Elizabeth Hemsley (The University of Hong Kong), "Open borders via natural resource egalitarianism: a failed route"
Forthcoming, Philosophical Studies
Open Borders NRE (And Why it Fails)
By Liz Hemsley
The “Open Borders” part:
Who owns the earth, and what do these ownership rights tell us about how access to the earth ought to be managed and controlled?
For proponents of what I term “Open Borders NRE”, the answer to the first question is “Everyone”. Following from this, their answer to the second question is that access to the earth ought to be open. In other words, immigration restrictions are a “no-no”.
This is the “Open Borders” part of “Open Borders NRE”. The NRE part is “Natural Resource Egalitarianism”, which is basically the claim that, since the earth belongs to everyone, all people must hold equal rights over its natural resources.
This, in a nutshell, is Open Borders NRE – it is the claim that all people necessarily possess equal ownership rights in respect of the earth and its natural resources and therefore should not be prevented from accessing any of them freely, including by immigration restrictions.
The “Why it Fails” part:
On its face, Open Borders NRE has some intuitive plausibility. However, the position generates certain difficulties which seriously undermine this plausibility.
The difficulties arise when we take equal ownership of natural resources to mean that all people should have equal access rights to all natural resources (including land). While this interpretation is necessary to get us to a demand for open borders, it also precludes exclusionary private property rights.
One way around this is to allow private property provided that those who acquire land as private property compensate everyone else who is excluded. But this only generates the further problem of how we discern the value of compensation owed for exclusion.
If what is owed is a proportion of the value of the land claimed as private property, then how are we to discern the value of the land as a natural resource, as distinct from its value as a result of human input? As I explain in my paper, it turns out this ‘Valuation Problem’ is pretty difficult to solve in a non-arbitrary way. It’s not clear that a violation of one’s natural ownership rights can be made legitimate by payment of an arbitrary compensatory sum, though. In which case, Open Borders NRE will always preclude rights of private ownership.
What if we are willing to throw out rights of private ownership along with immigration restrictions?
For one, this would make NRE a very radical position. More than this, though, an insistence on equal rights to natural resources does not only rule out private property. It also rules out any exclusionary use of any natural resource whatever.
This has the bizarre implication that, while I might hold rights of access to land which a stream runs through, I would have no right to actually drink from the stream, since water is a natural resource owned equally by everyone. If I consume any, I violate everyone else’s rights over that which I’ve consumed.
On this model, we would (privately) own nothing, and starve!
Given this, my paper supports a different interpretation of the rights we hold in respect of the earth’s natural resources, one according to which we can own and use natural resources in an exclusionary way, provided our doing so does not deprive others of their general ability to do the same.
On this interpretation, the right people possess in respect of natural resources is not a right against being denied access to any resource whatever. It is a right against being denied access to, and use of, those natural resources necessary for one’s basic needs.
On this interpretation, I can drink of the stream, provided that I do not take more than I need and – crucially – in so doing deny others what they need.
Note, though, that on this interpretation the implication of the belief that the earth belongs to everyone is not that immigration restrictions are morally impermissible rights violations. On this account, immigration restrictions will be morally impermissible only where they prevent people from accessing those natural resources necessary for their subsistence.
In the real world, this will not generate a demand for open borders. In fact, as my paper argues, in the real world this will not generate a demand for very much at all, at least in respect of immigration restrictions.