Central America is in a state of collapse. Human beings are carving paths through inhospitable jungle regions previously thought impassible. No matter your opinion of America’s posture towards black and brown people, you will not be able to escape the fact that these folks are literally beating a path to our southern border. When they get here, America should welcome them with open arms.
We Americans should really get some perspective about where we live… I was reminded lately of every conversation I’ve ever had with an immigrant, almost all of which… included the notion, ‘Oh, you people have no idea. All you do is bitch about and bad mouth your own country, but if you knew about the country I came from, you’d stop (expletive) on your own…’ In Saudi Arabia, grown women can be jailed for doing the kind of things we think of as routine without the permission of a male guardian. China rounds you up if you’re the wrong religion and puts you in camps… Only five percent of Burundians have electricity. The homicide rate in Honduras is eight times what it is here. The inflation rate in Venezuela is 2,719%. The Philippines in the last five years has put to death 27,000 low level drug dealers… There is a reason Afghan mothers are handing their babies to us… Any immigrant will tell you we’ve largely succeeded here.
Bill Maher, from Real Time with Bill Maher, 8/27/21 podcast
The great American experiment has always been fueled by a vision of self determined participation. Our founders felt that whomever wanted to play a part in our system of self-government was welcome to make their way to our shores. Prior to the mid 19th century emergence of the pseudo-science of eugenics, along with the immigration policies created in it’s name, the answer to the question “Who is an American?” was always whomever is living here and participating. We can acknowledge, and leave aside for the purposes of this discussion, that the ugly history of slavery and the slave trade brought unwilling victims to our shores, but this has little to do with today, other than to say that the ancestors of the unwilling are fully entitled to the Liberty our experiment has proposed all are entitled to.
The American vision of Liberty was best encapsulated in the statue Liberty Enlightening the World (French: La Liberté éclairant le monde), or as it is popularly known, The Statue of Liberty. The words at her base represent the fundamental aspirations of the American experiment:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
As Americans, one of the values we hold dearly is the right to associate with others as we see fit. We also believe that people should be free to engage in economic transactions with whomever we want. For a traditional conservative, these rights are constraints on state action. It is simply unjust for states to infringe on the individual rights granted to us by our Constitution, even in order to bring about socially beneficial outcomes. States certainly can’t, and shouldn’t, violate our rights to protect some of us from economic competition or shield our cultures from change. We the people should not favor some of us over others.
Americans should rightfully oppose immigration restrictions. When a country restricts immigration, it stops us from associating with other humans (simply by virtue of where they happened to be born) and engaging in many potentially mutually beneficial economic exchanges with them. Want to hire an unauthorized immigrant? That’s illegal. Suppose you have an aunt who wants to immigrate to your country, and you want to sponsor her. The odds are that your aunt won’t be able to immigrate. How does that help the cause of Liberty for humanity? How can we claim to be the shiny city on the hill?
But what about the jobs and livelihoods of those already here in America I can hear some of you cry. A review of the history of immigration (as has been done expertly in Bryan Caplan’s book Open Borders: the science and ethics of immigration ) tells us the influx of new immigrants would stimulate the economy. History shows us that many members of America’s working class (whom are made to fear newcomers by politicians seeking to divide us) would end up helping, educating, and training new arrivals, not competing with them.
The economic case that open borders would dramatically improve the well-being of the world is rock solid. In terms of global efficiency, we’d be moving productive resources (human capital) from places where there is next to no demand to places where they can engage in productive labor. The size of the numbers involved makes the case even more compelling. The economics of moving from Haiti to the United States is guessed by most people to cause around a 20 percent increase in wages. Nope. It’s much closer to a 2,000 percent increase in wages. The difference between labor productivity in poor countries and rich countries is so extreme, it’s hard to for most people to wrap our minds around it.
Consider the following thought experiment, the case of “Starving Marvin.” Marvin is in desperate need of food and is prepared to purchase it legally. On his way to the market, he is turned away by an armed guard. If Marvin subsequently dies of starvation, is the guard guilty of murder? The philosopher Michael Huemer, who first introduced this hypothetical, in 2010, concluded that the answer was yes. He writes, “If a person is starving, and you refuse to give him food, then you allow him to starve, but if you take the extra step of coercively interfering with his obtaining food from someone else, then you do not merely allow him to starve; you starve him.”
Every immigrant we turn away at our border through the use of force is a potential victim. If we desire to keep our role as the light of Liberty unto the nations of the world, we must lead by example. We must open our borders to all who wish to participate in the American experiment, the American dream.
This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t document all who come. We should. But anyone who comes and is willing to live by the laws of our jurisdictions should be allowed to enter (we can collect their biometric data as they do). They should be permitted to work, to educate their children in our schools, and ultimately to seek citizenship if they so desire.