You can't do away with borders in an environment where governments are at each other's throats and there's massive wealth and cultural inequality. At best — at best — the 1st world would rapidly equalize economically and politically with the rest of the world. And what would that accomplish? The refugees (small percentage of 3rd world residents who could/would migrate) come from cultures that are unable to fix their own countries' problems from within, granted often due to initial conditions outside their control. So how would they fix our problems — and we have a lot of them — which are equally out of our control to solve? And after such a grand experiment, the refugees would be hardly any better off than they are now.
Opening borders to absolve our guilty conscience about ill-gotten gains of empires past and present doesn't solve anything. It just makes us feel better. It's like shooting heroin on the titanic.
America was built on immigration from undesirables (an Irish or Italian Catholic ~100 years ago was treated as suspiciously as a Muslim is now), and it seemed to turn out okay. The key difference back then was there was minimal welfare, so immigrants had to find something productive to do or else they'd starve.
>At best — at best — the 1st world would rapidly equalize economically and politically with the rest of the world. And what would that accomplish?
This is already happening via outsourcing: see for instance the rise of China, hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty while working-class Americans get poorer, and China's rising political influence on other countries. Open immigration would encourage more competition between countries: a hellhole like North Korea would have to clean up its act if its citizens were free to get up and leave.
>And after such a grand experiment, the refugees would be hardly any better off than they are now.
Do you think current (legal) refugees would agree that they're hardly any better off than they were back in their original country? Why would illegal refugees be any different? (Often the only difference between an illegal and a legal refugee/immigrant is that the legal one is at the front of some queue, the illegal one is at the back).
>the key difference back then was minimal welfare
And an expectation of assimilation. Regardless immigration in the absence of a welfare state is a completely different beast than immigration into a welfare state.
>Do you think current legal refugees would agree.
Current refugees benefit from unequal access to our labor market. If you eliminated that advantage by letting anyone in, not just risk takers, they almost certainly wouldn’t find it so attractive. How is a race to the bottom a good thing?
>outsourcing
Yes Americans get poorer, and the world gets tons more plastic in its oceans every minute. So we all get poorer too. In my estimation it’s far more important that 1st world countries make a stand for the health of the earth. Globalism is completely incompatible environmentalism best I can tell.
Did you pay for the country's infrastructure upon your birth, or did you freeload for at least 18 years before contributing anything back to it in taxes?