Open borders practical and moral necessary

Mac O'Brien, Staff Writer

Amidst the ongoing political struggle to shape American immigration policy, Trump has tried to paint democrats as advocates for open borders. The claim is, of course, inaccurate, as most democrats favor some degree of immigration restriction and increased border security, but it does bring up the question — Why aren’t they? A policy of open borders, in which immigrants could come and go freely, would not only be exceptionally practical, but would also address the deep moral issues associated with immigration restriction of any kind in a country as rich as the United States.   

There are many mainstream critics of immigration, but their arguments generally boil down to the same few points. They say that immigrants would take American jobs, drive down wages and (Trump’s favorite talking point) bring crime into American cities. None of these arguments are founded in reality. Immigration does not threaten the job market because a higher population entails greater consumption, which entails greater demand, which means that more jobs are created. Studies have shown that the effect on wages would be negligible or even slightly positive. Statistics demonstrate that immigration does not bring with it the threat of crime because immigrants commit crimes at a significantly lower rate than non-immigrants. In short, the arguments against immigration fail at even the most superficial level of analysis. Arguments that posit that immigration would be a strain on the economy are especially misguided, as economists estimate that if open borders were globally adopted, the world GDP would nearly double.  

But to treat immigration policy as mere balancing of costs and benefits to native-born Americans would be to ignore the more fundamental reasons why open borders are necessary. So to be clear, even if all the arguments about the risks of immigration were based in reality, if allowing in more immigrants would hurt the economy and come at a cost to Americans, it would still be morally unjustifiable not to adopt a policy of open borders.  

Border enforcement is wrong because it is based on the erroneous philosophy that a person’s country of birth ought to determine the opportunities available to them. This idea is implicit in the previously addressed argument that immigrants would take American jobs. The argument assumes that the Americans are entitled to the jobs, while the immigrants are not, to draw the conclusion that by taking what they are not entitled to, immigrants are stealing from Americans. But what justifies such an assumption? If it is accepted that all people are created equal, why should the lottery of birth be allowed to determine who is entitled to the opportunity for success and who is destined for poverty? A person’s country of origin is not a condition determined by their character or virtue, but one inflicted upon them at birth by forces they have no control over. If a person is born in a poor country and wishes to move to a richer country, there is no valid justification for preventing them from doing so.  

There is another reason too that we should care about the plight of immigrants, and especially those from Latin America- in many cases the they are fleeing from crises engendered by the United States. Immigrants fleeing countries like Honduras and Guatemala are fleeing from high rates of homicide and violence directly linked to the instability left in the fallout of decades of U.S. interventionist policies. In Guatemala, for example, the United States, heavily influenced by lobbying from the United Fruit Company, supported a military coup to topple the liberal democratic government. The civil war that ensued lasted for 36 years and took the lives of an estimated 200,000 people. The U.S. took similar actions all over Central America, leading it to its current state of destabilization and violence. This means that immigration from Latin America is not, as some might claim, the unfair burdening of well-managed countries with the problems of poorly managed ones, but the natural result of a history of callous interventionist policies. Adopting open borders would not erase this legacy but would at least be a step towards mending the damages caused by our country. 

With the Trump administration in power, the cruelty of border enforcement is painfully visible. It is hard to hear stories like that of Marco Antonio Muñozman, a Honduran man who strangled himself in a cell after being forcibly separated from his wife and daughter, and not feel that something is deeply wrong with the way our country handles immigration. But the truth is that, although Trump’s policies takes it to an especially extreme level, this cruelty is inherent to the concept of border enforcement. As long as we restrict immigration to the United States, people will be violently constrained to the dim futures promised by poor countries sabotaged by United States intervention.