By Zoey Poll, The New Yorker, February 20, 2020
In the past decade, the government of Australia spent more than fifteen million dollars on an advertising campaign designed to deter prospective migrants. The multimedia effort, which has been lauded by President Trump, featured bold, red text—“no way: you will not make australia home”—over images of dark, choppy seas. The Department of Homeland Security has distributed similar flyers at migrant shelters in Mexico, near the border: “The next time you try to cross the border without documents, you could end up a victim of the desert,” they warn. Canada has mounted billboards in Hungary to deter Roma asylum seekers; Germany has sponsored posters on the sides of Kabul buses; Norway has purchased Facebook ads targeted at young men from Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Eritrea whose profiles indicate interest in “travelling” or “Europe.”
Activists and observers have criticized the hostile tone of these ad campaigns. Still, the ads’ underlying premise—that governments have a right to control entry into their countries—seems beyond dispute. Even immigration activists implicitly accept that it must be controlled: the movement to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for example, speaks to the question of how American borders are policed, not to whether they ought to be policed in the first place. In a new graphic-nonfiction book, “Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration,” Bryan Caplan, a libertarian economist at George Mason University, makes the radical pro-immigration argument that others don’t. In his view, immigration should be essentially unlimited. He envisions a future in which Democrats and Republicans vie to become the country’s “open border party,” each calling for nearly unrestricted immigration.
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