by Rod D. Martin
February 22, 2020

Some thoughts on the open borders position now advocated by every single Democrat Presidential candidate (and a number of Evangelical leaders, though far from most).

Open borders, in practice, are best described as a suicide cult. This statement is not, as some accuse, racial, but rather political and economic. It is true both here and in Europe. The open borders position seeks to render assimilation (or, in American terms, the Melting Pot) impossible, by overwhelming the system with inflows at rates far beyond those which the system can handle. The purpose has been articulated quite clearly by George Soros’s Open Society proponents: to annihilate nations and make national sovereignty infeasible.

I am strongly pro-immigration, from all nations and races, although I would wish to reform our system a good bit. I even believe in the occasional, properly constructed supranational organization, and as my primary example I submit the United States of America, to which I pledge my allegiance in place of the otherwise fully independent Republic of Florida. But the genius of the United States was and is that, speaking within Aristotelian categories, it maintains the liberty and local sovereignty of republics, while granting all its sovereign members the benefits, minus the curses, of empires.

(I recognize that those lines have blurred a bit in an era of unconstitutionally large government, and constitutional changes such as the 16th and 17th Amendments. But that is a discussion for another day.)

The open borders project is simply empire – with all its curses – by another name. Let me say that again: open borders are a strategy intended to create an empire, advocated by imperialists. And we see that in the European Union, that favorite project of all our anti-nationalist friends, which not only eliminates national sovereignty but consistently, intentionally reduces any manner of accountability of its elites, and any measure of popular control. It is just an aristocracy in form, an empire in function, the smiley-face fascism Jonah Goldberg used to decry (I stress “used to”). It is not a United States of Europe: it is a somewhat benevolent EUSR. 

Now, with the closing of the frontier, open borders wouldn’t achieve any such thing in the absence of a welfare state. But in the presence of one it is no surprise that recent polling shows that, given opportunity, almost a billion people would like to move to America almost immediately. Not shockingly, most of them are to the left of the current American political consensus.

So tell me this: if three times the number of people who constitute the current membership of your church suddenly joined, and all of them were Unitarians, and all of them wanted your church to become Unitarian, how happy would you be about that? Would you not assert some right to fence the table? It’s one thing for our churches to grow through conversion: it’s quite another for our churches to grow so that they themselves are converted into something other than churches. And the same is true of countries.

I know that most of the people supporting open borders mean well: they are thinking not of the consequences to our country but to immediate compassion toward those who wish to come. But some such people know precisely what they’re doing; and even if all of them were perfect in their intentions and without the slightest moral flaw, their idea would still be wrong, and would still need to be defeated.

And in point of fact it must be defeated. Because if it is not, the entire idea of liberty to which America specifically and Western Civilization generally gave birth will shortly be extinguished, replaced by a new imperial aristocracy ruling over we serfs with Roman bread and circuses and Chinese social credit systems. 

Open borders are not the worst idea the Democrats advance. But by flooding the country with a new socialist underclass, they mean to enact all of their others.

— Open Borders: Democrat Imperialism originally appeared as a Facebook post by Rod D. Martin.