<< ARI WatchCtrl + or   enlarges or reduces  text size.

Open Borders and Individual Rights

Preliminary Remarks  ·  Introduction  ·  Harry Binswanger (The Foreign View)  ·  A Nation of Immigrants?  ·  Yaron Brook (The Citizen View)  ·  A Few Remarks  ·  A Method to the Madness?
( For a prime example of ARI’s cultural leftism see  Yaron Brook on anchor babies  below . )

Preliminary Remarks

One of the most famous lines in The Fountainhead is uttered by its villain, Ellsworth Toohey:
“Don’t bother to examine a folly – ask yourself only what it accomplishes.” [1]
Hold that thought.

The Ayn Rand Institute promotes unrestricted immigration in the name of individual rights. As one board member put it:  “The principle of individual rights demands open immigration.” [2]  But we ask:  What does open immigration accomplish in practice? Because if ARI’s alleged application of individual rights leads to the destruction of America, then the application must be wrong.

This is common sense, not – as a student of Objectivism might worry about – pragmatism. Pragmatism maintains that if something works in one case it’s true in that case, if it doesn’t work in another case it isn’t true in that case. What’s true is what works, from moment to moment and trial to trial, each trial isolated from the others. It is impossible, says the pragmatist, to generalize over cases or to organize such knowledge into a network of dependencies. The result of pragmatism is a mentally fractured view of the world.

This much however is correct: If something doesn’t work there was something wrong before it failed.

Toohey’s aphorism is the moral analog of the logical argument reductio ad absurdum.  If a proposition logically entails something obviously false, then the proposition must be false. [3]  If a policy leads to the triumph of evil, the policy must be evil.

The consequence of open borders is conquest by Third World immigration. Slowly, slowly and by degrees, like a cloud changing from a fox terrier into a gargoyle, America becomes another nation. As with the cloud, while looking at it you are unconscious of the continuous change. You enjoy the terrier for a while, look away and later look back, and the terrier is distorted almost beyond recognition; look away again and look back, and the terrier is gone.

We are losing our country. Whether to oppose the conquest or not is a question of self-defense. ARI writers speak of individual rights in an argument that leads to the end of historic America, ultimately to the destruction of you and yours. If selfishness is a virtue then ARI’s argument must be wrong somewhere. You aren’t obligated to examine it further.

Nonetheless we shall ignore Toohey’s advice – he exaggerates to make a point – and examine ARI’s folly in detail.

Introduction

A country is more than a geographic area enclosed by an abstract boundary. It is more than a jurisdiction or political system. It is a people, their traditions, their culture and lifestyle. The people’s government has a proper role defending them from invasion. This defense does not violate a foreigner’s right to enter the country for he has no such right. He can be refused entry for any reason or no reason.

The Ayn Rand Institute launches a two pronged attack against this idea. They claim that a foreigner, whatever his character or your wishes, has a right to come into your country on his own initiative, that the very idea of “your country” is spurious, collectivist, and anti-capitalist. The country is not yours. You have no right, and your government has no right, to keep him out. A random Guatemalan, for example, has as much right to be here as you do. We shall call this the Foreign View claim.

Then, setting aside the rights of foreigners, there are the rights of citizens. ARI claims that a U.S. citizen has the right to import foreigners into the U.S., just as he does – we would say – sacks of corn. Neither you nor your government has a right to prevent him. Yaron Brook, for example, has the right to bring over a dozen willing Vietnamese. We shall call this the Citizen View claim.

The Foreign View Claim

ARI writers are less than consistent about making the first claim, the Foreign View claim. They do recognize the barrier nature of a country’s border and accept a mild form of immigration restriction. They would reject foreigners infected with contagious diseases (presumably after a thorough medical examination and quarantine, though ARI sluffs over details) and those with a criminal record (perforce in their previous countries of residence, determined by asking their governments, though again ARI neglects details). [4]  Otherwise anything goes, that is, anyone comes.

The problem here is that once you place conditions on a foreigner’s entry, you acknowledge that he has no right to entry. The folks at ARI make the Foreign View claim and undermine it in the same breath.

Or rather most do. One ARI writer is consistent. Here is Harry Binswanger in an article objecting to Arizona senate bill 1070 (an attempt to curb illegal immigration into that state), then under review by the U.S. Supreme Court:

“The widespread view that government may properly ‘inspect for disease and criminal records’ is well motivated, but mistaken. The terms of when a person may be inspected by government has nothing to do with whether the person is domestic or foreign, nor whether he is standing at the nation’s border or on the corner of Hollywood and Vine.”
...
“The border between the U.S. and Mexico (and between the U.S. and Canada) should be exactly like the border between Connecticut and Massachusetts: you see ‘Welcome to Massachusetts’ and otherwise you are unaware of the difference.” [5]
You can draw your own conclusion. As with Mexico and motor vehicles (or legs), so with Haiti and boats, Nigeria and airplanes, any country and any conveyance – by land, by sea, by air. Just as a citizen doesn’t need a clean bill of health to travel from state to state, neither does a foreigner to enter the United States. Welcome to America, one and all.

We would oppose open borders even if everyone on earth were perfectly healthy and uncriminous. Perhaps Mr. Binswanger had this in mind when writing:

“... xenophobia ... accounts for a lot of the opposition to open immigration”
– the usual leftist smear, a smear because a phobia is a fear of something. Immigration patriots aren’t afraid of Nigerians.  We just don’t want them here !

Mr. Binswanger knows our preference – “our” being most Americans, especially working and middle class Americans [6] – yet he claims anyone has a natural right to come regardless.  He argues as follows:

“A logical error makes some people think a government has the right to exclude, detain, or otherwise interfere with foreigners. The error is confusing the protection of rights and the non-violation of rights. The fact that a government is limited to protecting its citizens’ rights doesn’t mean the government is allowed to violate non-citizens’ rights.”
The writing is less than clear but yes, of course protecting (your) rights is one thing and not violating (foreigners’) rights another. But to argue for a foreigner’s right to come here by saying “government is limited to protecting your rights” leaves the question begging:  Is one of those rights the right to refuse foreigners entry into your country? Again, why do non-citizens possess the right to enter your country? Perhaps Mr. Binswanger will say in his next paragraph:
“... the source of government authority is the delegation of rights by the citizenry. A citizen has no right to interfere with the free movement of any individual, foreign or not, so neither does the government.”
Mr. Binswanger doesn’t say why you have no right to “interfere.”  He merely repeats what he claims to be proving, that is his logical error:  arguing in a circle. He goes from government to citizen to government.  Paraphrasing: “Why doesn’t the government have this right?  Because the citizen doesn’t.  Why doesn’t the citizen have it?  Because the government doesn’t.”

Notice how he expands  entry into the U.S.  into all encompassing  “free movement.”  An immigration patriot doesn’t care about the foreigner’s movement outside the U.S.  His movement across our border into our country, that is the issue at hand.  Later Mr. Binswanger says:

“... no individual has the right to go to some jurisdictional boundary and use force against people trying to cross it;”
He insinuates that by preventing a foreigner’s entry we initiate force against him but the situation is just the opposite:  by entering our country the foreigner initiates the force of his physical presence against us. [7]  Mr. Binswanger goes on to warn about confusing property lines with border lines and to say in effect that legal jurisdiction is a mere formality:
“The border is a line demarcating jurisdiction not ownership. Its function is to tell the government where its authority ends (and to tell the citizen what legal jurisdiction he has entered).”

From Sir Walter Scott’s poem “The Lay of the Last Minstrel”:

Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
“This is my own, my native Land !”
Apparently Scott never came across a soul so dead as that of Mr. Binswanger’s.  Your native land is not yours and your government must do nothing to help you.  Mr. Binswanger rubs it in with a witticism:
“The only proper governmental ‘managing’ of our borders ... is keeping in good repair the ‘Welcome to America’ signs.”

Mr. Binswanger takes the Foreign View claim to its logical conclusion in a talk to the Objectivist Club of New York University (December 12, 2005) titled  “The Case for Open Immigration: Why Immigration Is a Right.”  He claimed the U.S. is underpopulated – a rather hazy notion we would say – and to prove it he said the entire world could move to the U.S. with no problem, indeed it would benefit all of us.

Mr. Binswanger’s point was not that everyone on earth would take advantage of open borders but that any number could and everything would be all right, even better than before. Since in the event fewer would come, why worry?

How being peppered and shot through with a billion and a half Chinese – five per current American – would enrich your neighborhood is a question. And China is just the beginning. The arrival of the whole world would make 50 immigrants per current American.

The actual number who would come, though far less than everyone on earth, eventually would be huge. If in this manner the U.S. population swelled to eight times its current size – to choose a definite if arbitrary number – that would be seven immigrants for each current American. This may or may not be your idea of better than before.

However there are limits even for Mr. Binswanger. He went on to say he would want the migration – this massive influx of Chinese, Africans, Indians, South East Asians and so forth – to occur  gradually.

You can’t make this stuff up.  Mr. Binswanger is the walking absurdum of open borders advocacy.  We began by saying we would tie ARI’s argument to its consequences in the real world, and here Mr. Binswanger has done it for us. If the world is real to the people at ARI they must hate your guts.

Mr. Binswanger’s talk was reported in the news article “An Author Who Would Let the Whole World In” (New York Sun December 16, 2005). He expands his talk in the essay “Open Immigration” pinned to his website, updated and re-titled over the years. Since the Sun reporter might have been stoned during the talk or later at his desk writing about it, we now review Mr. Binswanger’s essay, the version found January 2015.

Again Mr. Binswanger recommends gradualism.  A full open immigration policy should come  “After a phase in period.”  Presumably this means fewer then fewer restrictions, a larger then larger monthly quota, until there are no restrictions and no quota, anyone and any number at any rate can come. As for the length of the phase-in period, he mentions a decade as an example. (In another article, “The Solution to Illegal Immigration,”  he says  “a 5- or 10-year period.”)

To those who worry about overcrowding, Mr. Binswanger claims that  “America is a vastly underpopulated country” (emphasis his)  and compares our current population density to that of France (about three times ours) and England (about eleven), as if those countries were a standard by which to judge population density.

He might ask a few Frenchmen or Englishmen what they think of their country’s population density or of immigration from the Third World. [8]

Mr. Binswanger writes, without qualification, that “high population density is a value.”  To demonstrate how underpopulated is America he considers  “a really extreme scenario”:  half the world moves to the continental United States. Again, his point is not that half the world would in fact move if we had open borders but that any number could and we would be better off than before. Apparently so well off that we could afford the multifold increase in the price of land but he doesn’t mention that consequence.

He says the  half-world  scenario would vastly increase the population density but it would be less – actually, we observe, only slightly less – than that of New Jersey today.

Let’s dwell on that for a moment. Imagine every state in the continental United States packed north, south, east and west with New Jerseys. The population density would be about 1,150 men per square mile of land, in each square mile of land (as an average) from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico; and each population of 1,150 men would consist almost entirely of Third World immigrants. According to Mr. Binswanger this is good.  This is good?

Population density per se is a comparatively minor issue. The real issue is demographics and culture. If open borders led to half the world moving here we – you and I and the other American citizens – would become less then four tenths of one percent of the total population, whites less than three tenths of one percent. In practice the influx would be less and so our percent more but for sure it would be miniscule. You are not supposed to notice, or at least not complain, for Mr. Binswanger writes, with official Objectivist righteousness:

“I’m very afraid that the actual reason for limiting immigration is xenophobia, which is simply a polite word for racial bigotry.”
If concern about becoming surrounded and swamped by Asians, Africans, Amerindians, etc. be racial bigotry the best response to Mr. Binswanger and his ilk is:  Make the most of it.

That tiny percent will be cursing the Binswangers of yesteryear from the bottom of their hearts.
·      ·      ·
Mr. Binswanger’s method, and as we shall see Yaron Brook’s, is to pretend that there is nothing special about a country and its people and culture. To them a country is a piece of real estate with laws, and the damn natives just get in the way of capitalists.

Mr. Binswanger claims – in the above “Open Immigration” essay – that the typical immigrant is a better human being than the typical American (for brevity call native Americans simply Americans).  Welfare?  He claims that percentage-wise, fewer immigrants are on welfare than Americans. That is not true, [9]  especially if non-white Americans are excluded. Furthermore, he claims that an immigrant cannot legally go on welfare until after five years of residency – a barefaced lie. [10]  He disapproves of “left-leaning States, like California” which “continue to throw tax money at immigrants ... ”  Note his choice of the word “throw,” as if the immigrants did not eagerly catch the money.  Note that he doesn’t consider whether immigration has made California more or made it less left-leaning.  (The answer of course is more.)

Crime?  He says  “immigrants are less prone to crime than are native Americans” (emphasis his)  and proves it by comparing the murder rate of El Paso, a Texas border town, with that of Baltimore.

But why not compare El Paso with  Manchester, New Hampshire  or  Camden, Maine?  Baltimore has one of the highest per capita violent crime rates in the country, and Mr. Binswanger knows why.

He should have considered El Paso by itself and compared the crime rate of its white Americans with that of its immigrants.  Considering only the residents of El Paso last year, were the criminal Americans more numerous as a percent of Americans than the criminal immigrants as a percent of immigrants?

Finding the answer to the same question about Los Angeles, which like El Paso has a high percentage of immigrants, is easy:  glance at the city police department’s most wanted posters. [11]  Clearly most of the crime in Los Angeles is committed by immigrants, most as in almost all.

After bringing up crime rate Mr. Binswanger says that crime rate is irrelevant.  It is unjust, he says, to curtail the rights of foreigners who would immigrate because of the crimes of some existing immigrants. He says this, though, in a twisted way:  “it is a slap at morality to curtail the rights of all immigrants because of the crimes of a few individual immigrants.”  Curtail the rights of immigrants? Note the switch: he confuses foreigners with immigrants. By “the rights of all immigrants” he means the rights of all non-citizens, and again begs the question of rights. The non-citizen possesses no immigration right to curtail.

Has your neighborhood been ruined by Third World immigration?  Apparently Mr. Binswanger’s response would be:  If they really did ruin your neighborhood then they ought to be arrested and imprisoned for a period prescribed by law at your expense. Still, they had a right to come and have a right to stay. You must deal with your ruined neighborhood before they were imprisoned and after they are released, it’s not my concern, I’m only interested in morality. And, frankly, I’m afraid your neighborhood wasn’t ruined at all, you just don’t like being surrounded by Asians, Africans and Mediterranean types. [12]

Mr. Binswanger ends his essay with a rhapsody of praise for immigrants and an extended insult to Americans.  A few standout lines:

“Immigrants are self-selected for their virtues:  their ambitiousness, daring, independence, and pride.”
Only the virtuous come to America. Mr. Binswanger’s America anyway; we must be living in an alternate universe America where the self-selection process broke down a long while back. Oh, they’re proud all right. Look at the Telemundo, Univision and Aztec America television channels (all promoted Obamacare, just one example of their leftism) or the “hurry up and die” reconquista movement La Raza / UnidosUS (who think they’re the rightful owners of the Southwestern United States).  And look at how the majority of those who become citizens vote. [13]
“Immigrants are the kind of people who refresh the American spirit.”
...
“These are the people our country needs in order to keep alive the individualist, hard-working attitude that made America.”
Need?  That’s need as in require, “without which it doesn’t happen,” in effect saying the U.S. would stagnate without an influx of Third Worlders to displace the existing lazy populace. Out of mind are – to name a few 20th century scientists and inventors – Charles Townes (laser), John Bardeen / Walter Brattain / William Shockley (transistor), Jack Kilby (integrated circuit), Philo Farnsworth (television), Edwin Armstrong (FM radio) and so forth. These luminaries are outliers and atypical, but the typical is pretty good, even today, not the slough of despond in need of refreshment Mr. Binswanger makes of them. [14]

Mr. Binswanger concludes his essay with “a short list of some great immigrants ... .”  Are we allowed to notice that every one of them came from Europe? Every one in the 18th to early 20th century?

He insinuates that today’s immigration is like that of yesteryear, that there is no difference between the Somalia of today and the Scotland of the 19th century. Why does he pretend? He must know that today immigration means Third World immigration.  Memo from Yaron Brook to Harry Binswanger:  “For Pete’s sake Harry, revise your immigration article to include ... uh ... well, scrape up a few minorities even if they’re not so great. And ditch that made-up Norwegian friend “Klaus” and make him Raheem from Pakistan.  And about the half-world scenario, sure, we want to dilute the goyim so they won’t be able to stuff us in an oven but do you have to blab about it?”  OK, I made that up.

Listing a number of outstanding elements of a class might or might not reflect on the typical member of that class. Mr. Binswanger could just as well have made a list of immigrant mass murderers. [15]

Related to his pretense that immigration today is from Europe is his failing to mention differing standards of human physical beauty. (Reference his own Lexicon.) It is perfectly natural to prefer for your countrymen people of your own standard instead of people grotesque by that standard. “Minorities” view themselves by their own standard and will always want to bring in others like themselves. [15a]

A Nation of Immigrants?

The stock response of the immigration enthusiast is:  “We are all immigrants”  or  “We are a nation of immigrants.”

First notice that it doesn’t say much. Unless somewhere there is a nation where the people sprang up out of the ground, every nation is a “nation of immigrants.” [16]  You might as well say  “We are a nation.”  or  “Our nation is a nation.”  It’s a vacuous statement.

Furthermore, the unqualified word  “immigrants”  in  “We are a nation of immigrants”  is misleading.  It’s like saying  “We are a nation of animals.”  Yes, but any kind of animal, any kind of immigrant?  The answer is that we are – or were before the leftists got control of U.S. immigration policy – a nation of Western immigrants. [17]

That’s better but still unsatisfactory. The Pilgrims were not immigrants of any kind. They came here to take over.  When they arrived there was no infrastructure, no government or social system – they started with nothing. Pushing aside any savage Indians that got in the way they created civilization out of wilderness. Instead of immigrants they were  settlers  or  colonists.

There was virtually no immigration from the Revolutionary War to the 1830’s – the population grew by natural increase, not by immigration – and virtually no non-northwest European immigration (except for slaves, unfortunately) until the late 19th century.

The following is our paraphrase of a satirical passage in Lawrence Auster’s essay “Huddled Clichés: Exposing the Fraudulent Arguments That Have Opened America’s Borders to the World”:

Imagine what the British would have said if they had adopted “we are a nation of ...” as a guide in 1940 when facing imminent invasion by Germany.  “Look, we’re a nation of invaders. First the Celts took the land from the Neolithics, then the Anglo-Saxons drove out the Celts, then the Normans subjugated the Anglo-Saxons. In between were Danish invaders and Viking marauders. Since we ourselves are descended from invaders, who are we to oppose yet another invasion of this island? Being invaded is our national tradition ! 

Better for us if Third Worlders were a nation of immigrants in their own nations.

The Citizen View Claim

We have been considering ARI’s Foreign View claim, that any foreigner has the right to cross the U.S. border and move to your neighborhood. In this view the foreigner is the active agent. We turn now to the Citizen View claim. ARI says that each American citizen has the right to bring over any foreigner willing to come. Here the American citizen is the active agent.

Mr. Binswanger makes the Citizen View claim in passing in his “Open Immigration” essay.  Yaron Brook makes it the main point in his talk “Open Immigration Policy.” [18]

Mr. Brook spends the first minute or so dragging in Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and the Declaration of Independence as if the Founders would approve of the browning of America, and as if they hadn’t warned against immigrants who might  “bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth” (Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia). [19]

Then Mr. Brook lays down Objectivist boilerplate about government and rights:

[Government exists] to serve one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to protect the individual rights of the citizens of this country ... .”
...
“... the only role government has ... is to eliminate force as a factor in society, to take away the gun, disrupting ... your ability to come in and force me not to pursue a certain course that I believe is good for my life.”

After more in the same vein he comes to the point:

“Now how does all this relate to immigration? Well I believe in open immigration. I believe people should be allowed into this country, openly with a few exceptions ... [lowers voice, inaudible]. I believe that, because we as Americans have a right, an inalienable right, to hire whoever we want to hire, for example. It is none of anybody’s business, not my neighbor’s, and not the federal government’s, and not the state government’s, whether I choose to hire somebody from Connecticut, or from Mexico, or from Thailand. It’s me pursuing my business, it’s me pursuing my life, making choices about what’s good for me ... .”
...
“If I want to sell my house to somebody from Thailand, if I want to sell ... it’s my business, nobody else’s. ... If I want to rent a hotel room to ...”  etc.

“... it is Americans’ right to deal with whoever they want to deal with, as individuals. Each one of us has a right to deal with Mexicans, to deal with Thais, to deal with Chinese, to deal with Scandinavians, to deal with Israelis, to deal with people who live in Connecticut, strange as that might seem [lowers voice for the end of that unfunny joke]. That’s what individual rights means; it means that you have a right to do what you want to do as long as you’re not infringing on other people, as long as you’re not using force on other people.

“... the basic right here that needs to be protected is the right of Americans to do business with whoever they want. And therefore I believe that our borders should be open.”

We interrupt.  Doing business with, dealing with, or contracting a service from, a foreigner is one thing. Bringing him here to live goes way beyond that. The second is immigration, the first without the second is not, it is outsourcing. Mr. Brook’s mentioning the first by itself (dealing with the man) makes the second (bringing him here to live) seem like merely an extension of outsourcing when in fact it’s in another category entirely. Immigration is  nothing like  outsourcing.

Cutting away the misdirection what Mr. Brook is saying amounts to this:  An American has a right to import Mexicans, Thais, Chinese, Scandinavians, Israelis, anyone, any number, into this country. Mr. Brook sidles up to this idea, which he will express forthrightly later, by confusing it with outsourcing.

Perhaps you do have the right to outsource but, to repeat, importing men is something else again. The Mexicans, Chinese, etc that Mr. Brook would import are not sacks of corn. They have a will of their own, they walk about, visit public places, get sick and use hospitals, bond with other immigrants, have children, agitate for more “rights,” etc and you are forced – as in difficult to avoid – to deal with them. [20]

And despite any cockamamie scheme of Mr.
Binswanger’s, eventually they will end up citizens, negate your vote several times over, and import more immigrants like themselves. [21]

Sacks of corn don’t do this, nor outsourced labor.

Mr. Brook goes on to say that there are a few exceptions to the open borders idea. Americans do not in fact have the right to bring in foreigners:

“Three classes of people I think should be excluded ...  Terrorists, or any kind of threat to national security, people who have that kind of background, spies, whatever;  criminals, people who are going to threaten the lives and property of American citizens ...;  and people who carry infectious diseases, that again are inflicting harm on Americans.  And harm I mean here is physical harm, harm I mean here as violence, as force.”
Regarding the first two, he doesn’t explain how to do the impossible. All the government can do is look at a past record, if available, and of questionable value when it is. (Criminal records on would-be immigrants from the Third World are useless given the corruption of the police, the legal system and the laws themselves in such countries.) Mr. Binswanger – in his advocacy of no exclusions – deserves credit for being consistent, even if consistently stupid.

Mr. Brook speaks of physical force, yet someone with a criminal record is not an actual, present threat of illegal physical force. He has only a greater than average potential of using such force. Keeping out people for what they might do negates the idea of a right of entry. In effect Mr. Brook admits that there is no right of entry, though he won’t admit that he admits it.

Mr. Brook continues:

“Other than the exclusion of those three classes anybody should be allowed into this country, from anywhere in the world.”

Mr. Brook then says having open borders is “good for the economy” and raises the standard of living for – he implies – everyone. It isn’t true, at least not with the Third World immigrants we have today. Though it might be good for the economy on average, if so it benefits “capital” (people who live primarily on interest from invested money) at the expense of “labor” (people who live primarily on a salary or wages). Of course some people are in both classes, either simultaneously or at different periods of their life. Still, on average over their life many people are predominantly one or the other, and with open borders capital wins and labor loses.

This is not to say there is anything wrong with capital per se, only that Mr. Brook is misleading his audience with his happy talk about the standard of living going up for all of us. Many Americans get the short end of the stick. [22]

Referring to a future time when we have the open borders policy he just described, Mr. Brook says it will be:

“... good for security. ... Because if somebody wants to come to America to work, they just walk across, they prove that they’re not a criminal, a terrorist, or carrying an infectious disease and they can come into the country. So who’s gonna sneak into the country, who’s gonna try and sneak in? Well only one class of people, those who want to inflict harm on Americans. Shoot them at the border if that’s what’s necessary, because as soon as they’re trying to sneak in it means they’re criminals or they’re terrorists. It’s easy to patrol the border when only a few people are trying to get in, it’s impossible today for security reasons to try to patrol the border when millions of people are trying to get in. When you know the people who are sneaking in are crooks, it’s easy to handle. ... indeed open immigration increases our ability to secure our borders, not decreases. ... It is good for America.”
In the literal sense of the word this is nonsense, an extreme case of willfully blind, unthinking rationalism. If the world is real to Mr. Brook then he has no respect for your mind. He utters any stray thought that sounds like it gets from Jefferson to mass Third World migration, banking on your naiveté in the face of his intellectual dishonesty.

No talk boosting mass immigration would be complete without putting down Americans:

“Having immigrants come into this country renews our entrepreneurial spirit ...” etc etc.

Then, without pointing it out, Mr. Brook switches from the Citizen View claim to the Foreign View claim we considered earlier. “Individual rights” now refers to the rights of foreigners. We’ve added a title to what he says next so it will be easy to reference in future. The title comes from the “anchor baby” analogy:  A woman crossing into the U.S. to give birth is like a ship dropping anchor: we get the ship as well as the anchor, permanently. [23]


Paean  to  Señoritas  Dropping  Anchor
“I believe that people who are today struggling and fighting to come to the United States are acting heroically.  My standard for heroism is a person trying to make the best life that they can make for themselves.  A pregnant woman in Mexico who wants a better life for her child, and is therefore willing to struggle through what it takes today to cross over the border illegally into the United States is heroically trying to make her life, and her child’s life, better by coming to America.  I don’t think that should be condemned, I think indeed that should be praised.  She’s a hero [sic] for trying to make her life a better life by coming here ...” [24]

A better life and more likely than not, two more welfare cases in one go.

Would that these heroines and their absent husbands worked to make their own country a better place instead of coming here changing ours for the worse.

Posters to Objectivist discussion groups sometimes lament that ARI writers feel they must pander to leftists, but that’s not what is happening. Outside the subject of economics, ARI writers are the leftists.

Mr. Brook winds down his talk telling us what to do about illegal immigrants. He says that a foreigner who crosses the border illegally is no worse than a citizen who took a drink during Prohibition. Along with opening the borders to future immigrants we should grant amnesty to foreigners now here illegally:

“My solution to illegal immigration is to make it legal. ... I don’t believe they should be prosecuted ... . When we did away with Prohibition we didn’t go back and find all the people who cheated and drank during Prohibition and put them in jail.

The Prohibition analogy expresses his position but it is not an argument for that position.  If a foreigner crossing the border today were no worse than an American taking a drink in 1925, then amnesty would follow. But the if  is flamingly untrue.

Mr. Brook concludes his talk (switching back to the Citizen View claim):  Beyond keeping out disease vectors etc, “state and federal government has no role in immigration.” He implies that limiting immigration, as was done before 1968 (when the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 went into effect), does not protect the lives of Americans. Notice, we sarcastically point out, how displacing Americans with millions of Third Worlders has protected their lives, not to mention their way of life. Notice how safe America has progressively become since 1968.

Thus ends this eyewash for students of ARI’s Objectivism.

A Few Remarks On All This

Yaron Brook is to Objectivism what Elmer Gantry was to Christianity.  Elmer Gantry thumped on the Bible and spoke of love and the morning star.  Yaron Brook thumps on Atlas Shrugged and speaks of individual rights and open borders – as if Atlantis welcomed anchor babies.

Individual rights, individual rights !  You must give up your freedom and way of life for anyone from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, they have as much right to live here as you do !

According to Mr. Brook the principle of individual rights gives him the right “to pursue a ... course that I believe is good for my life.” Some of the goodnesses he has in mind are hiring labor at lower wages and renting out real estate at higher prices.

To obtain these benefits Mr. Brook would import Third Worlders. He believes that their influx and physical presence does not force you in any way. If Americans don’t like their country being turned into Brazil that’s too bad, they have no right to resist. Thus Mr. Brook twists the pursuit of happiness into America’s misery.

The claim that a foreigner has a right to move here, or that Yaron Brook and his ilk have a right to import him, negates the idea of a country, ultimately negates your vote, and makes a mockery of rights. Only self-sacrifice, on a colossal scale, could justify it.

A foreigner has no right to enter America. We don’t need a reason to exclude non-citizens, we may exclude them for any reason or no reason. By forbidding entry, or requiring conditions, we take nothing from them. Regarding a right to live here they have nothing for us to take.

The intellectual hucksters at ARI repeatedly insinuate that today’s immigrants are typically more freedom-loving than Americans. The exact opposite is true and exceptions do not disprove the overwhelming trend. Individual rights? ARI’s convoluted argument confronts simple reality: the massive immigration allowed today, which is not as massive as it would be with ARI’s totally open borders, is leading to the triumph of the left and ultimately to the end of any recognition of individual rights.

For all Binswanger and Brook’s hosannas to individual rights and the American spirit they don’t give a damn about rights or about America. With sophistical arguments and outright lies they and the others at ARI are leading their students down the garden path. That the students find themselves walking shoulder to shoulder with leftists should give them pause.

Race is a factor whether ARI likes it or not. Besides the relevance of differing standards of human physical beauty, most non-whites (immigrant and native) vote socialist and most whites do not. More victories for Obama-type politicians, and more “minority occupied governments,” are in store for us as the immigration disaster unfolds.

We are reaching the point of no return. When you find yourself in a hole the first thing to do is stop digging. We could at least stop making things worse by restricting immigration as we did before the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 went into effect. Or as a step in that direction institute a blanket moratorium on immigration. It would violate no one’s rights and it’s the selfish thing to do.

A Method to the Madness?

We began by quoting Ellsworth Toohey.  Consider now a statement made by another of Ayn Rand’s characters, this time the hero rather than the villain. He is speaking of people who preach altruism in general and what he says is applicable to the immigration anarchists at the Ayn Rand Institute in particular. We have made it specific by substituting text in brackets not in the original:
“... I kept wondering how it could be possible that [the men of official Objectivism] could make a mistake of this size and preach, as righteousness, this sort of abomination – when five minutes of thought should have told them what would happen if [America] tried to practice what they preached. Now I know that they didn’t do it by any kind of mistake. Mistakes of this size are never made innocently. If men fall for some vicious piece of insanity, when they have no way to make it work and no possible reason to explain their choice – it’s because they have a reason that they do not wish to tell.” [25]

In the introduction we called the Ayn Rand Institute’s advocacy of open borders “ARI’s folly,” yet there must be a method to the madness.  How could a raft of untruths and specious arguments be an honest mistake?  Either ARI writers are lying outright, or they hypnotize themselves into believing their own lies which makes the lying more effective. Then the question is, why do they lie? What is the real reason behind their moral posturing and propaganda for open immigration?

One indication that ARI writers promote open immigration for reasons other than concern for individual rights is the precedence they give to open immigration over ending the injustices immigration makes worse. Today we have so-called civil rights laws and cannot always choose with whom we deal. We are forced to pay for many forms of welfare that others take advantage of. ARI pretends that this is irrelevant to the immigration debate. They do not say: first end the welfare state, end the violation of freedom of association, end affirmative action, etc then open the borders.  They say open the borders (even more than they are already) now, regardless of any bad laws.

Even a simultaneous phase-out of one and phase in of the other won’t satisfy them. The illegal immigrant must have amnesty now, you on the other hand can wait for your regulation and tax amnesty – except that because of the first amnesty your amnesty will never come.

Almost certainly ARI writers possess enough intelligence to know that with open borders welfare statism will expand, ending any hope of the libertarian future Objectivists like to envision. [26]

Another indication that ARI writers have something else in mind besides individual rights is that they promote open immigration for America but are content with Israel’s policy of restricted immigration.

ARI has an affiliate in Israel called the Ayn Rand Center Israel (ARCI), believe it or not. (Yaron Brook and Michael Berliner comprise its advisory board.)  Israel is not at war with Nigeria, Ethiopia, Algeria, China, Thailand ...  many countries. [27]  Does ARCI preach the virtues of vibrant Nigerian immigrants to the Israelis?

The heroism of pregnant Ethiopians as they struggle to cross the Israeli border?

That the principle of individual rights means Hop Wo Feng can move to Israel if he wants to?

The impossibility of patrolling the Israeli border anyway? [28]

Yet America gets the full monty.

Do we hear extreme scenarios about how half of Pakistan could move to Israel and Israel would be better than it ever was?

No.  America gets the Pakistanis and Israel gets the Jews.

And that is the point of ARI’s immigration propaganda:  America must not be allowed to be white.  America must be destroyed as a white nation. [29]

Just as open immigration would destroy Israel as Israel, the degree of open immigration we have had since 1968 is destroying America as America.

Israel is Mr. Brook’s home country. He frequently returns to visit and give talks about how Ayn Rand’s philosophy supports the Likud Party. It’s a sure bet he will never give his “Immigration Policy” talk there, with Israel in place of America, he’d be laughed off the stage.

He and ARI ought to be laughed out of Objectivism.



1  Ayn Rand quotes and applies Toohey’s aphorism in some of her essays. As hyperbole the thought behind it can be attributed to her.

2  Quoting Harry Binswanger in “Anti-Immigration Rhetoric Frighteningly Reveals Education’s Failure” (Forbes magazine February 3, 2013, a reworking – and softening – of “Immigration Quotas vs. Individual Rights: The Moral and Practical Case for Open Immigration” Capitalism Magazine April 2, 2006).

3  In mathematics reductio ad absurdum is sometimes called “indirect proof.”  It’s used to prove a statement true, as follows. Assume for the sake of argument that the statement is false then show that that assumption leads to a contradiction. The idea goes back to the Ancient Greeks. Aristotle analyzes the method in his Organon and alludes to the proof that the square root of two cannot be the ratio of two whole numbers.

4  ARI would also exclude “terrorists and spies,” which must refer to known ones since they don’t come with labels. For the purpose of this discussion include these in the criminal category.

5  “Collectivist Arizona Immigration Law is Anti-Capitalist”
Capitalism Magazine April 28, 2012.

Once Mr. Binswanger himself made exception for the diseased etc, including “would-be terrorists,” as he wrote in the article “Open Immigration” perpetually on his website. (He has since changed the text to reflect his current stance. You still find reprinted here and there outdated versions erroneously dated after he changed his mind.)  Like other writers at ARI, Mr. Binswanger didn’t tell how to determine whether a man is a would-be terrorist, or why – if we can exclude would-be terrorists – why not would-be criminals or anyone else. Perhaps it was this problem that led him to embrace open borders consistently. Better to let in murderers and disease carriers than give up the Third World dilution of America.

6  It was grassroots America, working and middle class America, that defeated the Rubio-Schumer amnesty / immigration surge bill of 2013.  They were up against a coalition of  leftists,  Third World immigrants,  organized religion,  Jewish groups,  and  “the rich who would rule” – and won.

The same grassroots effort gave Dave Brat victory over House Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a Virginia primary election. Brat ran a campaign stressing immigration restriction. ARI however refused to see the connection between that and his stunning victory. Yaron Brook, in an interview conducted by Steve Simpson and published June 16, 2014 – “ARI’s Perspective on Dave Brat” – said two or three times: “I don’t think this was about immigration.” He said that Brat’s victory showed that money couldn’t buy an election, and that voters didn’t like Cantor for being part of the establishment – true enough but evaded the central issue. Mr. Brook went on to praise Cantor, an extreme liberal Republican, for being a “fan” of Ayn Rand, believe it or not. He chastised Brat for opposing open immigration, saying “he should know better,” in effect trashing those who voted for him. Mr. Brook said he himself was “sympathetic” with Cantor on immigration. (Cantor supports amnesty / immigration surge.)

Update:  Donald Trump ran for president on an anti-immigration platform and grassroots America elected him despite the best efforts of ARI. See The American Spirit on this website.

7  The situation is analogous to when someone uses trickery to defraud you of a sum of money. By his subsequent physical possession of your money he is using force against you. (An immigration enthusiast would reply that it is no longer your money.) Possession is nine-tenths of the law and so is presence. Hard to get back and hard to send back.

8  At this point France has let in over five million Muslims. The morning of January 7, 2015, as this ARI Watch article was being written, France suffered its latest mass murder:  12 men and women killed, 11 of them inside the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a leftist weekly magazine that for years has championed Third World immigration (and also “hate crime” legislation). Not too consistently the magazine had published smutty cartoons ridiculing Mohammed. The massacre was the chickens coming home to murder.

The attack was about Third World thuggery not censorship. Free speech is part of the affair only in that Frenchmen who publicly say the attack was due to Muslim immigration risk being fined or imprisoned.

9  According to a 2012 Center for Immigration Studies analysis of the 2010 Census “... even after the 1996 welfare reforms, which curtailed eligibility for some immigrants, immigrant households’ use of the welfare system remains higher than that of natives for most programs.”
cis.org/2012-profile-of-americas-foreign-born-population
See also
“Hispanic Immigrants Three Times Likely To Be On Welfare Than American Whites”
vdare.com/articles/hispanic-immigrants-three-times-likely-to-be-on-welfare-than-american-whites?content=Politics%20of%20Immigration

Fraud is rampant. See the work of Edwin Rubenstein on just EITC and ACTC:
“The Earned Income Tax Credit and Illegal Immigration – A Study in Fraud, Abuse, and Liberal Activism”
thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc_19_3/tsc_19_3_rubenstein_intro_shtml
“Defrauding the American Taxpayer”
thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc_22_3/tsc_22_3_rubenstein_eitc_shtml

See also
“Tax fraud by illegal immigrants”
youtube.com/watch?v=Exptf9--5nA

And the next footnote.

10  The Clinton Administration law that the glib Mr. Binswanger claims has “rendered moot” the welfare issue applied to but one small gear of the vast welfare machine.

See “What I Saw at the Naturalization Ceremony” by Nicholas Stix.
Vdare.com/articles/amnestys-must-be-fought-or-america-will-become-impoverished
and
“Welcome to the USA” from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
web.archive.org/web/20130125143116/welcometousa.gov/Government_benefits/default.htm

Live links for these and more are on our Links page.

Another consideration is that some whites go on some sort of welfare or other, such as Medicare, in self-defense and even as they oppose its existence.

11  A random day on “LAPD’s Most Wanted”:
lapdonline.org/all_most_wanted
On January 9, 2015 the list began:  Ana Afhajanyan (grand theft), Jeronimo Alvarado (murder), Julio Cesar Alvarado-Monasterio (murder), Gustavo Araiza (murder), Fernando Araujo (murder), Guillermo Lua Avila (attempted murder, successful mayhem), Roxanna Bahrololoomi (grand theft), Hilario Baltazar (vehicular manslaughter while DUI, failure to stop and render aid), Baldomero Barrientos Banuelos (murder), Hector Manuel Barajas (murder), Sallvador Magana Barajas (attempted murder), Miguel Beltran Barreras (murder), Silva Baudello (murder, robbery), Larry Bazuaye (identification forgery), Suzanne Agnes Berron (grand theft), Juan DeDios Lopez Bojorques (hit and run), Oscar Bolanos (murder), ... on and on it goes, practically all from the Third World. The last is Ty Yiyara (criminal rape).

Not many John Smiths that day, none if you list only those wanted for “stranger violent crime” – violent crime where the perpetrator and his victim were previously unknown to each another – the kind of attack against you or yours that you worry about. Your day may vary, but does Mr. Binswanger think the result would be much different another day?

Here is the El Paso’s police department’s latest mug shots:
ElPasoTexas.gov/police-department/most-wanted
Clearly, without immigrants El Paso would be safer. Mr. Binswanger needs to make an effort to address the real world.  (Mr. Binswanger isn’t the only one hyping El Paso, see the first reference in footnote 14 below.)

Up north, a random day in the Minneapolis area:
hennepinsheriff.org/most-wanted

12  In 2014 Mr. Binswanger himself moved to a sparsely populated gated community in Whitopia.  See his entry in  Who’s Who.  Yaron Brook, quoted later, lived in a gated community too, as described in  Who’s Who.

Aristotle speaks of population size and migration in Politics, Book VII where he describes his objections to “an excessively numerous community,” among which is:
“... in such a community it is easy for foreigners and resident aliens to usurp the rights of citizenship, for the excessive number of the population makes it not difficult to escape detection.”
But viewing migration as the first stage of citizenship anyway, this wouldn’t faze Mr. Binswanger.

13  For an analysis of voting patterns see  Immigration Enthusiasts  on this website.

14  See  “Immigration Boosters Just Don’t Like Americans Very Much”
by John Derbyshire
ARIwatch.com/Links/ImmigrationBoostersJustDontLikeAmericansVeryMuch.htm
A live link is on our  Links  page.

About our short list of scientists and inventors, the last two were victims of intellectual theft by David Sarnoff, a creature we doubt even Mr. Binswanger would place on a list of great immigrants, being one of the most dishonest businessmen in U.S. history. Both Armstrong and Farnsworth eventually prevailed in court, Armstrong through his widow.

15  Chai Vang, Seung-Hui Cho, Gang Lu, Jiverly Voong, One Goh, Wayne Lo, Bin Thai Luc, Albert Wong, Chai Soua Vang, Nengmy Vang, Zhao Chunli, Weng Sor ...  Like a list of “valedictorians” they are not typical immigrants but still unusually frequent. See the following on Vdare.com:
“What is Immigrant Mass Murder Syndrome? (595 killed, over 1500 wounded, as of July 2016)”
vdare.com/articles/what-is-immigrant-mass-murder-syndrome

Besides mass murder, Third World immigrants are “over represented” in other crimes.  See
“Victims of Illegal Aliens Memorial”
ojjpac.org/memorial.asp
and
“The Human Cost of Immigration”
immigrationshumancost.org
(Live links for these and more are on our  Links  page.)
See also
“Hispanic Immigrants Taking Over FBI’s Ten Most Wanted”
vdare.com/articles/diversity-is-strength-it-s-also-hispanic-immigrants-taking-over-fbi-s-ten-most-wanted
and
“The VOX Pox Makes America Stupid on Immigration”
vdare.com/articles/national-data-the-vox-pox-makes-america-stupid-on-immigration

Mr. Binswanger should ask the loved ones of the thousands of victims each year what they think of his “Welcome to America” border signs.

15a  Tom Wolfe, in the 2006 Jefferson Lecture at the NEH in Washington, D.C., spoke about a recent conference he had attended at Washington and Lee University on the subject of Latin American writing in the U.S. (one paragraph broken into two):
“The conference soon became a general and much hotter discussion of the current immigration dispute. I had arrived believing that, for example, Mexicans who had gone to the trouble of coming to the United States legally, going through all the prescribed steps, would resent the fact that millions of Mexicans were now coming into the United States illegally across the desert border. I couldn’t have been more mistaken. I discovered that everyone who thought of himself as Latin, even people who had been in this country for two and three generations, were wholeheartedly in favor of immediate amnesty and immediate citizenship for all Mexicans who happened now to be in the United States.
“And this feeling had nothing to do with immigration policy itself, nothing to do with law, nothing to do with politics, for that matter. To them, this was not a debate about immigration. The very existence of the debate itself was to them a besmirching of their fiction-absolute, of their conception of themselves as Latins. Somehow the debate, simply as a debate, cast an aspersion upon all Latins, implying doubt about their fitness to be within the border of such a superior nation.”
Obviously it was a mistake to have admitted those Mexicans of yesteryear. Three generations later and all they care about is multiplying their race, hang American law.

16  As pointed out by Peter Brimelow in Alien Nation.

17  One reason for the restrictive immigration acts passed early in the 20th century was the influx of what at the time were called “anarchists” and more precisely described as communists. These immigrants and their descendents worked to overturn those restrictions, eventually succeeding in the latter part of the century

18  ARI uploaded “Open Immigration Policy” to YouTube on March 17, 2008. The talk was held at ARI in Irvine, California, no date given.

19  Exceptions not withstanding, Jefferson’s warning applies to most immigrants today despite their coming here to get away from the effects of their former government, a cause-effect relation they usually don’t understand and don’t care about. Whether they work here and earn money, or live off American taxpayers, or both, they tend to vote socialist. Again see  Immigration Enthusiasts  on this website.

Besides upbringing the Founders considered race to be relevant to immigration. In the same book referenced in the text above, Jefferson proposed eventually freeing the slaves – unwilling African non-citizen immigrants and their descendents – and setting up colonies for them in Africa.

Whenever the founders spoke of the benefits of immigration they meant immigration from Europe, not from (what today is known as) the Third World. Mr. Brook might look up the second article in the Federalist Papers, by John Jay, or the final paragraph of “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind” by Benjamin Franklin.

20  You are also forced as in physical force. Today the government does not recognize your right to deal with whom you please. Per the Orwellianly named Civil Rights Act of 1964 a business cannot legally refuse to employ, rent to, or otherwise deal with immigrants. Mr. Brook does not premise his open borders advocacy on the repeal of this legislation. Nor does Mr. Brook assume the end of Affirmative Action. “Let them come” regardless of the forced preferential treatment they might receive.

Mr. Brook fights for the right of Americans to deal with immigrants but not for their right not to deal with immigrants.

21  Binswanger’s scheme is to give any foreigner permanent residency without citizenship. He calls this policy a “compromise” and “a step in the right direction” (quoting from his article “Let’s Call The Democrats’ Bluff On Immigration”). He makes it clear that the goal is full citizenship. Of course these permanent residents would become citizens in short order. In any case, it is their presence, their permanent residency, that is the primary insanity. Getting the franchise, though important, is a secondary consideration. Even if by some miracle they never got the franchise masses of permanent residents would still ruin America.

22  An individual laborer’s standard of living goes down from either having to work for a lower wage/salary or from losing his job entirely. His quality of life decreases by having to work with immigrants.

Mr. Brook’s unfunny joke earlier in his talk might as well have been:  A business has the right to hire Mexicans, to hire Thais, to hire Chinese, to hire people who live in Connecticut [lowering his voice] strange as that might seem.

23  Anchor droppers also fly in from Asia and Africa.  For the legal issues involved see
“The Jackpot Anchor Baby: Transforming America”
by Frosty Wooldridge, February 18, 2010
newswithviews.com/Wooldridge/frosty545.htm
and
“Weigh Anchor! Enforce the Citizenship Clause”
by Howard Sutherland, August 31, 2001
vdare.com/articles/weigh-anchor-enforce-the citizenship-clause
and the following by Michael Anton, July 20 & 22, 2018:
“Citizenship shouldn’t be a birthright”
philly.com/philly/opinion/commentary/citizenship-shouldnt-be-a-birthright-opinion-20180720.html
“Birthright Citizenship: A Response to My Critics”
claremont.org/crb/basicpage/birthright-citizenship-a-response-to-my-critics

24  The women wouldn’t have to sneak in if we had open borders, so Mr. Brook’s “Shoot them at the border” does not apply.

Mr. Brook’s altruism sounds much like that of Jean-Claude Juncker when he was president of the European Commission, who said in an interview with CNN on 22 May 2019:
“These populist, nationalists, stupid nationalists, they are in love with their own countries. ...They don’t like those coming from far away, I like those coming from far away ... we have to act in solidarity with those who are in a worse situation than we are in.”

25  The “Mistakes of this size are never made innocently.” quote is from Galt’s speech in  Atlas Shrugged, reprinted in  For the New Intellectual.

ARI would object to the bracketed inserts, saying – as they have repeatedly – that Rand was a “staunch supporter” of open immigration. This is another of ARI’s lies. Rand never wrote a word about immigration. If she was for open immigration she would have a problem with one of her favorite authors:  O. Henry just doesn’t work with the New Immigrants.

26  We use “libertarian” as a compact expression for Objectivism’s political philosophy. In the mid-1960s Rand herself recommended using the word in that sense, see Ayn Rand’s Political Label on this website.

The net effect of the welfare state is on average to take money from whites and give to non-whites, including immigrants. The so-called Civil Rights Act makes it a felony for a businessman to refuse to deal with a non-white because he is non-white, which in practice means because of any reason. Both the transfer of money and the forced association are attractive to many Third World immigrants. With open immigration the welfare state would come into existence if it weren’t in place already.

To quote Ronald Neff (“ ‘No problem!’ is Not an Answer” subtitled “Libertarianism and Immigration”):  “... as long as discrimination [on the basis of race or national origin] is illegal in this country, there is no such thing as free immigration to be defended. There is only privileged immigration.”

We would oppose open borders even in an ideal libertarian country. One reason is that as the Third World immigrants became politically powerful eventually Welfare statism would begin again; a libertarian constitution would only slow the process. Laws do not make a people good. If the culture becomes corrupt eventually the laws will too.

27  Mr. Brook has said more than once “People hate the Jews,” so he might argue as follows:  Every country on earth is at war with Israel, we have no choice but to close our borders.  Or he might argue a milder version: Israel is at war with its neighbors, we Israelis can’t afford the risk of open borders.  The first version is ridiculous – if very convenient for Israel – and the second still leaves most of Africa and all of Asia.

ARI writers say ad nauseam “Israel’s enemies are America’s enemies” yet they don’t conclude that the U.S. should close its borders.

28  The relevant quantity is border length divided by the land area the border circumscribes. The smaller that ratio the easier it is to patrol the border because more square miles get protected per mile of border. The United States’ miles of border per square mile of land is less than 1/30 of Israel’s.

Israel’s treatment of illegal aliens is immediate, unapologetic, deportation.

29  Mr. Brook wants the freedom “to pursue a ... course that I believe is good for my life.” Open borders benefits his life by giving him labor at low wages and the ability to rent out real estate at high prices. Another benefit – the payoff – is the political destruction of white Gentiles even if eventually Jews sink in the same boat. Some Jews fear and loathe white Gentiles more than anything. (Listen to Mr. Brook’s talk “Anti-Capitalism and Anti-Semitism,” reviewed in  Capitalism and the Jews  on this website.)

Some Jewish commentators say explicitly what Mr. Brook hides under a cataract of verbiage about individual rights.  Leonard Glickman, president and CEO of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society  (Jewish Daily Forward, November 29, 2002):
“The more diverse American society is the safer we [Jews] are.”
Earl Raab, writing about a U.S. Census report that whites would become a minority in America (San Francisco Jewish Bulletin, July 23, 1993):
“And they will all be American citizens. We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country.
“We [Jews] have been nourishing the American climate of opposition to bigotry for about half a century. That climate has not yet been perfected, but the heterogeneous nature of our population tends to make it irreversible – and makes our constitutional constraints against bigotry more practical than ever.”
First off, there are no constitutional constraints against bigotry or any other thought crime. Probably Raab was referring to the so-called Civil Rights Act of 1964, most of which is unconstitutional.

The “about half a century” refers to the effort of Jewish groups to prevent passage of, and later to repeal, the Johnson-Reed Act – the Immigration Act of 1924 – promoted by Calvin Coolidge and very popular with the American public. It mandated limited immigration based on the demographic of 1890. The act passed, and was more or less reaffirmed in 1952.  At that time America was 90% white. The Johnson-Reed Act was repealed by the Hart-Celler Act, passed in 1965 and becoming effective in 1968. That, combined with an intentional breakdown in immigration enforcement, led to Earl Raab’s celebration.

Raab would probably call the Johnson-Reed Act “Nazi-Aryan” – in which case he thinks the vast majority of Americans in the 1920s were Nazis, and maybe would think you are too. If he was speaking of true Nazism, in America such people have always been on the outer limits of fringe; it was absurd to think such a party could prevail in America. Yet if the new immigration is not stopped soon, an extreme socialist party – call it Nazi if you want, but it won’t be Aryan – will  prevail, thanks to Emanuel Celler, Yaron Brook, Harry Binswanger, and the other profoundly un-American promoters of open immigration.

James Kirchick (a neoconservative and Jewish) in “Why Donald Trump is turning me liberal” (The Tablet March 14, 2016), after comparing Trump to Hitler writes:
“A staple of anti-Semitic complaint from the Nazis to Donald Trump’s newfound friends in the Klan is that Jews are always and everywhere the devious orchestrators of racial integration. Rootless cosmopolitans, Jews allegedly promote immigration and miscegenation so as to bring about a more diverse society in which they can sublimate their own ethnic difference. Through this ‘mongrelization’, Jews will precipitate the demise of white, Christian communities, thereby destroying the last vestige of resistance to their assertion of pernicious control.
“Unlike other anti-Semitic memes, there is truth in this observation, though not of course for the reasons that Nazis and white supremacists think. Jews have indeed played disproportionate roles in struggles for racial equality, from the movement against South African apartheid to the cause of civil rights in the United States. And while Jews felt called to these movements by faith, universalistic political commitments, or an innate sense of justice, doing so was also in their communal self-interest. A country that is politically pluralistic, open to new ideas and new people, ethnically diverse, and respectful of religious difference, is a country that will naturally be safer for Jews than a country that is none of these things. This, I believe, is why so many Jews, foreign policy hawks or not, innately fear Donald Trump. ...
“The fate of Jewish life in the West is inextricably bound to democracy, pluralism, religious tolerance and ethnic harmony. If there’s a silver lining to the resistible rise of Donald Trump, it’s that it has forced us to realize this truth.”
Thus Kirchick condemns Americans who hate the ethnic and cultural transformation of their country. To him, American immigration policy ought to be in the interest of Jews, no one else matters.

He thinks that in the West, “pluralism” is good for the Jews, consequently Trump is evil. As for Israel, he has no problem with “singularlism” – Jews only. This gives the lie to “faith, universalistic political commitments, or an innate sense of justice” entailing open immigration – he doesn’t really believe it, and indeed “ethnic harmony” exists only in a singular society.

Charles Silberman in  A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today:
“American Jews are committed to cultural tolerance because of their belief ... that Jews are safe only in a society acceptant of a wide range of attitudes and behaviors, as well as a diversity of religious and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for example, not approval of homosexuality, that leads an overwhelming majority of U.S. Jews to endorse ‘gay rights’ and to take a liberal stance on most other so-called ‘social’ issues.”
Jewish advocacy of “culteral tolerance” isn’t confined to America. Dan Goldberg observed in “Jews key to Aboriginal reconciliation” (Jewish Telegraphic Agency or JTA, February 13, 2008):
“In addition to their activism on Aboriginal issues, Jews were instrumental in leading the crusade against the White Australia policy, a series of laws from 1901 to 1973 that restricted non-White immigration to Australia.”

From A promise to keep : a narrative of the American encounter with anti-Semitism by Nathan Belth:
“No group in the land greeted the enactment of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 with a greater sense of elation than American Jews. In the final drive to reform the immigration procedures and policies, their self-interest was minimal [Ha!], but their efforts were undiminished. ...
“The determination with which Jews had continued to work for reform was grounded in principle. If there was self-interest, it lay in the belief that any national policy which enshrined racism in law undermined their status – as well as the status of other Americans. They fought the national origins quota system because they believed it did just that and because they saw in it a denial of the humane and democratic ideals that showed America at its best. [What a truckload.] In Congress, through all the years when the immigration battles were being fought, the names of Jewish legislators were in the forefront of the liberal forces:  from Adolph Sabath to Samuel Dickstein and Emanuel Celler in the House and from Herbert H. Lehman to Jacob Javits in the Senate. Each in his time was a leader of the Anti-Defamation League [ADL] and of major organizations concerned with democratic development. In the final effort, these Jewish agencies and those concerned with service to immigrants, which had long worked cooperatively, joined in the American Immigration and Citizenship Conference. They included the League, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and that guardian angel of Jewish immigrants, the United Hias Service (known through most of its long history as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid and Sheltering Society).”
In 1958 the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith got John F. Kennedy to put his name on a pro-immigration book, A Nation of Immigrants, ghostwritten with the help of the ADL’s operative Arthur Mann.  Otis Graham commented that the ADL was “part of a Jewish coalition whose agenda included opening wider the American gates so that increasing U.S. ethnic heterogeneity would reduce the chances of a populist mass movement embracing anti-Semitism ...” (“A Vast Social Experiment: The Immigration Act of 1965” Negative Population Growth, October 30, 2005)

For examples of ARI’s immigration enthusiasm (whatever insanity they promote is always in the name of individual rights and your self-interest) see  ARI on Immigration  on this website.