About open borders and allowing immigration.
First, living "on top of each other" is great. The condo provides all sorts of things and services people otherwise have to get themselves, manage themselves, and drive somewhere to obtain. It is also ecologically much better. That said, overcrowding applied to the US is a silly notion. The US is a big underpopulated country with plenty of room for sprawling suburbs if that is what you really want.
Allowing free immigration is great for foreign relations. A local population from a given country tends to influence the country back home to be friendly, and the fact that the country allows its nationals in avoids feelings of the receiving country being selfish, racist, what have you. As things are now a lot of the hate directed toward the States is because of its restrictive immigration. There is a well-known tendency for those who immigrate to be more ambitions, more energetic and more intelligent than those who stay home. If you look at immigrant populations, such as Asians or Jews or Eastern Europeans, within a generation or so they begin to be at the top of the achievement ladder, so long as they are not held down too much by discrimination, which is what holds down African and Mexican Americans. In other words, with open immigration a country tends to get the "cream of the crop."-- A side note here about Latin America -- the US cannot afford to have such a large country as Mexico feeling exploited. Allowing them more freely into the States is almost a necessity, as otherwise you have hate brewing in Mexico and a large illegal population in the States who feel no loyalty and also feel exploited.
New arrivals, especially if uneducated, not speaking English, poor, and so on, are a temporary burden on educational and health care systems and in some limited cases add to crime. This is short term until they become acculturated, and the investment is worth it.
Businesses in a country with unrestricted immigration can freely recruit what they need anywhere without the need to ship the jobs overseas, not that they get cheap labor as a competitive labor market quickly nips anything like that, but that they can find the best skill sets and best track records anywhere without a lot of bureaucracy and difficulty. This helps the economy.
A growing population naturally brings about a growing economy, and the nation stays strong, with a ready pool of people for the military and the economy. It also stays younger, with a large pool of working people to support the elderly. With present demographic trends services like Social Security are going to have to be steadily limited more and more. The birth rate in the States, as with most developed countries, is just not enough to sustain the present population, let alone grow the nation. Without more people the US will soon become like Britain, important but not dominant.
As Islam is today, I can see where allowing massive numbers of Muslims in would cause fear, even though the vast majority would acculturate over a couple generations, such a community would tend to produce a certain number of terrorists and other evils, in spite of their parents. I can't see any good way to manage that, and admit it.
I can also see some restrictions being reasonable, a point system without a waiting period for education and English and family relations and freedom from criminal record, but not numeric limits or quotas. (Quotas are inherently racist even if not intended as white countries don't fill their quotas and brown and black countries develop long waiting periods).
One final thing -- what other countries do is beside the point -- that one country is stupid doesn't mean the States has to be stupid too.
This is a well-developed, internally consistent argument for open (or substantially liberalized) immigration. Let me engage with it seriously, noting where the evidence supports you, where it's mixed, and where critics would push back.
Where the evidence is broadly on your side
The "cream of the crop" selection effect is real and well-documented. Immigrants are, on average, more entrepreneurial and risk-tolerant than comparable non-migrants — this is called positive selection in the economics literature. The outsized achievement of immigrant communities you mention (Ashkenazi Jews, East and South Asians, Cuban exiles) is a genuine pattern, though it's partly explained by which immigrants arrived under which conditions — Cuban and Vietnamese refugees, for instance, skewed heavily toward educated and professional classes.
The demographic argument is probably your strongest. Nearly every developed country faces the same math: sub-replacement fertility plus aging population plus pay-as-you-go retirement systems equals fiscal stress. Immigration is the most immediately available lever. Japan's resistance to it is a live cautionary tale.
The foreign-relations point has real merit too, though it's underappreciated in mainstream immigration debates. Diaspora communities do function as informal diplomatic assets — the Indian-American community's relationship to US-India ties, or Cuban-Americans' historical influence on Cuba policy, illustrate this running in both directions.
Where the picture is more complicated
The labor market effects are genuinely contested. Most economists find modest net positive effects, but distributional effects matter: low-skill native workers (disproportionately minorities and prior immigrants) face more wage competition than high-skill workers. George Borjas and Giovanni Peri have debated this for decades without resolution. "The competitive labor market quickly nips cheap labor" is the right long-run story, but the transition period can be painful for specific communities — and those communities vote and have legitimate grievances.
The crime question is broadly in your favor — immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens — but it's not quite as clean as "temporary burden until acculturation." Second-generation immigrants in some communities (particularly where they face discrimination and blocked mobility, as you acknowledge) do show elevated rates. The mechanism you identify — discrimination as the bottleneck — is probably right, but it means the policy alone doesn't resolve the issue.
The "overcrowding is silly for the US" point is geographically true but politically incomplete. Population pressure is intensely local — it hits school systems in specific districts, housing markets in specific metros, emergency rooms in specific hospitals. The fact that Wyoming has room doesn't help Tucson school budgets. This is an argument for better fiscal distribution, not against immigration per se, but it explains why opposition is concentrated in high-immigration areas.
The harder challenges
Your Muslim immigration point is honest and the tension is real, but it may prove too much. The logic — a large community will statistically produce some bad actors — applies to almost any group. It's an argument for surveillance and integration policy, not necessarily restriction. Most European countries that have struggled with Islamist terrorism have also had poor integration records: economic exclusion, residential segregation, identity politics that hardened boundaries. The US has historically integrated Muslim immigrants better than Europe, arguably because American identity is more civic than ethnic.
The point system without numeric limits is attractive in theory, but "without numeric limits" is where most economists and even pro-immigration scholars get nervous. Labor markets do absorb workers, but not instantaneously — genuine supply shocks take time to clear. A point system with no ceiling could, under some scenarios, produce inflows larger than institutions can absorb without stress, even if the long-run equilibrium is fine.
The strongest unaddressed counterargument
Political economy: large-scale rapid immigration, even when economically beneficial in aggregate, tends to produce political backlash that results in policies worse than the status quo. The post-2015 refugee wave in Europe arguably set back liberal immigration politics by a decade. This is an argument not against open immigration as an end state, but for sequencing and pacing — which your argument doesn't really address.
Overall
The argument is stronger than most of its opponents will admit, and weaker in a few places than you suggest — mainly around distributional effects, institutional absorption capacity, and political dynamics. The core case — that the US would benefit from substantially more immigration, that current restrictions are economically irrational and diplomatically costly, and that quotas are structurally discriminatory — is defensible and supported by a reasonable reading of the evidence.
The political backlash you mention when immigrants are highly visible is a product of antiforeign bigotry and needs ignoring and education and protective laws. I see it in some people in every country I've ever spent time in, seems to be an unfortunate personality trait of a significant number.
The effect on the labor markets are both good and bad. The immigrants still eat and consume, as well as need jobs. Often there are labor shortages in certain skills that can be countered by firms recruiting overseas when immigration rules are relaxed, not possible now. Market forces tend to control people movement more naturally. Besides, the real labor problem in the US is the need for retraining coming from automation, not new entrants.
There is also the problem that make a law make a criminal, leading to the Sates having a large illegal population. This leads to exploitation on one end and disaffection on the other. Solving it via police power is ineffective and tends to be Fascist in nature.
These are fair rejoinders. Let me engage them honestly.
On political backlash being "just bigotry"
You're partly right — there is genuine xenophobia in anti-immigrant sentiment, and it tracks with personality traits (authoritarianism, disgust sensitivity, low openness) across cultures, as you observe. But "needs ignoring" is where I'd push back hard.
In a democracy, you cannot simply ignore the preferences of a large minority or even majority of voters. Calling it bigotry and educating around it is a long-term project — meanwhile those voters elect governments, and the backlash policies they produce (mass deportation, border walls, the hostile-environment policies in the UK) cause real harm to real people right now. A politically sustainable immigration policy that admits more people may do more good than a theoretically ideal open policy that triggers a shutdown. This isn't moral capitulation to bigotry — it's strategic realism about how change actually happens.
There's also a distinction worth making between ethnic hostility to foreigners (genuine bigotry) and cultural anxiety about rapid community change — the latter isn't entirely irrational and doesn't map cleanly onto racism. People have legitimate interests in the continuity of their communities, even if those interests can be weaponized by bad actors.
On labor markets
Your consumption point is the standard and correct economic response — immigrants are both workers and consumers, expanding the demand side as well as supply. Agreed. And the skill-shortage recruitment argument is strong and underappreciated — companies currently offshore entire operations partly because they can't import the talent. That's a genuine own-goal of restrictive policy.
The automation point is well-taken as a reframing — the structural labor disruption coming from automation dwarfs anything immigration produces, and conflating the two lets politicians scapegoat immigrants for dislocations they didn't cause. That said, the two pressures do compound in specific local labor markets and for specific demographics, so separating them analytically doesn't make the combined pressure disappear for affected workers.
On "make a law, make a criminal" — this is your strongest point here
This deserves more attention than it gets in mainstream debate. The US has created, through restrictive immigration law, a permanent class of somewhere between 10-12 million people who:
- Cannot fully participate in civic life
- Are vulnerable to exploitation precisely because they can't appeal to legal protections
- Develop rational distrust of institutions
- Can be used as a political football indefinitely
This is a serious institutional pathology. The enforcement apparatus it requires — E-Verify, ICE raids, detention centers, family separation — is not only expensive and often cruel, it does corrode civil liberties for everyone, as enforcement can't be surgically precise. You're right that it has a structurally authoritarian character, because that's what enforcing unenforceable laws at scale requires.
The argument essentially inverts the usual framing: the illegal immigration problem is substantially a product of the legal framework, not a natural phenomenon the law is struggling to contain. Change the law and much of the problem dissolves — the people don't change, just their legal status and the incentive structures around them.
Where I'd still hold some ground
Even granting all of this, "therefore open borders" doesn't quite follow automatically. The more modest but still very substantial conclusion is: current restrictions are far too tight, the enforcement regime is counterproductive and harmful, and a generous points-based system without numeric caps would be a major improvement. That's actually a fairly radical position relative to current politics, even if it stops short of fully open borders. Your overall case lands somewhere around there, which is well-supported.
Let's not overstate this, open borders is different from tolerant admission of qualified applicants without quota.
That's a fair and important clarification. The two are genuinely different things, and conflating them weakens the argument.
What you're actually advocating:
- No numeric caps or quotas
- A points system rewarding education, English, family ties, clean record
- Reasonably fast processing without years-long waiting periods
- No ethnic or national-origin discrimination baked into the system
That's a coherent, moderate-to-liberal reform position, not open borders. It's closer to how Australia and Canada operate, and both countries have managed high immigration levels with relatively less political backlash than the US or Europe — partly because the visible process is seen as orderly and merit-based, which reduces the cultural-anxiety dimension of opposition even among people who aren't bigots.
What it isn't:
- Unrestricted entry
- No vetting
- No criteria
- Come as you are in any numbers
That distinction matters politically too. A lot of opposition to immigration reform in the US is opposition to the perceived version — which critics caricature as open borders — rather than to anything actually proposed. Keeping the distinction sharp denies opponents that strawman.
The honest summary of your position is probably: liberal, criteria-based admission without the arbitrary national-origin discrimination embedded in quota systems. That's a defensible and fairly well-evidenced case, and doesn't require defending the harder arguments that true open borders would invite.
Does a democracy really need to recognize the unfortunate interests of bigots? That is not far different from recognizing the interests of criminals. Of course they should not be denied franchise, although the latter often are, and we must live with that, but the majority can be persuaded that if the US is to be the dominant nations a hundred years from now it must have a greater population.
That's a sharp challenge and worth taking seriously. But there's a tension in it worth examining.
Where you have a point
Democracy doesn't mean every expressed preference is equally legitimate as policy. We don't design drug laws around the preferences of people who want to exploit addicts, or property rights around those who'd prefer to take things. Civil rights legislation explicitly overrode majority preferences in many states — and we generally regard that as correct in retrospect. The 1924 Immigration Act, which established the national-origin quota system you rightly criticize, was popular and democratically enacted, and was also straightforwardly racist in design and intent. Democratic legitimacy didn't make it good policy or good ethics.
Where it gets harder
The analogy to criminality is where I'd push back. Criminals have acted against others. Bigots hold views you find — and I'd agree are — morally deficient. But in a liberal democracy there's a meaningful difference between acting against others and holding wrong views. The bigot still has a vote, still has interests beyond their bigotry, and still lives in the community that immigration policy affects. Dismissing their vote entirely tends to produce exactly the backlash dynamic that sets reform back — not because they're right, but because people whose concerns are treated as illegitimate don't become persuaded, they become radicalized.
The more useful frame may be: their bigotry deserves no recognition, but their vote must be contended with strategically, meaning persuasion rather than dismissal.
On the persuasion point — this is probably your strongest ground
The demographic-dominance argument is actually well-suited to persuading non-bigots who are currently skeptical. National power, Social Security solvency, military capacity, economic dynamism — these are arguments that don't require anyone to overcome ethnic anxiety, they appeal to straightforward self-interest. That's a more tractable political path than convincing people their cultural anxieties are illegitimate, even when they are.
The honest political reality is that the coalition for serious immigration reform probably has to include people motivated by national interest and economic self-interest, not just those who've worked through the ethics of it. That's not a moral compromise — it's just how durable majorities get built.
No comments:
Post a Comment