Salon: Open Borders ‘Only Way to Defeat Trump’

Open borders are the only path to defeating President Donald Trump, a Salon writer claims.

In a piece titled “Everyone’s wrong on immigration: Open borders are the only way to defeat Trump and build a better world”, Salon writer Anis Shivani claims that there is no distinction between a legal and illegal immigrant; immigration law is “racist”; and “open borders are the only way to go.” Shivani adds:

We are in a situation of chaos, breeding technical illegality, because federal regulations have become too complex. Comprehensive immigration reform of any type would make these laws even more cumbersome by drastically curtailing family unification (our quotas, even after the 1965 liberalization, have always been vastly insufficient to the needs) and thus inviting more illegality. I don’t want to rest my case for open borders on the economic justification, but studies in the 1980s noted that world economic output would double if open borders prevailed everywhere, and studies in the 2000s showed even greater gains for the world economy.

Americans often compare the nation to a house, arguing that immigrants who enter without inspection or overstay their visas are like robbers whom we have every right to detain and expel. But a country or even a state or a city or a neighborhood is not a house (just as it is simplistic to compare a country’s budget to a household’s). The nation is dynamic and includes all of us. The nation is an abstraction is only as good as the operation of freedom within it. The same is even truer of the world. If the world cannot be put inside a border, then a country trying to do the same is foolish.

The Salon writer also claims that Trump’s border wall is “a fantasy, not a reality” and argues that “national sovereignty” is nothing more than a “knee-jerk” reaction.

When it comes to illegal immigrants who commit crimes, Shivani contends that those individuals should be treated like American-born criminals.

“The only solution to this anomaly is to cease treating immigration violations as crimes and to completely end detention for immigration,” the Salon writer argues. “If an immigrant commits a crime, he or she should be prosecuted under normal laws, as a criminal defendant not as a ‘criminal alien’.”

Shivani also claims that the mere action of deporting illegal immigrants by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) out of the U.S. is one of the “world’s major human rights calamities”:

Countless numbers of immigrants, even legal permanent residents, have been hauled away from their families, their communities, everything they know and love, based on some minor misdemeanor they may have committed decades ago, which has suddenly been reclassified as an “aggravated felony,” and is cause for their deportation to places they have no memory of. Such immigrants do not have the right to be heard by a judge except in a perfunctory manner, with little room for clemency based on individual circumstances.

We do not call our immigrant detention facilities concentration camps, but at any given time we have about 34,000 immigrants serving time in prisons far from home, waiting to be deported. Is this any different than the prison regimes of the most brutal governments we have protested?

The right to free speech is made entirely synonymous with the “right to migrate,” which Shivani writes that “If we do not recognize migration as an inviolable human right, and if we do not give up the idea of the wall, we are bound to lose human rights for all of us.”

Shivani likewise champions the idea that in an open borders U.S., American citizenship “ultimately will be so cheapened as to be worth nothing.”

The Salon writer admits that he wants to see a nationwide “sanctuary” system where criminal illegal immigrants are protected from federal immigration law, writing that it would “become a constructive, constitutional, universal concept.”

The immigration issue has defined the rise of Trump, as Americans continue to be on his side.

Some 80 percent of Americans said they disapproved of sanctuary city policies, as Breitbart Texas reported, with 52 percent of voters saying they supported Trump’s border wall plan.

Even when it comes to other immigration issues, like the number of refugees entering the U.S. every year, some 52 percent of likely voters said they supported Trump’s ban on refugees for a few months, as Breitbart Texas reported.

Similarly, a small minority of 30 percent of Americans said foreign worker guest programs, like the H-1B visa, was necessary, as Breitbart Texas reported.

Shivani closes with a mandate for the courts as they continue to hear challenges to the Trump Administration’s policies:

For the courts, as they face the Trump assault, the challenge is clear: Do away with the plenary power doctrine and extend full constitutional rights to immigrants. Rights should depend on personhood not citizenship, as some of our best legal minds have recognized throughout our history.

John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.