Immigration Liberty — Open Immigration

This is a teaser of a forthcoming article that I’m about to have published in both The Articulate and The Rebirth of Freedom Foundation. This post is a more personal version of an article that I’m writing. I’ve been asked by many individuals why I support open immigration or “open borders” as some try to call it. We run this case in a high-school debate league in Texas — not the most immigrant friendly place on earth. This is my answer.

I cannot overstate how strongly I feel about the topic of turning America into a land that accepts all people into her arms of freedom. I believe it to be of the most fundamental purpose of Government to protect the rights of all people that it comes across — government is a moral institution established for moral protection. Its purpose, its goal knows no borders, for morality has no borders.

The idea of blocking people from another country, on the basis of geographical location, is naive both economically and on national security reasons. The state of America’s borders are such that any well-financed organization could penetrate its borders, with or without open immigration, with or without a wall, with or without defenses.

We have left the stone age. We left the ages of knights and castles. Walls will not do justice — they will not work.

But in a broader sense, to answer the question specifically. You ask for a moral justification for freedom. I believe it to be fundamentally wrong for a family to be forced by a state to live in economic destitution for all their lives. I believe it to be wrong. For a state to force an individual to accept poverty when that individual could achieve prosperity.

I believe it to be obvious that our policy towards the people of the world should be a policy of openness, of freedom — liberty, and justice. I believe that a moral immigration policy is a policy that opens, that welcomes the immigrant home.

We have a moral obligation to open our arms to the world, to the poor, to the tired, to the huddled masses, yearning to be free. It is our greatest moral responsibility, to answer the pleas of the world by supplying them with “home.”

May nature deal justly with us if we forget the lessons that our forefathers learned. Let us learn from economic and philosophical history, and return once again to the philosophy of the Statue of Liberty, that monument that was often the first impression people had of America as they traveled here from foreign lands.

Let us return to the philosophy of that monument of liberty, and be a beacon of freedom shining throughout the world. Let us do what is inscribed on the Liberty Bell: “Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof.”

In the end, our options are clear. We can take the moral and economic high ground, and grant individuals across the land the ability to be free, to live in the United States, to partake in its revered economic system of capitalism — to work, to produce, to achieve.

Or we can base our views on immigrants being “the others”, and reject their moral right to be free, and in the end, ironically, robbing ourselves of the privilege of a stronger and more diverse economy.

The choice should be clear — freedom needs no wall. Let us open our arms to the peoples of the world and tell them, “If you wish to be free, if you wish to be able to work, live and achieve your dreams — just look this way. We are America, and we welcome you gladly.”