Is a Policy of Open Borders Moral or Immoral?

The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday concerns open border policies versus morality. Is an open border the only moral immigration policy? Many people in the United States as well as Great Britain and Europe believe it is. Michael Barone writes of this dilemma in his article published at The Daily Signal.

Former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, like the George Bushes, professed to want to enforce immigration laws. They decried the flood of illegals that crested in the prosperous decades before the financial crisis, and afterward saw with relief that the flow of illegals slowed.

As I wrote recently, careful projects of the illegal population estimate that it peaked at about 12 million in 2007, fell to about 10.5 million 2019, then increased by about 4 million during the Joe Biden administration, which essentially opened the borders to the point of paying for illegals to live in New York’s Roosevelt Hotel, two short blocks from where Jamie Dimon’s JP Morgan Chase was constructing its $9 billion office tower. The impetus for this policy came from something other than the usual elite economic argument that, as population growth is slowing, advanced countries need more workers to maintain economic growth. That something else can be summarized in the phrase “Orange Man Bad.” If Trump wants to stop people at the border, then we shouldn’t stop anyone there.

There is another element here, seen more prominently in Europe. And that is the conviction that barring people from your country who are different, in ancestry or customs, from the preexisting population is invidious discrimination.

Immigrants to the United States over the past half-century have come mostly from Latin America and Asia form countries that to varying degrees share religious orientations, market economic norms, and cultures of literacy and numeracy with most Americans.

It’s likely true that a flood of mostly illegal immigrants, like those welcomed by the Biden administration, will tend to have a higher proportion of violent migrants than among legal immigrants. And a higher proportion of arrivals with adversarial attitudes toward American mores, traditions and government.

But that is a problem orders of magnitude greater in Britain and Europe, where very much larger shares of immigrants, from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, are Muslims. Many are quite ready to assimilate to European mores. But many – especially the floods welcome[d] by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel starting in 2015 – are not. They want to impose their religion and their culture on the host society, and elite leaders of such nations have been willing to let them do so….

Political parties that campaign for restrictions on immigration are treated as pariahs with which established parties must never allow in coalition governments….

But it’s not apparent that [German] AofD’s policy of restricting the inflow of immigrants, or those of Eastern European democracies like Poland and Hungary, which re decried by unelected European Union leaders, is the moral equivalent of Nazism. Excluding people with different cultures and attitudes from your country is not the moral equivalent of murdering all your Jews.

Those leaders who treat the two as morally equivalent are captive to bad ideas. They have been taught to divide the world into oppressors and the oppressed, to cast immigrants as virtuous victims and their own citizens as culpable oppressors. They have been instructed to see colonialism not as a limited chapter in history but as its dominant theme, and to treat its harms as a kind of second Holocaust.

           From these delusions, most ordinary Americans, including recent legal immigrants and their                   offspring, and large numbers of ordinary Britons and Europeans, seem happily immune. Perhaps             in time, their common sense will dissuade the elites of their “luxury belief” in open borders.