Open Borders Now

The deeper we get into this immigration debacle, the more I think we should simply have open borders. I don’t mean open citizenship, but I see no reason why most people who want to work and live here shouldn’t be allowed to do so. It’s a big country with a declining population which would benefit from a helluva lot more folks restoring it from its current shithole status.

Why not make it easy for people from around the world to get on their phones, apply for a work permit or visa, upload their info, get vetted, and get their butts to America? Guest workers would be given an American ID, afforded the same legal protections as citizens, permitted to receive state-issued driver’s licenses, but would receive limited social services. From there, we ought to have a simple way to gain residency and, if they want, eventual citizenship.

Am I an idiot?

What’s the actual problem with that?

Ok, I anticipate one problem: the entire reason both parties turned a blind eye to illegal immigration for decades is because Americans like cheap food and services. Overhauling our immigration system so that people could more easily work here threatens to both raise prices for certain goods and/or depress domestic worker wages. How to fix that? Minimum wage protections, which are already supposed to be in place, but which are regularly skirted by employers, with some estimating that undocumented immigrants earn up to 40% less than their domestic counterparts.

Instead of terrorizing people, a good job for ICE would be to enforce such worker protection laws. Admittedly, that would mean fewer opportunities to deploy chemical munitions, but the happy trade-off is less whistle-related hearing loss.

This is America

Open border opponents argue that such an arrangement would lead to greater national security risks, strains on social services, and a loss of national culture. None of those arguments hold much water with me.

Why would our national security risk be any greater than it is now? We would still control our borders. People would still be required to pass through immigration, present their IDs, get vetted, etc. etc. The only difference is we would actually know more about the people in our borders.

If anything, making it easier to cross legally would disrupt the human trafficking cartels, which would, presumably, make it harder for those with bad intentions to make it to the American interior. Plus, loosening border restrictions would redirect immigration enforcement from scrutinizing every strawberry picker and home health care aide so they can focus on people who would actually do us harm.

(A possible downstream effect: if people around the world see us treating their citizens well, they will have far less reason to hate us.)

As far as social services go, it seems to me that growing the tax base without the concomitant outlays for most social services that such tax dollars provide would improve social services, particularly if guest workers are required to procure some form of health insurance to be eligible for their visas.

There are also concerns about the already-tight housing market, concerns which I understand, but the actual evidence I’ve read suggests that immigration is a mixed bag for housing. On one hand, increased immigration does modestly raise rents and housing prices, but immigrants also tend to be the ones actually working in the construction trades. Additionally, as we saw in Springfield, OH, immigrants often move into depressed areas, turning those areas from blighted neighborhoods to burgeoning communities.

The “national culture” argument, to me, is the weakest and funniest. We frequently hear this nonsense from anti-immigrant activists, to which I ask: “What parts of American culture are you looking to preserve?”

Cheez Whiz?

Because the best parts of American culture were almost all made by immigrants or the children of immigrants. Our greatest export, American pop culture, is a creation of immigrants. A cinema industry created by foreigners like the Polish immigrant Samuel Goldwyn who partnered with the Ukrainian immigrant Louis B. Mayer. Charles Laemmle (Germany), Adolph Zucker (Hungary), the Warner brothers (Poland). A television industry pioneered by people like Willam Paley (son of Ukrainian immigrants), David Sarnoff (Belarus). We can throw Rupert Murdoch (Australia) in there, too. American music, especially rock-n-roll and hip-hop, is a mélange of global influences, especially African but also Irish, German, Scotch, and Mexican.

American food is the same. American business, the same. Preserving American culture means welcoming people from everywhere because American culture IS immigrant culture.

But when I think of “American culture,” what I think of first is the poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty, herself a French immigrant placed in New York Harbor to celebrate the American centennial, commemorate the end of slavery, and to inspire democracy in France. The poem, written by Emma Lazarus, a fifth-generation American whose family originally arrived in 1654 after fleeing the Inquisition in Brazil.

That poem, with its invocation of the world’s tired and poor, her wretched refuse and huddled masses yearning to be free, speaks to my American culture more than anything else. It is that culture they’re fighting to preserve in Minneapolis and Los Angeles and Chicago and Memphis and Maine. Opening our borders would preserve that.

Open borders make sense economically. They make sense ethically. They make sense from a policy perspective because they would redirect so many resources wasted on preserving an unsustainable system. Frankly, I don’t see the downside. Unless you’re afraid of people from other places. Because you’re stupid.