Open borders for land too?

[I am trying to explain what I think is a conceptual confusion by the "Open Borders" people. Unfortunately, my brain isn't very clear either.]

Land can't move, of course. But borders can. We can't move land across the borders, but we can move borders across the land.

So if half the people in country B want to move to country A, there are three ways we could satisfy their desire:

1. Move the people across the border.

2. Move the land and people across the border, by letting country B annex half of country A.

3. Move the land and people across the border, by letting country A annex half of country B.

Which of those three would be better? Are all three equally feasible? Why would people object more to some than to others? Why would one be more morally acceptable than the others?

Would the people earn more if they moved to country A?

Would the land earn more if it moved to country A?

Here's a very abstract way of thinking about it:

There are three things: people; land; and law. Please understand "law" in the very widest sense, to include not just written law but unwritten law, customs, and ways of life. "Institutions" might be a better word.

A country is a set of people, land, and law. What is the optimal allocation of countries? (Think of it like the optimal currency area question, except we have three things that can move in relation to each other.)

People have preferences defined over land and law. When people want to move across a border, it might be because they like the land better, or it might be because they like the laws better. Or it might be a bit of both. Their income and standard of living will depend both on the new land and on the new laws.

"Colonialism" is where people and laws move together, to new land.

"Imperialism" is where laws move to new land, and the people don't move.

"Migration" is where people move to new land, and the laws don't move.

Which one is best, and who gets to decide?

Law is produced mostly by people, and less by land.

I like consuming cars, but I don't like producing cars. Maybe it's the same for law. We solve this problem for cars, by having someone else produce the car and me paying them for the car. Can we solve the problem the same way for law too? Probably not as easily, or else imperialism would work fine.

A country is a native reserve with an army. [US English translation: a country is a native reservation with an army.] It's where people follow their traditional laws on their traditional land. The army is there to keep it that way, except when they choose to let in migrants who will also follow their laws.

I can understand that some people might want to live on a reserve.

Comments

[Frances Woolley]

And "Separatism" is when a border is drawn across a land, and the laws on each side of the border begin to diverge.

I think the point of this post is to raise questions, rather than answer them? Here are two of the questions it raises for me:

What is the optimal size of a country? That is, how many people can share the same system of law before things inevitably tend to diverge and fragment, the way that languages start diverging so much that the latest Dr Who episodes have to have subtitles for American audiences. And has the optimal size of a country being changing?

When people migrate, they inevitably bring a little bit of their own laws with them. The distinction between migration and colonialism is not so clear cut.

[Vladimir]

Joseph Carens from the UofT has made the case for open borders by asserting that the democratic ethos , as represented by Canada, the U.S etc. is not consistent with the claim that states have a moral right to close their borders. You can find the argument in Aliens and Citizens. If I have the right to hire whoever I want to hire, and indeed the state tells me I must not discriminate over race, religion, gender and national origin - all consistent with liberalism - then why can't I hire someone from Haiti? If we have the right to protect our culture, language etc then we have the right a la Quebec to ban signs in all but Canada's official languages. Do we ban all winter sports other than hockey and only play football according to the proper CFL rules? If you believe that human rights, in a good positive law sense, are created in the context of a political process and have no meaning outside that process, then fine. However if rights exist outside the political process then it follows that they are sovereign - in the normative sense - over territorial political arrangements.

[Lord]

In 2 do you mean letting half of B sucede and annex country A?

[Matt]

I am unsure how to answer the questions directly. My sense is that there have been a few reasons why borders have changed in the past: 1)To obtain basic needs for a community; 2)For power, greed, and/or paranoia; and 3)To advance or maintain a narrative (a calling). Of course there are cross-overs. But it seems to me that in the last little while, option 3 is most prevelant. I guess you could call it nationalism, but religion/ideology is not an uncommon aspect. Narratives create their own logic, and it is probably more difficult to nail down from an economic - and even political standpoint - what the motivations are, and thus what is the best strategy. Since WWI in particular, haven't there been "new Reformations" popping up all across the globe?

[Nick Rowe]

Frances: yes, this post is mostly to raise questions. Or maybe raise awareness? ;-) ISTM many of the open borders people have a bit of a conceptual blind spot. They think land and laws always go together.

Yep, the optimal number of countries, as well as which people and which land belong in which country, is an open question. Very much like the Optimal Currency Area question.

Vladimir: OK. But then why not just have one country for the whole world? Why should land not be allowed to migrate too? By what moral right should my house and garden be prevented from migrating to the UK, if I so desire?

Lord: "In 2 do you mean letting half of B sucede and annex country A?"

I would say that is more like 3. But if half of B joins with A, then it is an open question who annexes who. Does A annex half of B, or does half of B annex A? Which is a good point.

Matt: "I am unsure how to answer the questions directly."

Same here. I am trying to create a little self-doubt in the people who think they are sure about the answers.

[Philippe]

Vladimir,

"If I have the right to hire whoever I want to hire, and indeed the state tells me I must not discriminate over race, religion, gender and national origin - all consistent with liberalism - then why can't I hire someone from Haiti?"

You made a mistake there. You don't have the right to hire whoever you want to hire, in your country.

If you do hire someone, you are also not allowed to engage in certain forms of discrimination.

There is no real contradiction there at all.

[Majromax]

I think the root problem is the "law" aspect of this.

We really don't have a problem with migrating people, at least not in democratic nations. A Canadian can move from Halifax to Vancouver, unmolested. Likewise, a Canadian can move from New York City to Toronto without a problem -- because the Canadian is already bearing Canadian law.

Likewise, holding law constant we don't have a problem with moving land around. I can sell property to anyone else in Canada, but the national law remains the same. It's only when the (land, law) pairing changes that we run into trouble. (Nationally, that means Canada would have a problem if I sold my land to the United States. Sub-nationally, it means my neighbours might have a problem if I tried to sell to someone sufficiently different: imagine a white US householder in the 50/60s Deep South trying to sell to an African-American family.)

That suggests that the problem is one of optimal allocation of law, and this is where we run into an extremely interesting situation. The trick is that law/custom is steeped in uncompensated externalities. As a trivial lunchtime example, everyone else (a critical mass) liking butter tarts means I can be assured of an easy time purchasing one at the bakery, whereas I wouldn't have such an easy time in Los Angeles.

In this regard, it's probably not too dissimilar from arguments about firm ownership, only here using less-direct monetary reasoning: the optimal boundary of a country is the set of (land, people) such that transaction costs are minimized. Differences between Pareto optimality and Nash equilibriums here are ripe areas for international conflict.

This optimality gives some immediate "large scale" principles of nation-states, namely territorial integrity and (often, but not always) linguistic unity. Patchworks of enclaves and exclaves cause significant transaction costs, and equally linguistic translation causes economic losses.

This dovetails with separation referenda: are the claimed issues for forming a new nation-state really significant and universally-held, and will the increased transaction costs for now cross-border interaction be worth the improvement in the domestic markets? The Scotland referendum can be summed up as a question of whether integrity of Scottish culture (and politic) is worth the unknwon and possibly large costs of disunity with England.

Immigration here is a nation accepting a hit to legal unity in exchange for the economic benefit of additional people. That's why nations tend to focus on immigrants "like us", to the extent that such definitions can be made concrete. In Canada, where explicitly racial and cultural reasoning is considered abhorrent, the focus is now on "easily-integrated" immigrants, namely ones with a direct and durable economic connection to civil life.

[RPLong]

People choose laws + land whenever they move from Quebec to Ontario, Newfoundland to Alberta, Iowa to Texas, and so on. we usually just call it "moving." Only when people move to a different country does it gets a special name, "migration," but this is only thanks to quotas, armies, and special tax laws.

When I talk about open borders, what I mean is keeping the movement but doing away with the special name, i.e. the quotas, (enforced by) armies and special tax laws.

[Lord]

A right to join would deny any right of free association so which will it be? Humans tend towards tribalism so the latter is accepted and the former must be rejected.

[Jeremy Fox]

Crooked Timber did a very good series of commentaries on Joseph Carens' open borders book, including a reply from Carens himself. Starts here:

http://crookedtimber.org/2014/05/26/book-symposium-on-joseph-carenss-the-ethics-of-immigration/

[Philippe]

"When I talk about open borders, what I mean is keeping the movement but doing away with the special name, i.e. the quotas, (enforced by) armies and special tax laws."

from what I've seen so far, these 'open borders' advocates seem to prefer misleading rhetoric and making false comparisons to using actual substantive arguments.

[Philippe]

"A right to join would deny any right of free association"

do you think that having to apply to join a club means that there is no right of free association?

[Philippe]

"People choose laws + land whenever they move from Quebec to Ontario, Newfoundland to Alberta, Iowa to Texas, and so on."

No. There are some variations in local laws but these places are all part of Canada and subject to Canadian law.

[Philippe]

sorry, obviously Iowa and Texas are not part of Canada. Same thing applies: there are some variations in local/ state laws but these are part of the US and subject to US law.

[Jacques René Giguère]

Vladimir: foreign languages signs ae not forbidden in Québec. They just must be accompanied by a french sign twice the size. (unless they are for cultural, religious or politacal purposes, in which case, there is no language requirements)

[Greg Ransom]

Most of the open borders folks I'm familiar with don't want there to be any law, or any nations or any borders or any armies.

I think they are attempting to believe in impossible geometric objects, but there you have it.

[Nick Rowe]

Greg: Hmmm. You may have a strong point there. If we want a theory of what borders should do (let people through or keep people out?), we should at least have some sort of theory about why borders exist at all.

[Nick Rowe]

Another thought that came to my mind: is there some sort of Groucho Marx effect with countries? And how big is it? Or tragedy of the commons?

[Majromax]

> If we want a theory of what borders should do (let people through or keep people out?), we should at least have some sort of theory about why borders exist at all.

I don't think that one is so difficult. Look at the Scotland referendum: the "yes" camp argues that a sovereign government in Edinburgh would be more responsive to Scotland's needs, whereas the government in London is not. That's a story all about transaction costs.

Within a single nation, any transaction will have transaction costs α. α is variable for an individual transaction, but on average it is composed of costs related to diversity (dealing with "more different" people versus more similar people) and misfits between the law and the transaction (for example linguistic translation).

Cross-border transactions incur a somewhat higher set of transaction costs β -- they incur the same set of costs, but they also have to deal with specific international rules such as customs and trade barriers.

The argument goes that for a de novo set of borders, improved homogeneity amongst the people can improve the legal environment, such that the law and populace are better fits. That strictly improves the costs of any transaction within the new nation, at the expense of increasing newly cross-border transaction expenses. On the other hand, cross-border transactions are often handled by specialists (either directly or by proxy), so some of the effective cost can be reduced via expertise.

At the same time, larger states have an economy of scale when it comes to policies; smaller states are necessarily less efficient. Federalism is an attempt to optimally structure sub-states, permitting local legal variation but not at the expense of undue increases of national transaction costs.

For the Scotland referendum, the "yes" and "no" camps divide pretty strictly along transaction cost grounds. The "yes" side argues that Scotland is culturally distinct, would have easy entry to the EU, and would benefit from local spending of North Sea oil money; the "no" side argues that issues over currency, immigration, and EU/trade agreements are substantial.

[Patrick]

" we should at least have some sort of theory about why borders exist at all"

I have no special knowledge or training to tackle this, but what the heck...

Off the cuff, I'd say borders go along with laws. Start with empty land. Put people on it. They setup laws (in Nick's general sense) that suit them. They spread out and 'bump' into another group of people who have done the same thing, but their laws aren't the same. Each group is unwilling to change their laws to match the others. Maybe they fight a bit, but assuming neither group is able (or willing) to obliterate or conquer the other, the equilibrium state would seem to be to set-up a border so everyone knows what rules apply where.

[primedprimate]

Nick - one of the things to keep in mind is the cost of moving.

A person in country X who prefers the laws of country Y has three choices:
1. He can try to change the borders so that Y's laws are now applicable in X.
2. He can try to change the laws of country X.
3. He can change his own location.

For this person, 3 is the only feasible and realistic choice.

Also note that options 1, 2, and 3 are not mutually exclusive.

The real cost of moving a border is very large - how often do we see referenda like in Scotland? Countries like India devote substantial military resources protecting a tiny piece of largely unproductive land (Siachen Glacier) from Pakistani and Chinese militaries.

The idea of laws moving without people or land moving is difficult to implement. You have chosen to call it imperialism but I think that idea is fraught with negative connotations in many parts of the world since imperialism has historically included a forcible extraction of resources from the ruled lands to the imperial power. If however, you simply mean that good institutions should be made contagious, I agree that there would be less need for migration if that were possible. However, good institutions are not really contagious - if it were that easy, we wouldn't see so many countries with per capita incomes less that 1000$ (and there are many in this ballpark).

I don't think we can ethically tell this person from country X that option 3 is prohibited because options 1 and 2 exist.

Considering that individuals pay extraordinary amounts to migrate (many risk their lives), revealed preferences suggests that option 3 is better than living under the laws of country X.

When this person moves to country Y, we could compute whether the pecuniary and non-pecuniary externalities of the move are net positive from the viewpoint of native "migration protectionists" and device appropriate transfers using a Kaldor-Hicks welfare function.

[Nick Rowe]

Primed: yep. Each individual takes the laws as (more or less) exogenously attached to the land. The only way he can change the laws that apply to him (unless he is extremely successful at politics) is to move to another land. But in aggregate that can't be so. If all the English moved to Japan, and all the Japanese moved to England (if the English and the Japanese swapped lands) then the laws would move with the people.

When Europeans moved in large numbers to the Americas, they took their laws with them.

[primedprimate]

Nick, yes - this is an empirical question - how large do movements need to be for laws to be transferred along with the movement. With a 100% forced switching of populations, I think you could be right.

But I think it is important to note that immigrants who self-select to move to country X, do so because they like the laws of X. I don't think that laws of X would change significantly if enough people who like the laws of X but are born in Y, move to X (unless you think that there is something genetic about folks from Y, but then a quick look at second and third generation migrants dispels that notion).

Europeans who came to the Americas came as colonizers rather than immigrants. They were not seeking to live in a land with Native American laws and institutions; they were simply seeking land.

I wonder how many Indians it would take to convert Silicon Valley to mini-India or how many Mexicans it would take to convert San Antonio to mini-Mexico. Based on current immigrant population percentages in those places and the current laws there, I would guess the number required to transform the laws significantly is large enough to not be a cause for worry.

[primedprimate]

Just completing the thought...

Europeans who came to the Americas came as colonizers rather than immigrants. They were not seeking to live in a land with Native American laws and institutions; they were simply seeking land.

Current immigrants to North America are not seeking land (in fact, in most cases they do not possess land) - they are self-selecting to be immigrants because they desire to participate in existing North American economic institutions.

May be the most economical way to spread good institutions to more people is to bring more people to places with good institutions.

[Nick Rowe]

Primed: mostly agreed. A lot depends on who the immigrants are, and the strength of the self-selection effect (vs do they just like the land, or the income). And countries like Canada do their own selection too. And it depends on speed and numbers. (And the second and third generations matter a lot more than the first generation migrants like me, because, well, we will all be dead soon, but our kids won't.)

[Jacques René Giguère]

And colonizers wish to select immigrants so that they help change the laws of (some of) those who are already here. Nobody immigrate to the U.S. to move to the Bronx, paint himself black and talk ebonic or move to an Indian reservation and talk Hopi. When you immigrate, you are expected to act as a scab on some group already there. (In Canada,you are not supposed to go to Davis Inlet or Attawapiskat or even Quebec City.)