In a remarkable 2003 speech delivered to Yale University, former President Bill Clinton called for the establishment of a “global community,” praised the “openness of our borders to immigrants,” and declared that America “has greater obligations to open our borders.”
In his address, Clinton plainly articulated his worldview and laid out his vision for the future. Clinton argued that the world currently relates to itself as “interdependent nations,” but that this model of interdependence lacks sufficient “integration.” Clinton declared that he considers the formation a “genuine global community”—complete with an “over-arching system” to regulate it—to be “the great mission of the 21st century.”
“I think the great mission of the 21st century is to create a genuine global community, to move from mere interdependence to integration, to a community that has shared responsibilities, shared benefits and shared values. How would we go about building that kind of world?” he said. “We cannot continue to live in a world where we grow more and more interdependent and have no over-arching system to make the positive elements of interdependence outweigh the negative ones.”
During his address, Clinton sang the praises of globalization, and, in particular, the “openness of our borders.”
“Many people today refer to the time in which we live as the age of globalization, and for most Americans, it has brought enormous benefits,” Clinton said. “Our country’s enormous increase in productivity was in no small part fueled by… the openness of our borders to immigrants who continued to replenish the energy of our entrepreneurial system.”
Clinton described “open borders” and “easy immigration” as two of the “forces of interdependence”—forces, which Clinton suggests, are an essential part of creating a global community. However, Clinton admitted that these “forces of interdependence” come with certain risks, and he acknowledged that the 9/11 terrorists had exploited America’s “open borders” for their advantage.
“On Sept. 11, 2001, Al Qaeda terrorists used the forces of interdependence—open borders, easy travel, easy immigration, easy access to information and technology—to turn jet airplanes full of fuel into weapons of mass destruction, killing 3,100 people including hundreds from 70 foreign countries who were in America looking for positive interdependence,” Clinton told the audience.
Nevertheless, Clinton—who was addressing the crowd just two years after 19 foreign terrorists killed thousands of people on U.S. soil—proceeded to argue that the nation’s open borders ought to be opened even further:
“The opposition to globalization in the world is rooted in the feeling of some people that they are left out, left behind and stepped on by other countries. If you, like me, believe in expanded trade and believe America has greater obligations to open our borders and to invest more in the development of poor countries, we have got to maintain the political support here in America for doing that.”
Clinton suggested that creating a global community built upon shared prosperity is necessary in order for wealthy nations to continue to keep their borders open:
“We also have to share the benefits of the interdependent world. Why? For one thing, if you come from a wealthy country with open borders, unless you seriously believe you can kill, imprison or occupy all of your enemies, you have to make a world with more friends and fewer enemies, with more partners and fewer terrorists.”
Clinton was correct in his assessment that the September 11th terror attacks were a result of the nation’s open borders immigration policies.
Indeed, all nineteen of the September 11th hijackers were voluntarily imported into the country on visas issued to them by our federal government. Five of the September 11th hijackers had overstayed their visas or violated the terms of their permits. In a blockbuster 2002 report, National Review’s Joel Mowbray acquired the visa applications of 15 of the 19 hijackers and exposed how every single one of their applications should have been flatly rejected.
It is interesting that Clinton described the nation’s immigration policy of 2001 as being one of “open borders,” considering that immigration has only continued to increase since then, and Hillary Clinton has repeatedly backed immigration policies that would only further open our nation’s borders to would-be foreign migrants.
Before September 11th, immigration experts observed that the nation was experiencing “unprecedented” number of immigrants by historical standards.
As the Center for Immigration Studies’ Steve Camarota reported in January of 2001: “By historical standards, the number of immigrants living in the United States is unprecedented… 28.4 million immigrants now live in the United States, the largest number ever recorded in the nation’s history, and a 43 percent increase since 1990. As a percentage of the population, immigrants now account for more than one in 10 residents (10.4 percent), the highest percentage in 70 years.”
The record level of immigration into the U.S. was the result of a 1965 immigration rewrite championed by Ted Kennedy, which lifted the immigration curbs enacted by President Calvin Coolidge and opened up American visas to the entire world. As Camarota wrote in 2001, “The number of immigrants living in the United States has more than tripled since 1970, from 9.6 million to 28.4 million. As a percentage of the U.S. population, immigrants have more than doubled, from 4.7 percent in 1970 to 10.4 percent in 2000.”
“More than 1.2 million legal and illegal immigrants combined now settle in the United States each year,” Camarota added, at the time.
While in the early 2000s, Clinton described this immigration policy as “open borders”, since then immigration has only increased.
As Camarota now tells Breitbart News today, “census data shows that each year the U.S. adds 1.5 million legal and illegal new arrivals.”
“A new analysis of government data from December 2015 indicates that more than 61 million immigrants and their American-born children under age 18 now live in the United States; roughly three-fourths (45.3 million) are legal immigrants and their children,” Camarota wrote in March. “The numbers represent a complete break with the recent history of the United States.”
Despite Bill Clinton’s prior forthrightness about his support for open borders, many in corporate media today insists that Hillary Clinton does not support open borders.
While Republican nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly made the case that his opponent supports open borders, many in the media have denounced Trump’s assertion as false—without providing any substantive evidence to counter his claim.
For instance, Politifact, the Associated Press, CNN, and FactCheck.org have all claimed that it is not true that Clinton supports open borders.
They make this case by pushing unrelated arguments about how Clinton supports “border security”—which has nothing to do with the fact that she endorsed, championed and, is now campaigning, on open borders immigration policies that would allow virtually unlimited amounts of foreign migrants to enter the country on U.S. visas.
These so-called “fact checks” rarely mention how many migrants would be imported into the country under a Hillary Clinton Presidency. While Bill Clinton described the immigration policies of 2001 as “open borders,” his wife has championed policies that would only open our borders even further.
For example, the 2013 Gang of Eight bill Clinton supported would have tripled green card issuances—permanently resettling 33 million foreign nationals on green cards in the span of a single decade—and would have doubled foreign guest worker visas to compete for American jobs.
The 2006 Ted Kennedy immigration plan Clinton supported would have more than doubled legal immigration by increasing the number of family-based and employment-based visas.
Clinton’s refugee program, which she outlined in 2015, calls for a 550 percent increase the number of Syrian refugees admitted. If Clinton were to continue this policy throughout her presidency, the U.S. could potentially permanently resettle nearly one million Muslim migrants during the first term of her presidency alone—and all of their children born on American soil would be automatically awarded U.S. citizenship.
Indeed, Clinton primary rival Bernie Sanders has explained how “open borders” is a radical and fringe position supported by wealthy donors, which hurts working Americans. In a 2015 interview with Vox, Sanders denounced open borders as a “Koch brothers proposal” that would essentially amount to “doing away with the concept of a nation state.”
Sanders said “open borders” is “a Koch brothers proposal… which says essentially there is no United States… It would make everybody in America poorer—you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country.”
Interestingly, the libertarian Koch Brothers are furthering Hillary Clinton’s candidacy by refusing to run negative ads against her.
Clinton’s push back against the “open borders” label while clearly championing open border policies is perhaps related to the fact that increasing immigration levels is not a popular policy. According to Pew, an overwhelming 83 percent of the American electorate overall would like to see immigration levels frozen or reduced.
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