From The Vault: In this article from SpeakFreely’s ‘Roaring Twenties Issue’ (2022), Ilya Somin considers hopes and doubts for open immigration over the coming decade.
Few aspects of liberty are more important than freedom of movement. Empowering more people to “vote with their feet” can liberate tens of millions from oppression and poverty. People can engage in foot voting through international migration, and also through domestic freedom of movement.
As I write these words in March 2022, we see a dramatic illustration of the importance of migration rights, with some three million Ukrainian refugees fleeing Vladimir Putin’s brutal war of aggression, and Russians seeking to escape his repression at home. The West would do well to welcome both. And they are far from being the only ones in need of migration rights.
Much can be done to expand foot voting opportunities. Modern technology and communications potentially make foot voting more effective than ever before. But we must break down political barriers to migration rights, in order to realize that potential. Freedom of movement is an important element of liberty in and of itself. For obvious reasons, a person who is forcibly barred from moving away from her home country or region suffers a severe restriction of freedom. But migration rights are also essential to the protection of other aspects of human freedom and wellbeing.
Consider a person who is able to move to the United States from Communist Cuba, to Western Europe from Syria, or from North Korea to South Korea. They will immediately gain a massive increase in freedom of virtually every kind: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, economic freedom, and so on. Much the same is true of Ukrainians fleeing Vladimir Putin’s brutal war against their country, or for that matter, Russians seeking to escape his increasingly severe domestic repression.
Or consider such cases as ethnic and religious minorities fleeing persecution and women fleeing patriarchal societies, such as Saudi Arabia. Here, too, there is a massive increase in freedom. On average, immigrants moving from one country to another gain a massive 70 spots on the Cato Institute Fraser Institute Human Freedom Index – a difference comparable to that between Libya and Mexico, or Mexico and the United States. In addition to destroying the liberty of would-be migrants, immigration restrictions also infringe the liberty of natives in receiving countries. The latter suffer from loss of the right to make economic transactions with migrants, and from the harm caused by immigration enforcement measures, such as racial profiling and deportation (which often result in the detention and deportation of American citizens mistaken for undocumented immigrants).
In addition to increases in liberty, freedom of movement also greatly increases economic productivity and human welfare. Economists estimate that abolishing migration restrictions throughout the world would roughly double world GDP. That’s because so many millions of people live under oppressive or corrupt governments where they have little or no chance of ever escaping poverty, no matter how talented they are. Moving to a freer society with better institutions almost immediately makes them vastly more productive.
Restrictions on internal migration within countries are somewhat less consequential, in part because there are fewer of them, and in part because the difference in institutional quality between different parts of the same nation are usually much smaller than those between countries. Nonetheless, they too have major welfaredestroying and liberty-undermining effects. In the United States, for example, zoning restrictions that make it difficult or impossible to build new housing in response to demand also cut off millions of people from living in places where they would otherwise find greater opportunity. That, in turn, massively reduces the productivity of the US economy – and especially hurts the poor and disadvantaged. Restrictions on housing construction have similar deleterious effects in Britain, Canada, and elsewhere. In sum, governmentimposed restrictions on mobility are among the greatest liberty issues of our time. Few if any policies imposed by democratic governments forcibly consign so many millions of people to lives of poverty and oppression.
Libertarians and others concerned about freedom would do well to make this set of issues one of their foremost priorities. In some ways, prospects for freedom of movement are better than ever. Modern technology makes mobility cheaper and faster than ever before in human history. Similarly, the internet and other communications technologies make it easier than ever for potential migrants to learn which areas have the most appealing government policies and economic opportunities for their needs. As I describe in the conclusion of my book Free to Move, in both Europe and the United States, younger and more highly educated people are more open to immigration than their elders, which may portend a more favourable political environment for reducing migration restrictions.
At the same time, a crossideological zoning reform movement has emerged in the United States, which has begun to break down the most significant barrier to internal freedom of movement in this country, including even in the state of California, which features some of the most egregious policies of this kind. But there are also some negative countervailing trends. In both the US and many European nations, the last decade has seen the rise of powerful antiimmigrant nationalist movements, of which Donald Trump has been just one of the most prominent leaders. They have managed to enact some draconian new immigration restrictions, including massive cuts in legal migration in the United States. During the COVID19 pandemic, both the US and many other countries enacted severe migration restrictions, in the mostly vain hope they would prevent the spread of the disease. For a time, the US was more closed to immigration than at any time in its history, and we have not regained anything like prepandemic levels even now. Countries such as Australia enacted draconian restrictions even on internal freedom of movement.
A resurgence of COVID or some other deadly disease might lead to a resumption of such measures. With respect to domestic mobility, powerful “not in my backyard” (NIMBY ) interests still pose powerful political obstacles to breaking down internal barriers to mobility. In some federal systems, including the United States, occupational licensing also makes mobility difficult for many workers. It’s hard to move to a new state if doing so requires spending vast amounts of time and money getting a license that you must have to do your job.
And these are just the obstacles in liberal democracies. Authoritarian states such as China, Russia, and North Korea still impose their own (often much more severe) restrictions on freedom of movement. In sum, the future of freedom of movement remains in doubt. There are great opportunities for expanding it, but also grave dangers. Whether the former prevails over the latter remains to be seen. But the first step in the right direction is realizing the enormous importance of the issue.
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