EliotDickinsonHuman Migration and the Refugee Crisis: Origins and Global ImpactBloomsbury Academic, 2023, 248 p., $61.20.JohnWashingtonThe Case for Open BordersHaymarket Books, 2023, 263 p., $19.95 (paperback).

The modern state, usually traced to 17th century Europe, is sovereign over a defined territory; controlling borders is an elementary function of its government. In his classic treatise from 1672 on the law of nature and nations, Samuel Pufendorf discussed the duties of a state toward “the admission of strangers.” Echoing Grotius, he acknowledged an obligation to offer refuge to persons “driven by violence out of their own country,” provided the newcomers behaved with prudence and decency and were seen as “not likely to disturb our religion or our constitution.” More generally, he allowed that some states have flourished by allowing foreigners to enter and settle. But, he added, no one would assert “that we ought in the same manner to receive and incorporate a great multitude…” The bases are thus covered: refugees, economic migrants, humanitarian values, national interest. Together they define the policy space in which immigration is determined. The right of a state to govern entry has rarely been questioned. Occasional efforts to internationalize migration governance have gone nowhere. In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirmed a right to leave one's country but conspicuously did not assert a complementary right to be admitted elsewhere. The current Global Compact for Migration, endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 2018, acknowledges at the outset “the sovereign right of States to determine their national migration policy and their prerogative to govern migration within their jurisdiction, in conformity with international law.” Refugees, recognized in that law as a distinct category, are hardly an exception, since receiving states in practice apply the rules on who qualifies and can cap how many are admitted. Border-crossing asylum-seekers, often in much greater numbers, similarly face case-by-case adjudication of their claims. The main departures from this system are cases where waves of migrants overwhelm border authorities, challenging law enforcement and roiling domestic politics. Separate from the question of rights is the state's interest in migration levels and migrant attributes. Significant gains from migration for the economy as a whole can usually be found. (The large gain to the migrants themselves does not strictly belong in the calculation.) There are argued to be losers as well, particularly in lower income groups. Social and cultural diversity brought by migrants is reckoned by some to be a net positive; for many others, it is unwelcome, seen as leading to a loss in mutual trust and social cohesion. Migrant origins and numbers relative to the host population obviously matter in gauging that balance. So does the fact that migration readily lends itself to becoming a partisan political issue. This is all common thinking about immigration. It is the starting point of the two books under review, both of them concise, readable, well-referenced accounts addressed to nonspecialists. Eliot Dickinson, a political scientist at Western Oregon University, offers a wide-ranging conspectus of the subject under four headings: origins and causes, global impact, responses, and future implications. Within the first three, he offers brief descriptions of selected migration situations: those in the United States and Europe, mostly, but also, for example, the mass exodus after economic collapse in Zimbabwe and Venezuela, the refugee flight from civil war in Syria and Afghanistan, and the expulsion of Myanmar's Rohingyas. On future implications, however, he has little to offer. He sketches the trajectories of expected population growth and contraction, new high-tech surveillance capabilities, and the dire climate trends, but does not relate these to possible migration scenarios and policy choices. He ends blandly: we may not be able to “prevent future refugee crises or mass climate migrations, which are already underway,” but can nevertheless find ways of “living peacefully together on an increasingly crowded and overheated planet.” Dickinson's book is implicitly middle-ground liberal in its politics. In contrast, John Washington, an investigative journalist based in Arizona, is openly progressive—starting with the provocative title. He would deny the right of a state to control immigration and asserts the wisdom of not doing so. He is dismissive of “the nonsense of nationalism”—that the right of self-determination accorded “all peoples” by a broadly ratified UN convention gives a political community a right to exclude. That assumption of control is “misanthropic effrontery” (p. 25). He focuses on settler societies—the United States and Australia, mainly—and their ugly histories of displacing indigenous inhabitants. Such origin stories he sees as permanent bars to these countries' legitimacy in designing their own demographic futures. Open borders would count as a kind of reparation for colonialism, owed by both settler societies and the original colonizing powers. It is a position totally at odds with political realism, which gives scant place to ancient wrongs in dictating present policy. The modern world is one of Westphalian states, not about to unravel the innumerable past injustices of conquest and settlement. Like Dickinson too but to a greater extent, Washington relies on anecdotes to illustrate present-day generic situations and the often sad outcomes experienced by particular would-be migrants. This journalistic device may help to sustain reader interest, but the focus on persons rather than populations and individual predicaments rather than underlying issues defeats serious policy analysis. As an example of where the argument for free movement might appear stronger at the individual level, Washington draws on the political philosopher Joseph Carens (The Ethics of Immigration, 2013) in noting the unfairness of the unearned rent a person enjoys simply by being born in a prosperous democratic society. But if a radical impartialism is sought in assigning moral weight, why stop at state sovereignty? A philosopher not cited in the book, Peter Singer (in One World: The Ethics of Globalization, 2002), would deny preference even to family and friend: “neither the biological nor the cultural basis of our intuitive responses provides us with a sound basis of morality.” What is lost in such flattening is any societal distinctiveness as a value worth preserving. Michael Walzer's Spheres of Justice (1983) strongly defended that value, as have done a train of earlier thinkers. Washington is unyielding: “Closed borders are racist,” he writes. In an annex to the book, Washington's case for open borders is encapsulated in 21 propositions, each with a brief defense. They make a mixed bag, some of them overlapping, seemingly thrown together rather than emerging from a developed argument. Many are factually correct but tangential to an open borders debate in that they would apply to any plausible migration program that was not strongly restrictionist. They state, for instance, that migrants do not raise crime rates, that on balance they create jobs, and that they can rejuvenate communities—well-attested findings, although the relevant issue of their robustness under very high entry numbers is not explored. Several other propositions are variants of “closed borders are unethical”—contingent on one's ethics. And one is both bluntly empirical and, at least by common belief, false: “open borders doesn't mean a rush to migrate.” Washington questions the inferences drawn from Gallup surveys that great numbers of people in the low-income South would migrate North if they had that option. Even without physical, financial, and political barriers, as he puts it, most people want to stay at home. Puerto Ricans, for example, are entitled but have chosen not to move en masse to the US mainland. But that is thin evidence against the quotidian press of Mexico–US and Mediterranean border-crossers, the burgeoning human-smuggling industry, and the predicted vast displacements from civil conflict and climate change. Carens, in the work cited above, also argued for open borders but with the crucial caveat that the states participating had reached comparable levels of development, allowing for rules like those of Europe's Schengen Area. Open borders work provided they are not much used.