Why did Effective Altruism abandon Open-Borders Advocacy?

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Introduction

We live in an era of unprecedented passport checks, visa quotas, and detention centers, a world that regulates human movement more tightly than at any other point in history. Some scholars and activists think we’ve gone too far; they think that this hyper-restriction is neither just, nor economically rational.

One of these groups is Effective Altruism (EA), a social movement that aims to identify which interventions are the most promising in terms of overall social impact. This makes sense from a demographic perspective: open borders are championed by both progressives/leftists (who are more common among EA’s rank-and-file) and by a growing number of moderates/capitalists, who are more common among EA’s big funders/decision-makers.

There’s a tension between these two groups, but on open borders they can agree. For example, in my country the leftist Naima Charkaoui wrote Het opengrenzenmanifest (the open borders manifesto) and on the more liberal side, Stijn Bruers (head of EA-Belgium) wrote Open grenzen? De economie en ethiek van vrije migratie (open borders? The economics and ethics of free migration).

And it’s not just in my country that we see this agreement. Leftist authors who have written books on open borders include: John Washington, Harsha Walia, Teresa Hayter, Reece Jones, Rutger Bregman, Aviva Chomsky, and many more.

And while railing against borders has been a hobby of leftists since leftism was invented, we’ve recently seen more capitalists writing books on it too, such as: Bryan Caplan, Robert Guest, and Philippe Legrain.

I should make clear that “open borders” generally doesn’t mean totally uncontrolled migration (without registration and efforts to involve immigrants in society and so on), but rather the removal of the current strict restrictions on who is allowed to immigrate, and how many immigrants are allowed.

Common arguments for Open Borders

Which arguments people use, and where they put the emphasis, varies from author to author, but the three most common arguments are:

1. Global Justice
   Wealth is wildly uneven. When a nurse from a low-income country can quadruple her wage by crossing a border, barring her entry looks less like “protecting jobs” and more like denying her a fair slice of global prosperity. Higher earnings abroad translate into remittances that uplift whole communities back home.

2. Benefits to host countries
   Migrants often fill roles locals shun (care work, agriculture, cleaning…) while paying taxes that prop up ageing welfare systems. New jobs are also created to help newcomers settle; like language schools, NGOs and public-sector jobs.

3. Humanitarianism
   Safe, legal entry routes would end the lethal journeys, detention camps and asylum-processing backlogs that currently define global displacement.

Detractors worry about brain drain and cultural regression, but proponents point out that these work both ways:
The economic cost of a brain drain can be counteracted by having the immigrants send back remittances. On top of that, with open borders it’s also easier to return to your country of origin.
Similarly, even if immigrants hold more socially conservative views, immigration can make them become more egalitarian by putting them into contact with progressive views, making those ideals more common.

Taken together, these points give open-borders advocates both a moral and pragmatic case.

EA’s foray into Migration Reform

In Doing Good Better, philosopher William MacAskill (one of EA’s founders) listed “international labour mobility” among seven high-impact causes. Four years later he repeated that call. It’s clear that Effective Altruists like open borders¹, but what have they actually done to make them a reality?

In the past, Open Philanthropy (an EA organization) had listed ‘Immigration Policy’ as one of the focus areas they donated to. However, they only ever donated <1% of their funds to said area, and that was before they shut it down completely.
EAs have made a site about open borders, and they’ve written 26 posts tagged “immigration reform”, but for context, they’ve written more than a thousand posts on “AI governance” alone. It’s all very meager. What happened?

It might be that some high-profile figures in effective altruism changed their minds. Elon Musk was one of only a small number of people on the EA-people page (before I made the controversial decision to edit him off of it), who seems to have strongly turned against immigration recently. Maybe the same is true for others?
It might not even be because they’ve become more anti-social or even anti-immigration (like Musk), it might just be that they don’t want to focus on this cause in our increasingly anti-immigrant social environment.

I think this does play a role, but I also have an additional hypothesis.

Capitalist-skew

One of the “immigration policy” grant-recipients (receiving almost half a million dollars) was ImmigrationWorks, which disbanded in 2019. ImmigrationWorks was an organization meant to represent the interests of US businesses that sought to be able to more easily hire migrant workers.

This is a common concern among capitalist proponents of migration, whereas leftist proponents tend to be more focused on the well-being of the immigrants. It’s striking how prevalent capitalist grant-recipients and authors are in the EA-sphere², given that open borders activism itself is so dominated by leftists. Since EA’s stated aim is to be pro-social, this skew towards capitalists carries some risks with it.

For example, ImmigrationWorks’ website had a bullet point list of six principles which they claimed to adhere to, with one of them being that ‘all workers should enjoy the same labor protections’. However, a review by GiveWell found that…

in practice, [ImmigrationWorks] focuses primarily on the first of these bullet points [i.e. ‘bringing America's annual legal intake of foreign workers more realistically into line with the country's labor needs’], and its advocacy efforts tend to be oriented towards Republicans.

It should be noted that they still gave funds to ImmigrationWorks after they had concluded this. If you’re donating to these kinds of capitalist organisations, you always run the risk that your pro-social intentions get turned into exploitative outcomes. The goal of open borders should obviously not be to allow businesses in high-income countries to more efficiently exploit immigrant workers, which seems to have been more or less the actual goal of ImmigrationWorks.

If EAs have largely abandoned funding open borders advocacy because their donations didn’t have the pro-social impact they had hoped for, perhaps they could consider removing/decreasing the pro-capitalist-skew by reading/promoting/funding more leftist advocacy.
 

Is Effective Altruism Neocolonial?

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Special thanks to Maxim Vandaele for his help. All opinions and mistakes are my own.

1. And will, on occassion, still write posts defending it

2. Just look at the list of Open Philanthropy’s grants, or search various leftist vs capitalist open-border advocats on the EA forum.