REVIEWS

COMIC

OPEN BORDERS

KATHERINE MANGUWARD

George Mason economist and recreational controversialist Bryan Caplan has teamed up with artist Zach Weinersmith of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal fame to create a surprisingly readable visual case for open borders.

Overall, the arguments in Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration are rather sophisticated—much more so than skeptics of the genre might expect. A red devil in a necktie fights with a cartoon Caplan about the impact of immigration from low-trust societies. Caplan digs into the infamous Skittles metaphor (“If you have a bowlful of Skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful? That’s our Syrian refugee problem.”) to talk about crime rates and terrorism risk.

A cartoon Lant Pritchett in a Harvard sweatshirt (it’s hard to differentiate between economists, OK?) raises the specter of “zombie economies” that are insufficiently responsive to changes in the demand for labor, as actual zombies