. And yet, I don’t think folks are seeing it that way, or they’re not thinking long term.

And what it would actually mean if, somehow, you were able to, say, seal in all the people in some of these Central American states. What does that look like? Just morally, what does that mean? When we continue to rely on some of these states for fresh produce, for coffee, for apparel? And we’re able to somehow sneak just those goods out, but the people who are consigned to dangerous situations, who are facing hunger, who are facing extreme insecurity, political violence, oppression, they are just stuck there?

I mean, when you just back up for a second and think about it, it makes no moral sense. And it, also — going back to your hypothetical there — it does seem to imply that there’s going to be an explosion, it’s going to be a political explosion. And what that looks like is going to be probably very ugly. And would inevitably also lead to huge outflows of migrants.

So, how are you going to solve the problem? I mean, it doesn’t seem to be the way to do it is just [to] circle people in and hope that they figure it out?

RG: The great irony of the Great Migration, of course, as a lot of people know, is that the white elite down there hated it. As horrifying as their treatment was of Black people in the south, when Black people started leaving, they did everything they could to try to stop that, because they understood, through their racism, how essential they were to their economy. And it actually pushed them toward reforms that you don’t see for decades afterwards, but they understood it as this massive threat.

Now, at the same time, the migrants that were going north were often used by northern industrialists as strikebreakers, or to undermine the white working class up in the North, which creates, then, some serious tensions. And so, you always hear this argument that, “they’re going to take our jobs.” And, obviously, sometimes, like in many of those specific cases, they were.

But what is your response to people when they say we can’t have open migration, because it’s going to destroy wages and they’re going to take all of our jobs?

JW: Well, we have so much evidence that it doesn’t do either of those things. There is study after study after study.

Let’s start with wages. If there is any effect on wages of even huge inflows of migrants, it is minuscule, and it’s often, actually, a positive effect. One of the best examples of this, and a lot of people have written about it, is the Mariel Boatlift of 1980, when I think it was a hundred-and-sixty-some thousand Cubans landed in Miami in a span of a little bit more than half of a year. And study after study after study — there’s been some contending studies, but they’ve been disproven — has shown that it didn’t really affect wages very much. It didn’t really affect employment very much, either.

You know, this idea that they’re “going to take our jobs,” I think, is predicated on this fallacy — it’s called the lump of labor fallacy — that there’s a set number of jobs in any economy, and there’s not. Jobs often create other jobs. When migrants come in, they may take an open job, and their presence, or the presence of them and their family or their colleagues, will create another job. And also, often, migrants pay into systems like welfare states long before they’re able to receive any of the benefits.

So, economically speaking, it’s just a really easy argument to make. And anyone who actually looks at the data … And a lot of people have. You know, I quote The Wall Street Journal from the 1980s, there was a proposal for a constitutional amendment that was five words long, and it was “we shall have open borders.” And they weren’t doing it, that I know of, out of the goodness of their hearts. They were doing it because they realized that, economically, it made a lot of sense.

And you see now that serious trained economists will tell you time and again that, actually, it’s decent for wages, it doesn’t really affect unemployment rates, and it’s overall just a boon for the economy.

There was one study by George Clemens, it was called something like, “trillion dollar bills on the sidewalk.” And, if we had completely open borders throughout the world, the global GDP would balloon, would increase by hundreds of percent. And there’s a number of different reasons for that, but it just really isn’t a threat to the economy in any way.

And you could drill down into a number of different studies, a number of different ways that that makes sense, but start looking into it and you see, just any economist that you trust will be on the side of, yeah, migrants are good.

RG: And I would add, on the flip side, for people who this is counterintuitive for, it actually is much easier to find cases where labor shortages cost people wages and cost people jobs. If you think back to the labor shortage after the pandemic, a lot of restaurants had to close. They could not open, say, on a Friday night, because they couldn’t get enough staff to come in, either to work the kitchen or to work the front of the house.

And so, let’s say they had fifteen people, and eight of them were able to show up, but eight wasn’t enough to run the restaurant, all eight of those are now out of luck. Everybody that’s supplying that restaurant is out of luck, and all the downstream economic cycling down the drain that that creates …

If you look at the Israeli economy right now, they have shut off … It’ll be fascinating to see studies of this down the line, because you have such a stark dividing line. Like, after October 7th, all workers from Gaza were prevented from working in Israel, there were hundreds of thousands of them that did. And even workers from the West Bank were blocked from going into Israel, and it’s had a debilitating effect on the Israeli economy as a result.

So, it’s not as if, well, now there are a million fewer workers coming into the economy so, all of a sudden, wow, we’ve got a million new jobs for people, and wages are going to skyrocket because we need people to fill those jobs. No. In fact, the economy is just tanking is what’s actually happening.

And, by the way, our producer flagged this for me, some breaking news. It says the NYPD has created two full-time posts in Bogota, Columbia, and Tucson, Arizona, now expanding their list of foreign outposts to sixteen; the New York City Police Foundation pays for these deployments.

What do you make of the NYPD branching out around the world like this? The New York City Police Foundation is a pretty reactionary kind of right-wing civil organization, so this is probably some kind of political stunt as well.

JW: So, yeah. I want to underscore your last point really quickly. You talked about the opposite effect. I was saying how migrants actually have, typically, a positive, or almost a net neutral effect on the economy. The opposite is also true.

When you deport migrants, it has a negative effect on the economy, even in times of extreme economic hardship. There’s a number of studies done [on this topic]. In the years subsequent to the Great Depression where, after they passed the Mexican Repatriation Act, and the places they were deporting people from actually suffered higher unemployment than elsewhere in the country, wage loss, and just a myriad of other issues, because they didn’t have workers.

About the NYPD, it sounds to me like an exercise in futility. I don’t know what one law enforcement officer is going to do in Tucson. Tucson is not suffering from high crime rates because of migrants. You can look at a host of studies and examples in the United States and throughout the world of migrant communities being safer, less crime, less violent crime. There are, of course, outlying exceptions to that, but that is true the world over. Some people are going to cause harm, and that is actually less the case in immigrant scenarios, or immigrant populations, but not impossible to find.

So, I don’t know what they’re going to do. They could embed with the Border Patrol, and the Border Patrol here, mostly what they’re doing is saying hi to people, telling them to take off their belts and their shoelaces, looking at their documents, and putting them in a van. That is the majority of Border Patrol agents’ work these days.

Most of the people, the overwhelming majority of the people who are crossing the border are doing so to turn themselves in to the Border Patrol. They’re not in these high-speed pursuits or running through the desert. So, if the NYPD wants to pick up the backpack of a mother and put it in the back of a van, Border Patrol does need more folks to help with that kind of work, but I don’t know what else they’re going to really be doing here.

RG: Maybe this can be your next freelance piece for The Intercept?

JW: Yeah, it sounds interesting.

RG: John, best of luck with the book launch.

Again, that was John Washington, a staff reporter for Arizona Luminaria and a contributor to The Intercept. His new book “The Case For Open Borders” is available February 6th, but preorders are ready now.

Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. José Olivares is our lead producer. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. Legal review by David Bralow, Sean Musgrave, and Elizabeth Sanchez, so don’t even think about suing this one. Leonardo Faierman transcribed this episode. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s Editor-in-Chief. And I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. Bureau Chief of The Intercept.

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