Does YIMBY Mean Open Borders?

Thinking through the idea of housing as a subset of immigration

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I saw this post on Substack last year, and it reminded me of a very old draft I had sitting here, about a big conceptual question I’ve grappled with since first considering myself a YIMBY/urbanist/etc.: what, if anything, does housing say about immigration?

Now, the manner in which most people have probably heard housing and immigration discussed together is the anti-immigration argument, such as made by JD Vance, that high levels of immigration push up housing prices, and that what housing says about immigration is that we need less immigration.

For example:

Many state and local governments are taking steps on the supply-side of housing policy to address rising costs by pre-empting local zoning or removing regulation. However, supply-side reforms are ultimately limited in their effects because they are essentially trying to bail out a ship being flooded by external forces. A discussion of high prices for a supply-constrained good must also consider why demand for that good is so consistently increasing. Federal action is necessary to address unsustainable housing demand because much of that demand is itself being generated by federal policy; namely, America’s extremely permissive immigration policies.

This is wrong, because 1) construction is also largely done by immigrants, so reducing immigration, especially low-wage, “low-skill” immigration, cuts into the workforce that builds housing; and 2) this wouldn’t be an issue even in theory if the zoning laws permitted housing to grow with demand, which is the whole point. Cutting immigration to reduce housing prices is like telling people to skip meals to afford groceries.¹ In general, “the demand is the problem” is not a way to solve supply and demand problems.

However, if you follow a lot of housing and YIMBY folks, you will probably come across a different idea of how housing and immigration relate to each other: the idea that they are different aspects or levels of the same issue. I’ve seen this said different ways: as something like “housing is the micro form of immigration,” or “everyone has a right to live wherever they want.” Sometimes the pro-housing agenda is also cast as a way to make it easier to absorb new immigrants, without the real or alleged housing shortages that folks on the right warn about.

When I first came across this linkage, I quite honestly found this it very odd. Not odd because either building housing or favoring immigration are odd; odd because it would never have occurred to me that building housing for Americans—whoever they are, wherever they were born, etc.—had anything at all to do with the question of immigration. If anything, my natural perception of housing would be somewhat nationalistic: more housing for Americans! (Regardless of their immigration or citizenship status or place of birth).

This made me realize that the reasoning avenue by which we arrive at a policy matters. It isn’t mere “framing.” Though I didn’t understand it at first, I think I now know how this idea of housing and immigration as the same issue is arrived at. It’s the unstated premise that the absolute bottom-level idea behind housing advocacy is not building housing per se, but rather freedom of movement. Housing is a means to an end of living in a specific place with economic opportunity. Failing to build housing is in fact erecting a wall around an opportunity-rich community, raising the cost of admission to the community equal to the cost of an artificially scarce house. The analogy, then, is that national borders are a similarly artificial wall around a desirable place. Immigration restrictionism is national NIMBYism.

For YIMBYs it is almost axiomatic that localities do not have the power or collective right to determine who can move in or live there; using zoning to block housing for newcomers² is not legitimate. If a neighborhood has no legitimate power to lock itself down and affirmatively exclude people, why does a country have that power? So I understand how YIMBY can end up at the free movement of people across borders—which I suppose is what the shorthand “open borders” means.

As a conservative-leaning urbanist, I find this a little bit uncomfortable, for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that it raises a tension or fault line I’ve sensed within urbanist discourse over what exactly a community is. I have always gotten the sense that there’s a premise somewhere in YIMBY thinking that there isn’t really any such thing as a community, per se, at all. A community is just a collection of individuals who happen to live together at a given moment in a given place.

The reason I think that YIMBYism doesn’t believe in “community” is that I think, on some level, that community is premised on exclusion. What is a community if not a group of people who have some right or power to determine who is and isn’t a member? But perhaps there is another way of looking at it.

My second and related discomfort with “housing is immigration” is that it strikes me as slightly confirming the right-wing critique that all of this housing and urbanism stuff is just a lever for other left-inflected goals, and not a real self-contained cause of its own. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I don’t like the idea that housing advocacy is a Trojan horse for open borders, or of paywalling “build housing” behind “abolish the nation-state.”

Ultimately, I don’t believe that localities have the right to exclude people. But localities or neighborhoods are not nation-states. I don’t really think of immigration limits as exclusion³, per se, in the same way that I think of restrictive local zoning as exclusion, because I do not think a locality has the power to exclude in this way, while I think a nation state does (even if that isn’t the policy I want, and it isn’t). In other words, immigration restrictionism strikes me as an admissible policy within our understanding of legitimate national powers, while rank NIMBYism does not.

But beyond this conscious reasoning, my right-leaning background simply did not give me the logic to connect these issues, while the left-leaning or progressive folks who connect them likewise probably do so because it feels natural to them to do so.

Linking housing and immigration sounds like an “agenda” or a left-wing grab-bag to a lot of conservatives, who, like me, would never think to connect these issues. It feels unintuitive, like some machination. Yet, a lot of progressives wouldn’t necessarily think to un-link them. The idea of housing and immigration being the same issue follows so naturally from left-ish ideas about power and exclusion that it doesn’t even feel like a logical jump.⁴

The point here is that neither side necessarily understands the other’s meta-conception of all these issues and how they work together with implied but not necessarily stated principles. In fact, I think a lot of people don’t even understand their own meta-conceptions or hidden premises.

I find these discussions some of the most interesting things to write about because (naive as it might be) I think that clearer communication that really gets down to what we’re talking about—stripped of the layers of assumptions or typical phrasing or premises hiding as facts—would find more agreement between us than it often looks like there is.

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In that vein, before I wrap this up, I want to come back to “the abolition of the nation-state.” That is how I natively or naturally understand “open borders.” When people talk about the free movement of people or affirm that everyone should have the right to live anywhere, I took them to be rejecting the legitimacy of the nation-state. And I more or less thought I was neutrally describing their position.

I realize, though, that that may be one logical jump ahead, one of those accidental characterizations hiding as a description. I saw a post online, recently, about what “open borders” would actually mean, and the person detailed a bit how you would have clear points of entry, easy, legible rules for the granting of visas, etc. He argued that if we imposed this kind of orderly but permissive system on immigration, we would end up with a more orderly system than we have now, and with the benefits of what is currently illegal immigration, without the pervasive dishonesty of the whole affair.

In other words, people who decry “open borders” imagine—or want you to imagine—unending, unknown hordes of people pouring into the country. But nobody who actually advocates for a more open immigration system intends that. For the most part, for those who’ve actually thought it through, they don’t mean we should get rid of borders or visas or work permits or processes for residency. What they want is a system that is more rulebound, but also much easier to navigate, less frictional, and more properly resourced (e.g. more immigration judges and case workers to reduce wait times).

That is a case I had literally never heard made, and it makes more sense to me to link housing and immigration, if that is the imagined end state of the immigration regime.

And yet if you put this all in different words, it would sound to me like an insane and un-American idea that would make me question the rationality of everything else its proponents were advocating.

What I try to do here, in my little corner of the housing and urbanism world, is to articulate these “submerged ideas” that a lot of us hold without knowing it. And I think that fully understanding where our own ideas come from, and what they’re premised on, is a necessary step towards really having these discussions fruitfully.

And finally, to answer the question posed in the headline, no, I don’t think that to be a housing advocate requires you, for the sake of logical or moral consistency, to support an effectively unlimited immigration policy. I do think that these are distinct issues with different considerations, and I do think an American excluded from an American community is a different issue from a foreign national excluded from America.

But the linking of housing and immigration makes much more sense to me after thinking it through, and I hope, in this and other pieces like it, that I’m showing-not-telling how to think these things through.

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Related Reading:

The Final Filter

Urbanist Ecumenism

Do You Hear What I Hear?

See What You’re Looking At

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1. And look at that! In 2023, the Wall Street Journal published an article headlined “To Save Money, Maybe You Should Skip Breakfast.”

2. And of course, locals are also collateral damage in this.

3. Yes, the Chinese Exclusion Act was exclusion, and racist. What I mean by limits on immigration here is merely the absence of free movement, not class- or race-based exclusions of entire groups of people.

4. I’ve used the example of Eucharistic adoration to illustrate this point. Catholics practice Eucharistic adoration because we believe the Eucharist is really Jesus. Eucharistic adoration isn’t a specific idea; it just follows inevitably from transubstantiation.

Except it doesn’t, because the Eastern Orthodox hold substantially (heh) the same doctrine of what the Eucharist is, but they don’t practice adoration. They find it, like the Protestants, to be a misuse of the purpose of the sacrament. I find this very fascinating, because it forces us to understand that ideas which we see as one idea are really whole logic chains that other observers might not agree with.