Open-Borders Immigration Would Destroy American Sovereignty and Exceptionalism

The video of the speech based on this essay can be viewed here.

The immigration crisis at the Mexican border cannot be overstated. On March 28, 2019, former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen stated:

We face a system-wide meltdown … We are witnessing the real-time dissolution of the immigration system.

In the flurry of opinions about immigration, border walls, compassion for immigrants and their children, economics, and an influx of crime, there is a larger, more urgent, and civilization-changing crisis: the real probability that open-borders immigration would destroy American sovereignty and exceptionalism.

Open-borders advocates declare that America’s southern border with Mexico should be open to all. Farhad Manjoo wrote, in an opinion piece for The New York Times on January 16, 2019 titled “There’s Nothing Wrong With Open Borders: Why a brave Democrat should make the case for vastly expanding immigration”:

Imagine not just opposing President Trump’s wall but also opposing the nation’s cruel and expensive immigration and border-security apparatus in its entirety. Imagine radically shifting our stance toward outsiders from one of suspicion to one of warm embrace. Imagine that if you passed a minimal background check, you’d be free to live, work, pay taxes and die in the United States. Imagine moving from Nigeria to Nebraska as freely as one might move from Massachusetts to Maine.

Manjoo refers to the immigration system’s “bottomless unfairness,” and uses false ad hominem attacks like “President Trump’s racist immigration rhetoric” and “the president’s xenophobic policies.” He writes:

… according to this nation’s founding documents, we were all created equal. Yet by mere accident of geography, some were given freedom, and others were denied it.

Manjoo’s arguments couch unfettered immigration as an issue of compassion for those less fortunate who simply want to come to America to work and better themselves. Anyone opposing immigration becomes a racist, a xenophobe, and a cruel and selfish bigot. Shame on those xenophobes!

Thus, America’s sovereign rights to restrict open immigration become immoral, and border walls are immoral too, to use Nancy Pelosi’s term. But are immigration restrictions and border walls actually immoral? Let’s test that theory.

First, it must be said that if all the people in the world were saints, it would indeed make borders unnecessary. Religious people would describe that as the “Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.” However much we might like to see that world of saints, it hasn’t arrived yet. Murderers, criminals, and selfish people still roam the planet.

So, although it’s truly important to be compassionate, one must also exercise wisdom when it comes to allowing just anyone to enter one’s country and one’s home.

To me, the crux of the immigration argument rests on the words “sovereignty,” “home,” and “exceptionalism.”

Do all of us have the sovereign right to manage our own home and restrict other humans from coming in without permission? If you don’t agree, can all those who do agree come over to your home tomorrow and camp out in your living room? If you say no to that, are you being hypocritical? If you say yes, then all I can respond with is: “Really? Hundreds of us can move in to your house, and yard, and living room?”

==> Read the entire essay at peterfalkenbergbrown.com.