Bryan Caplan’s argument on immigration is well worth serious consideration precisely because it identifies the true source of most immigration pathologies, rather than mistaking symptoms for causes.

In Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, Bryan Caplan makes a clean and often neglected distinction: immigration itself is not a fiscal burden. The burden arises only when movement is fused to unconditional access to government transfers. People who move in order to work are not “funded” by society; they fund themselves by producing goods and services others voluntarily buy. Treating labor as a cost rather than a source of value is a category error.

Caplan’s reframing is powerful because it treats immigration as labor arbitrage rather than charity. Allowing people to move from low-productivity environments to high-productivity ones increases total output, lowers prices, deepens specialization, and raises living standards. These gains are not hypothetical; they are identical to the gains that occur whenever workers are allowed to move from inefficient firms to efficient ones. Borders, in this sense, function as artificial constraints on human capital.

The familiar objection that immigrants strain public resources is, in Caplan’s account, an indictment of policy design rather than migration. Any system that detaches benefits from contribution will experience fiscal stress from population growth of any kind. Historically, the United States absorbed enormous waves of immigration under near-open borders precisely because the welfare state was small and work was the norm. Immigration was not free, but it was largely self-financing.

This clarity also exposes the moral and institutional problem of modern enforcement. Agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement exist to criminalize peaceful behavior such as accepting a job, renting a room, living with one’s family solely because it crosses an administrative boundary. In doing so, ICE represents one of the harshest expressions of the modern state: armed enforcement directed not at violence or fraud, but at ordinary people engaged in productive activity. The fear, family separation, economic distortion, and sheer human damage inflicted by such enforcement vastly exceed any plausible public benefit.

Bottom line: The state is the biggest threat people ever face while the free market free enterprise free society is really the only safe system there is. At this very moment we are under threat of nuclear incineration thanks to states and their endless pursuits of ever more lethal ways to murder entire populations.....and yet smart people tell us how essential the state is to our survival. Meanwhile it is only the market and what gets produced in the private realm that ever did anything for anybody and yet it is treated as almost incidental.

https://openborderscomic.com/