In April, FiveThirtyEight wrote that immigration is likely to be the central issue of the 2020 election. President Trump has made an anti-immigrant agenda the central piece of his successful 2016 campaign and subsequent presidency. Prominent Democrats have responded by defending immigrants: they have fought the wall, the travel ban, and occasionally called for the elimination of ICE. While this spectrum of views appears dramatically broad, one view curiously gets marginalized by both sides: open borders.
Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump, a conservative, opposes open borders. In his State of the Union Address this year, Trump complained that “wealthy politicians and donors push for open borders while living their lives behind walls and gates and guards.” Interestingly, Bernie Sanders, a progressive, also opposes open borders. Bernie Sanders makes a similar populist stand against the policy, arguing that “there’s a lot of poverty in this world, and you’re going to have people from all over the world” if the US adopts open borders. He has previously claimed that the policy was a “‘right wing proposal’ pushed forward by the wealthy Koch brothers.” Why might conservatives and progressives both oppose open borders?
Arnold Kling, in The Three Languages of Politics, introduced a tool that allows us to see why Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders both oppose a policy of open borders, despite their fundamental disagreements about politics. Kling put forward three different political languages that people use to think about the world. Conservatives view the world in terms of civilization and barbarism. Progressives view the world in terms of oppressors and the oppressed. Libertarians view the world in terms of freedom and coercion.
Trump opposes open borders, if we take him at face value, because he deeply fears barbarism. In his Oval Office address regarding immigration, Trump claimed that “thousands of Americans have been brutally killed by those who illegally entered our country and thousands more lives will be lost if we don’t act right now.” He is trying to prevent the crime and chaos that he believes uncontrolled immigration causes.
Sanders opposes open borders because he cares about economic oppression. Sanders argues that open borders “would make everybody in America poorer” by allowing the wealthy to “bring in all kinds of people” and have them “work for $2 or $3 an hour.” Sanders is trying to prevent further economic oppression of the poor in the United States.
As a supporter of open borders, who is libertarian, I might be deeply frustrated by both men’s willingness to allow the state to curb freedom. But Kling’s tool empowers me to be more productive. I can make conservative and progressive cases for open borders that would be more convincing to Trump and Sanders, respectively.
How might we convince Donald Trump to support open borders? We can argue that, in fact, open borders would make America trend towards civilization, not barbarism. The Cato Institute reports that legal immigrants commit crimes at a quarter of the rate of native-born Americans (relative to their share of the population). What about illegal immigrants? They too commit crimes less than native-born Americans, at roughly have the rate (relative to their share of the population). Whether or not Trump accepts these facts is not in my control — but any person who both shared his worldview and accepted these facts would be forced to shift her position, since immigration actually subtracts from overall barbarism.
How might we convince Bernie Sanders to support open borders? We can argue that open borders actually help the oppressed. It is untrue that the oppressed would become poorer as a result of open borders. Economist Michael Clemens published a study that shows that we’re losing trillions of dollars of economic potential through border restrictions. In a world of open borders, global GDP would double, according to economist Bryan Caplan. But would the wealthy be reaping the rewards of this economic growth off the backs of the oppressed, as Sanders suggests? Caplan disagrees, arguing that “‘if production in the world were to double, almost everyone is going to get enough of that doubling that they’re going to, in the end, be better off as a result. You can’t double the output of the world and leave a lot of people poor as a result.’” Like Trump before, Sanders may not accept these facts, but anybody who both shared his worldview and accepted these facts would be forced to shift her position, since open borders would actually make everyone, including the oppressed, wealthier than they otherwise would have been.
In a time of existential partisan conflict, Kling’s framework allows us to bridge political divides and begin speaking the same language again. By speaking to our political opponents’ interests, rather than shaming them for having those interests, I am a far more effective political communicator, whether I am discussing mainstream policy ideas or even marginalized ones, like open borders.
Pranav Mulpur
themiddlepath.home.blog 