There is, to my mind, a Quixotic appeal to the project of open borders, of a world without any immigration restrictions. As anyone who has been on the sharp end of it knows, state-enforced immigration control is an ugly business, reducing men, women and children to items to be processed or discarded. It is also inevitably a blunt instrument that can take but little account of personal and local circumstances. And immigration control means handing over to politicians and government bureaucrats decisions about who can live where, rather than letting such matters be negotiated among those directly affected. Beyond that, the project of open borders appeals to the universalist hope that there is a brotherhood of man, more potent than the divisions of culture and creed. Certainly, in heaven, there will be no borders.
So one can respect someone who advocates openly for open borders. I do not in fact believe there will, this side of heaven, ever be a world without borders of some sort. But, as utopian projects go, building such a world here seems at least to stem from a benign vision of what we are capable of.
Outside various libertarian, anarchist and Marxist sub-cultures, advocacy for open borders is quite rare.
However, outside various libertarian, anarchist and Marxist sub-cultures, such open advocacy is quite rare. To be sure, there is much discourse from the right about how even the mainstream left is in fact pursuing open borders as its endgame. But it is much harder to find figures on the mainstream left prepared to acknowledge this: indeed most left-wing leaders will openly commit to immigration control in their electoral platforms. However, the belief in a left planning for open borders is fueled firstly by the frequent gap between those electoral commitments and actual policy (the Biden administration is a notorious case), and secondly by the overall temper of left-wing discourse on immigration. This involves, on the one hand, constant attacks on right-wing critics of immigration as racist and inhumane, and on the other, reporting and opinionating in this area that focuses exclusively on the sufferings of immigrants and the cruelties of immigration enforcement.
Undoubtedly, there really are some politicians and activists on the left who see open borders not just as a long-term ideal, but as a project towards which they are called to work here and now, and who also keep this position quiet. Open borders are after all hugely unpopular, and it takes only minimal political nous to keep quiet about one’s least popular projects.
To reduce one’s immigration politics to denunciations is a convenient way of avoiding the hard questions.
Nevertheless, I do not believe that what drives most of the left’s attitude to immigration is any such deep, occult commitment to open borders. Rather, it seems that the left, in the sort of discourse described above, has formed its position by obstinately choosing to see only one side of the matter. It is true enough that there is lots of racism and other petty fears and hatreds mixed in with anti-immigration politics. It is truer still that immigration enforcement will always be a nasty business: compelling or cajoling people to live where they do not wish to live can never be otherwise. There is thus always opportunity for much righteousness in denouncing these things. However, to reduce one’s immigration politics to such denunciations is also a convenient way of avoiding the hard questions that the era of rapid global mobility has brought upon us.
No one can answer those questions directly, except by either advocating for open borders, or embracing some form of immigration controls. The former requires an extreme revolutionary commitment. The latter cannot be done without taking some responsibility for the cruelties that must form part of even the most measured immigration enforcement, cruelties often inflicted on those who are already poor and wretched. Ordinary left-leaning people are hardly revolutionaries; nor do they wish to see themselves as oppressors of the weak. It is thus far easier for them to merely complain about the nastiness of the other side’s anti-immigration discourse, and so not formulate any solutions of their own.
The best that can be said for this posture is that it may be useful within a political dialectic: the left defends immigrants, the right attacks them, and some sort of working compromise is reached. But this is a fragile balance, and it also delegates entirely to the right the responsibility for forming any coherent and positive vision of how immigration control ought to actually work.
The left cultivates a hysterical fear that the right’s answer to this question may become increasingly nasty. This hysteria is hopefully unwarranted. Nevertheless, if the left cannot develop its reflections on the problems of immigration beyond shouting “racist” and “bigot” at its opponents, it will be poorly placed to propose any workable, humane alternative to the right-wing cruelties it is forever predicting, should these actually come to pass.
