The open borders viewpoint holds that the United States should substantially eliminate or radically reduce legal restrictions on immigration, permitting individuals to move, reside, and work in the country without the gatekeeping mechanisms of visa quotas, nationality-based exclusions, or mandatory deportation regimes. Proponents include libertarian economists, cosmopolitan political philosophers, certain strands of progressive and left politics, and a minority of immigration scholars. Advocates argue that free movement of people is a moral imperative comparable to free trade in goods and capital, that current restrictions cause enormous and unnecessary human suffering, and that the economic and social case for liberal immigration policy is overwhelmingly strong. The position ranges from advocacy for fully open borders with no state control of migration to advocacy for dramatically liberalized policies that would make entry nearly automatic for most peaceful migrants.

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Open borders advocates, drawing heavily on the work of political philosopher Joseph Carens, argue that citizenship in a wealthy country is analogous to feudal birthright privilege. An individual born in the United States receives enormous advantages in health, income, education, and political freedom that have nothing to do with merit or desert. Carens and others contend that a liberal political theory committed to equal moral worth of persons cannot coherently justify a system that assigns life prospects so dramatically based on the morally arbitrary fact of where one is born. From this perspective, borders do not protect liberty - they restrict it, and do so in a way that systematically benefits those already fortunate enough to be born on the right side of a line.

A major pillar of the open borders position is empirical and economic. Economists sympathetic to this view, notably Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development, argue that the gains from full liberalization of global labor mobility could effectively double world GDP - a gain larger than the elimination of all remaining trade barriers combined. Proponents hold that restrictionist immigration policy is one of the most significant suppressors of human productivity in existence, trapping billions of workers in low-productivity economies when they could be employed in high-productivity ones. Domestically, open borders advocates argue immigrants expand the labor supply and consumer base simultaneously, that they are net fiscal contributors over their lifetimes, and that fears of wage suppression for native workers are overstated, particularly in dynamic economies with flexible labor markets.

Some advocates ground the position in a libertarian natural rights framework. They argue that the freedom to move, to seek employment, and to enter into voluntary arrangements with willing counterparties is a fundamental liberty. On this account, the state has no legitimate authority to prevent a Guatemalan worker from accepting a job offer from a Texas employer, any more than it has the authority to prevent a Texan from moving to California. The state's border enforcement apparatus is, in this framing, an act of coercion against peaceful individuals and should be presumed illegitimate unless a compelling justification can be given - a burden restrictionists are argued to fail.

Progressive open borders advocates often add a historical and reparative dimension. They argue that U.S. foreign policy - military interventions, support for authoritarian governments, trade policies that destabilized agricultural economies, drug prohibition enforcement - has directly contributed to the instability and poverty driving migration from Central America, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. On this view, the United States bears particular obligations to those displaced by conditions the country helped create. More broadly, advocates note that much of U.S. history involved relatively open migration: prior to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the immigration restriction acts of the 1920s, the country functioned with minimal formal immigration controls and absorbed vast numbers of migrants from Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

Open borders advocates typically address the two most common objections directly. On security, they argue that legal immigration channels reduce illegal border crossings, that documented migrants are more easily vetted and tracked than undocumented ones, and that border militarization has not demonstrably reduced terrorism. On cultural and social cohesion concerns, they contend that assimilation has historically occurred across generations regardless of the sending country, that cultural diversity generates economic and intellectual dynamism, and that the “absorptive capacity” argument has been made - and proven wrong - about every major immigrant wave in American history, from Irish and Italian Catholics to Eastern European Jews to East Asian and Latin American migrants.

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The open borders position as a formalized political-philosophical stance is largely a late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century development, though its antecedents run deeper. Classical liberal and anarchist thinkers in the nineteenth century often assumed freedom of movement as an implicit corollary of personal liberty. Emma Goldman, among others, argued forcefully against immigration restriction in the early twentieth century.

The modern philosophical articulation is usually traced to Joseph Carens's 1987 essay “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders,” published in The Review of Politics. Carens argued from within both Rawlsian and libertarian frameworks that consistent application of liberal premises led to near-abolition of immigration controls. The essay was influential but remained a minority position in political philosophy for decades.

The economic case was developed most rigorously in the 2000s and 2010s, particularly through the work of Michael Clemens, whose 2011 paper “Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?” in the Journal of Economic Perspectives gave the position its most cited quantitative framing.

The position gained a broader audience in U.S. political discourse during the debates over comprehensive immigration reform in the 2000s and the surge of Central American asylum seekers in the 2010s. Libertarian outlets such as Reason magazine, the Cato Institute's immigration scholars, and left publications such as Jacobin and Current Affairs all published prominent defenses of open or radically liberalized borders during this period, drawing diverse coalitions under a loosely shared position.

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Joseph Carens - Political philosopher at the University of Toronto; author of The Ethics of Immigration (2013); widely regarded as the foundational theorist of the contemporary open borders position.

Michael Clemens - Senior fellow at the Center for Global Development; principal author of the empirical economic case for labor mobility liberalization; his research on migration's GDP effects is the most frequently cited in the field.

Bryan Caplan - Economist at George Mason University; author of Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration (2019), a graphic nonfiction book making the libertarian-economic case; among the most prominent popular advocates.

Alex Tabarrok - Economist at George Mason University; collaborator with Caplan; argued that a “keyhole solution” - open borders combined with targeted taxes or conditions on migrants - could address most practical objections.

Reihan Salam (critic-turned-partial-interlocutor) - Salam's book Melting Pot or Civil War? (2018) is a sustained critique, but the debate it engaged helped sharpen open borders advocates' arguments and is frequently cited in the literature.

The Cato Institute's immigration scholars, including Alex Nowrasteh, have consistently advocated for substantially liberalized immigration policy from a libertarian framework, making Cato one of the most institutionally prominent homes for this viewpoint.

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A significant internal division exists between advocates who call for the literal elimination of immigration controls and those who argue for practical near-equivalents: automatic work visas, elimination of numerical caps, administrative processing replacing adjudicative gatekeeping. The latter group argues that full open borders is politically unworkable as a slogan and that a focus on achievable liberalization better serves the underlying goals. Purists respond that framing matters and that conceding the legitimacy of the border regime in principle undermines the moral argument.

Libertarian open borders advocates sometimes argue that open borders requires a leaner welfare state, or that migrants should be excluded from certain public benefits for a transitional period, to prevent “welfare magnet” effects and address fiscal concerns. Left open borders advocates typically reject this, arguing that the two are compatible and that means-testing immigration status for benefits is itself a form of exclusion contrary to equal dignity principles. This is one of the sharpest fault lines within the coalition.

Some advocates accept narrow security-based exclusions - barring individuals with credible terrorism ties, for instance - while others argue that any such exception reintroduces the categorical border control logic and should be resisted. The debate turns partly on empirical questions about how well security screening works and partly on civil liberties principles about presumption of innocence.

Strategically, advocates debate which framing is more persuasive and more honest. Some hold that the economic argument is the most tractable with skeptical audiences and should be foregrounded. Others contend that the moral argument is the more foundational one, and that an economic framing risks conceding that the policy would be wrong if it were economically costly - a concession they regard as incorrect.

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• United States - Immigration - Main topic
• United States America Immigration - History - History of U.S. immigration policy
• United States Immigration - Restrictionist Viewpoint - Overview of viewpoints
• United States Immigration - Restrictionist Viewpoint - Restrictionist viewpoint
• united-states-america-immigration-moderate-reform-viewpoint - Moderate reform viewpoint
• United States Immigration - Immigration Enforcement First Viewpoint - Enforcement-first viewpoint
• United States - Immigration - Debate - Main debate page
• united-states-america-immigration-skilled-worker-debate - Debate on skilled immigration
• united-states-america-immigration-asylum-controversy - Asylum system controversy
• freedom-of-movement-viewpoint - Broader philosophical context

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1. Joseph H. Carens, “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders,” The Review of Politics 49, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 251-273. 2. Joseph H. Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 3. Michael A. Clemens, “Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 25, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 83-106. 4. Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith, Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration (New York: First Second, 2019). 5. Alex Tabarrok, “The Case for Open Borders,” The Independent Review 25, no. 3 (Winter 2021): 349-367. See also Tabarrok's earlier popular statement: “The Case for Getting Rid of Borders - Completely,” The Atlantic, October 10, 2015. 6. Alex Nowrasteh, “The Most Common Arguments Against Immigration and Why They're Wrong,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 856 (May 2018). 7. Reihan Salam, Melting Pot or Civil War? A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders (New York: Sentinel, 2018). Cited as the principal interlocutor whose critique open borders advocates most frequently engage. 8. Giovanni Peri, “The Effect of Immigration on Productivity: Evidence from U.S. States,” Review of Economics and Statistics 94, no. 1 (February 2012): 348-358. Cited by advocates for the labor-market complementarity argument. 9. Emma Goldman, “The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation,” and related anarchist writings on freedom of movement, collected in Alix Kates Shulman, ed., Red Emma Speaks (New York: Schocken Books, 1983). 10. Lant Pritchett, Let Their People Come: Breaking the Gridlock on Global Labor Mobility (Washington, DC: Center for Global Development, 2006).