Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.

• Author: Nowrasteh, Alex

Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom

Ilya Somin

New York: Oxford University Press, 2020, 263 pp.

Immigration policy is the most debated and controversial issue of our time. Across the developed world, political parties have greatly diverged on this issue. In Europe, political parties with a nativist bent have won elections and governed in coalition with other mainstream parties. But even mainstream parties, such as the Danish Social Democrats, have adopted anti-immigration platforms as they adapt to the opinions of voters skeptical of immigration--and have maintained power as a result. In the United States, the 2016 election of President Donald J. Trump on an anti-immigration platform and an increasingly pro-immigration Democratic Party reveal a greater difference of opinion than on any other policy issue. Related to these political and policy developments is the perceived partisan sorting of voters into different geographic regions, the rise of left-wing and right-wing identity politics, and a general sense of deepening political polarization.

Antonin Scalia Law School Professor and Cato Adjunct Scholar Ilya Somin deftly combines these issues into one forceful thesis in his new book, Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom. There are many new books about immigration, but Somin's is the only one that argues that the ability to exit a political jurisdiction and enter another, whether inside of a federal system or internationally, is the cheapest and best way to improve individual political freedom. As Somin argues, individual voluntary sorting through migration to different jurisdictions with different policies is a positive development that improves human welfare more than other means of changing political circumstances such as ballot box voting. We should emphasize how foot-voting can improve public policy by sorting people into jurisdictions where they prefer to live.

Many people in the world today live under governments that they would like to change, but voting and democratic decisionmaking are fraught with problems. Not only do individual voters disagree with each other over optimal policies, but a single voter has an infinitesimal chance of altering government policy through the ballot box. And even if policies were to change, the lag in time from their enactment to when their effects are felt can be quite long. Voters are rationally ignorant and often vote based on biases since their individual votes don't affect the outcome anyway. Thus, the resulting policies are often irrational and don't work. The outcomes are a lot like the famous "tragedy of the commons," where individual choices on how to use a collectively owned resource, in this case public policy, results in poor...