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Comment by jlangenauer | Hacker News Reader

For me. I'd love to see open borders, where everyone has the freedom to move to where they can achieve their goals and dreams, rather than being restricted to the country where they happened to be born. How many Einsteins have been born in Africa, but denied the chance to make the contribution to humanity that they could have?

(And before the cynics note that open borders are incompatible with welfare states, that's not necessarily true, and the path to open borders is a long one, not a sudden change we can make without massive upheaval right now.)

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And before the cynics note that open borders are incompatible with welfare states, that's not necessarily true

Ok, why is that not true?

And I'd argue that any Einsteins born in Africa are going to find moving to another country and near impossible task regardless of how open the borders are.

OP said not necessarily true

Take universal basic income, if combined with open borders, you are attracting people who would like to also get (say) $1000/m, who will now use that welfare to induce demand on people who may like to trade this freshly minted coin for some service they can render, so the economy grows through immigration instead of debt.

so the economy grows through immigration instead of debt.

Without debt how would the state pay the monthly income for the increasing number of people coming to collect it?

MMT would suggest that the government prints money and then adjusts taxes to control inflation.

So you have a bunch of new people move, they start collecting UBI, the government prints money to fund the new liabilities, the newly-immigrated spend their UBI, incomes/revenues go up for businesses, the overall size of the pie grows, and if inflation starts to get out of control you raise taxes such that everyone is still better off than before.

Unfortunately this wouldn't work because of politics. You need a relatively reactive monetary & tax policy which just is not realistic.

But what happens when you can't raise taxes any further? Or the high taxes shrink the motivation of the people running businesses to expand their businesses.

The money has to come from somewhere or you _will_ have runaway inflation.

They spend what they get - few people surviving on $12k/year are saving much. So do the people who sell them stuff, as do their providers, and so on and so forth. At every step, some taxes make their way into the state's coffers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplier_(economics)

Eh, this doesn't really work well with too much immigration running in to land and water use issues, along with uncontrolled need for infrastructure expansion.

Let's not forget that this does cause some negative externalities. I like the idea of it overall, but I think we need fewer people on the planet (1bb max probably) and a more overall educated and wealthy population for it to be successful. You would probably also want to start with non "western" countries (including Japan etc.) because if you start with, say, the US and the EU, it would almost immediately become uncontrollable. It also doesn't factor in disruption in local communities, changing how others live their lives or how they afford to live their lives now. Some of the tensions we see now are directly linked to mixing of cultures (and subsequent local divisions). At least that's how I see it.

Open borders != citizenship.

How many non-Einsteins from Africa and Asia would want to move to Western countries if given a chance? a few hundred million? A billion? How does a say Germany or France support a couple hundred more million people all at once?

I think open borders is inherently a call for decreasing standards of living for the populations of those countries where most of the migration would be directed to. I just can't picture a scenario where hundreds of millions of people move to my country within a short span of time and not completely destroy the infrastructure under the weight of sheer numbers.

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