From Vox:
How to rethink our borders
Why some activists think it’s time for fully open borders.By Dylan Matthews and Byrd Pinkerton Nov 7, 2018, 9:00am EST
But, honest, we were not thinking about open borders before Nov 7, 2018, 9:00am EST.
A victory for Democrats this midterms, President Donald Trump warned before the election, is a victory for a terrible, dangerous idea: open borders.
Trump is entirely making this up …
The idea that it was time for fully open borders just suddenly came to us at 8:59am EST. After the election. After … Trump was entirely making this up that we were just waiting for the election to be over to get back to our obsession with opening up your country to anybody who wants to come. We waited a full 8 hours after the polls closed in Nevada before getting back on our Open Borders hobby horse, so that proves Trump was lying.
But Fabio Rojas does want open borders, and on the latest episode of the Future Perfect podcast, he tells us why.
Rojas, a sociology professor at Indiana University Bloomington, is part of a small but growing movement of libertarians and leftists who are questioning the need for any restrictions on entering the United States. …
Leon Fresco, an immigration attorney who was the primary drafter of the 2013 “Gang of Eight” immigration bill and served as deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Immigration Litigation under President Obama, has spent much of the Trump years trying to get a very tiny change to immigration law: a tweak to make it easier for Chinese and Indian immigrants to get green cards (they are currently limited by arbitrary per-country caps).
You can tell it’s a “very tiny change” because China and India are very tiny countries.
After all, what’s the maximum number of people affected? 2.6 billion? 2.7 billion tops.
The idea has massive bipartisan support, with senators from Tom Cotton on the right to Kamala Harris on the left signing on and 329 co-sponsors in the House (more than three-quarters of the House’s members).
But even that has been a struggle! …
Rojas, whose sociological work studies how once-fringe movements (like Black Power or the antiwar movement in the early 2000s) can become mainstream, is more optimistic. “A couple of hundred years ago, if you said that black people and white people were equal in the eyes of God, people would have been horrified. They would have said, ‘No, no, blacks and whites are different.’ But you just slowly make the argument,” he says. “We have to communicate with people and say: America is a great country when it’s a country of open doors.”
Here at Vox, we’re not for Open Borders. We’re just anti anybody who is anti-Open Borders, you hateful haters.
