Why Doesn't the World Open Its Borders?

As a collective, the modern world has mostly agreed that individuals hold certain freedoms. These include the right to speech, the right to practice your religion, and the right to individual expression. So why is the freedom of movement included in that list? As Alex Tabarrok, an economist focused on migration, says, “our moral intuitions and indeed our laws today are that you shouldn’t discriminate against someone because of their race, because of their gender, their sexual preference or other issues. But for odd reasons, it’s perfectly OK to discriminate against someone because they were born somewhere else. You can, in fact, put up walls and machine guns and prevent someone from moving simply for the reason that they were born somewhere else.” The novel Exit West by Mohsin Hamid displays this kind of aggression faced by migrants and refugees and also what a world without borders may look like.

In Exit West, refugees are met with violence and protest when arriving in new countries through magical doors. This reflects the way that things seem to be now in the world; Immigrants are thought of being something to be scared of and regulated. Not only are the migrants thought to be a threat to the cultures they are entering in the book, but to their economies as well. Sadia and Saeed, the two main characters, migrate outside of London where they are kept in a migrant community in which they work in a closed system. This comes from the fear that immigrants will steal locals’ jobs when they arrive. This is a common tactic today, especially in politics, used to convince people that immigration is not a good idea. However, once the pervasiveness of immigrants reaches a certain point in Exit West, it seems that the world accepts the freedom of movement, and becomes a safer and better community because of it.

So what would happen if countries went away with, or at loosened, their borders in the real world? On the economic side of things, many economists believe that an influx in immigration to richer countries would help things. In terms of wages, the low-skill jobs of a wealthy country may take a dip, but higher wage jobs would increase wages, and the poorer wage country’s wages would increase as well. Overall, immigration could add massive amounts of revenue to the global market. The European Union has experimented somewhat with open borders, with a large amount of stability for all countries participating. It was shown in the EU that less well-off countries’ residents did not flock to other places at the opportunity. This would seem to suggest that a relaxing of borders might not necessarily lead to a global migration crisis.

Of course, most of this is merely hypotheses on what a world without strict borders could look like based upon some numbers and a lot of opinion. This ultimately leads the decision up to the citizens of the world on how to respond to the world: Should migration be a right, and if so, could the world handle it?