Hostility to Immigrants is exactly counter-productive

2024 Trip to South East United States, Immigrant Economics, Trump

 

The fact is that Donald Trump and those he surrounds himself with, like Steven Miller, who drafts most of his immigration policies, such as the “Muslim ban,”  actually don’t like any kind of immigration at all. Or at least any immigration other than immigrants with extraordinary qualification. As economist Paul Krugman said,

“Trump and those around him are profoundly hostile to immigration in general. Partly this is xenophobia, if not outright racism. If you repeatedly declare, as Trump has, that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” you don’t really care if they came here legally, you’re all but saying that what matters is whether they’re white.”

 

But there is more to it than that. Trump and his minions don’t understand how immigration affects employment and the economy. Neither did I until I read Krugman.  This is what he said, “People close to Trump have a zero-sum view of the economy, in which every job taken by someone born outside the United States is a job taken away from someone born here.” They don’t realize that the work of one immigrant worker can add to the work needed of other Americans.

But Trump and his fellows believe that work done by one immigrant always take away jobs from other Americans. The architect of Trump’s policies, Here is how Trump and Miller screwed things up:

“Back in 2020, Stephen Miller, one of the architects of Trump’s immigration policies, told Trump supporters that one of the goals was to “turn off the faucet of new immigrant labor.” Remarkably, Trump issued an executive order meant to deny visas to highly skilled foreigners, many working in the tech sector. Miller and his boss apparently believed that this would mean more plum jobs for Americans, when what it would actually do was undermine American competitiveness in advanced technology.”

 

America needs a lot of those workers it is trying to keep out of the country.By relentlessly attacking immigrants, Trump was making things worse for American workers!

Myths and Realities about Immigrants

2024 Trip to Southwest USA, Immigrant Economics, Trump

 

Immigration issues are top and center in the current America election cycle. Talk to anyone here and they have opinions about immigration or the crisis at the border.

A Recent PBS poll showed immigration was the number one issue in the current political races for the US Senate, House of Representatives, and Presidency. This is particularly true in a border state like Arizona where we have been living. Everyone is willing to opine about immigration even people like me who know little about it. I have been trying to learn more while I have been here.

Many of the people I have talked to here in Arizona think refugees get all kinds of lavish benefits far beyond anything American citizens get. For example, I was told by a good friend here that they are entitled to a car!  My research indicates that is not true. Added to that, many Americans think refugee claimants are taking jobs away from Americans so they harm the poor in America.

Moreover,  many of Americans are convinced that the immigrants are responsible for a “crime wave’ in the country. Remember Trump called Immigrants rapists and murderers on the first day of his campaign in 2015! That continues to be Trump’s view and we must also remember that to many people—I call them Trumpsters—whatever Trump says on the issue is “gospel” truth whether there is any evidence to support them or not.  I choose that word advisedly because they treat him like a religious leader. Many of them nearly worship Trump. Trump himself has likened himself to God.

I want to consider some of these claims. I may make mistakes in this quest. If so, I urge my readers to correct me.

One of the economists I like to read is Paul Krugman who is Princeton professor of Economics as well as a New York Times columnist and winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2008. I confess he has a definite left-wing slant. I like him because he writes clearly on economics so a peasant like me can understand much of what he says.

First, he begins with the fairly obvious proposition that almost all modern nations will not tolerate open borders, and contrary to what Republicans in the US say, Democrats don’t advocate for open borders.

Very few people argue in favor of allowing anyone to choose to live in whatever country he or she wants to live. I have never met anyone who says that. As Krugman said, “The good news is that America doesn’t have open borders, and there is no significant faction in our politics saying we should. In fact, immigrating to the United States legally is fairly difficult.”

 Yet, Krugman admits that there is also bad news. That is that America has a very hard time enforcing its current rules.  The main problem though is that the authorities have inadequate resources to deal with the problem. Republicans in particular love to complain, and campaign on the “disaster at the border,” but they don’t want to pay the money to fix the problem however.

 

The most recent example of this reluctance was where the American House of Representatives rejected without even voting on it, the recent bill proposed by a group of non-partisans in the Senate. This group of non-partisans got the Democrats to agree to surprising compromises because they realized the American public was blaming them for the “disaster” at the southern border. That was why Trump instructed his sycophants in the House to reject the proposal which offered the toughest immigration laws in a generation! It also would provide sufficient funds to deal with the problem. At least more than has been allocated in the past. As Krugman said,

“The reason they don’t have those resources is that many Republicans in Congress, while fulminating about a border crisis, appear determined to deny the needed funding. Their position is rooted in extraordinary political cynicism, and they aren’t even trying to hide it: Donald Trump has intervened with Republicans to block any immigration deal because he believes that chaos at the border will help his election prospects.”

 

That is one of the problems, the Republicans want to rail against the catastrophe at the border but make no proposal to deal with it, reject advancing more money as the non-partisans agree. Instead, they want to rail against the problems because they know their supporters will jump to scapegoating the Democrats for everything that is wrong at the border.

I intend to examine in particular the economic realities at the border, which are very different from the economic myths.

Make America White Again

2024 Trip to South East United States, Immigration and Refugees

 

By cutting immigration so drastically, the American Immigration Act of 1924 brought huge changes to the United States. It created a new country. A less welcoming country. It revealed a country riddled with racism. As if there was ever any doubt about that. As Zakaria said, “The country got whiter and more monocultural.”

This is the country many American conservatives want back again when they beg to take America back, or make America great again. They are really saying, they want America to become white again.

Things changed again in the 1960s. As Fareed Zakaria said,

“In 1965 freedom and racial equality were on the march from Selma to Montgomery. Yet in America immigrants were basically allowed on the basis of the color of their skin. Asians, Africans, and other racial groups were severely restricted. The race-based immigration system that began in the 1920s, which Adolf Hitler had admired was still going strong.”

President Lyndon Johnson signed a number of different laws which were designed to establish, he said, that America would be colour blind when voting, going to school, and choosing its immigrants. The new immigration laws would usher in a much more diverse country filled with immigrants from around the world.

According to Zakaria,

“this demographic revolution happened largely by accident, thanks in part to a Congressman who wanted to keep America white. By the 1960s the racist authors of the 1924 Immigration Act got exactly what they wanted. American was overwhelmingly white.”

 

As Jia Lynn said, “ They wrote laws to ensure that that would happen. And it worked.” The percentage of foreign-born Americans dropped by nearly 2/3rd. There was no more American melting pot.

However, after seeing what the Nazis did in Germany, many people began to understand that a race-based immigration policy was not only wrong, it was wooden-headed. It made no sense. It excluded too many people America needed. Look what Jews like Einstein and Oppenheimer had done for America. Americans did not want to be like the Germans.

Those race-based immigration laws shut out too many good people. Even war heroes were held back. Even some Holocaust survivors were not allowed into the country while Nazis gained entry. Truman signed a new law allowing many new immigrants to come to America. This law had widespread support. But even Truman, who hated the race-based system was not able to have it ditched.

 

The Dark History of Immigration in America and Canada

2024 Trip to South East United States, Immigration and Refugees, racism

 

As Fareed Zakaria, an immigrant himself,  said,

“The Ugliest crusade against immigrants [in America] happened in the 1920s. A huge wave of immigrants was landing in America, the largest wave this country has ever seen. 100,000 people a month arriving on Ellis Island. Italians, Hungarians, Italians, Russians.”

Randall Kennedy noted that this included,

” the so-called ‘good Europeans’” Great Britain, France, Scandinavian—those were ‘the real whites’, the good whites, but then you have these Jews from eastern European and Italians from southern Italy, they were actually viewed as different races…”

 

The racial categories were actually elastic so that they could be stretched as circumstances warranted. So, for example, for a while Italians were viewed as non-whites.  Remember, racism is nothing if it is not irrational. There is no scientific basis for concepts of race. We are all homo sapiens.  The racial categories are non-existent and have no basis in science. Racism is about emotions, not facts.

 

As Randall Kennedy pointed out, at times Hungarians are considered a race. At other times Czechoslovakians are considered a race. Jews were a race, Irish were a race. As Kennedy said, “they are viewed as lesser.”

That is really what the concept of race is all about. Labelling some people as less worthy based on bias and only bias.

Many of them ate strange foods, worshipped odd gods, had weird customs, ate distinct foods, dressed differently, spoke unusual languages, and were existentially “the others.” This was all new to America and many were not pleased. As Zakaria said, “All of it horrified America’s wealthy elite. The blue bloods of Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue.”

As Jia Lynn Yang, the author of One Mighty and Irresistible Tide said, “They begin to freak out and say we can’t allow these hordes of immigrants who are so different from us and are going to change our country. These immigrants threaten everything we hold dear about America.” Of course this is exactly what many in America are saying right now. There is nothing quite as scary as the foreign other. Irrational distinctions of race or caste are used as the basis of hierarchies.

A bunch of people who considered themselves as the best and brightest of America got together to come up with a plan about how the country should deal with this invasion of others. Many of them referred to the “scientific study” of so-called “inferior races.”  This dubious science was called eugenics. It was racism under a cloak of pseudo-science. Hitler took these ideas from Americans whom he admired. Whether you were a dependable candidate for immigration or not depended on your racial origin.

As Randal Kennedy said, “We want to basically freeze the racial/ethnic composition of the United States.” Eugenics was referred to as “the self-direction of human evolution.” As Zakaria said, “the eugenicists believed the new immigrants were physically and mentally defective.”

Just like the modern anti-immigrants, they believed the immigrants were largely more susceptible to diseases, more likely to commit crimes, they stank, could not be trusted, were lazy, looking for handouts rather than jobs, and many other ills.

As Zakaria pointed out, “If it looks and sounds like Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler embraced American eugenics.” He praised Americans and said we can learn from the Americans.

These anti-immigrant Americans showed up in Washington to influence the political leaders. They came with their pseudo-sciences, and their experts ready to testify. As Jia Lynn Yang said, “They came to Congress and said it’s not you being racist or prejudiced, we have science to back this up.”

The politicians bought this and enacted the most restrictive legislation in the history of the country. Congress passed a new Immigration Act in 1924,  [one year after my parents immigrated to Canada where they were also met with some racism]. Racism was everywhere. The result of the new law was to cut immigration sharply from countries around the world. It “put rigid quotas on so-called ‘undesirables’ ”. Or as Randall Kennedy said, “they shut the door. They cut immigration to the United States by 97%.”

It seems that many groups, after they have “made it” to Canada or America want to close the moat behind them.

 

The Melting Pot

2024 Trip to South East United States, Immigration and Refugees

 

 

I have always heard this claim that America, unlike Canada, is a melting pot. Canada, has always tried to provide for a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic state. Canada, at least compared to the United States, has welcomed diversity. At least mostly. Now it seems things are changing. How did we get to where we are?

As Fareed Zakaria said,

“American has long prided itself on the healthy vibrant melting pot—a nation that lives in harmony with its newcomers. But if we look back at our history honestly, more often than not the story is filled with resentments, restrictions and backlash.”

 

 

In the middle of the 19th century, Ireland was suffering a horrific famine and many Irish people flocked to America seeking better circumstances and opportunities. It is not that different now, as millions of South Americans and Central Americans are flocking to the United States for the same reason, but this time the Americans are actively trying to keep them out and they have legislation and international law to back them up to some extent. Seeking better opportunities is not grounds for seeking asylum.

The Irish who arrived in America usually found jobs and opportunities, but, as Zakaria said, “their arrival also sparked the rise of the xenophobic Know Nothing Party. It called for restrictions on immigration and even violence while electing 100 congressmen, 8 governors, and a presidential candidate.”.

Of course, none of this is new. It has happened over and over again. As Randall Kennedy of Harvard Law School has said, “what is happening now has a very long lineage.”

The same thing happened with the Chinese immigrants. At first it accepted Chinese workers to help open the west. That led directly to another violent backlash. It ushered in the Chinese Exclusion Act which prevented them from immigrating to the United States. It was signed by a Democratic president. One poster gleefully proclaimed: “Hip! Hurrah! The White Man is on top Let every DEMOCRAT and all other GOOD citizens turn out and Ratify this Democratic Measure.”

Sanctuary Cities

2024 Trip to South East United States, Immigration and Refugees

 

Some northern cities have declared themselves sanctuary cities. There are none in Arizona where we are living.

Because immigrants in the United States have been increasingly vulnerable to raids, detentions, and deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) immigration agents many faith groups as well as some neighbourhoods, campuses, and offices have tried to find ways to advocate for and protect the immigrants in their communities. The practice of sanctuary is one way that faith groups and other communities are trying to protect immigrants from deportation.  

A number of candidates for the presidency, including Ron DeSantis while he was still running,  and Donald Trump (again) zeroed in on this issue. They are doing that because they have seen how popularity among voters can be achieved. They think they can make liberal politicians look ridiculous. They might be right.

Governor Abbot of Texas launched “Operation Lone Star” in Texas. Things he has done at the border look Texas is preparing for a war. More walls, more barbed wire, and more drones.

Busing to northern states with sanctuary cities has proved popular with right wing voters, and has been driving liberal leaders in the north into apoplexy. Taking care of the immigrants cost their states a lot of money. The Mayor of New York city has said it could bankrupt that city. He has discovered that offering sanctuary to refugees is very expensive.

Governor DeSantis has called what is happening at the southern border “a total disaster.”  Even many Democrats appear to agree. DeSantis said, “the cartels are just eating our lunch.” He came up with a very popular plan among Floridians to send migrants to northern liberal sanctuary cities.  Fareed Zakari said to do that he duped the undocumented. Immigration lawyer Rachel Self said, “they were the victim of a crime.” Fraud is a crime. A Texas Sheriff said this amounted to “unlawful restraint,” and could warrant criminal charges.

Governor DeSantis said Florida was not a “sanctuary state” and it could help the immigrants to go to one. He also helped pass the most restrictive state immigration law in the US.

What DeSantis did not mention was that this actually cost Florida a lot of money because its immigrant workers were vital to the Florida economy.

Fascists will Finish What Liberals Fail to do

2024 Trip to South East United States, American Fascism, Extremism, Immigration and Refugees

 

As I said in my last post, when borders get overwhelmed, the locals get fearful. They want order on the border, not anarchy. Too often, liberals forget this and sometimes lose elections as a result.

As Fareed Zakaria said in his CNN special, “It’s a trend we’ve seen repeatedly all over the world.  Anger over immigration, leads to hard-right populist power.”

In 2015 as a result of the Civil War in Syria, Europe took in the most refugees since World War II. European countries took in millions, often with deep reluctance. It took a lot of courage, from leaders such as Angela Merkel in Germany and it sparked a huge political backlash and a sharp rise in popularity of populist leaders. It led to the UK leaving the EU. Marie le Pen garnered many more votes in France than she ever had before. In 2022 a party that sprang from the fascists in Italy led by Mussolini then was led by Giorgia Meloni, its most extreme right wing party since that war. In Sweden a party with neo-Nazi roots won the second most votes for its parliament. And, of course. Donald Trump won a surprising election for president over Hillary Clinton and his anti-immigration policies were a big part of his appeal.

David Frum a wise conservative commentator in an interview with CNN,  stated the issue directly: “If liberals won’t defend the border, fascists will.”  And as Fareed Zakaria said, “Disturbingly, today America seems very open to an anti-immigrant message.”  Some go even farther, suggesting that America seems very open to an authoritarian government or even, a fascist one.

 As Zakaria, said in 2023, “54% of Americans believe there is an invasion at the border, including 40% of Democrats and while 3 in 4 once believed immigrants were important for America’s identity, just over half now think that is true.”

Immigration is such a red hot issue it can lead to very dangerous political consequences. We should all be careful.

Texas Border Troubles

2024 Trip to South East United States, Immigration and Refugees

 

Many of the asylum seekers have come to El Paso Texas, a city Chris and I have frequently driven past on our way to the easy life of Arizona.  We did so again this year. I have frequently thought of the immigrants that come there seeking safety and a better life. I have never done anything to help those people. I have not even stopped to look.  That is not something to be proud of.

I remember listening to El Paso Mayor Dee Margo on television  a couple of years ago. He was a levelled headed-Republican when Trump was president. The mayor explained how El Paso and Mexico got along well with each other, contrary to Trump’s claims in his inauguration speech. Thousands of people walked across the border peaceably in both directions every day.

When Donald Trump was president in 2016  after being elected on an anti-immigrant platform, he helped to make things worse. He called out the border city of El Paso during his State of the Union Address. In the process he made false claims that the city at the time was overrun by violent crime. Trump falsely claimed that El Paso urgently required his wall to stem the tide. Mayor Margo denied there was an emergency at the border.  He said people from El Paso got along fine with the people from Mexico.

This is what Trump said:

“The border city of El Paso, Texas, used to have extremely high rates of violent crime, one of the highest in the entire country and considered one of our nation’s most dangerous cities,… Now, immediately upon (the wall’s) building, with a powerful barrier in place, El Paso is one of the safest cities in our country.”

 

Yet this is what USA Today and the Arizona Republic jointly published about  El Paos which:

 “as never one of the most dangerous cities, the violent crime rate peaked in 1993, and had declined dramatically over the next decade, the El Paso Times found. The rate was at a low by 2006, when the federal Secure Fence Act was passed. By 2011, two years after the fence was built in El Paso, violent crime rates had actually increased slightly

In general, El Paso has long been considered one of the safest big cities in America. “Our city police’s community-relations efforts and the cooperation between our law enforcement agencies contributed to making our city a safe place to live and work before border fencing was put in place,” El Paso Mayor Dee Margo, a Republican, wrote in an opinion column published Sunday by USA TODAY. “

 

The truth was that El Paso was very different from what Trump advertised to be the case. His antics were not helping matters

More recently, things got worse in El Paso as a result of a global crisis of immigration. El Paso was always proud about welcoming immigrants, but it has been overwhelmed. Recently, the new mayor declared a state of emergency there.

According to Fareed Zakaria in his CNN special in 2023, in Eagle Pass Texas there were “more migrants in one month than it had total residents.”The turmoil at the border had a dramatic effect on border politics. Zapata County in Texas had not voted Republican since the 1920s! Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama by 43 per centage points. But  Donald Trump won in 2020. People there thought, rightly or wrongly, that Trump cared about the border. It didn’t matter that his policies made little sense. As is so often the case, when it comes to politics, reason and immigration keep little company. Republicans made gains all the along the Texans southern border.

And it seems they are doing so again.

A Disaster at the Border?

2024 Trip to South East United States, Immigration and Refugees

 

Nearly everyone acknowledges that immigration everywhere is a mess and no one wants to resolve it. Problems are not confined to the United States.   Partly, that is because too much ideology is intertwined with immigration issues. They are thorny issues that ideology does not help in solving. Particularly when ideologues like Steve Miller in the US, get involved things just get worse.

One person who does understood the issues and is not an ideologue, is CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, who is himself a proud immigrant to the United States. He looks at immigration with empathy and without ideological blinders, ignoring ideologues on both the left and right.

First of all, Zakaria acknowledges, unlike some liberals, that there is a problem at the American border. As he said in 2023,

“It is no longer just a partisan talking point, or a hyperbolic claim on Fox News. The country has been facing a surge of migration the likes of which has never been seen. A Record 2.4 million migrants were apprehended at the border last fiscal year [2022]. That shattered the record made the previous year, and nearly equaled the population of Chicago. Hundreds have been arriving each day at some border cities. Sometimes tens of thousands of migrants in a single month. Homeless shelters have been overwhelmed. Families have been sleeping on the streets. These borders are no strangers to big migrations, but they have never gone through anything like this. Numbers went down in recent weeks after new restrictive measures were introduced, but the numbers still very uncertain.”

 

It is not enough to say, as some liberals do, that we are a nation of immigrants. It is not enough to say, as Donald Trump said, “our country is full.” Particularly when a country is not full and actually needs immigrants for its economy and to fill jobs that are unfilled to the dismay of employers, statements like Trump’s must be based on ideology, not facts. At the same time when Biden seemed to invite the entire world to America that was also a huge mistake.

Immigration is a wicked problem, and not just in the US or Canada. Immigration is a problem around the world. But it requires critical thinking to tackle it, not just blind ideology.

As Fareed Zakaria asked,

“Why is this happening now? It is a unique moment in the history of the hemisphere. The pandemic and climate change with its brutal storms, droughts, and disease led to economic meltdowns, political unrest, and a perfect storm of migration. Cuban migration to the United States rose nearly 500% in a single year. Columbian migration rose over 1,100%! Over 7 million people have fled Venezuela to the US and other countries. That is close to the exodus from war torn Ukraine.”

 

As Rachel Self, immigration attorney, said, “It’s a perfect storm in a system that is ultimately breaking. These are all people who had families, had lives, had jobs, and then their countries fell apart and then they take the journey and the journey itself is a life or death experience. As David Frum, a thinking person’s conservative, pointed out, “more people than ever before moving to more places in the history of the world.  And that creates wicked problems everywhere.

By International Law Countries Must be Open for Asylum Claims

2024 Trip to South East United States, Immigration and Refugees

 

At the outset, I want to say that rich countries like the US and Canada have an obligation to give asylum to legitimate claimants. That is an obligation under international law agreed to by an international convention. Canada and the US are both rich countries and they can afford to establish such a system. In the US under their current system, it takes years for legitimate claimants to have their cases heard.  Each country is entitled to have claims adjudicated to ensure that only legitimate claims are accepted. Applicants must be accepted as genuine claimants fleeing persecution. Economic migrants do not have an automatic right to enter the country unless they have legitimate claims based on persecution. The US is not putting enough resources into the system to allow it to work properly efficiently and swiftly enough. They must do that. That is their clear responsibility, even though tax payers will inevitably be less than keen to pay.

During the delays in both countries, the asylum seekers in the country inevitably get attached to the country they inhabit and grow connections to the people there that are difficult to break and often lead to citizens of those countries gaining sympathy for them and then pressing their countries to make exceptions or improve their reception. This makes things more difficult. And the longer they stay waiting for their cases to be adjudicated the worse things get. As a result of this things have got very bad in the US. A good part of the problem is the lack of resources devoted to this. Looking the other way does not solve this problem. Currently in the US many claims take many years to be adjudicated because of a lack of resources.

Canada and the US are part of the problem. They must change their ways and stop shirking their responsibilities. They must not take advantage of delays to discourage claims when they are partly responsible for those delays.

We must remember that those who are comfortable in a country, such as the vast majority of Canadian and Americans, many of whom are themselves immigrants or of whom nearly all are ancestors of immigrants  and are prone to exaggerate the difficulties of accepting large numbers of asylum seekers. How many refugees can we really tolerate?

Once one is privileged it is easy to see the privilege as natural and justified but is it? What really gives Americans and Canadians the moral right to say, “No more!” as Trump did when he was president. He basically tried to keep out all immigrants, not just unjustified asylum claimants because that was popular with his base supporters.

Many of the original settlers arrived in this continent from Europe where they often did often did not face persecution, let alone extreme persecution. Yet they thought they could come here whether the inhabitants wanted them or not.

Some countries like Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon are able to take millions of asylum seekers even though they are much smaller and much poorer countries than Canada or the United States.

We must all recognize that since the time of the reforms after the World War the world has changed dramatically. That is in part the consequence of climate change and political change, both of which were significantly, but not solely, caused by western countries. Both are contributing immensely to increased immigration around the world. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, there  currently are more than 40 million  refugees and asylum seekers around the world. How can the world deal with that many? And we must realize that the climate problems and political problems that have created this deluge of refugees and asylum seekers are not going away any time soon. In fact, things are likely to get worse. Much worse! So what do we do about it?

As Zakaria said,

“We need entirely new laws, standards, courts, so that asylum can be granted, but through some orderly rational process, rather than just leaving it up to officials in countries that are overwhelmed by illegal entrants at their borders. The migrant process is exposing democratic weakness at every level. From an administration that is scared to take on its progressive wing and take bold action, to states like New York and Massachusetts that have right to shelter rules that are utterly unworkable under the face of this onslaught. Unless Democrats seize control of this issue, the politics of this will have the same effect as under other western countries—rocket fuel for the populist right.”

  

As David Frum said, “if democracies are unable to solve the issue of immigration, autocracies will do it for them.”

 Donald Trump’s “big beautiful wall” has not worked even where it was built. But most Americans recognize that he is right when he says the current system is not acceptable. If a wall is not the answer, and I don’t think it is, we must do better. As Zakaria said, Trump was “willing to take extreme measures to end it and they know no such thing about his Democratic opponents.”  On the issue of immigration Trump is respected in the US much more than Biden. And According to a recent poll, immigration is the most important issue on the minds of Americans.

Yes, immigration is a wicked problem. Liberals need to understand that open borders are not acceptable to their citizens and won’t be tolerated by them.   Conservatives need to understand that their countries need more workers and immigration can help their economies as it helps them fulfill their moral and legal obligations.