Visas and Walls. Nazli Avdan
$1.6 billion toward building a 1,900-mile wall (Nixon 2017).
Costs are not restricted to the actual price tag on the border instrument. Stringent border controls “place governments on a collision course with easy trade, which is central to sustained expansion and integration of the global economy” (Flynn 2000, 58). Stringent controls run counter to liberal principles that are integral to reaping the benefits from benign flows. After 9/11, for example, the United States pushed forward illiberal measures that limited the rights of foreigners and immigrants (Flynn 2003). The Patriot Act is a case in point. These measures were controversial not only because they defied the tenets of liberalism but also because of their deleterious economic effects. Illiberal measures may impede desirable migration flows by undercutting incentives to migrate or by pushing existing migrants to exit the country (Czaika and Haas 2013). Stiffer policies are also not feasible long term because of downstream and lasting economic losses. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the United States toughened its border-control efforts. As a direct consequence of border closure, cross-border traffic in the area covered by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) slowed to a crawl in the weeks following the September 11 tragedy. The United States faced immediate economic losses from its border crackdown. These losses resulted directly from the logistical hurdles of border closure. There are also downstream and lasting economic repercussions. Such measures can put a dent in cross-border exchange by temporarily relocating trade. They can also anger commercial partners and hurt diplomatic ties and even elicit overt backlash from trade partners. In sum, at the dyadic level, we expect economic interdependence to render states reluctant to close their borders.
Globalization and Borders
The foregoing discussion underscores that globalization engenders open borders. Globalists take the argument further, however, by proclaiming that globalization will wipe out international borders (Ohmae 1990, 18). Some scholars even claim that cross-border mobility signifies the retrenchment of state powers and the weakening of territorial authority (Sassen 1998; Strange 1997). While globalists’ assertions of a borderless world seem exaggerated, there is some evidence of freer movement across borders. There is support for both sides of the debate on the costs and benefits of maintaining borders in a globalizing world. Since World War II, more and more states’ citizens enjoy visa-free travel. Mau et al. (2015) refer to the visa-waiver programs as the global mobility regime. The global mobility regime is certainly expanding, but it’s also lopsided in privileging a select number of countries. While only 20 percent of the world’s population benefited from visa-free travel in 1968, in 2010, that number surpassed 35 percent. Global migration has also risen considerably, reaching 244 million migrants in 2015, a 41 percent increase from 2000. These numbers seem impressive. Nevertheless, the world’s population grew at a faster rate than that of the migrant population. Hence, the global migrant pool as a ratio of the world’s population is still modest. In fact, the ratio has remained fairly steady since the 1960s, hovering at around 3 percent (Czaika and Haas 2015).
Trade and financial flows have grown more rapidly than labor flows. States’ policies partially explain the lag: we know that even economically liberal states retain restrictions on legal migration (Hollifield 1992, 516). Moreover, when states have loosened controls, they have done so selectively. Mobility rights have increased for a subset of countries—primarily citizens of advanced Western democracies (Mau et al. 2015; Neumayer 2006). Western democracies tend to have disproportionate passport power in terms of the number of countries their citizens can travel to without a visa. When it comes to their migration policies, however, Western states are not the most open. For instance, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Canada rank among the top three countries in terms of passport power; however, these same countries are not among the most liberal in terms of their visa policies toward other countries.4 The limited scope of the global mobility regime means that aside from a select subset, countries still encounter steep visa hurdles. In other words, borders continue very much to matter where human mobility is concerned: “Anyone who thinks differently should try landing at a Sydney airport without an entry visa or go to France and apply for a job without a work permit” (Freeman 1998, 93).
Perhaps more vivid evidence against globalists’ prognostications of a world without borders is the recent trend toward fencing borders. Since the fall of the “iron curtain,” new border barriers have cropped up, and they have done so at an accelerated pace. From 1945 until 2013, states built sixty-two new fences, and they built forty-eight of them after the end of the Cold War. More recently, the war in Syria and resulting outpouring of refugees into Europe have spurred EU member states to fortify their borders (Batchelor 2015). As a result, non-EU citizens now face tougher hurdles to enter the European Union. This has led to concern that European consensus on the freedom of movement is beginning to show cracks. While terrorism is not the sole reason why states erect border barriers, fears over security in general certainly serve as a politically expedient justification for building walls and fences. President Trump, for example, lists a host of security threats including crime, narcotrafficking, and illegal migration in pushing for the construction of a wall along the border with Mexico. Yet, in most cases, politicians sincerely believe in the necessity of a fence as well as in the effectiveness of a barrier in blunting the terrorist threat. Democratic leaders tout fences as security enhancing and necessary for the protection of the country against external threats. In no other context is the security link more pronounced as when politicians can point to terrorism as a concrete and formidable threat and the border wall as a panacea against that threat (Jones 2012a, 2012b). For example, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu stressed concerns about ISIS infiltration of Jordan when trumpeting a new fence along Israel’s border with Jordan. Netanyahu underscored that the wall is necessary, noting, “We must be able to stop the terrorism and fundamentalism that can reach us from the east at the Jordan line and not in the suburbs of Tel Aviv” (“Netanyahu” 2014).
In sum, globalists’ claims that we are headed toward a borderless world do not find much support. Borders may matter less for some types of flows, but for people, they continue very much to matter. We may speculate that non-state threats, or the “globalization of informal violence,” is the culprit (Keohane 2002). Globalization has negative externalities such that the transport and communication technologies that facilitate benign flows empower threatening actors as well. Globalization increases states’ vulnerability to non-state threats. Just as goods and money are now able to traverse larger distances in a shorter amount of time, so are individuals. If threats are carried on the backs of individuals, then more remote threats have the potential to traverse greater distances to reach target states. With globalization, perforated borders stand to endanger states’ security. Non-state actors can wield large-scale violence, previously the preserve of states’ militaries. These actors can surmount the gap in capabilities they face vis-à-vis states through surprise, secrecy, and shock. The growing menace of non-state actors demands that we rethink our assumptions about geographical space as barriers. Coincident with the rise of non-state threats, globalization also makes possible dangerous alliances, for example, as evidenced by the crime and terrorism nexus (Dishman 2005). As non-state groups forge links across borders, they are further able to capitalize on globalization.
Thus it is not surprising that states lean toward restrictionism when it comes to human mobility. The preceding discussion leads us to expect that border controls are here to stay, even among liberal states. These trends may only lend circumstantial evidence on the domineering influence of security fears, however. In order to gain granular traction on how states balance economic and security objectives, we need to narrow the analytical focus by examining the impact of a specific type of security challenge: transnational terrorism. The impact of economic objectives may remain unclear, as I argue, if we look at states’ overall economic openness. Although the European Union has been castigated as “fortress Europe” (Finotelli and Sciortino 2013), economic liberalism is its mainstay. Hence, it is misleading to expect economic liberalism as a philosophy, or economic openness as grand strategy, to directly influence migration- and border-control policies. To better capture the effect of economic incentives, we need to look at ties between states and analyze how these ties in turn affect policies toward commercial partners. This perspective takes inspiration from economic interdependence theory in arguing that economic ties affect how states seek security.
Existing Explanations of Migration