Opinion

The Left Goes All In On Open Borders

REUTERS

Scott Greer Contributor
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“No borders. No nations. Fuck deportations!”

That was the rallying cry of protesters demonstrating at San Francisco International Airport Saturday against President Donald Trump restricting immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations.

All across America, protests have erupted at airports — already notorious centers for human misery — to show disgust for Trump’s executive order, which has earned the false title of a Muslim ban. Whether in New York or in Chicago, demonstrators made it clear that they thought Trump’s move to temporarily block migration from these nations went against American principles and laws.

According to these demonstrators, preventing anyone from coming to this country based on their nation of origin or their religion was prohibited by both the Constitution and “our American values.”

Obviously, there are issues that arise with Trump’s order. Travelers with citizenship in one of the seven banned nations but permanent green cards in the U.S. were detained, which was one of the reasons a New York judge halted the president’s action. That measure may be beyond the original intent of the executive order and the White House has already indicated that they are changing course on stopping green card holders from entering the country.

There’s also the perception that the law unfairly targets an entire religion and bans its adherents from America. However, the order only affects — temporarily to boot — a small percentage of the world’s Muslims and is based on national origin, not religion. In many ways, it’s only an expansion of Barack Obama’s 2011 executive order banning Iraqi refugees from the U.S. for six months over terror concerns. (RELATED: Majority Of World’s Muslims Untouched By Trump Visa Ban)

Shockingly, there were no hysterical airport protests then.

While concerns over green card holders and targeting a religion were aired amid the demonstrations, the San Francisco protesters took it a step further by explicitly calling for open borders, the eradication of the nation-state and, needless to say, the total non-enforcement of immigration law. (On Sunday, they had toned down “fuck deportations” to “stop the deportations.”)

It seems that the West Coast demonstrators were more blunt in expressing the moral thrust of those gathering at America’s transportation hubs. Rather than a squabble over the semantics of immigration law, the guiding principles of the protest apparently see open borders as morally desirable and that no person should be refused entry to the U.S.

The hashtag of this movement is #NoBanNoWall, which isn’t too far away from #NoRestrictionsNoBorder. The inevitable signs lecturing the American public that “No person is illegal” were out in full-force, suggesting everyone has the right to come to this country.

What’s been elevated in these demonstrations in the growing support on the Left for what essentially amounts to open borders — a proposal once only associated with anarchists and fringe libertarians. Now it looks like the hot-new position of woke progressives.

That’s a major change from only a few months ago. During the election, “fact checkers” fell over themselves to wag their fingers at Trump and his supporters for claiming Hillary Clinton backed open borders — even though she gave a whole speech where she declared how she dreamed of an open borders future. Clinton herself at least put up the pretense she cared about immigration and said she was not for open borders.

That pretense appears no longer needed.

The protesters don’t seem to want any restrictions on immigration or enforcement of our present laws. All refugees are welcome. All illegals should be given citizenship. Banning people from this country — unless they’re white racists! — is absolutely wrong. This is the rhetoric emerging from the airport protests and which will likely shape our political discourse over the coming years.

In years past, Democrats and liberals would argue that they believed in strong security measures when it came to immigration. They supported the construction of a border wall in 2006, and agreed to hiring more border security to put an end to illegal immigration in 2013 as a part of the Gang of Eight deal.

Now those measures are equated with fascism in the liberal discourse of 2017.

The Left is now staking the ground that immigration is the core principle of America and newcomers must be welcomed, regardless if they come from a country that is producing a disturbingly high number of jihadis. (RELATED: The Statue Of Liberty Poem Is Now A Weapon In America’s Culture War)

The lionization of the airport protests by the media and celebrities only further enshrines open borders as the emerging consensus of the Left. To think otherwise is un-American, apparently. One wonders how “open borders is as American as apple pie” will pair with the leftist notion that America is also based on white supremacy.

Last weekend shows a nation that is drawing very sharp battle lines over the issue of immigration: with one side favoring open borders and the other side wanting immigration significantly curtailed.

The days when the center-right and center-left could dream of “common sense” immigration reform appear to be vanishing amid a cacophony of “no borders, no nations” chants.

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