8 minute read
Student Politics - Should the UK's borders be more open or more closed?
CUCA - Isaac Lamb, Speakers Officer-Elect
There are two different senses in which a country's borders might be 'open' or 'closed'. In one sense, a country with open borders is a country which has a large intake, numerically speaking, of migrants. Closing the UK's borders would mean reducing net immigration to the UK. In another sense, a country could be said to have open borders in that it does not 'vet' or 'test; potential migrants; a country has closed borders, then, not because net immigration is low, but because potential immigrants are met with a long list of requirements they must meet before they earn citizenship.
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In terms of the UK’s numerical intake, there are several considerations for a Conservative. On the one hand, the economic strength of the UK is of great concern to Conservatives. Studies suggest that immigration aids the growth of an economy; gaps in the labour market are filled, and talent from overseas is injected into our institutions and businesses. On the other hand, Conservatives also value what they call ‘social’ capital. This is the value assigned to our institutions, culture, and in a more broad sense, ‘way of doing things’. Our practise of electing representatives to parliament, and accepting the results regardless of whether they go our way, is an example of something that does not directly produce economic capital. For the Conservative, however, this custom produces something valuable nonetheless. From this, it follows that if immigration is shown to be occurring in high enough numbers that there is a loss of social capital then the Conservative would see this as a reason to close the border.
The Conservative line on whether more vetting is needed is clear. Conservatives are naturally disposed to see the vetting of potential migrants as positive. It aligns with some key Conservative ideas. A pointsbased system rewards merit. It also supports the conservative understanding of rights and citizenship; citizenship is not universal but denied unfairly to people born overseas. It is something that was earned, fought for, and died for, by the British and passed on to their descendants. It is therefore no injustice that potential citizens be asked to meet some criteria before being awarded citizenship. Finally, Conservatives see it as right and proper that the government’s concerns are local. The settlement Britons inherit is one where our government presides over a territory and everyone within it. It is only right, then, that this government concerns itself primarily with the concerns of those over whom it presides, and vets those that are to enter to ensure they do not wish to damage native interests.
In conclusion, Conservatives do believe that moderately open borders can be positive. The economy grows, and as long as immigration isn’t excessive, the social capital of the UK is not damaged. At the same time, this is only the case if those that do immigrate share our values and respect our traditions. As such, Conservatives are naturally drawn to a system of moderate, points-based immigration.
CULA - Keir Bradwell, Secretary
For years, we liberals have decried our opponents on the left and right for their hopelessly facile solutions to deeply complex problems. Witness Labour deciding higher education could be solved by “just making it free”; the Conservatives claiming to have fixed the 2008 financial crisis by “simply spending less money”. A liberal rarely has a policy position that does not take several mystifying graphs and a 20,000-word thesis to explain.
On immigration, however, an issue that touches upon the lives of billions and the economies of all in incomprehensibly variegated fashion, the solution, by radical contrast, genuinely is very simple.
Open the borders. Completely.
A basic premise of contemporary liberalism is that every human life is of equal worth. The responsibilities of the modern industrialised nation-state, whose wealth confers it enormous power to improve the lives of its inhabitants, therefore extend far beyond its own citizenry. Thankfully, comfortably the most effective thing such a state can do in this regard is also the easiest: allow anyone who wants to live here to do so.
Migrants move to the UK, not for the miserable weather, but because they stand to earn multiples of their current income. Some of that income can be sent back home to provide for friends or relatives; the rest used for establishing a new life in a country with a state-of-the-art healthcare system, decent schools, and good University Liberal Associations. Whether by quotas, expense, or bureaucracy, every would-be migrant prevented from living in the UK is a person forcibly kept in relative poverty.
This is the moral argument for opening Britain’s borders. If we mean what we say when we deem every human life of equal value, we reject the idea that those born in the UK are somehow especially deserving of the advantages of living in the UK. Every migrant prevented from entering Britain is thus also victim to our failure to properly uphold our liberalism.
Many moral causes are not necessarily practicable. Abolishing material inequality is a lofty, noble ambition, but if it undermined humanity’s basis for economic growth it would trap us all on unacceptably low incomes, forever. Thankfully, immigration is nothing like this. The best part of the argument for open borders is that it works.
Explaining this imaginatively is difficult. In so few words here it is impossible to pay adequate tribute to the vast cultural endowment handed to Britain by those who have chosen to make it their home. Vast quantities of empirical literature show low-skilled migrants do not lower domestic wage rates, much more convincingly than this short piece ever could. Other arguments are relatively well established: the Economist estimates a borderless world would be $78 trillion richer, migrants are net contributors to the government’s coffers, and the notion of a ‘brain drain’ has been thoroughly critiqued.
But from all that work emerges a fundamental message. Britain freeing itself of its self-imposed restrictions on immigration is not just morally necessary. It is also common sense.
DULC - Freddy Fossey-Warren , Bailey College Liaison Officer
To put it bluntly, open borders are good. Not only should more open borders be supported on humanist grounds, but there are many, often overlooked, economic advantages too. Many of the disadvantages it is claimed that open borders would bring are indicative of wider, global issues that should be directly addressed, rather than merely swept under the rug through a policy of closed borders. The moral argument for open borders is obvious. Many migrants are vulnerable people who are motivated to migrate far more by economic and political push factors than they are by pull factors. These are the people that closed borders harm the most. When many of these push factors exist due to both the historical and recent actions of the UK abroad, it seems clear that a more open border policy is the ‘right’ thing to do.
While this may be true, the criticism of this line of thinking is obvious. Just because something is morally correct doesn’t mean it is pragmatic or feasible, and it is on this basis that most arguments against an open border are given. The idea of immigrants being an economic drain is not new, but in fact, an open border would help the UK economy far more than it would hurt it. Closed borders fundamentally act as a barrier to trade by restricting the movement of goods and labour across national boundaries. Further to this point, maintaining a strong border requires large amounts of public money. For the financial year 2016, the average annual cost for maintaining an active border force was said, by the exchequer, to be over £550 million. On top of this annual cost, between 2009-2015, over £830 million was spent on modernising border security.
An open UK border would not only incentivize trade but allow a lot of money to be redirected from border security into the economy and local communities. Some economists have even gone as far as to estimate the economic benefits of global free movement as leading to a global GDP increase of between 67-147%.
One of the critiques of an open border coming from the left is that open migration contributes to issues of brain drain in the Global South and benefits the countries to which people migrate at the expense of the countries of origin. Migrant workers are also more readily exploited by businesses leading to the undercutting of domestic wages and a race to the bottom that harms all workers. To the extent that these concerns are true, they are not arguments against open borders, but rather arguments for an open border policy to not exist in a vacuum. An open border policy can only be at its most effective when it is merely one aspect of a larger policy of combatting neo-colonialism, underdevelopment in the Global South, and reinforcing workers’ rights globally. Preventing brain drain should be approached by combatting anti-labour trade organisations such as the IMF and the EU that hinder development and funnel capital from poorer nations to richer ones. On top of this, an open border policy would, in many ways, aid workers rights movements. A migrant worker not living in fear of arrest and deportation would be far more empowered to combat exploitation within their workplace, using their traditions of labour activism to the benefit of both them and their fellow workers.
Ultimately, while an open borders policy should not exist in a vacuum, the UK should move towards having more open borders. Looking beyond the oft-repeated, yet still incredibly important moral arguments, an open border policy would not only be economically advantageous. It would also see more effective labour activism and could easily exist alongside action to reduce the effects of brain drain.▪
