Aimee Terese and Benjamin Studebaker have a podcast named What’s Left.

In their latest episode they discuss the idea of “open borders”. This idea these days is presented as some sort of a binary and is frequently conflated with the idea of “no borders” with a world government among other things.

In the episode, they make a convincing case that “open borders” is a neoliberal idea serving corporate interests.

In my view, lots of things need to happen before we have have relaxed migration controls. There needs to be a coordinated fiscal expansion with a reform of WTO with planned trade with balance of payments targets. Instead we have tight fiscal policy and balance-of-payments constraint in a world of free trade. If employment creation is high, a nation can allow migrants to come in and even expand more. Tight fiscal policies constrains output and hence employment and additional labour supply from migrants becomes a cheap labour policy.