Destroying Liberty To Save It by Ryan McMaken

“Relying on the false premise that immigration numbers are at historically unprecedented levels, anti-immigration advocates have managed to whip a sizable portion of the American public into a nationalistic frenzy against immigrants. In general, illegal immigrants are targeted as the more politically acceptable scapegoat, and these immigrants, we are told, come to the United States to do nothing other than steal jobs from Americans, live off the welfare state, inconvenience us with their strange foreign languages, promote bizarre political movements, or simply introduce their inferior foreign ways into our pristine civilization.

While many of these arguments made against immigrants are based on little more than pop-psychology and pseudo-science, not all of them are, and we can’t conclude that opposition to open borders and unrestrained immigration is necessarily a bad thing. There are good reasons to oppose them. In certain ways, open borders are indeed a threat to liberty, although the problem that we repeatedly encounter is that many of the conservatives behind the anti-immigration hysteria focus on all the wrong reasons while supporting authoritarian solutions that diminish rather than enhance liberty.”

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