National restrictions on human movement– immigration, tourism, anything– are unacceptable and there is no sense in pretending otherwise. It can be difficult not only to imagine a world of free movement but even to articulate the position, hence the clunky wording in the preceding sentence. I can’t just say borders because I don’t mean territorial boundaries between countries should be abolished. Eventually I’d like that too, but I’m talking about something we can and should do now: let people move between nations freely. 

The President and his followers often say that if you don’t have borders, you don’t have a country. But that isn’t true. The origin of the modern territorially-bounded sovereign state is generally placed at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. This replaced the Swiss cheese European medieval state– which always sat alongside the church, a sort of para-state institution, and often had numerous other overlapping authorities– with the present’s single sovereign territory. But these borders were porous: people could and did freely slip across them. Customs restrictions were possible– but restrictions on human movement were rare. 

In the Anglosphere, one close historical analogue to today’s xenophobia might actually be internal restrictions on movement, by which I mean the poor laws. Beginning in 1601, English commoners could count on limited support from their local parish, paid by local taxes. Because this was administered locally, it led naturally to arguments over what town was responsible for which people. The 1662 Settlement Act created a violent system as an answer: the wandering poor could be thrown out by agents of the state and forced back to the parish they were born in. Later laws continued to build on these draconian internal mobility restrictions. 

These restrictions were expensive and troublesome and largely accepted as part of the necessary economic order– you can’t just let people move to whatever locality is most generous, or prosperous, right? Likewise, anti-immigration sentiment today is generally justified primarily in scarcity terms– even if explicitly chauvinist arguments about wanting to see people “like you” are rising, they still aren’t the go-to in the political mainstream. How can we take care of so many people when we have people struggling here now? This was a weak enough argument even in early modern England, but at least there, local budgets really were constrained. The parish could not summon more money into existence. 

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Today’s states have no such restriction. When the government spends it creates new money that did not previously exist. Banks do this when they give you a loan too. Economists can and do disagree over the terms of this money creation– acknowledging money is fake and can be created does not mean it should be created in any particular place or infinitely. Our monetary infrastructure is fiendishly complicated. 

Immigration, however, is a case where the math for money creation almost uniquely works out. There are tens of millions of people– perhaps fewer right now of course– who, at this moment, want to work in the United States and are not allowed to. They also want to spend in the United States. Even if we imagine millions of unemployed immigrants would get their every need taken care of by the state– unimaginable in America today– and that they would be satisfied with that and unemployment– which seems unlikely, given the population of people willing to move their lives to another country is certainly going to be an anomalously ambitious one– that would still be millions of additional consumers that our current economy could expand to serve. 

Free movement of people could also make it easier to control the movement of things. People smuggling and drug smuggling can support each other, in the status quo. But in a world where anyone can cross the border, it would be harder to hide illicit activity within that flow, or for crime syndicates to get an income from moving people. (One important caveat here is that free movement needs to include everyone, including convicts– if you are free to move in your own country, you should be free to move in and out of others.) Beyond crime, this would improve tax collection, environmental regulation, and generally the enforcement of every rule that involves moving things. 

Mass legal immigration as a global norm would also supercharge democracy around the world. Every autocracy would suffer immediate brain drain, and every potential autocracy would be economically and militarily checked in the process. Even with only relatively more open borders than our present iron walls, America long benefitted from this process. In contrast, closed borders benefit oppressors and exploiters of labor everywhere. There are millions of migrant workers in dictatorial Gulf states like Saudi Arabia. Lured by promises of jobs, they toil with few legal rights, often losing their passports and not infrequently their lives. And here in America, undocumented workers face lower wages and few legal rights against their employers due to their immigration status. An old talking point holds that open-borders competition will drive down wages. In some cases perhaps! But in a global market we compete with underpaid labor everywhere. Giving workers around the world more options helps them raise their wages. 

Without free movement, nations are not the communities that xenophobes often claim they should be– they are prisons. How many potential flourishing diasporas are confined by their oppressors? How many— if we must think of this in economic terms— businesses don’t exist because the person who would run them is stuck hiding from the local dictator? The point here isn’t that everyone should come to America, but that we should all be free to build a world we like, where we like. This might sound unthinkable, but we’ve done hard things like this before. Through long-fought political struggle, we have rendered some questions off-limits, as best as we can. We broke the power of aristocrats and slaveholders. Just as we’ve cast down crowns and broken chains, we should shatter borders next. We will be wealthier, safer, and happier— all of us— the moment we do so. And until then, the constant back-and-forth with the xenophobic far right seems to warn, we won’t know peace.