Closed Borders Are the Line in the Sand

The common framing of open borders, even among many liberals, is that it is an extreme position. At best, it’s a far ideal, not serious politics. As a far-ideal position, advocacy for open immigration is treated as indulgent. When considered an extreme position it is treated as a political liability. 

Jacob Levy remarked to me this summer that this framing gets things exactly backwards. Open immigration is not something out-of-touch liberals are pushing for out of nowhere. Liberals are talking about immigration because closed borders is the worldwide-unifying, motivating ideal of the illiberal, authoritarian right. 

He’s right. Liberals are not pursuing some ephemeral ideal. We are fighting against concrete policies of parties in power that are realizing the opposite extreme: closed borders. We do not need a policy consensus about what we’re for to see a way forward. 

And we should fight. The illiberal right really is pursuing a shared, extreme, harmful political goal.  Set aside that immigration is an economic boon. The illiberal, authoritarian right demands borders be closed even to—especially to—the most desperate, helpless people. We do not have to speculate about what this will mean. It has already had concrete, deadly, heartbreaking consequences. 

When liberals let those who would close borders frame the conversation, we make two mistakes. We fail to put the blame for dysfunctional, polarized immigration politics where it belongs. And we concede a point that should not be conceded. Illiberal authoritarians who want to close our borders should not get to frame the issue. They should be forced to acknowledge what they’re advocating.

There's a serious mismatch between how some voters think of immigration and how it affects politics. Millennial-and-older liberals remember immigration as an issue that people disagreed about within political coalitions. People on the left and the right held a range of views about immigration policy. Today, we should treat positions on immigration the way we treated political views about free markets and the size of government in the 1980s.

I was a skeptic that immigration could be so important as a marker of where someone falls in their politics. I think now that my skepticism came from a mistaken understanding of our transforming political coalitions. 

Under the old political alignment, we understood the politics of someone who said "I think markets should be generally free." We should be able to understand where someone sits on the political landscape now when they say they want to severely limit immigration or even deport immigrants. On the flip side, we should understand that someone who says "I think immigration should be generally free" is against mass deportation.  

Were all-the-way freed markets on the table forty years ago? No! But opposing communism was a political motivation that we understood. We didn't treat the goal of free markets as an extreme, taboo position because we understood the political coalition it was in. Until we can do the same with people who want open borders as part of a coalition opposing the illiberal, authoritarian right, we're at a disadvantage.

The opponents of liberalism have chosen this issue. Liberals don’t need to be squeamish about taking a side on it. Even those whose ideal world would not have open borders should be decisive. Closing borders comes with—it requires—political permission for not just non-liberal reform that would frustrate the association rights and property rights of citizens, but illiberal reform that would undermine due process, limits on police and executive power, and equality before the law.

It's hard to be optimistic when we look at the problem this way. Because liberal immigration reformers are losing. We may be losing to illiberal authoritarians more significantly here than on any other issue. 

The political movement against immigration has built a broad political coalition pushing immigration skepticism. That’s why we should not fall into the trap of damning everyone skeptical of immigration. People are not the political equivalent of Stephen Miller or Victor Orban because they have been convinced that they can fix the housing crisis by cutting immigration. It probably just means they’re persuadable. 

Liberals don’t need to build a coalition for completely open borders. But we must build one against closing borders. 

Getting our feet back under us will mean being able to tell the difference between our committed opponents and those who can be persuaded that the costs of closing borders are too high. We must then be measured and decisive in condemning those who really are pursuing a political extreme.

There is no need to exaggerate the stakes. They are devastating. There are people in danger with nowhere to go. Families are torn apart. Children are dead in the water or the desert. People would be left to die slowly in earshot of those who could help. Tax dollars pay for officials who mock frightened children. 

Those who would not only turn their backs on a child in need but would stop others who want to help should be forced to say so. We should be incredulous that they are not ashamed of themselves. It’s the most obvious thing in the world that they should be.

Those who print signs calling for mass deportation should have to own up to what a policy of mass deportation would mean. Anyone who would hold one of those signs should have to confront it, too. 

Liberals don’t have to let illiberal authoritarians set the terms of this debate because of our attachment to a bygone political era. We should embrace a coalition that defends the freedom to find somewhere safe—to pursue happiness wherever it takes us. 

Do some liberals really want far-ideal open borders? Sure, just like some of us still want free markets. But practically, that isn’t what matters. All of us should look at the authoritarians who would design immigration policy that would turn away a modern-day MS St Louis and know we’re against that. As we should be.

We seem to have forgotten that the world ever had the resolve to do something like pass a global convention protecting refugees. The people who achieved that were not special or different from us. Reclaiming that resolve is possible. We have to stop apologizing and do the work.

Featured image Arrested refugees-immigrants in Fylakio detention center, Evros, Greece, by Ggia