The Case for 50 Percent Open Borders

A call for restricting immigration accidentally makes the case for radical liberalization.

- BRYAN CAPLAN

ALMOST EVERYONE WILL take Garett Jones' The Culture Transplant as a forthright defense of not just maintaining existing immigration restrictions but tightening them. Every chapter strongly implies that liberal immigration policies are naive and myopic. Jones, an economist at George Mason University (where I also teach), concludes by warning that admitting millions from the poorest nations will impoverish all humanity: "Innovation would decline overall, and since new innovations eventually spread out across the entire planet, the entire planet would eventually lose out." Even his support for high-skilled immigration is restrained: Jones wants to welcome "immigrants who have substantially more education, more job skills, more promarket attitudes, than the average citizen" (emphasis mine), and he advocates "instantaneous citizenship" for "one-in-a-thousand minds" such as "Nobel laureates, great writers, and innovative scientists."