Immigration myths: introducing an overview of arguments for closed borders

By now, the ongoing refugee crisis has been making headlines for quite a while. Political leaders in both Europe and North America have to address it. It has affected the Canadian election campaign as the Harper government is being challenged on its response to the developing situation.

A lot of people, both political leaders, pundits and citizens in general, have opinions about this. Alas, a lot of those opinions seem deeply misinformed about how migration (refugee and otherwise) and immigrant integration actually works. I will address a (somewhat random) selection of common statements that I have seen across the Internet over the past few weeks in three coming blog posts. They will be based on theme, the economic, law and order, and cultural rationales that people often use to defend the "we need to close our borders for immigration"-position. I originally planned to deal with them in just one blog post, but...well...it sort of grew a bit.

These "closed borders"-arguments are represented in just about all democracies. The most obvious such come from nationalist politicians, in Europe represented by parties like UKIP in the UK, Front National in France or the Sweden Democrats in Sweden, so the anti-immigration stance is often associated with the right-wing politics. However, it exists on the left, too. The US presents a good example of this, where Democrats want to close borders to "protect American jobs" and Republicans (the most glaring example being Trump) want to build a wall to Mexico "to keep the criminals out". The short reply to these politicians is that they are wrong. The scientific consensus is that immigration does not hurt the economy and that immigrants are not more criminal than the native born population.

Instead of thinking that the norm should be closed borders and asking how many immigrants can we accept, the norm should be to ask: What rights do governments have to set up barriers for the free movement of all humans?

Recommended sources

There is a quite an extensive body of scientific literature on this topic which I'm not going to cite here. The list would simply be too long (and some of the material is behind the pay walls of academic journals). The below are accessible reads/videos that succinctly summarizes the state of the art in research:

The Case for Open Borders
Myths about Immigration
Let the people go - a review of Paul Collier's argument for closing the borders


Oh, and: