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.
