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Is John Fund an open-borders advocate?
John Fund disagrees with my recently reiterated opinion that he is a supporter of open borders. As evidence he points to his January 31, 2005 Wall Street Journal article, “Rush for the Border.” I wrote about that article last winter. I said it showed that “Fund is not backing away from Bush’s overall goal of open borders. He’s just saying that, in order to be credible and placate conservatives, we’ve got to enforce whatever immigration and border laws we still have on the books.” As I understand it, Mr. Fund’s view is that, since in that article he backs some measures to enforce immigration laws, it is incorrect and unfair to call him a supporter of open borders. But this is only the case if the phrase “open borders” is limited to support for the literal elimination of all border restrictions and all laws pertaining to the ingress of people into this country. Thus, by Mr. Fund’s lights, the only true open-borders position would be that of the Wall Street Journal’s infamous editorials during the 1980s which called for a constitutional amendment saying, “There shall be open borders.” Anything short of such a far-out position (and Mr. Fund says he does not agree with his paper’s view on this) is not an open-borders position. In reality, however, the phrase “open borders” is not limited to such a literal, absolute meaning. It means the general tendency to support ever-more-open, ever-increasing immigration into the United States, whether illegal or legal. Thus President Bush’s so-called guest-worker proposal, which is really an amnesty proposal, and which Mr. Fund favors, is really an open-borders proposal, since it involves legitimizing millions of people who came into the country illegally and thus making a hash of our laws. That’s an example of illegal open borders. But there is also legal open borders. The president’s proposal to admit into the U.S. any person who can underbid an American for a job is a legal open-borders proposal, since it would, albeit legally, open the United States to untold millions who are unable to gain immigrant status under our current law. In fact, it would effectively eliminate our existing immigration law, since entry of foreigners into the U.S. would not be limited by any national or hemispheric or global quota, nor by the specific preference categories, but only by the willingness of four billion Third-World people to underbid Americans for jobs. I’m not aware that Mr. Fund has ever taken issue with the president’s insane proposal.
In conclusion, the fact that a person backs some modest and sensible measures to stop the most outrageous violations of our immigration laws, does not necessarily mean that he is not an open-borders proponent. This is especially the case when, as with Mr. Fund, the person’s main reason for backing those measures is to gain political support for a massive amnesty of illegal aliens, as well as, presumably, a vast increase in legal immigration; and when, furthermore, the person has never expressed the slightest concern about the impact of mass legal immigration on the United States. Email entry |