Should countries accept immigrants?

People have the right to live wherever they want

Question: Should countries accept immigrants?
Position1 of 2›: Yes, countries should accept immigrants
Argument‹5 of 5: People have the right to live wherever they want

Progressives argue that borders should stay open because people have the right to migrate to wherever they want. The desire to migrate and settle in a more prosperous country is a purely rational one. Open borders is a good response to the huge economic inequalities in the world.

The argument

One's country of birth does determine, to a significant extent, what one can expect to achieve in life. Some people are born into prosperous countries with rewarding paths of education and work, but others are born into countries with no promising paths of learning or livelihood. However, neither is responsible for their relative positions within global society: nobody selects the country they are born into, and nobody earns it. Therefore, arbitrary borders do nothing but perpetuate this inequality, since they attach a person's prospects to a circumstance that is wholly a matter of chance. Pro-immigration arguments object to this massive international inequality on exactly that ground. The average Swede, they maintain, only has a better life than the average Chadian because they were born in a flourishing environment; only because of luck do they enjoy a comfortable life. If the difference between those two lives is not a difference in desert, then the border holding it in place is not enforcing anything either person can claim to have earned. So what grounds can the Swedes give for turning Chadians away from their borders — Chadians who want to migrate north and settle in a better social, political and economic environment? The demand usually made is that the migrant justify their wish to move; on this argument the demand runs the other way, and it is the exclusion that stands in need of a justification. None of the familiar answers survives that reversal, proponents argue, because each of them appeals back to the very circumstance of birth that neither party controlled. What is left is a claim that belongs to people rather than to places: the right to live wherever they want, exercised by the person whose life is at stake rather than granted by those who happened to arrive first. Keeping borders open is therefore a necessary response to the serious economic inequalities that exist between different countries, and so countries should accept immigrants.

Premises

[P1]One's country of birth largely determines one's prospects, yet no one is responsible for where they were born. [P2] Arbitrary borders therefore merely perpetuate the inequality between, say, a Swede and a Chadian who differ only by the luck of birthplace. [P3] There are no grounds to turn away those who wish to migrate to a better social, political, and economic environment. [C] Therefore, because people have the right to live wherever they want, countries should accept immigrants.

Counter-arguments

This argument for open borders assumes that inequality is fixable. Those who put forward this argument believe that every inequality that emerges from luck needs to be fixed. For others, the real flaw in this argument is that its conclusion does not seem to follow from its ethical foundations. There are other means for prosperous nations to meet provide justice and meet their ethical obligations, not just open borders. Foreign aid and investment is another form of justice that helps better the contexts of other countries This is how wealthy individuals and countries can provide justice, without opening borders to all immigrants. For example, as long as Jeff Bezos gives a portion of his wealth to the less fortunate, he has every right to keep others out of his home. If the domestic environment is like this, then why should the international one be any different?

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Nobody is responsible for where they were born, but that establishes the inequality is undeserved rather than that any particular remedy follows; a bad outcome no one caused still needs an argument about who must fix it and how. [Rejecting P2] Borders do more than perpetuate inequality: they mark the units within which taxation, welfare, courts and political representation operate, and the premise does not address whether those functions could be sustained without them. [Rejecting P3] "No grounds" is too strong. The counter offers grounds the premise does not answer — that obligations of justice can be discharged through aid, investment and trade — and open borders raise further claims from existing residents about wages, housing and services, and from the countries losing their skilled workers.