How to rethink America's borders

Do you ever look back on something you posted on the Internet and think, well, that was cringe? Yeah, I mean, I look back at that stuff and I'm just like, it's so emblematic of the era, and it's also just like, why did I think this would age well like in the slightest? This week, unexplain it to me from Vox. What to do with your online regret? New episodes on Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. This week on the gray area, we're talking about what unites us. We've kind of created a society now where the really the monoculture is just football and tailor swift. Those are really the only things that are like that now, and I'm not being sarcastic, it really is the case. But what does that say about American culture? Listen to the gray area with me, Sean Elling, new episodes available everywhere. I start with a very intuitive example. This is Fabio Rojas, a sociologist. I lived in Chicago when I went to graduate school there, and every day, thousands upon thousands of people from Indiana and Wisconsin would travel to work in Chicago. And you'd say, that's all right, it's okay if somebody comes to Chicago to get a job. Who are we to tell somebody that traveling from Indiana to Chicago is a bad thing? They should decide for themselves. However, we don't apply the same logic or reason when we think about people from other countries. Why is it bad that a person from Canada or Germany or Mexico should come to our country? From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Future Perfect, a podcast where we look at big problems through the lens of effective altruism. I'm Dylan Matthews. Effective altruists are obsessed with increasing well-being, and they want to find low-cost, efficient ways to do it. One idea that seems low-cost, at least on its surface, open borders, as in anyone who wants to come into the US can come in. It doesn't matter where they're from, they have a standing invitation. It sounds like a radical idea in a country that's debating whether it's okay to separate immigrant parents from their kids. But the case for it is more compelling than you might think. Fabio Rojas, the guy we heard from at the top, is a professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. He's an active member of the Open Borders Movement. We'll talk to him about the idea as something theoretical. And then we'll talk about how hard it can be to implement in practice. So to start, why would we want open borders? The immigrant themselves can often make themselves better economically, they can find a better job. A person from Mexico earns twice as much in the US for doing the same job, and a person from Nigeria can earn 16 times as much. Open borders is low cost, easy, and almost sure to work for a lot of people. And almost no other policy has those properties. So for example, people often say, instead of letting people migrate to America, why don't we try to reform that country? Why don't we try to make Mexico a less corrupt economy? So you have to ask, how would you actually reform Mexico? There's a lot of police violence down there, there's a lot of gang violence. These are incredibly hard problems that nobody has offered a good solution to. However, we know from hundreds of years of experience that migration is cheap, it's easy and it works. Building schools, even building a good school in the United States is really hard. Now imagine how much harder that is in a place like India, or Mexico, or Russia. Instead, the very simplest solution is to say if you're honest to God, interested in helping poor people, simply tell the border patrol to take the day off. Tell them to take the year off, and just let people move between countries and follow opportunities. And they will benefit way more directly and way more quickly than having us tinker with the government or the schools of another country. For an effect of altruists, these are like the magic words. It's a low cost intervention with a big effect on well-being. But I think if you're going to make the argument that opening borders is an ethical thing to do because it benefits the migrants, it's also important to look at what happens to the countries the people are leaving. So I asked Fabio Rojas about brain drain, for example, the risk that other countries would lose their best and brightest people and be worse off. When people move to another country to work, there's lots of spill over effects back into the country that sent them. Let me give you a very simple example for my own family. My in-laws are from the Philippines. They grew up in Manila, so I have a lot of family out there. And so it is common in the Philippines for people to work in the United States and then go back to the Philippines. What does that do? They take their American dollars and they build new homes in the Philippines. They hire maids to clean their homes. They hire landscapers. They buy clothing. They buy electronics like television sets and computers. Brain drain is not quite an accurate term. It's more like a brain loan. These countries are loaning their brains, loaning their talent to other countries. Those people are making a lot of money and they're sending a lot of it back. So if you live in a country where the economy is not great, or you live in a country where there's repression or some sort of issue and it's not easy to get a good career, you may actually benefit your country by moving away, working in the United States as a doctor or even as a maid or as a gas station attendant, building up a little bit of money, bringing that back and then supporting the economy in the country that's sending the immigrants out. Bobby Rojas also argues that open borders and all these benefits open borders could bring for migrant workers, for their families, for their home countries. They don't have to mean a huge sacrifice on the U.S. as part. The policy could actually be really good for us. We get more workers, more taxpayers, more creative people, more entrepreneurs. When you open the borders, you bring in the best people from other countries. Because it takes money, it takes time, it takes planning, you often have to learn a new language. These are challenges that people with a lot of issues may not be able to handle. But people with a lot of education, a lot of entrepreneurial spirit, a lot of grit, those kinds of people will say, yeah, I'll take that risk. I will learn a new language. I will come to America and be part of the country. So if you're really looking out for America, you want to make America a better place. You want the best people possible. And if you put those two things together, the ethics and the benefits of migration, you're letting a direction that suggests we should really open the borders. This all sounds great. But I wanted to also talk about some of the reasons people push back on open borders. Why they might think this is going too far. People worry about the details. You need to figure out things like, do you screen people or not? You need to figure out if you're going to check for smuggled goods. You need to figure out how to build new schools for people moving here, how to build new houses for people moving here. But the first worry that comes up when you talk about immigration is jobs. And that's something that Fabio Rojas can speak to. He says the whole people will come and take our jobs idea has a really fundamental flaw. It assumes that there's a fixed pie of jobs that doesn't change in size. Like a fixed block of jobs and if somebody gets a job, another person doesn't get a job. That's really a misleading way to think about an economy. And the reason is, is that migrants create jobs because they have to eat, which means they have to buy stuff from the supermarket. They have to drive a car, which means they have to go to the gas station. They may need their children to get vaccinated so they take their kids to the pediatrician. They certainly need to live in a house or an apartment so they have to rent from somebody. So immigrants, what they do is they expand the pie, they expand the economy. So in the same way that a person from Indiana doesn't steal a job from a native of Chicago, a person from Mexico doesn't steal a job from a person in California. Instead, they compete for jobs and they also create jobs because they have to spend money to work and live in the new place. And that's what's different about people moving than say TV sets where if you just produce more TV sets, the price of TVs goes down. You often hear the argument that people who are competing more directly for the same kinds of jobs say like dishwashers or other low-skilled American workers might lose out even if Americans benefit as a whole. And the evidence there is actually fairly modest to negative in the sense that when you see a big influx of people, in some cases it does negatively affect the employment statistics in places, but not as much as you think. Most economists would say that people already in the U.S. are probably not hurt or if anyone has hurt its previous immigrants because they are directly competing with the new ones. That said, there are some economists who argue that poor Americans see lower wages. And there's one specific example that's talked about a lot. There's a big group of Cubans who immigrated to Miami all at once in 1980. And for decades, people have been fighting about whether or not those Cuban immigrants temporarily brought down wages for low-income Floridians. But I'll say back up. Hold on. Let's say that the most conservative argument is right. Let's say there is a small impact on low-income Floridians. A few people are going to be a little bit less well off in the short term. And in exchange, you get a huge benefit for all the people who are escaping from Cuba, which is a very poor place with a lot of repression. The other thing that also note is that markets readjust. People find new jobs. They find better jobs. And remember, all those people coming in, that's a new market that can be served. And you can make money off of that, you can have a living off of that, and you'll be better off if you let them in. But a lot of the backlash against immigration is an economic. There's also a cultural feeling that you're losing some culture that you grew up with. And this sort of bleeds intel outright bigotry pretty easily, but it's real. Right. So, look at the historical evidence. The United States absorbed tens of millions of people from Russia, Germany, France, England. And then later, China and Mexico. This country has been a mother of exile, the cradle of a new race of men, and the young nation with all of world memories. If you take the average American, their grandparents or great grandparents may have come from Italy, or Ireland or Germany. Or as this 1955 radio play puts it, Dutch, Swedes, French, German, Jews, Scots, many Americans believe that the melting pot was boiling over from new ingredients that could not be properly absorbed. And I would say, people were worried, 100 years ago, 150 years ago, that your Irish grandparents are your German great-grandparents. People were worried that they would make the country worse off. They would ruin the culture of America. Violence and bigotry was directly against all foreign-born, but especially the Irish because of their religion, some of their habits, and their extraordinary activity in American politics. And back then, people did say a lot of kind of outrageous things about people from Ireland, people from Italy. But what did we learn from that experience? All these processes of Americanization and amalgamation were far stronger than the separation of any national or ethnic group. Today, some of the most distinguished Americans in public life in the professions are the descendants of people whom the champions of Nordic supremacy once called barbarians. We learned from that experience that if you let people be in peace, let them find jobs, let them get educated, most of them will do very, very well. Most people will assimilate, and they'll adopt the culture of the land that they move to. And their children will become Americans just like you and me. So let's say, for the sake of argument, the Fabio Rojas is right. Let's say open borders is a really good solution. The question then is, could we sell the American people on it? After the break. Let me put it this way. I don't know how you could do that in an immediate shock to the system like that. A guy whose whole job is selling people on immigration policy gives us his answer. A lot of us have spent a lot of the last week watching videos of what's happening on the streets of Minneapolis. And understanding what it is that we're seeing, but also what's real and what isn't, and what's AI, and who is taking these videos and how we're supposed to understand the source feels harder than ever. So this week on The Vergecast, we're talking about what's happening in Minneapolis, how information moves in an AI age, and what it means to make sense of it all. All that, plus what's new with the new TikTok, why everything feels like it's falling apart on TikTok, and more on The Vergecast wherever you get podcasts. It may not feel like it, but Trump's approval rating is some of the lowest and recorded history, and it's fallen to new lows in recent weeks. Because the nation reels from recent killings of two anti-ice protesters in Minnesota. But not everyone thinks he's failing. This week, we're hearing from Trump voters. It is very unfortunate that it happened, but it's also unfortunate that the ice is being blamed for just murdering somebody who is just so innocent, which isn't the case whatsoever. A, they were provoked, B, he got ran over, and it's hard to tell what's real and what's not anymore. He's delivered, on virtually every promise he's made, the economy is booming right now. He closed the border, we're not getting any more legals in, that has been done, that was a major promise, that's been done. Today explained, listen wherever you get your podcasts. I've heard you describe sometimes as a fixer, is that a term that you like? I mean, it's like any lawyer, you come to a lawyer with a problem, and it's the job of the lawyer to figure out how to fix that problem. Leon Fresco is an immigration attorney in D.C. He worked in the office of immigration litigation for the Obama administration, and before that, he was Senator Chuck Schumer's staffer. I know a little bit about immigration, he's the guy you go to if you have an immigration problem, or a policy idea. He'll give you a big grin, a couple of jokes, and a three-pronged strategy to solve your issue. A solution that works with the courts, the Congress, and the administration. So if somebody wants to call that fixer, you call it whatever you want, we figured if anyone could help us figure out just how realistic open borders would be in actual practice, it's Leon. We asked him to walk us through his process, for getting a really simple and small change to immigration policy past. He gave us an example. We have a bipartisan bill in the Senate that has senators Mike Lee and Kamala Harris to resolve the situation of the very long wait time for people waiting for green cards from Indiana and from China. How would you categorize this bill in terms of things you could do on immigration? Is this like a really big step? Is it more of a tweak? This would be the smallest possible thing you could do on immigration. It's literally eliminating a digit from a 10,000-page code, and it is still the amount of work and sweat that all of these members put into calling their members of Congress, visiting them, talking to them, pushing, and pushing. Clearly, even a tiny tweak is a big lift. One of the main things Leon and his team have to do is go into congressional offices and talk with the staffers there. He convinces them one at a time to sign on, which means answering all their questions. The one question that's always asked, who else supports the bill? What does the business organizations think? What do the labor unions think? What do the immigrant rights groups think? What do the anti-immigrant groups think? You spend a lot of time then having to explain to all of those groups what your bill does. Even though obviously none of those folks are members of Congress, but you have to try to gain their support so that then you can go back to the people who are asking you these questions and say, oh, they're fine with it. They support it. They're neutral. People have asked, show us that you have a thousand members in our district that care about this. And so we'd have to come up with a rally in like, you know, a week. You could see all this as an argument for going for a really big change, like open borders. Something you could focus all your energy on, instead of getting lost in tiny fixes. If it's going to be hard, why not go big? And Leon has worked on bills that went for big change. With the gang of eight bill from 2013, four Democrats and four Republicans working towards a reform that had nothing to do with open borders, but was still huge. He says that it was an exponentially heavier lift. Well, it's just a lot more time consuming because what you do is you take a small bill and you multiply the amount of questions by about, you know, tenfold. And at the end of the day, it fell apart. It didn't pass. This is an episode about the most dramatic change to American immigration policy that you can imagine. It's open borders. So let's say I'm Senator Matthews. I've just been elected. I'm not worried about getting reelected. I come to you. I say, Leon, my one dream in life is that anyone in the world who wants to move to America can do that tomorrow. What do you say to me? Well, I mean, so I have a wonky answer and I have a non-wonky. So the very simple answer is we can't get that accomplished. This from a guy whose specialty is getting stuff accomplished or at least coming up with a solid plan of action, he walked us through some of his reasoning. First he says he'd have to go talk to political staffers and most of those staffers wouldn't even hear him out. Most of the people you could never get past the initial my boss would never do it once the point of even having this discussion. But even if staffers took him seriously, he'd have to answer their questions. For me, at least it's easy to jump on board the open borders train after I hear Rojas' pitch. But even I acknowledge that there are a lot of details you'd need to work out to adopt the policy and practice. Again, what do you do about security or vetting people? How do we absorb so many people all at once? What does it look like for schools or hospitals or housing? Well let's say we have answers for all those questions and we bring them to the staffers. Then I think the answer you get 99 out of 100 times is okay, let me go check with my boss and then those people never talk to you again. You'll never get a second meeting. You'll never get to talk to that staffer and it just won't go anywhere. The kind of thing you'd have to do to get that second meeting is you'd have to mobilize thousands of people in that person's district or state to go to their town halls to email them every day to make phone calls saying no, no, no, we're serious. We want open borders and then they'd have to start responding. But if it's that have to be part of some sort of unprecedented grassroots movement where somebody felt like their existence as a member of Congress actually required them to change their mind on that issue. We're not at that point, obviously. We do not have control of our borders. It's an immigration system that's out of control. Illegal aliens. Illegal aliens. Illegal aliens. And we are building a wall on the southern border which is absolutely necessary. If the world was the voting public then the world would happily support open borders. But if you say only the 330 million Americans are the voting public what you're going to soon find is that many, many, many more Americans are extremely nervous about this policy and would reject it out of hand and the number of Americans who are willing to give you an open mind. As someone who's in the nitty-gritty of this and has been for a long time, do you sort of find economists and philosophers and radicals from outside the political process calling for things like open borders helpful or does it distract the issue? What I think is not helpful in the grand scheme of things is if too many of the members of the Democratic Party believe in completely open borders, then I do think it is a natural lizard brain reaction for someone who only has two choices. I have to vote for the party of open borders or I have to vote for the party of draconian family separation and god knows what else to choose the second one because at least the second one has some order to it. People don't just like fundamentally like to take risks like that and say well we're just going to open the border. We'll let you know how this all works out. Fabio Rojas is more hopeful. His academic research actually focuses on how fringe ideas can become mainstream. Yes, the open borders movement is an unpopular movement, but the same time that's how a lot a movement start out. A couple hundred years ago, if you said that black people and white people were equal in the eyes of god, people would have been horrified. They would have said no, no, blacks and whites are different. But you just slowly make the argument. And so what I and my colleagues of the open borders movement are hoping to do is to really start a very slow gradual process where we engage the public and we say look, if it was okay for your grandparents to migrate to America, it's probably okay for that guy. And that's not something that people buy into. But little by little we have to make the argument, we have to get it out there, we have to communicate with people and say America is a great country with a country of open doors. With Fabio Rojas and Leon Fresco agree on one thing at least. In order for open borders to go through, you would need a massive upswell of support. You'd have to figure out answers to all the logistical questions and you'd have to convince people to get on board. So that's a less obvious cost, the cost of persuading voters. But it's a real cost, and it's a cost that doesn't end once the policy is adopted. You'd have to keep fighting to prevent a backlash. But persuasion is a cost that's mostly borne by individuals, trying to win over their friends and their family and their neighbors. Open borders isn't going to happen because of a decision that some foundation or government makes, at least not any time soon. If it happens, it's going to happen because individual people worked really hard to persuade fellow voters that it's the right thing to do. So if you think that open borders is an intervention worth fighting for, then fight for it. Our wonderfully talented producer is Bird Pinkerton. Our editor is Amy Drozdowska. We've got a lot of help and a lot of thanks to Jillian Weinberger. Our engineer is Jarrett Floyd. We have music from Chris Sabrinsky, Blue Dot Sessions, and Scott Graton. Many thanks to Darlin for her help on this episode and to the New York Municipal Archives and WNYC Studio for use of the radio play "The Immigrant in American History." Future Perfect is made possible through a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. To read more of our reporting on effective altruism, check out vox.com/futureperfect.