We should abandon our silly and futile notion of trying to "seal the borders" and just "let the markets work," so to speak.
I think there should be two conditions that, if satisfied, should allow anyone and everyone to enter or exit the United States at will. First, do they have a job? If yes, then they are productive, and they should be allowed to stay. If not, is there someone willing to claim them as a dependent? Is there someone willing to feed, clothe, school them? If so, there is no reason to keep them out of the country. The second condition is that they don't have a criminal record.
Why not seal the border? Well, for one, futility. No matter what we do, people find ways to enter the country. So really, we're kicking and screaming, we're pouring countless resources in to fight a "problem" that is probably never going to be resolved.
Second, aside from pure xenophobia and/or racism, I haven't heard a good argument yet for why we should try to stem the tide of immigrants in to this vast country of ours. You have to admit, that's part of the equation. Nobody would complain if a bunch of blond hair, blue eyed, English speaking Canadians were crossing the border en masse. So I think we need to be mature and ask ourselves if xenophobia is really a good enough reason to literally build a fence between ourselves and our neighbors.
No. Population migrations are a natural phenomenon. It's been going on forever. Massive governments and their laws and walls are artificial phenomenon. Nature will find a way.
At a forum where there are quite a number of liberals and libertarians, the poll still shows the great majority wants the borders closed, 55-10 at this point.
When ISPs post "legalization and citizenship" articles on their home pages, the general population reader commentary is more than 10-1 opposed to that and open borders.
We already have a population mismanagement crisis in our cities, where instead of putting a moratorium on building more homes and business buildings, cities are instead trying to emulate Manhattan, building to the sky, making it nearly impossible to walk down the streets it's so crowded, as city managers care more about the resultant increase in tax revenues than the quality of living of their citizens.
Left to their own devices, the "markets" would crush the quality of life from American cities, and overflow overcrowding into the country side, creating massive company buildings like the ones in China that employ a million people, complete with suicide nets to catch the many each day that can no longer tolerate that sardine-packed "living".
As it is, the 2010 estimate for the world's population by 2050, even with descending yet not projected to be negative population change rates, predicts that by 2050 the world's population will increase over the 2010 count by the combined 2010 populations of India
and China, with America increasing by 85 million to 395 million people, and that's
without open borders.
If America's borders were open to anyone, those being squashed by even worse over-population would throng here, creating Bangladesh-like poverty.
"Immigrants" is an emotionally laden term for many going back many decades, a term that is misused and abused today by both wings of the political spectrum to further their ideological agendas.
It is important not to get caught up in emotionalism when dealing with such a dire problem as today's population mismangement matters.
For the American quality of life to re-ascend post-recession, we need to set emotionalism aside and instead focus on
smart thinking and with respect to quality of life liberty
and justice for the
members of our country: its
citizens.
America must do right by its citizens first, or there is no reason to even have America, to have countries at all.
If other countries won't focus on and work to solve their population mismanagement problems, we should not be the ones codependently coddling their lack of effort by giving them a place to deposit their continuous overflow.
It is time for us to close the borders to the best of our ability, a task at which we can most definitely succeed if we make an effort, and to "encourage" illegals and their children to leave and return to their ethically-correct country of origin.
The only way we will get other countries to manage their populations is if we show that we are not only dedicated to managing our demographic resources for our citizens but that we will no longer tolerate other countries ignoring their own population mismanagement problems, that we also "encourage" those countries to solve their population mismanagement problems, no matter what culture or religion or corruption had historically blocked their way.
Our country's, indeed our planet's, resources of physical space and breathable air and hospitable climes and tillable soil and all the basics of people's needs is
finite and
dwindling.
Maintaining healthy boundaries is a foundational value for individuals, one that extends to groups of individuals, citizens, of a country.
We must do all that we can to maintain our healthy national boundaries if we, as the citizenry of America, are to continue to have hope for a quality of living for ourselves, our children, and their children, and to also thereby give other countries a model of success which they can emulate.
Keeping the borders closed, keeping our healthy boundaries intact, is an essential requirement of maintaining that quality of American living.
