I sympathize strongly with this article in the Atlantic. Yet the author doesn’t discuss an important point: borders don’t exist just because people think human rights depend on an accident of birth. That’s a straw man argument – it’s hard to find anyone who thinks human rights should depend on accidents of birth.

Historically, people created borders to protect themselves from attacks from other people. Clearly, this is a morally justified reason to create borders and militarily defend them. Over time, borders merged, dissolved, grew until eventually becoming the nations of the modern world.

The author’s case would be more compelling if he acknowledged this. Perhaps his point is that there is no legitimate justification for preventing peaceful, productive people from crossing borders. Of course, there are numerous illegitimate justifications, mainly related to displacing or disrupting the status quo, whether economic or cultural. From a moral perspective, whatever displacement or disruption arises from somebody taking a job, opening a business, joining or starting a club, or any other peaceful activity, is something we all accept as part of a free society. The benefits of living in a free society, where we can all do these things, outweighs the drawbacks of the disruptions that free and mutually voluntary actions may cause.

The only morally justifiable restriction to people crossing borders that I can think of is the time & effort needed to confirm that they aren’t carrying contagious diseases and aren’t  “bad guys” – criminals, terrorists, etc. Put differently, people and governments have the morally justified right to keep out bad guys. The effort to distinguish bad guys from everyone else represents the extent of immigration/emigration restriction consistent with ethics, public safety and security. Yet the restrictions we have today go much farther than this. And people attempt to justify them for additional reasons, most of which have no ethical basis.

There’s a difference between no ethical basis, and ineffective. Some restrictions are neither effective nor ethically sound. Others may be effective, yet have no ethical basis. For example, preventing people from entering the US to work in agricultural fields or high tech companies is effective, if the goal is to restrict the supply of labor increasing wages of those already employed in these jobs. Yet it does so by making the resulting products – whether groceries or software – more scarce or expensive. If the goal is cheaper more abundant groceries and software, it is ineffective. However, even if effective, it has no ethical basis. This is not the kind of beneficial disruption mentioned above, because it was not achieved by the voluntary cooperation of free people. It was achieved through the use of force – restricting the free movement of people across borders.

If we ask ourselves: do we want to live in a society of abundance, or of scarcity? The question answers itself.

A world without borders sounds attractive at first. Yet anyone who knows why borders were first created knows that a world without borders would be violent and unstable. I would like to live in a world where borders were used only to protect and defend from outside aggressors, never to restrict the movement of peaceful productive people, as they are today. I wonder whether such a world might eventually evolve into one without borders, as the free movement of people would tend over time to more evenly distribute human talents and perspectives across the world. This would tend to reduce conflict by balancing economic differences and promoting acceptance of cultural differences.