“No longer enslaved or made dependent by force of law, the great majority are so by force of poverty; they are still chained to a place, to an occupation, and to conformity with the will of an employer, and debarred, by the accident of birth both from the enjoyments, and from the mental and moral advantages, which others inherit without exertion and independently of desert. That this is an evil equal to almost any of those against which mankind have hitherto struggled, the poor are not wrong in believing.”

— John Stuart Mill, Chapters On Socialism (1879)

“The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again.”

— Joseph Schumpeter

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

— Mark Twain

“No standard moral framework, be it utilitarian, libertarian, egalitarian, Rawlsian, Christian, or any other well-developed perspective, regards people from foreign lands as less entitled to exercise their rights – or as inherently possessing less moral worth – than people lucky to have been born in the right place at the right time. Nationalism, of course, discounts the rights, interests, and moral value of “the Other, but this disposition is inconsistent with our fundamental moral teachings and beliefs.”

— Alex Tabarrok, The Case for Getting Rid of Borders – Completely (The Atlantic, 2015)

“I really do consider existing First World societies to be morally comparable to the Jim Crow South. Worse, actually. Under Jim Crow, blacks couldn’t legally do some jobs or live in some places in the country. Under modern immigration law, illegal immigrants can’t legally do any job or live anywhere in the country.

“Anti-immigration laws make me poorer, but I just think it’s unjust that everyone on Earth doesn’t enjoy at least the same rights that I do – and tragic that First World countries could do the right thing at a cost of less than nothing. Still, when I think about immigration, I’m grateful for the simple fact that I can make my voice heard. If one victim of immigration restrictions feels better knowing that someone somewhere stands up for his basic human right to accept a job offer from a willing employer, I’m glad.”

— Bryan Caplan, My Path to Open Borders (January 2, 2013)

“I regard open borders as the moral imperative of our time. [M]odern immigration laws may be ever so slightly more malleable than the colour line, but it remains that the typical citizen of a developing country has a near-zero chance of ever living and working in a country where they can realise their full potential. The economic implications alone are staggering: immigration policies consign millions to lives of poverty based on nothing more than an accident of birth.

There is no moral justification for what we do today. We purport that all human beings are created equal, and yet we arbitrarily agree that some human beings have more of a right to work and live in certain places than others. [T]he case against immigration restrictions is simply an extension of the case against slavery and the case against racial segregation.”

— John Lee, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” (Open Borders: The Case, October 11, 2012)

“Almost every argument for immigration controls is flawed. Take, for example, the argument that we need to ‘protect out jobs’. Well, why is someone who charges too much for his labour entitled to keep that job and not be out competed? The usual answer is that it is all right to be out competed by a compatriot but not by a foreigner. But this is simply xenophobic (‘communitarian’ would be a more charitable word)[.]”

— Fernando Tesón, On Trade and Justice (2004)

“Morality in foreign policy isn’t about bombing bad guys. It’s about helping people. And usually, the best way to do that won’t involve bombings at all.”

— Dylan Matthews, The Best Way the US Could Help Syrians: Open the Borders (Vox, September 4, 2015)

“Suppose Marvin is in danger of starvation and walks to the market to buy some food. In the absence of outside interference, the market is open, and there are people willing to trade him food. Now suppose I block Marvin from reaching the market. As a result, he starves to death. In this situation, I would surely be said to have killed Marvin, or at least done something morally comparable to killing him.

Countries are like the market where would-be immigrants could satisfy their needs. There are people willing to hire immigrants, to rent them living spaces, and in general to engage in all other kinds of interactions with them. Governments actively and coercively prevent many from meeting their needs that they would otherwise. This is much closer to inflicting a harm than it is to merely allow a harm to occur.”

— Michael Huemer, Starving Marvin (Open Borders: The Case)

“When Americans today recall the unabashed racism of earlier generations, we may easily feel ashamed of our forebears. Most of us would cringe at the suggestion that our race is better than other races. We feel that we cannot understand what it would be like to be so prejudiced. How could one not see the injustice in slavery, or racial segregation? But most Americans, like most human beings around the world, in fact have easy access to what it was like to be an unabashed racist. It was to feel about one’s race the way most of us now feel about our country. Today’s Americans do not cringe when we hear the statement that America is the greatest country on Earth, any more than white people a century ago would have cringed to hear that whites were the best race. We do not cringe to hear that American businesses should hire native-born Americans rather than immigrants, any more than Americans three generations ago would have cringed to hear that white-owned businesses should hire white people in preference to blacks. Naturally, nationalists may attempt to devise explanations for why nationality is different from race, and why nationalism is really justified. This is not the place to attempt to argue that point. I would like simply to put forward for consideration the thought that perhaps we have no right to feel ashamed of our ancestors, and that our descendants may feel about us the way we feel about our ancestors.”

— Michael Huemer, Is There a Right to Immigrate?

“Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives, from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires? We may as well assert that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean and perish, the moment he leaves her.”

— David Hume, Of the Original Contract

“A right to emigrate from a country without a correlative right to immigrate to a country is a facile right.”

— Kok-Chor Tan, Liberal Toleration in Rawls’s Law of Peoples (1998)