Reminder: Our online Zoom conference on open borders continues with Bryan Caplan on Monday, October 14, at 7 p.m.-8 p.m. Eastern Time. Register here.
Reminder: I’ll be speaking at the JFK Lancer Conference in Dallas, which is being held on November 22-24 at the Dallas Marriott Downtown. I’ll have some of my JFK books there to autograph and sell at a discounted price. I hope to see you there!
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American right-wing supporters of America’s system of immigration controls love to exclaim that President Biden has adopted a policy of “open borders,” by which Biden, they say, has knowingly, intentionally, and deliberately “let in” millions of illegal immigrants.
An October 3, 2024, article entitled “The Expanding Immigrant Detention Nexus published by the Border Chronicle states:
Since Joe Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, there have been alarming trends in detentions and deportations undertaken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC). For instance, the daily number of people detained has gone up 140 percent. Now there are 37,000 people locked up every day, up from 15,000 in 2021.
A June 27, 2024, article entitled “The Biden Administration Is on Pace to Match Trump Deportation Numbers” published by the Migration Policy Institute stated:
The Biden administration took office amid heightened debate in some circles over the merits and tactics of deportations, yet it is on track to carry out as many removals and returns as the Trump administration did. The 1.1 million deportations since the beginning of fiscal year (FY) 2021 through February 2024 (the most recent data available) are on pace to match the 1.5 million deportations carried out during the four years President Donald Trump was in office. These deportations are in addition to the 3 million expulsions of migrants crossing the border irregularly that occurred under the pandemic-era Title 42 order between March 2020 and May 2023—the vast majority of which occurred under the Biden administration. Combining deportations with expulsions and other actions to block migrants without permission to enter the United States, the Biden administration’s nearly 4.4 million repatriations are already more than any single presidential term since the George W. Bush administration (5 million in its second term).
Additionally, the Biden administration has left intact longtime immigration police-state measures, such as warrantless searches of ranches and farms along and near the border, fixed highway checkpoints, roving Border Patrol checkpoints, boarding of Greyhound buses to check people’s papers, the criminalization of hiring, transporting, harboring, and caring for illegal immigrants, violent raids on American businesses, Donald Trump’s Berlin Wall, military troops at the border, and thousands of Border Patrol and ICE agents.
That’s what passes for “open borders” within the minds of right-wingers who support America’s decades-old immigration-control system and the immigration police-state that comes with it.
But an actual system of open borders is one without any of those police-state measures. Genuine open borders is the unrestricted movement of goods, services, and people, back and forth, across borders.
To get a good picture of the genuine concept of open borders, think the domestic United States. We have a system of open borders between the states. It appears normal to us because we have all been born and raised under it. No border guards, no border stations, no state border patrol agents, no state walls, and no border police-state measures surrounding the borders of each state. Instead, unrestricted movements of goods, services, and people across state borders. That is open borders.
So, why do right-wingers claim that Biden has adopted a system of “open borders?” The answer is simple: It enables them to avoid confronting reality: that their border-control system doesn’t work, has never worked, and will never work.
The goal of the immigration-control system has always been one in which everyone is vetted and no one comes into the United States without official permission. That goal, needless to say, has never been achieved and is still not being achieved. And as long as the United States remains a relatively attractive country, that goal will never be achieved. There will always be people — over and beyond the arbitrary number and types of immigrants established by immigration central planners — who will circumvent the controls and enter in violation of the rules and regulations, which, as we have seen, causes right-wingers to become filled with rage.
But rather than simply accept the obvious — that socialist central planning in immigration and an ever-growing immigration police state simply do not work and have never worked and will never work — right-wingers go off on their nonsensical lark of how Biden has established a system of “open borders,” one in which his immigration police state has supposedly knowingly, intentionally, and deliberately “let in” millions of unauthorized immigrants.
Just like right-wing proponents of the drug war, right-wing proponents of immigration controls simply cannot accept the discomforting reality: their socialist immigration-control system has never worked, continues not to work, and will never work. The only thing that works is freedom and free markets. And that necessarily means open borders — real open borders.
Reminder: Our online Zoom conference on open borders continues with Bryan Caplan on Monday, October 14, at 7 p.m.-8 p.m. Eastern Time. Register here.
Reminder: I’ll be speaking at the JFK Lancer Conference in Dallas, which is being held on November 22-24 at the Dallas Marriott Downtown. I’ll have some of my JFK books there to autograph and sell at a discounted price. I hope to see you there!