https://unherd.com/2024/04/the-fantasy-of-open-borders/
Before entering today’s torturous immigration debate, we would do well to remember James Baldwin. “Power without morality is no longer power,” he observed. And the border question is fundamentally a moral one.
On one side, there is a growing belief that an open borders policy is a vital moral response to the economic inequality between countries. In these milieus, national citizenship within a bounded community in the Western world is increasingly seen not as a birth right but as just another unfair advantage. As the political theorist Joseph Carens puts it, Western citizenship is “the modern equivalent to feudal privilege — an inherited status that greatly enhances one’s life chances [that] is hard to justify when one thinks about it closely”. And just like feudal privileges, they should be cast aside.
On the other side, meanwhile, the vox populi disagrees. Polling consistently shows that most Western citizens want less immigration, a sentiment that has risen in recent years in the US, UK, France and Germany. Faced with the elite-approved “human right” to unlimited free movement, popular opinion responds with an emphatic no.
With die-hards on both sides, it’s no wonder the Senate border bill has become such a point of contention. For Democrats, the problem is not that too many foreigners are abusing asylum claims in order to immigrate illegally; it’s more that, with an election coming up, news coverage of chaotic conditions at the border doesn’t paint Biden in a good light. For the rest of us, meanwhile, the problem is the assumption that everyone in the developing world has a moral right to claim asylum in the US.
