As someone who has researched U.S. immigration policy for over three decades, I’m often asked why the Biden Administration effectively opened America’s borders, allowing in 9 or 10 million foreigners who had no legal right to enter. Was it done to import voters who would change the balance of power in red states? Or perhaps to bulk up the population of blue states that have been hemorrhaging residents, in preparation for the 2030 census? To change the nation’s ethnic composition? Or maybe just for cheap labor?
None of these possibilities was the real reason—though some of those ends certainly have been served. Biden’s illegal border surge happened because the people in charge of border policy didn’t believe in the legitimacy of borders. Even the most radical of politicians can’t come out and say that, though the policies they support point inexorably in that direction. Fortunately, writers have no such constraint.
Which is why John Washington’s The Case for Open Borders is so useful. A staff writer for Arizona Luminaria, a nonprofit news organization, he avoids the usual obfuscations and says the quiet part out loud: borders, as such, are immoral. “[P]eople should be able to move and migrate where they need to or want to.” He believes free movement of people is an inherent right—not just the right to leave your own country, but also the right to enter any other country you want.
Washington presents an explicitly leftist case, to the point of parody. (His publisher is Haymarket Books, named after the 1886 riot in Chicago that led to May Day being the premier Communist holiday; it also published Angela Davis’s memoir.) He stresses throughout that open borders are necessary for climate justice, racial justice, economic justice, proletarian solidarity, reparations, anti-colonialism, and so forth (though I don’t recall anything about the trans issue). Open borders, he writes, “must be part of a more profound readjustment of global politics that includes the abolition of the inequality regime set in place by postcolonial capitalism.” You get the picture. Washington is arguing for the immigration policy of John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
It’s easy to laugh at such drivel, especially after the rebuke it received last November. But that would be a mistake. The modern Left is part of a powerful post-national, anti-borders axis that is primarily driven not by the activists themselves but by globalizing corporate interests, whose version of the case for open borders is made by Cato Institute-style libertarians.
***
Washington and others on the Left go to great lengths to deny they are the junior partners in the open-borders axis. But he misunderstands immigration politics because he tries to force it into a class-warfare, anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, racial-grievance mold. In his chapter on “The Economic Argument” for open borders, for example, he writes that “commodifying migrants, squeezing them for all their labor power and compensating them as little as possible, bringing them halfway into the fold of the national economy only to exploit them and spit them back out—is one of the principal drivers for closed borders and restrictive immigration enforcement.” In fact, the commodification of immigrants that he describes, which is often a real thing, is driven by Washington’s fellow supporters of open borders. His protestations are an attempt at dealing with cognitive dissonance, to reconcile the fact that he’s a socialist who hates capital, and yet he’s a cat’s paw of capital—he’s “red-washing,” as it were, the corporate anti-borders agenda.
He quotes another leftist author who writes that “[m]igrant workers provide liberal capital interests with cheapened labor without altering the racial social order through permanent immigration.” Washington fails (or refuses) to understand that both mass illegal immigration and guest-worker programs are not a strategy cooked up by “liberal capital interests”—not a “well-functioning system designed to squeeze and exploit,” as he puts it—but rather the result of competing political forces. On the one hand, there are those like Washington and his corporate and libertarian fellow-travelers who seek open borders, and on the other, those here and elsewhere who don’t want mass immigration. The result of this tension is that the public is appeased with laws that appear to limit immigration, while in actual practice, corporate interests get something approximating Washington’s anti-borders immigration policy. Migrants (and citizens) often really are squeezed and exploited, but it’s mass migration itself that is the cause—illegality or guest-worker status only matters at the margins.
***
At the end of his chapter on economics, Washington seems to realize that he is, in the end, serving the interests of post-national capital interests. “[H]ow much better is it, really,” he asks, “if the corporate elite suddenly [sic!] cozy up to the idea of open borders, but only do so in order to squeeze migrants all the harder?” He mentions The Wall Street Journal’s repeated editorial demands for a constitutional amendment stating “There shall be open borders,” and wonders, “[W]ere they writing from the goodness of their hearts and real feeling for migrants, or were they sharpening their corporate filet knives?” The truth is that the heart’s motivations don’t matter—open borders exploit both American and immigrant workers, something a more clear-eyed leftist, Bernie Sanders, understood, until he abandoned his principles to run for president.
John Washington protests, “On what grounds does the United States require someone to ‘earn’ their citizenship?” This is a rhetorical question for him, because he forthrightly rejects “the figment of sovereignty and territorial integrity, the concept of a nation” or the notion that consent is required for new members to join. Contrast that with J.D. Vance’s observation at the 2024 Republican National Convention that “when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms. That’s the way we preserve the continuity of this project from 250 years past to hopefully 250 years in the future.” The open-borders agenda, whether dressed up in leftist, libertarian, or corporate garb, is an assault on nationhood and, ultimately, on self-government itself.
