Whence cometh the conviction, in America and even more in Britain and Europe, that open borders is the only moral immigration policy? Of course, not everyone believes that, and many who do stop short of saying so. But the contrast between the rhetoric and policies of the first two decades of the century and those that have prevailed since President Donald Trump’s election is unmistakable.
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 decade before the financial crisis, and afterwards saw with relief that the flow of illegals slowed.
As I wrote recently, careful projections of the illegal population estimate that it peaked at about 12 million in 2007, fell to about 10.5 million in 2019, then increased by about 4 million during the 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 JPMorganChase was constructing its $3 billion office tower.
THE THREAT OF AN OVERPRODUCED ELITE
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 Donald 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 pre-existing population is invidious discrimination.
Immigrants to the United States over the past half-century have come mostly from Latin America and Asia from 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 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.
An example is the scandal of Britain’s “grooming gangs,” often long-settled immigrants from Pakistan and Afghanistan, who sexually abuse and enslave adolescent working-class English girls. For at least two decades, this oppression has been largely ignored by Britain’s political parties, local and national police forces, national press, and certainly by the TV-set-owner subsidized BBC.
This oppression of women and violation of human rights is virtually unknown to American liberals, as the liberal talk show host Bill Maher has pointed out with appropriate indignation. Nor are they aware, despite mention of the practice, that Britain has been arresting thousands of citizens for social media posts that are thought to hurt immigrants’ feelings.
European elites, in government and the press, have suppressed news of immigrant violence, even when directed at women and gays. Both center-right and center-left governments have professed themselves unable to reduce the flow of immigrants with cultural attitudes adversarial to European norms. They profess they must obey rulings by international courts and agencies whose personnel are immune to democratic checks.
Political parties that campaign for restrictions on immigration are treated as pariahs with which established parties must never allow in coalition governments. This includes Britain’s Reform party, which currently has huge poll leads, and France’s Rassemblement National, whose leader, Marine Le Pen, was blocked from running by a dubious court decision. But her 30-year-old deputy, Jordan Bartella, appears more popular than other parties’ leaders.
Germany’s AfD, which is currently tied in the polls, is treated with particular scorn by the two main parties, which, between them, capture less than 50% in polls. Within AfD’s ranks are some with nostalgia for Germany’s Nazi past, and the nation’s leading parties deserve respect for their longstanding commitment to renouncing Nazism and making reparations for the Holocaust.
DEMOCRATS WANT OPEN BORDERS, MOST AMERICANS DON’T
But it’s not apparent that AfD’s policy of restricting the inflow of immigrants, or those of Eastern European democracies like Poland and Hungary, which are 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.
