Possibilities for philanthropy towards achieving more migration and/or open borders







Possible different goals people could have in mind






Options for increasing immigration without changing or breaking immigration laws




    Here’s Joe Cushing’s response to daubery:








    Might not maximize bang/$, but here we go:



    oneeyedman (excerpt of comment, not the full comment):


    Motoko responds to oneeyedman:








Making small changes or tweaks to the laws governing legal immigration


Another possible area where policy might be more responsive to special interest lobbying while moving along the margin of public indifference is asylum advocacy. I suspect that in most places, the public’s hostility to immigration and their desire to be seen as friendly to asylum-seekers largely cancel each other out, meaning that there is considerable slack for policy. Here’s Mike Linsvayer making the case for asylum advocacy:

Asylum advocacy organizations.

I have no real work to show, but my rationalization:

  • There may be more flexibility in “the system” overall, such that advocacy for individual refugees and other at-risk persons, and groups of same, might increase total immigration to wealthy jurisdictions.
  • Excluding people whose risk is acute puts movement/residence/work restrictions in the worst light possible, assuming no systemic change in discourse from “immigration” to “apartheid”.
  • Further to both of the above points, there is vast ground to shame the US and other Iraq/Afghanistan invader/occupiers for excluding people put at-risk by those campaigns, starting with all collaborators.
  • I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never investigated asylum advocacy organizations, but I will give to at least one before the end of the year.

    The Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project appears to be one with a small budget, coordinating lots of pro-bono work. http://www.urbanjustice.org/ujc/projects/refugee.html

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Refugee_aid_organizations is someplace to start looking for others.


john wahba has a clever if offbeat suggestion:

Fund journalists in third world dictatorships who are on the brink of having an asylum case developed against them.

In contrast, Simon C takes the view that lobbying for increases to work visas and student visas (the boring old categories!) might be the right way to go:

Contra some of the other comments, I imagine the most efficient use of money might be to hire someone to subtly lobby for increases in work and student visa issuance. There is no concentrated lobby against this so a small amount might go a long way. Admittedly there is popular opposition, but if the change was made quietly, gradually increasing visa numbers rather than any sudden legal change perhaps it could happen without raising much notice. As to being unethical, I can’t really think of a more ethical act than doing this.

Human smuggling/active facilitation of illegal (unauthorized) immigration

Clearly, violating immigration laws is “illegal” in the legislative sense. But is it “illegal” in the sense of the common law, as people intuitively understand it? Is it unethical to violate or facilitate the violation of immigration laws? These are hard questions and this is not the place to discuss them, though you can browse our past blog posts on the subject to get a variety of perspectives on the issue. Some of the proposals here will doubtless strike readers as unethical, but as noted earlier in this post, the goal of this post is to simply describe all the options, not to evaluate the morality of individual options.

oneeyedman offers a subtle suggestion:

For very small budgets how about providing steady work at a slightly above market wage to an undocumented worker on the theory that this would increase illegal immigration.

Incidentally, this is consistent with Robin Hanson’s ideal of marginal charity, though Hanson’s post was made a day after oneeyedman’s comment.

Blake Watson recommends hiring a coyote:

Hire a Coyote. The cost of smuggling illegal aliens into the country may be high for the immigrants but they are fairly low for Americans. If its true that the best thing you can do for 3rd worlders is move them to the first world then this is obviously the fastest and cheapest way. I think it costs only a few thousand dollars and you boost that person’s income and their children’s incomes permanently (provided they are not caught). Plus it would appear that more illegals increases the political pressure on liberalizing immigration law.

Keith Webb tweaks Blake Watson’s proposal:

To provide a slight alternative to Blake Watson’s proposal, give money to someone trying to save enough to smuggle relatives or friends into the country.

Or one could make an effort to use more immigrant labor. At least some of the money paid in wages would go to getting more people here, and at the margin, boost wages for immigrant labor therefore convincing more people to try to enter the US.

Simon C recommends document forgery, if feasible:

Another cheap way might be the production of a large amount of fake documentation. Modern technology may prevent this being effective though and it would be considered a crime. We can remember though that people who rescued the victims of the Nazis using false documentation are now considered heroes. Why could it not be the same for rescuing someone from Libya, Zimbabwe or North Korea?

Human smuggling is a contentious topic. The secrecy of this large-scale enterprise makes possible a lot of abuse and mishaps. The Freeman recently had a cover story on the perils of human smuggling and how this pointed to a need to have freer immigration. Donating to human smuggling might therefore be morally problematic for many, even those who support the goal of open borders.

My co-blogger Nathan Smith, in his book Principles of a Free Society (Amazon ebook) (the immigration chapter can be downloaded as a Word Document or as a PDF), suggested a much more ambitious form of large-scale human smuggling: smuggling humans in shipping containers. His proposal was mostly as a backup plan in case the First World decided to seal its borders in a complete and tamper-proof manner, but some might want to take it seriously. Here’s Nathan:

Shipping containers might be one means of transport for the next wave of illegal immigrants if a border fence turned out to be effective. There are already cases of people getting into the U.S. by shipping container. Several million cargo containers arrive in the United States each year. A standard shipping container is 40 feet by 8 feet by 8 feet, and may spend 3-4 weeks at sea en route from China to the United States. It is typically not opened for inspection in either the port of departure or the port of arrival, but is lifted by a crane onto a truck and delivered to a final customer. To inspect every incoming shipping container would raise prices on all kinds of imports and be crippling for the US economy. The cost of shipping one container from China to the US is around $5,000.

Not many people resort to immigration by shipping container now, of course. But for a person who is willing to live in a shipping container for a little over a month, this might be the next best way to get into the United States, if the Mexican border is effectively closed. The biggest problems are feces and the lack of fresh air, but technology might find solutions to those problems if there was enough demand for them. Anyway, would you spend four weeks in a stinking shipping container to raise your lifetime earnings by one or two million dollars? I would. But it would take a certain human infrastructure—front companies, internet forums—to help people come into the United States by shipping container on a large scale. A border fence and an amnesty for the illegal immigrants still here might be just the thing to trigger the emergence of this industry.

Changing the de facto and de jure treatment of unauthorized immigrants after they’ve crossed the border

This could include lobbying for DREAM Act-like legislation, and other forms of amnesty, which may or may not include a path to citizenship, but reject deportation for the majority of unauthorized immigrants. The direct effect of this is that more of the current unauthorized immigrant population gets to stay. More important, from the perspective of Caplan’s bleg question, is the indirect effect: it reduces the deterrent effect on future prospective unauthorized immigrants, and thus increases the net payoff of unauthorized immigration (either through crossing borders without authorization or overstaying a visa). This increased net payoff would probably lead to more immigration. There is another indirect effect to be considered if some of these immigrants are offered citizenship: they may be able to sponsor relatives to migrate.

While major changes in this regard would require major changes to public opinion (at least in democracies), minor changes like the DREAM Act operate within the margins of public indifference, and are susceptible to framing effects and the charisma of individual leaders.

Sidenote: joining an immigration enforcement job, then breaking the law

Many open borders advocates have suggested that it is morally good to violate restrictive immigration laws, and it may be morally wrong to do more than the bare minimum in trying to enforce them. Thus, for instance, if you have a job in enforcing immigration laws, it may be morally desirable, or perhaps even morally necessary, to do your best to look the other way as people break these laws, rather than do your job as per its actual job description. This idea is controversial. If you disagree with the morality of immigration enforcement, does that morally justify taking up a job whose contractual responsibility involves that enforcement, then not doing that job as contractually specified? This might strike even some open borders advocates as wrong. The moot point here is: just how immoral are these laws? Is the immorality sufficient to justify the prima facie unethical act of taking up a job and violating the terms of its contract? These are difficult questions. If, however, you think that such actions are morally justified, then this might well be a powerful way of increasing the number of people who immigrate: take up a job at the appropriate point in immigration enforcement with the most discretionary power, then quietly undermine the enforcement of these laws. The position may be at the consular officer level, or at the border security level, or at the level of discretionary checking of immigration status of people in the target country (where you are responsible for identifying and deporting potential illegal immigrants).

A historical example of interest here is Chiune Sugihara (HT: John, in a comment on Nathan’s post). Here’s what Wikipedia says about the man, who today has a memorial dedicated to him in Lithuania:

Sugihara is said to have cooperated with Polish intelligence, as part of a bigger Japanese-Polish cooperative plan.[5] As the Soviet Union occupied sovereign Lithuania in 1940, many Jewish refugees from Poland (Polish Jews) as well as Lithuanian Jews tried to acquire exit visas. Without the visas it was dangerous to travel, yet it was impossible to find countries willing to issue them. Hundreds of refugees came to the Japanese consulate in Kaunas, trying to get a visa to Japan. The Dutch consul Jan Zwartendijk had provided some of them with an official third destination to Curaçao, a Caribbean island and Dutch colony that required no entry visa, or Surinam (which, upon independence in 1975, became Suriname). At the time, the Japanese government required that visas be issued only to those who had gone through appropriate immigration procedures and had enough funds. Most of the refugees did not fulfill these criteria. Sugihara dutifully contacted the Japanese Foreign Ministry three times for instructions. Each time, the Ministry responded that anybody granted a visa should have a visa to a third destination to exit Japan, with no exceptions.[2]


Sugihara continued to hand write visas, reportedly spending 18–20 hours a day on them, producing a normal month’s worth of visas each day, until 4 September, when he had to leave his post before the consulate was closed. By that time he had granted thousands of visas to Jews, many of whom were heads of households and thus permitted to take their families with them. On the night before their scheduled departure, Sugihara and his wife stayed awake writing out visa approvals. According to witnesses, he was still writing visas while in transit from his hotel and after boarding the train at the Kaunas Railway Station, throwing visas into the crowd of desperate refugees out of the train’s window even as the train pulled out.

Clearly, the situation that Sugihara dealt with was in many ways unusual, and the cross-applicability of his actions to the modern context is questionable. But this does demonstrate at least one instance where derelection of contractual responsibility may have had a huge human benefit.

Funding advocacy groups and research centers for the short, medium, and long term

In the short- to medium-term, advocacy groups and think tanks play an important role in shaping the thoughts of people in government at all levels, who often lack the resources and energy to conduct their own in-depth investigations and/or reflect on the issues a lot. In the second post of his series on how to achieve open borders, Fabio Rojas highlighted the role of intellectuals and others who influence specific segments of the public and decision-making bodies. In addition to explicitly pro-immigration groups, it may be a good idea to also fund more research-oriented centers and institutes, as long as these are not explicitly anti-migration (i.e., groups like CIS are not included here). Even though these centers may not be involved in advocacy, their work can be used effectively by advocacy groups. It’s also true that any research can also be used by anti-immigration advocacy groups, but if your general view is that the “truth” is more on the pro-migration side, and the empirics are more likely to support the assertions on the pro-migration side, then the balance would be more favorable to migration advocacy. Research centers and institutes that have a reputation for neutrality and even-handedness might also have more credibility, and donations to them (provided these do not come with any “strings attached” that would damage this credibility) might be better than funding some advocacy groups.

Prima facie, the lists of pro-immigration groups and migration information resources is long and diverse, and should offer a rich source of possibilities for prospective donors.

Unfortunately, most advocacy groups that deal with immigration-related issues tend to focus on specific ethnicities and also are often focused on immigrant rights issues more than they are on increasing the number of people allowed to immigrate. It may still be the case that the issues they advocate for have the indirect effect of increasing the number of people who immigrate (for instance, a push for a path to citizenship for immigrants might mean more immigration for relatives sponsored by them) and this needs to be estimated/calculated to get an idea of the effectiveness of these organizations. However, few of them are fans of anything approaching open borders, and they may even be opposed to open borders with keyhole solutions, or open borders for ethnicities or skill groups other than the ones they are concerned about. Thus, one also needs to worry about whether their lobbying will expand the total number of migrants, or simply lead to one set of migrants displacing another. I discussed the distinction between immigrant rights advocates and open borders advocates in an earlier blog post.

The organizations that do in fact advocate clearly and forcefully for open borders or something close to open borders tend to not have it as their main focus. Within these, there are two major groups: those focused on international development and poverty alleviation, and those with a libertarianish perspective. In none of the top organizations in either category is it possible to earmark funds specifically for their open borders advocacy, and even if it were, this may be more of an accounting trick. This means that a person who does not share broader libertarian goals would be obviously reluctant to donate to a libertarian organization (such as Cato or the Future of Freedom Foundation or the Independent Institute) for the small fraction of the donation that would go to open borders advocacy. Similarly, even people who are great fans of the Center for Global Development‘s initiatives on migration (such as this and this) may be reluctant to donate to the group if they don’t think that the CGD’s other activities are worthwhile.

The International Organization for Migration is one organization with a worldwide focus and an explicit role for advocacy that I haven’t had the opportunity to examine closely. They’re quite explicit in some of their pro-migration advocacy, but I don’t think their focus is all that close to open borders. I hope to consider their activities in more detail in a subsequent post.

Research centers and institutes that do not engage in advocacy, but rather focus on data collection and background research, may be better bets for the long term. Examples are the Migration Policy Institute (in particular, its and various university-affiliated centers such as the International Migration Institute (Oxford) (a full list is at the pro-immigration and migration information web resources page). Unfortunately, a lot of the activities of these research centers have very limited use for open borders advocacy. There is one particular activity that I think holds more potential than most: data gathering about immigration policies and laws (such as IMPALA — a full list is at the pro-immigration and migration information web resources page). Nathan hinted at this in a blog post a while back titled If I Had a Million Dollars…

But since this post is already getting long, and an evaluation of data-gathering initiatives is a tricky business, I’ll defer a discussion of the possibilities here for later.

PS: I didn’t quite know where to fit this in the post, but David Barry’s comment on Caplan’s bleg is pertinent:

GiveWell posted a (very preliminary) conversation with David McKenzie on this topic recently here (Word doc).

There weren’t really any definitive take-aways, but apparently there are countries which don’t currently reach their government’s immigration limits. Migration is politically sensitive, so most large NGO’s stay a long way away from the area, and this probably leaves a large gap that donors or philanthropists could fill.

But there was no recommendation of a particular charity to donate to, they just said that some particular institutes of migration would know more about organisations that directly facilitate migration from developing to developed countries.

Here’s the migration section of the GiveWell conversation that Barry linked to:


Organizations that facilitate international migration

There are organizations that pair workers in poor countries with employers in rich countries so that the workers in poor countries can temporarily move to the rich countries to earn much higher wages.

Most current such organizations are either for-profit, international organizations (e.g. the IOM), or very small organizations that have a localized presence. There don’t seem to be large organizations working on this that could absorb a large amount of funding from donors.

A neglected cause

Migration is a politically sensitive issue because migrants can displace local workers in rich countries. For this reason, development banks and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) avoid working on programs to promote migration. Thus, there may be a very large arbitrage opportunity for philanthropists to facilitate migration.

Offsetting effects

Because of governmental quotas, programs that facilitate migration may do so at the cost of barring other workers from migration. However, in some countries like Australia and some bilateral arrangements that certain European countries have, the government quotas are far from being met and so efforts to facilitate migration can result in more opportunities for migrant workers as a group.

Organizations for GiveWell to talk to about opportunities for facilitation

GiveWell can talk to Manjula Luthria at the Marseilles Center for European Integration, the International Office for Migration (IOM) and the Georgetown Migration Institute for more information on opportunities for facilitating more migration to countries with unmet quotas and the non-profit organizations that work on this.

Room for more studies

There have been many studies on the impact of migration programs on the migrants and their families. There is a paucity of research on which interventions and policies work well for facilitating migration and make it work best for the migrants.

National versus international migration

The financial benefits to migrants from moving from a poor country to a rich country are often an order of magnitude larger than the benefits to migrants of moving from a rural area in a poor country to an urban area in the same country.

6 thoughts on “Possibilities for philanthropy towards achieving more migration and/or open borders”

  1. Helping people escape a murderous regime where they are unwanted by the native majority is quite different from bringing people *into* a place where the native majority doesn’t want them…

      1. Yes, that’s an important boundary case. Right of exit only requires one sanctuary, but it doesn’t work with zero.

        This is currently handled by international agreements, which are a serviceable but suboptimal solution–predictably, countries do what they can to quietly discourage refugees they consider undesirable. A better way is to work out how to actually assimilate these people.

        Forcing borders open *without* having worked that out is likely to be counterproductive.

        And with that, I’m out of here for a while, since I have some pressing charity work to attend to (directly related to this problem, in fact). I hope I’ve given you guys some useful things to think about over the next several months.

Leave a Reply to Christopher Chang Cancel reply