Open Border - Arguments Against Open Borders

Arguments Against Open Borders

Controlled borders restrict migration by non-citizens. Several arguments for controlled borders and against open borders are as follows:

1. That controlled borders encourage responsible policies in relation to population and birth rates for countries by preventing high population and high birth rate countries from disgorging their people onto other low population and low birth rate countries. This is critical in an over populated world that is struggling to feed itself. Open borders essentially punishes those groups of people who are exercising birth/population control to reduce their impact on their local environment and potentially rewards high population growth by allowing people to move from over populated areas to less stressed areas where people may be protecting their environment by controlling their population. Open borders by allowing easy emigration also encourages high population growth regions to continue their high fertility practices by providing an escape valve.
2. That open borders can be a threat to security and public safety. Open borders assumes that people will have the best of intentions towards an areas existing people and will continue to have the best of intentions. The threats to security and public safety can sometimes manifest themselves many decades after the initial immigration.
3. That open borders encourage poor and unskilled immigration that is good in the short term for businesses as a source of cheap labor but bad in the medium & longer term for the taxpayer as these people require costly government services and require expensive infrastructure to be built to sustain them, neither of which the new immigrants can afford to pay for. If this infrastructure is not built, which is increasingly the case due to its expense, then it can result in the creation of slums and ghettos which consists of much of the illegal immigration and also people displaced from the society by the new immigrants. Alternatively Controlled Borders can be used to encourage skilled immigration that is in demand in a country and at levels of immigration that will benefit the country.
4. That conditionally open borders based on environmental conditions, i.e. environmental refugee, will discourage a country from conservatively assessing environmental risks and will also discourage a country from taking the necessary steps to ensure that their population and resource usage are within the constraints of those environmental risks. An example of this is climate change, science is clearly showing what conditions have previously been present on different parts of the planet due to natural variations in climate and it is reasonable to expect governments to assess these past conditions for population carrying capacity and make changes to their population policies to ensure that they can manage these changes without creating a large number of environmental refugees for other countries to absorb. For example, Bangladesh has already requested that other countries be prepared to accept Bangladeshi environmental refugees, despite a rapidly growing population.
5. That conditionally open borders for people fleeing conflict, i.e. asylum seekers, based on the rights afford by different UN conventions and international laws has created a route for people to flow from low income developing countries to higher income developed countries, bypassing the usual border controls. This has created many problems associated with people smuggling, such as debt bondage and many other forms of personnel abuse as people move across the globe to select countries which offer the greatest benefits. In fact people have often moved in such numbers to the developing world that structured assessment processes have broken down and that the conditionally open border that was intended has come to resemble more of an unconditional open border.
6. That large scale migration across open borders can result in demographic changes that can result in demographic shifts that change a country's political power structures in favor of the new demographic and against the existing people of a region or country. It is common place for an ethnic and cultural group to lobby politically for further immigration from its particular ethnic and cultural group. Further it is well known that they are likely to assist any irregular migrants from their particular ethnic and cultural group to maintain themselves within the community and avoid detection from immigration officials. A bad start/experience to immigration for a particular ethnic and cultural group once established can be difficult to redeem. A key factor in the successful integration of a particular ethnic and cultural groups is careful selection of candidates for immigration and a numerically limit on numbers of immigrants both of which are facilitated by controlled border.
7. That open borders can lead to infrastructure deficit in a country. This occurs when large scale migration occurs but the infrastructure to support that migration does not get built.
8. That controlled borders can be used to ensure that new immigrants can afford suitable housing without disadvantaging the existing local population, that they can afford to significantly contribute to the additional infrastructure they will require and that they will be unlikely to become a burden on the taxpayer.