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What's So Bad About "Open Borders"? [1]

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Date: 2023-09-19

Often, advocacy groups use extreme and false descriptions of their adversaries’ positions to frighten people. An example of this is the NRA telling people that supporters of gun-control want to “take all of your guns”.That’s not true. There is no mainstream proposal to do anything like that.

We may want to take guns away from violent felons who post about eating human hearts on Facebook along with pictures of their nachos (I assume the nachos are the appetizer and the hearts are the main course, but I’m open to persuasion on that). But nobody wants to take BB guns away from little old ladies who use them to shoot local birds and threaten their grandchildren, and nobody wants to stop Mitt Romney from hunting “varmints”. That’s just something they say to scare you out of supporting ANY gun restrictions.

Another issue on which the exaggerate-to-frighten technique is used is immigration. When I tune into Fox News for my nightly dose of “The Brown People are Coming!!!”, I am told, in panicky verbiage, that the “left” wants “open borders”.

Again, this is an effort to terrify the bejesus out of you, and most people, being very attached to their bejesuses, respond as intended. The phrase “open borders” is supposed to conjure images of hordes of non-English-speaking, tattoo-bedecked hellians racing into America to move into your shed, marry your children and steal your job as a middle-manager at Applebees.

But what if we had some form of open borders, would it really be so bad?

First, for the record, there is no legislative proposal for completely unfettered access into America. In other words, nobody is suggesting making our national borders as easy to traverse as the border between Pennsylvania and Ohio, where the only impediment to crossing is the knowledge of the traveler that they will be entering Ohio.

Further, I could not find a single mainstream immigrant-rights group advocating that. Certainly, even the most radical supporter of relaxing immigration rules thinks that we should at least know who is coming into the country. Nobody supports terrorists, or violent criminals, or members of Menudo streaming into ‘Murica.

That said, a policy closer to an “open border” policy would actually facilitate better vetting. If people could come into the country simply by appearing at the border with some basic background information, there would be far fewer people swimming across the the Rio Grande and risking their lives crawling through miles of desert to avoid detection. And those who we do catch trying to sneak in are much more likely to be those whose background would preclude them from legal admission.

Assuming we can vet new arrivals properly, should we still have to shout “eek” and reach for the smelling salts (it’s amazing how they are always in reach) every time the phrase “open borders” is uttered? The short answer is NO. Ironically, the long answer is also NO. But let me give you the medium answer.

There is nothing, at least under current conditions, to fear in terms of being overrun with people in general. The United States is actually having a real problem with declining population rates. America’s natural population growth (births over deaths, not counting Elvis, JFK Jr., Tupak and Jim Morrison, who are still alive, but just disappear) was about 0.1% in 2021, the lowest one-year increase in history. In other words, natural population growth was virtually zero.

American’s overall population gain was almost entire due to immigration. And that is national. In 24 states, deaths actually exceed births plus immigration, resulting in population declining in real numbers. Some states, such as California, New York and Illinois, are losing hundreds of thousands of net residents per year. And even in states that are gaining the most population like Texas and Florida, over 70% of their net gain is due to immigration, legal and illegal.

This population stagnation is causing real problems, such as an increasingly unstable work-force, an unsustainable tax base in some places, housing problems, etc. We are actually seeing TV commercials produced by states enticing people from other states to move in. Although, I’m not sure North Dakota’s “Come Freeze your Nuts Off!” campaign is going to be all that successful.

If we aren’t afraid of having too many people, at least in the short-term, what are we afraid of? Could it be having the wrong type of immigrants? I hate to be cynical, but I suspect that could be it.

Our border with caucasian Canada is more than 2.5 times the size of our border with Mexico, and there isn’t even a river to cross on much of it. But I have yet to hear any politician call for building a wall between Lake of Woods, Minnesota and Derry Creek, Canada, and making the Canadians pay for it. And I don’t remember anyone beginning a presidential campaign by saying that people coming here from Saskatoon are “rapists”, or warning us of “Caravans of Canucks”.

The fact is that undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes per capita than natural-born American citizens, which makes sense given that people who just walked 1,500 miles to leave the only home they’ve ever known generally do not wish to be deported. Also, immigrants who are grateful to escape extreme violence and poverty, tend, on average, to be hard-working, driven-to-succeed additions to our communities.

So, maybe we can embrace an at least quasi-open border policy. We can dramatically raise, or perhaps even uncap the number of legal immigrants we allow in each year, liberalize and streamline the asylum process, expand the family-based immigration system, and incentivize new immigrants to settle in places that are suffering from damaging declines in population.

This would solve a number of economic problems we face, change the lives of millions of people for the better, diversify our culture and be much more morally sustainable than setting up more indefinite detention facilities and ripping families apart at the border.

If this results in 2–3 million more immigrants per year entering the US, that is a number we could easily handle and in fact, actually need. If it’s dramatically more, we can adjust the policy as needed. Donald Trump might have to focus more on scaring us about racial and ethnic minorities already IN the US, but I feel he’s up to the task. And that’s a small price to pay.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/19/2194111/-What-s-So-Bad-About-Open-Borders

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