Welcome the Stranger

The Ever-More-Urgent Case for Open Borders

The single most important moral and political cause of our times is to get countries around the world, but especially the wealthy nations of the West, to welcome the stranger. Open the borders. Give people the freedom to move and live where they want.

Most of the human race is born poor and unfree, without a way out. The West, with all its historic good fortune in enjoying so much wealth and freedom, could do far more good by welcoming people from all over the world into its prosperous societies than by any other action or policy. Many Westerners oppose immigration but try to make up for it with other good deeds. You can't really do that. If you support immigration restrictions, forcible separation of families by deportation and trapping people in poverty and all that, that's who you are. Repent of that first, and then look for other ways to love your neighbor.

I have believed this for many years and have sometimes labored a good deal as a voice in the wilderness, trying to open people's eyes to the moral necessity of open borders, curing them of the evil of supporting the exclusion and oppression of foreigners. 

To this end, in 2010, I wrote the book Principles of a Free Society, published through a now-defunct think tank called the Locke Institute, and let the chips fall where they may. I had vague notions that I was committing some sort of professional suicide by publishing such radical and unpopular views. But I was determined to make whatever ascetic sacrifices and endure whatever humiliations might follow from proclaiming the message of justice and mercy. None did. The book didn't even disqualify me from, in due course, getting a high-powered job in the Republican administration of Governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas. If anything, it helped me professionally. People with no intention of reading it were impressed that I had published a book. I had rather hoped to provoke negative feedback in order to learn from it, but it's far harder to get attention by writing than I had imagined, and especially, attention from the other side. And so the book had very little personal cost for me, but also very little impact.

The book may, however, have helped catalyze the formation of the website Open Borders: The Case, where I soon joined the team of writers and blogged regularly for several years. I’ve long had a vague sense that writing for Open Borders: The Case is the best thing I have ever done, and vague guilt for dropping that ball these last few years. Unlike Principles of a Free Society, it had some impact. It's hard to say how much, but some. It provoked the other side to rebuttals, and it got a little bit of mainstream press coverage. It had followers, and conferences were organized. It still gets traffic today, and occasionally provokes angry responses from random visitors, even though regular writing there has ceased for years. 

From a perspective of digital marketing optimization, I ought to be writing this there, and not here. 

But just because people agree on open borders doesn't mean they agree on everything. And in fact, I have a lot of philosophical differences with various other writers at Open Borders: The Case, which don't prevent my respecting and admiring them, but do make it hard to build up a coherent case. 

So I'm continuing the work here instead, and under a different name: not “open borders,” but “Welcome The Stranger.” You'll notice I've renamed my Substack. I still plan to write about other topics, but it's nice to have a purposeful brand, and I plan to get rather focused on this. The change of slogan from “open borders” to “welcome the stranger” is sufficiently justified by the need to distinguish the sites, but it's mildly strategic too.

Some advocates of freer immigration dislike the term “open borders” because it's unpopular. But I don't think the term is to blame. I think people want the border as a blindfold. They want the government to use force to keep poor people out of their field of vision so that they can feel better about themselves than they deserve. Open borders sounds nice, but it would mean flooding the country with poor people, so they don't like it. By contrast, I like the term “open borders” because it pushes people to face up to the radicalism of what justice demands. 

In that sense, I like it better than “welcome the stranger,” which is more innocuous and less explosive of cruel complacency. “Sure, we'll welcome the stranger,” people might think, “up to a point. We'll let in maybe a million immigrants a year, and try to make them feel reasonably welcome.” Not good enough. 900 million people worldwide want to migrate, and the number who would benefit by migrating, and who would probably join the human tide once the movement began, is greater. By what right do we exclude them? “Open borders” advocacy, under that name, pries open the doors of the mind to the idea that we have no right to exclude peaceful immigrants, and to envision a future in which that unjust and harmful practice is abolished.

However, “open borders” is also ambiguous, in a way that Open Borders: The Case tried to define better, though I'm not sure even we ever meant quite the same thing by it. But I'm less ambitious in trying to change the language, so I want to sidestep the ambiguity. To see the ambiguity in talking about, consider three policies: 

1. National borders are no barriers at all. You can cross them at 65 mph on a highway, like state borders in the US. People treat foreigners like everyone else.

2. There are checkpoints and passport requirements at the border, and immigrants might face some disadvantages after arrival: special taxes, discrimination for some jobs, no voting, no public benefits. Rare cases of exclusion occur, e.g., bona fide terrorist risk, contagious disease. But essentially, all those who want to come, can.

3. There is a comprehensive global caste system based on place of birth, with draconian enforcement, and the vast majority of the human race could never hope to enter the rich countries, or to achieve a life as rich, free, and flourishing for themselves and their children would enjoy by doing so.

Now, most people seem to think the status quo is closest to (2). They assume the rules are reasonable, and are indignant at the perversity of those who break them. They think “open borders” means (1), and they oppose that. 

But actually, the status quo is (3). I don't care much about getting the world to (1). I want to get it to (2). And I call it “open borders.” 

With this misunderstanding in mind, you can see why calling myself an advocate of “open borders” would lead onto a tedious treadmill of confusions. People hear “open borders” and wonder why I want to let in terrorists. I say I don't. Checkpoints, and exclusion on bona fide anti-terrorism grounds, are okay. So they ask: then I'm not really for open borders? The script varies but it's an uphill battle to clarify the stakes. “Welcome the stranger” avoids that. But once the conversation is started, “open borders” can home in behind to underscore my ambition.

The other reason for the slogan change is to signal my Christian motives. 

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

“He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

“Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” (Matthew 25:31-46) (My emphasis)

While welcoming the stranger is the most obviously relevant thing that the “sheep” in the parable do, and the “goats” do not, open borders is also by far the most effective way that rich countries can feed the hungry and clothe the naked. It is far more effective than any foreign aid in lifting people out of poverty. Matthew 25:31-46 doesn't give me any choice but to believe that complicity in the West's immigration restrictions puts souls in danger of hellfire, and that Westerners’ best hope of avoiding that fate is to do anything they can, to make any sacrifice, in order to resist the nefarious regime of total immigration sovereignty.

This is one of many passages in the Bible that make God's uncompromising support for hospitality and immigration clear. Ancient Israel under the law of Moses welcomed the stranger. All the more must we Christians do so, whose religion is far more inclusive and oriented towards expansion and evangelism.

In writing this post, I was haunted by a fear that I was being too self-righteous and judgmental, especially towards my fellow Christians, most of whom do not support open borders and some of whom are full MAGA followers. And yet Jesus Himself and prophets down the ages have denounced injustice and issued harsh condennations. How ought Christians to read “Judge not, that ye be not judged?” (Matthew 7:1)

And then it hit me. How ought we to avoid judging others? In the ways that we would not want to be judged. That certainly does not mean that I should not warn my fellow Christians when they're doing wrong, for I would certainly want to be warned if I'm doing wrong. Better that they hear it from me now, than that they hear it from God at Judgment Day, when it's too late. By the same token, if my fellow Christians see that I am guilty of any evil, especially one as great as immigration restrictionism, I would earnestly beg them to bring it to my attention, proving by the Bible what the right course ought to be. If I am shown to be in the wrong, I'll try to change.

I said at the beginning of this post that the most important moral and political cause of our times is welcoming the stranger. Of course, for a Christian, there's always a cause even higher than that: the soul’s death to self and turning to God, the birth and maturation of the Christ-life within each of us, the two great commands to love God with all our might, mind and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. That means a lot of things. But among other things, it means welcoming the stranger, in whom, as the parable of the sheep and the goats makes clear, we also meet God. And since exclusion of foreigners is the single greatest besetting sin of modern society, the great cause of inequality and misery and unfreedom in the contemporary world, that's the best place to focus. It's not much use making people chaste and hard-working if they damn their souls by hating the foreign-born. 

That's certainly not to say that advocacy of deportation is always or even usually motivated by a particularly strong hatred of the foreigner. Yet I don't think it is very compatible with or conducive to loving the foreigner, either. And as Christianity is a grand coherence of truth, you can't get the whole right while getting the parts wrong. Opposition to immigration is a barrier to being fully Christian, at the level of individuals and of society. I want to see a re-Christianization, and a deeper Christianization, of society than ever before, and I think Christian hypocrisy is the single greatest barrier to that, for the moral beauty of Christianity has perennially been obfuscated by the sins of Christians. Christian hypocrisy has many aspects, but in the present day, none is more flagrant than the contempt of most American Christians for God's command to welcome the stranger. And if Christians could convert themselves on that point, I believe they would go far towards converting society about Christianity as a whole. Many who rightly turn away in horror and contempt for MAGA pseudo-Christianity would be eager to join a Christianity that mobilized millions to active love and restored a decadent and jaded nation to its historic manifest destiny of welcoming the huddled masses yearning to breathe free through the golden door of liberty.

Which brings me to the other reason why this is so urgent right now. When I was young, American democracy seemed impregnable. People's loyalties to the Constitution, to respect for elections and democratic law, seemed unshakably strong. Now there's been an attempted coup, and its immoral and criminal leader enjoys so much support that he is the front-runner for president. I knew that people can turn against democracy. It happened in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, and in many other places. I just didn't think it could happen here. Why do we seem to be on the verge of losing our country to liars and thugs? 

There are a lot of reasons, but perhaps the most important is this national obsession with total immigration sovereignty. Just about all politicians say that they'll enforce the immigration laws. As I'll explain in an upcoming post, that's not actually possible, because illegal immigration is a victimless crime, so enforcement doesn't enjoy the cooperation of conscientious people. Free societies that practice due process of law are especially constrained. So mainstream politicians, by buying votes with cheap, simplistic promises of enforcing the law, continually fueled expectations that couldn't be met, and bred cynicism and frustration. “Build the Wall and make Mexico pay for it” was appealing precisely because bullying a poor country into funding US border security was so obviously illegal and vicious that it signaled a radical break from routine politics, and maybe, just maybe, a politician who lacked the democratic pieties and was so flagrantly and obviously wicked and lawless might ride roughshod over due process of law or whatever it was that was holding mainstream politicians back from closing the border. 

Twenty years ago, I began advocating open borders out of mercy towards the billions of poor people in this world for whom it would be their best chance to escape poverty. Later, I studied the relevant biblical passages, and gained another reason for advocating open borders: the clear command of God. But now I have a third reason: to save American democracy. I don't really see how that can be managed anymore without taking the poisonous idea of total immigration sovereignty off the table. As Abraham Lincoln once saw that the country couldn't continue half slave and half free, so today we can't have a limited government at home but unlimited power to control the borders and exclude immigrants. There's a basic contradiction in that which has been destroying our democracy in front of our eyes for the past nine years. MAGA has forced me to realize just how patriotic I am, just how fervently I love our country's institutions and traditions and hate their impending destruction by wicked unpatriots.

Welcome the stranger: for mercy to the poor of the Earth; for God; and for America.

A lot of upcoming posts in this series have already been drafted, based on a book project that was sponsored by Steve Kuhn years ago and never quite got over the finish line. I plan to start by setting up the problem that Western societies, especially the United States, face:

1. The Dreamer Problem

2. The Limits of Enforcement and the Nature of Free Societies

Next, there will be a long series on the economic benefits of freedom of migration:

3. The Niagara Falls Economics of Open Borders

4. How Immigration Helps American Families: Housing and Food

5. How Immigration Helps American Families: Child Care, Eldercare, and Family Formation

6. Dow 100,000 and its Trickle-down Effects

7. Fixing the Broken Escalator: How Immigration Can Help American Workers Get Ahead

8. Fast Forward: Immigration and the Technology Frontier

9. Immigration as a Fiscal Lifeline

Next, I’ll turn to constitutional questions about immigration interacts with the nature of free societies and the sustainability of their liberal and democratic constitutions in the face of a diverse immigrant tide:

10. Basic Principles: Immigration, Democracy and Freedom

11. The Story Instinct and the Constitution of Consent

12. America’s Cold Civil War and the False Fear of Immigrant Revolution

13. Immigration and the Meaning of Community

14. The Rise and Decline of Nationalism

I have a few more posts sketched out after that, especially on immigration and Christianity, and spelling out detailed policy recommendations within the general framework of “don’t restrict immigration, tax it.” However, I love a vigorous discussion, and if readers lean in with comments, I may change course to address whatever appears to be top of mind for people.

Eventually, I’ll package it up as a book and distribute it through the various online channels. So– stay tuned!