The idea of making a case for “open borders” arouses a great deal of disagreement and disapproval. Open borders, in the minds of some, implies no borders, it is argued and feared. There may be some who oppose the notion of political borders due to their disapproval of any form of government with a geographical area of responsible jurisdiction. There have been serious people who have tried to make the case for a world without any and all governments. But this does not apply to most of those usually classified as classical liberal or libertarian, who have made their own case that for any viable and stable social order, a minimal political system of constitutionally limited government is required for an effective protection of each individual’s right to their life, liberty, and honestly acquired property.
Open borders mean simply the idea and ideal of a world in which people are at liberty to peacefully move where they desire for purposes of earning a living, residing, or simply traveling for whatever non-violent reason. While this may seem like a utopian dream world — a world without passports, visas and border controls restricting the movement of people into or out of any country — such a world came close to actually existing a mere 150 years ago.
The liberal epoch of free trade and freedom of movement
The 19th century is often considered to be the heyday of classical liberalism in modern history. The ideal was a world of domestic and international freedom of trade in which those participating in an increasingly global system of division of labor were allowed to freely enter into mutually beneficial exchanges of all kinds. Not only was this considered essential for respect for an individual’s autonomy in deciding what associations and relationships with others were considered most advantageous to them. It was also considered the economic avenue by which all participating in such a system of peaceful and market-based interactions could benefit from the respective specializations and endowments of others anywhere in the world whose productive potential could enhance the well-being of virtually everyone in the long run.
Less attention has been paid to the accompanying conception of personal liberty in the right of freedom of movement. Many classical liberals of the 20th century drew attention to this complementary element of human freedom, which they often looked back on with nostalgia after the rise of various forms of collectivism and government interventionism during the decades after the First World War.
For instance, in his The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1920), John Maynard Keynes (who was far more of a liberal before he became a “Keynesian”!) referred to that “extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August 1914!” It allowed people to buy all that they might want or need from any corner of the globe and freely travel for any purpose with practically no government hindrance. Explained Keynes:
The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprise of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages….
He could secure forthwith, if he wished to, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, and could dispatch his servant to the neighboring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals [gold and silver] as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference….
The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.
In the midst of the Second World War, German free-market economist Gustav Stolper, then in exile in the United States from the ravages of the conflict in Europe, referred to that period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as the era of “the three freedoms” — the free movement of goods, money, and men. Said Stolper in This Age of Fable: The Political and Economic World We Live In (1942):
Everyone could leave his country when he wanted and travel or migrate wherever he pleased without a passport. The only European country that demanded passports (not even visas!) was Russia, looked at askance for her backwardness with an almost contemptuous smile. Who wanted to travel to Russia anyway?… The trend of migration was westward — within Europe from the thinly populated agricultural east to the rapidly industrializing center and the west, and above all from Europe to the wide-open Americas.
There were still customs barriers on the European continent, it is true. But the vast British Empire was free-trade territory open to all in free competition, and several other European countries, such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavia, came close to free trade…. Whether a bit higher or a bit lower, tariffs never really checked the free flow of goods. All they effected were some minor price changes, presumably mirroring some vest interests. And the most natural of all was the freedom of movement of money…. Most of the [European] money flowed into the United States and Canada, a great deal in South America, billions into Russia, hundreds of millions into the Balkan countries, minor amounts into India and Asia…. [These investments were] protected not only by [Great Power] political and military might but — more strongly — by the general unquestioned acceptance of the fundamental capitalist principles: sanctity of contract, abidance by internal law, and the restraint of governments from interference in business.
The free and peaceful movement of millions of people
Literally tens of millions of people freely migrated from one part of the world to the other. The make-up of those who moved was diverse in terms of places of origin, social status, religion, language, and reasons for uprooting themselves from the countries and cultures they had known to make new lives for themselves in new lands. Between 1846 and the First World War, over 60 million people left Europe and made their way to other parts of the world, with almost 35 million of them coming to the United States. Most of the remainder settled in Argentina, Canada, Brazil, Australia, British West Indies, Cuba, South Africa, Uruguay, and New Zealand.
Historian R. R. Palmer explained a number of the reasons for this peaceful and mass movement of people in History of the Modern World (1956). Some were escaping from poverty and starvation, as reflected in the case of the Irish during the famine of the 1840s. Some of the German migrants were attempting to avoid compulsory military service during Bismarck’s wars of the 1860s and 1870s to unify the German states under Prussian leadership. Swedes and Norwegians came to America for a more productive and prosperous life in farming. In the 1890s and the 1910s, Russian and Polish Jews emigrated to the United States to escape religious persecution and violence in Imperial Russia.
What enabled and fostered such a global freedom of movement, Palmer said, was the principle and increasing practice of political and economic liberalism:
But perhaps most basic in the whole European exodus was the underlying liberalism of the age. Never before (or since) had people been legally so free to move. Old laws requiring skilled workmen to stay in their own countries were repealed, as in England in 1824. The old semi-communal agricultural villages, with collective rights and obligations, holding the individual to his native group, fell into disuse except in Russia. The disappearance of serfdom allowed the peasant of Eastern Europe to change his residence without obtaining the lord’s permission.
Governments permitted their subjects to emigrate, to take with them their savings of shillings, marks, kronen, or lire, and to change nationality by becoming naturalized in their new homes. The rise of individual liberty in Europe, as well as the hope of enjoying it in America, made possible the great emigration. For so huge a mass movement the most remarkable fact is that it took place by individual initiative and at individual expense. Individuals and their family groups (to borrow the metaphor of one authority) detached themselves atom by atom from the mass of Europe, crossed the seas on their own, and reattached themselves atom by atom to the accumulated mass of the new world.
In 1913, the population of Western and Eastern Europe was slightly less than 350 million, while the population of the United States in 1913 was less than 100 million (97.225 million) people. This migration of 60 million people from Europe from 1846 to 1913 was equal to almost 19 percent of the entire 1913 population of the European continent. The inflow of 35 million people into America over the previous 60 years equaled 36 percent of the entire population of the United States at the eve of the First World War.
This liberal epoch of freedom to move and mass migration especially stands out because of its basis in voluntary choice. Other large movements of people have often been compulsory and violent. For instance, between 1525 and 1866, it is estimated that about 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the Americas as slaves, of which around 10.7 million survived the cruel and inhuman journey across the Atlantic. The vast majority, 12.131 million, were brought to South America and the Caribbean islands, with approximately 389,000 coming to North America. Slavery was ended during this same 19th-century liberal epoch after existing for thousands of years everywhere around the globe.
Passport requirements and restrictions on free movement
This freedom of trade and migration came to an end with the coming of the First World War in the summer of 1914. All the belligerent powers soon not only closed or restricted trade between themselves and the enemy countries but also imposed migration prohibitions with the reintroduction of passport and visa requirements not seen across Europe since the end of the Napoleonic wars a century earlier in 1815. The Woodrow Wilson administration imposed passport requirements on all U.S. citizens traveling abroad in November of 1914.
Immigration limitations into the United States had first been officially established in 1875, prohibiting suspected prostitutes from entering the country. But it was in the 1880s that the first really significant barriers to immigration were introduced with prohibitions on the arrival of first Chinese and then Japanese into the United States, especially along the West Coast areas of the country. These first immigration laws were based on racial prejudices and fears of Asians coming to America and undermining the morals of young people. The American Federation of Labor called for these immigration barriers due to fears of employment competition from the “Asian hordes,” who, it was said, also tempted young Americans into their opium dens.
The first immigration restrictions on Europeans were introduced in 1917, during the war. These laws were systematized in the early 1920s with the introduction of quotas on the number of people who might come to America from various countries. These limits on European immigration were especially focused on Eastern Europeans, who were considered to be culturally and racially inferior to the Western and Northern Europeans who had made up the larger majority of migrants to America in the 19th century. Bolstered by the widely accepted new “science” of eugenics, the immigration limitations were rationalized as a means of assuring an appropriate racial “hygiene” on the blood stock of America. There was also the frequently argued necessity of keeping unskilled, cheap labor out of America to preserve the American standard of living.
The rationales for and the quota categories of the immigration limits and restrictions have changed over the decades of the 20th century and now into the 21st century. But like so much else during the last 100 years, the premise and presumption has been the need and necessity for centrally planning the absolute and relative numbers of others from around the world allowed to come to the United States.
Compulsory mass movements of people
At the same time, in other parts of the world, there have been planned and unplanned forced movements of peoples from one country to another. In the wake of the First World War, there was a forced population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923, with 1.2 million Christian Greeks expelled from Turkey, and 500,000 Muslim Turks forced to leave Greece. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, an estimated 12 million Germans were forcibly removed from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other parts of Eastern Europe, with personal and real property confiscated in the process, and a resettlement of these millions of people in West and East Germany.
During and following the partition of British India in 1947, about 7.2 million Hindus moved from what was now Pakistani territory into India, while 7.2 million Muslims transferred from the territory of India to Pakistan, all because of religious intolerance. Another one to two million Hindus and Muslims died during these population transfers. Before and following the formation of the state of Israel in May 1948, nearly 900,000 Jews left the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa after living in these countries for centuries, the large majority of them doing so under the threat and use of violence or formal expulsion. Upwards of 700,000 Palestinians were displaced during the Israeli-Arab war of 1948–1949 to surrounding countries.
Totalitarian regimes prohibited emigration
At the same time, the rise of totalitarian regimes in the years between the two world wars, in the 1920s and 1930s, saw the rigid imposition of emigration barriers and prohibitions. Not only was all physical property and finance assets under the control of the governments in Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany; so were the people living in these countries. Human beings were as much “property of the state” as farm land or a factory building.
With the coming to power of the National Socialists (Nazis) in Germany in 1933, Jews were encouraged at first to emigrate as a solution to the “Jewish Problem,” as anti-Semitic Germans referred to it. Making up less than 1 percent of the entire German population, by 1939, half of the approximately 525,000 German Jews had left the country; following the German annexation of Austria in March 1938, 117,000 Austrian Jews fled, out of a Jewish population of 192,000. In the years leading up to the start of the war in September 1939, it became increasingly more difficult for Jews to escape Nazi control without surrendering virtually all of their financial assets and real property. But a difficulty just as great as obtaining permission to leave Nazi Germany and Austria (and Czechoslovakia after Hitler’s annexation of most of that country in March 1939) was finding alternative nations that would take them. The United States and many Western European and Central and South American governments imposed strict immigration permits. Most of the remaining German and Austrian Jews ended up in the concentration and death camps that cumulatively over all of Nazi-occupied Europe during the war resulted in the mass murder of about six million Jews. How many more of those millions might have found ways to make it to safe havens if only the entrances to those safe havens were not closed to them due to immigration quotas?
The plight of the illegal migrant sometimes became the basis of works by famous authors. An example is Erich Maria Remarque’s 1945 novel Arch of Triumph. It is the story of an anti-Nazi German who lives in France as an illegal refugee during the 1930s, possessing neither passport nor identity card, after escaping from a Nazi concentration camp. Though a highly skilled medical doctor by training, he cannot openly practice medicine in Paris, so he performs secret operations for French physicians lacking his expertise. Being found out and deported constantly hangs over his head every day. Having no legal standing, unable to make a living openly in the marketplace, he wallows in his own despair and uncertainties. He waits for the start of the war that is clearly coming to hopefully bring at its end some change in his status that might make him, once again, a normal human being.
Soviet prohibitions and punishments for attempted emigration
Attempting to leave the Soviet Union without rigidly controlled permission of the Communist Party became virtually impossible starting in the 1920s. It was a severe criminal offense to want and attempt to emigrate from the “worker’s paradise.” Only a selected few, screened and vetted by the Soviet secret police and the Party apparatus, could travel out of the country, and all such travel could only be for official state business; private travel for pleasure was nonexistent, since every citizen of the country was a government employee in some capacity and therefore had no private life or purpose. The types of cultural exchanges that brought Soviet scientists or entertainers to the West in the post-World War II period were all “affairs of state.” Every such delegation was joined and surveilled by accompanying agents of the KGB to prevent unwanted contacts with those in the Western host countries and to do all that was necessary to stop all attempts to defect.
Soviet citizens traveling in the West knew that their relatives at home were hostages who would suffer if they escaped the watchful eyes of their secret police handlers and failed to return to the Soviet motherland. Anyone attempting to leave the Soviet Union directly by trying to cross the border into a neighboring country was likely to be killed in the process or executed or sent to a labor camp after being captured.
The most dramatic symbol of the Soviet barrier to emigration was the Berlin Wall in East Germany. Constructed in August 1961, its purpose was to prevent the continuing hemorrhage of the already more than four million East Germans between 1946 and 1961 through the center of Berlin by simply crossing a street from the eastern Soviet sector of the city to either the western American or British zones. Built of concrete, the Berlin Wall ran for nearly 30 miles around the British, American, and French zones making up West Berlin; it was nine feet tall with a 200-yard-wide no man’s land leading up to the wall that was covered with land mines and patrolled by the East German police and military personnel. Dozens of people lost their lives attempting to get over, under, or threw the Berlin Wall during the 28 years it split the two halves of the city before it was finally brought down in November 1989.
The profound importance of the freedom to move
The profound importance of the freedom to move was emphasized by the German liberal economist Wilhelm Röpke in his essay “Barriers to Migration” (in Glenn Hoover, ed., Twentieth Century Economic Thought, 1950):
It may even be maintained that the actual practice of severely restricting international migrations represents not only the logical counterpart of general political and economic nationalism, and of national economic planning, but that feature of them which is the greatest challenge to the spirit of universalism which our civilization must imply, and the factor most conducive to international frictions and resentments.
If we agree that the freedom to move is one of the most elementary rights of man, of which he cannot be deprived without dangerous psychological reactions, it must be obvious that by imposing the present restrictions of migration nationalism has done its worst. As the mediaeval system of feudal serfdom fixed the serfs to the soil of the manor, modern nationalism and collectivism have, by the restriction of migration, perhaps come nearest to the “servile state”….
Man can hardly be reduced more to a mere wheel in the clockwork of the national collectivist state than being deprived of his freedom to move, even if he has no particular desire at the moment to make use of it…. Feeling that he belongs now to his nation, body and soul, he will more easily be subdued to the obedient state serf which nationalist and collectivist governments demand. He will be readier to join his fellow nationals in the mass chorus of nationalist slogans, to swallow the government propaganda and to follow some mystic leader who knows how to exploit the instinct and sentiments of these masses which have been hemmed into the national frontiers.
America a land of immigrants in search of freedom
Those who wish to come to the United States today are no different than the earlier waves of immigrants in the 19th and the 20th centuries. They, too, are escaping from political oppression, religious persecution, or lack of economic opportunity due to the corruption and plundering of the governments under which they have lived. They may look different from those earlier waves of immigrants; they may speak other languages; they may follow some different faiths. But they, nonetheless, remain human beings like us. They, too, want better and safer lives for themselves and their children and grandchildren.
It is estimated that the immigrant population in the United States numbers 46 million, or about 14 percent of the total U.S. population of around 335 million people in 2023. It is also estimated that between 11 and 12 million of them are illegal or “undocumented” immigrants under current U.S. law. This is still below the peak in the 1890, when immigrants comprised 15 percent, or 9.25 million people out of the total U.S. population of 63 million Americans, when there still were few restrictions on immigration into the United States.
The vast majority of Americans are the descendants of those who immigrated to the United States over the last 200 years. The same types of doubts, fears, and accusations made today were often heard in those earlier times. The Irish and the Poles are all drunks or Catholics who worship the Pope in Rome; how can they ever be “real” Americans? The Germans are often arrogant and sometimes draft dodgers who live in their own clustered communities and won’t learn English, preferring to speak German and read German-language literature and newspapers; how can they ever be “real” Americans? The Italians are also Pope-worshipping Catholics and are Mafia types who bring organized crime to the United States; how can they ever be “real” Americans? The Jews are the murderers of Jesus, they kidnap Christian children to use their blood to make matzo bread, they are cheating businessmen, and are all communists; how can they ever be “real” Americans?
Well, we are their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, if not even further back. They have all been part of the melting pot that makes this unique and special people called the “Americans.” If the use of these words had not been misappropriated for certain political purposes in our own time, it would be correct to say that our American society truly is one that has been and is “diverse” and “inclusive.” These waves of immigrants from so many lands, customs, faiths, talents, and backgrounds have been the lifeblood behind America’s creativity, innovativeness, industry, and cultural distinction.
In a classical-liberal world, the political borders on a map designate and distinguish the administrative boundaries of different political jurisdictions, the role of each of which is to secure and protect the rights of its citizens and residents to their lives, liberty, and honestly acquired property. This leaves each individual safe and secure in his freedom to peacefully go about his life in free association and exchange with others, whether those others are next door or half way around the globe. In such a classical-liberal world, it also means that all individuals are also free to peacefully travel, work, and reside wherever they desire.
Instead, around the world today, including the United States, boundary lines on political maps have been turned into walls closing off peoples from each other. Part of these limits on interpersonal associations and relationships restrict buying and selling, borrowing and lending on voluntary mutually agreed-upon terms of trade at market-determined prices. But it has also placed often insurmountable barriers to people’s freedom of movement. Emigration restrictions lock people into the countries that accidents of birth and circumstances have placed them at the mercy of those possessing political power. Immigration restrictions deny human beings the liberty to find that place on the planet that they consider most likely to give them opportunities to improve their lives and that of their families, as they define and desire it.
All barriers to migration, therefore, are forms of government central planning to determine and dictate how and where human beings may live, work, and reside. No worse Sword of Damocles can more hang over a person’s head than in the circumstance that living in one place has for political, economic, religious, or other reasons become intolerable or an actual threat to their life, yet their own government will not let them go; and even if they legally or illegally escape, some other country’s government will not let them in. A true and ultimate prisoner of the state.
Open versus closed borders, therefore, is really a matter of individual freedom versus political control over people, just as much as denials of civil or economic liberty within a country. The classical-liberal idea and ideal is inseparable both from free trade at home and abroad, and freedom of movement within and between the countries of the world.
This article was published in the December 2024 issue of Future of Freedom and is based on a talk given on September 30, 2024, as part of the Future of Freedom Foundation’s online conference, “The Case for Open Borders.”
