THE WELCOME MAT
The Democratic Party is being ridiculed as the party of “open borders” after its presidential contenders competed with each other in their first debate to see who could most forcefully renounce enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws.
Such claims actually do something of a disservice to the open-borders position, which was the country’s de facto position for much of its history.
Until at least the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), America didn’t really have much of an immigration policy; just about anyone who could get here could stay here. We became a “nation of immigrants” not just because so many wanted to come to the land where streets were “paved with gold” but also because those already here made little effort to keep them out.
There are also a fair number among us who still believe that the nation that owns the future will be the one (hopefully ours) that proves best able to attract the talented and ambitious from around the world. At the risk of uttering a heresy in our populist age, globalization is here to stay, and it includes the movement of people across borders nearly as much as the flow of goods and services.
Immigration is our biggest problem, according to surveys of American voters, but it is also a problem that only prosperous and free countries have to worry about.
Nobody wants to move to Iran, China or Russia; that so many still wish to come to America should tell us something both important and good. The radical left depiction of our country as a hell-hole of oppression, sexism and racism apparently isn’t shared by all those people outside our borders struggling to get inside them.
Whether a policy of open borders can still work as well as it did in the 19th century, when newcomers arrived often with just their dreams and the shirts on their backs and were left largely on their own to make out the best they could (without the welfare state and its dependency-inducing blandishments to greet them), when American elites embraced “melting pot” assimilation rather than identity-politics separatism, and when so many of the actual immigrants were crossing oceans instead of just dry creek beds is, of course, a relevant question about which reasonable people can differ.
Still, however one answers that question, what the Democrats were offering up on those debate stages wasn’t so much an open-borders policy but a giant neon sign with the words “break our laws and enter our country illegally, please.” Democrats are no longer just disagreeing with the Trump administration on how to best address the border problem; they are now doing everything they can to discredit the very idea of borders and laws pertaining to them.
As Frank Miele succinctly put it, “Almost unanimously, the candidates said that anyone who gets into our country illegally should be handed an official apology; a path to citizenship; and an IOU good for free health care, a free college education, and a good-paying job.”
The sheer cynicism of it all is breathtaking — Democratic leaders have become so attached to the idea that their party can acquire future electoral dominance by corralling the Hispanic vote that they increasingly embrace positions that effectively erase the distinction between American citizens on the one hand and those who are in the country illegally on the other, and promise to advance the interests of the latter at the expense (literally and figuratively) of the former.
As if abortion on demand at taxpayer expense, reparations for slavery, a return to forced busing, doing away with private health insurance, and embracing democratic socialism weren’t enough.
It represents a bizarre new electoral strategy: Figure out the most unpopular possible position on key issues and all rush to embrace it.
Whoever among the pathetic gaggle of hand-raisers in the Miami debates ultimately wins the dubious prize, the Democrats have already pulled off the unprecedented achievement of losing an election 16 months in advance. To Donald Trump, no less.
Bradley R. Gitz lives and teaches in Batesville, Ark.