In March 2012, I created the Open Borders: The Case website at the openborders.info domain. The site is devoted to a mixture of discussion, debate, and (verbal) advocacy of steps in the direction of freer migration and more open borders. The site has since attracted a large coterie of contributors. According to Google Analytics, the site received 136,944 views in 2013 and 259,607 views in 2014. This does not count views by administrators when logged in, and also does not count a large number of readers who read blog posts on the site through RSS-based subscription services without visiting the site. On March 16, 2014, the site celebrated its first Open Borders Day to commemorate two years of existence. Here is a roundup post for the two-year mark describing what the site had done so far.
If you’re interested in the site, consider liking it on Facebook (a little over 4100 people have done so as of January 1, 2015) or following the Twitter account (a little over 1000 people have done so as of January 1, 2015).
We also have an Open Borders Action Group discussion forum where people interested in open borders (including, but not limited to, bloggers for the site) post and comment on a wide range of open borders-related topics. As of January 2015, the group has a little over 700 members, and somewhere around 20-50 reasonably active participants. If you have a deep interest in the subject (regardless of whether you are convinced of the desirability of open borders) I recommend you join this group.
My active involvement with the site is now minimal: I manage some aspects of the site backend and I write occasional blog posts. I also participate in the Open Borders Action Group discussions when I have time.
For more on my personal interest in the subject, see:
- Site story, with a list of key site milestones.
- My personal statement for the website
- My detailed description of how I went about recruiting bloggers for Open Borders: The Case.
- Why I’m sticking with open borders, or, plucking the not-so-low-hanging fruit, a blog post by me on November 19, 2014, for Open Borders: The Case, describing the reasons for my continued interest in open borders.
In 2014, I co-authored a book chapter with economist Bryan Caplan of George Mason University titled A Radical Case for Open Borders. The chapter is part of a book being edited by Benjamin Powell on economics and migration, with a particular focus on migration to the United States. The book is slated for publication by the Oxford University Press. I’ll update to include a link once it is available for order.
Most of the draft chapters are currently available online here. Here’s a direct link to the draft of my chapter, and here’s an archived copy I maintain. Note that this may differ somewhat from the final published version, that incorporates some reviewer feedback and corrects some outdated information.