ABSTRACT
Defenders of open borders want to impose the burdens of proof on their opponents. They think that every restriction of freedom stands in need of justification, choose freedom of movement as their favorite, and claim that restrictions on the freedom to move across borders therefore stand in need of justification. However, others might choose the freedoms to exclude outsiders from one’s association or territory as their preferred freedoms. In a conflict between these diverging preferences, burdens-of-proof arguments are question-begging. Another maneuver is to claim that restrictions must be justifiable to everyone and that existing immigration restrictions are not justifiable to would-be immigrants. This maneuver is one-sided: it never asks whether open borders are justifiable to the citizens of receiving countries. Moreover, the idea that restrictive moral norms must be “justifiable to everyone” is untenable. A third move is to claim that in order for immigration laws to be “democratically legitimate,” all those affected (including would-be immigrants) must have had an actual say in the formulation of the laws, which obviously they did not have. This argument misinterprets the concept of “democracy” and is morally irrelevant, since laws being “democratically illegitimate” in this novel sense does not undermine their moral legitimacy.
