Don's Reviews > The Case for Open Borders

Open Borders, or No Borders? Joseph Carens’s distinction between these two ideas gets muddied in this book and with it the possibility of a political strategy to advance the rights of migrants at borders is lost.

Washington admits a soft spot for the sort of social life which flourished in border regions, where cultures of different kinds rub up against each other. Preserving this does not require the strict policing of the border, with all the modern paraphernalia of immigration and customs control reducing contact between people to an irreducible minimum. For intercultural contact to be a net positive it rather needs mature and sophistic citizens who are conscious of the fact in crossing a border they will meet people who do not necessarily think and behave like them. As we are learning at the present moment, strictly policed borders seem to require an enormous commitment to expenditures and resources which can only be justified by hyping up the experiences of contact with others as something inherently undesirable and to avoided wherever possible.

But the elites who run modern states don’t necessarily believe their own propaganda that tightly controlled borders are needed because foreigners are so often devious and untrustworthy people. The higher level justification for ever-tightening immigration controls is the assertion of relations of power between nations competing with one another for access to resources in global markets. This is the reason why the supposed virtue of being able to impede the entry of others onto one’s territory is seldom accompanied by a firm upholding of the right of other countries to stand in the way of its own nationals going as freely as possible across the planet. The capitalist order of things dictates that states which can optimise access to the resources held by other countries, with control concentrated in a cohort of actors who can traverse the globe at will, will have the advantage over nations of the second, third and lower tiers who are left scrabbling to fill in complex forms and paying inordinate visa fees.

Washington brings out this power relationship between imperial and neocolonised states and makes a strong argument about the numerous forms of disadvantage it creates. He frames much of this in the contact of climate change, brought about by the fossil fuel profligacy of the Global North, and the catastrophies it will entail for the nations of the South. Open Borders becomes an argument for reparations for the harm done over the centuries by slavery and colonial domination.

What is less convincing is his claim for a strategy for forcing a step down from policed borders to the openness which will benefit everyone. He agrees that this will be gradual, with the mobilisation of political forces that can challenge the building of walls and the incarceration of would-be migrants, but how this relates to the moods of the demos at any time or context is only loosely sketched out. Overall, he relies on ethical and moral arguments which are adapted in accordance with various audiences – ranging from church goers through to right wing libertarians in a chapter setting out twenty-one arguments for open borders. This is okay in and of itself, but a work which is aiming to integrate a progressive argument for open borders ought to have more focus on what is happening among subaltern social groups, and offer ideas on how these can be fused into a coherent case for radical change. More work to be done on that!