{"id":48618,"date":"2021-02-22T08:50:27","date_gmt":"2021-02-22T08:50:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=165223"},"modified":"2021-02-22T08:50:27","modified_gmt":"2021-02-22T08:50:27","slug":"joe-biden-and-open-borders-as-if-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/02\/22\/joe-biden-and-open-borders-as-if-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Joe Biden and \u201cOpen Borders\u201d: As If"},"content":{"rendered":"
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On February 9, more than 50 Republican members of the US House of Representatives sent President Joe Biden a letter decrying his \u201copen border\u201d policies. Of all the hyberbolic claims I\u2019ve read regarding the Biden administration since Inauguration Day, that one takes the cake. In neither word nor action has the new president come within a country mile of supporting \u201copen borders\u201d in principle or in policy.<\/p>\n

As the Cato Institute\u2019s David J. Bier notes, \u201cBiden has been in office for less than a month. Many people keep saying \u2018give him time.\u2019 But what\u2019s concerning isn\u2019t that Biden hasn\u2019t \u2018gotten around to immigration yet.\u2019 It\u2019s that he has, and is intentionally choosing to perpetuate one of the worst immigration regimes in American history.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s true of both his early executive orders (yes, he cut off misappropriated funding for Donald Trump\u2019s \u201cborder wall\u201d boondoggle, but boondoggles being boondoggles, the wall wasn\u2019t stopping anyone anyway) and the legislative proposal he unveiled on February 18 (he wants a \u201cpath to citizenship\u201d and is asking for some visa caps to be raised, but not for immigration freedom).<\/p>\n

For the most part, Biden\u2019s just carrying on in the Obama\/Trump tradition of gaming immigration to satisfy authoritarians on both the \u201cright\u201d (the \u201cwon\u2019t say we\u2019re white nationalists, but you get it\u201d wing of the Republican Party) and the \u201cleft\u201d (Democrats beholden, like Biden himself, to the corrupt remnant of what was once a vital, universally pro-worker \u201corganized labor\u201d movement but over time became a protectionist racket).<\/p>\n

House Republicans have mistaken a fellow authoritarian \u201cborder security\u201d cultist for a pro-freedom activist. And they think that\u2019s a bad thing!<\/p>\n

Would you like to know who DID support \u201copen borders?\u201d<\/p>\n

The framers of the US Constitution, in Article I, Section 9 forbade the federal government to regulate immigration for 20 years, after which a constitutional amendment would have been required to create any such federal power (see the Tenth Amendment). It never was so amended, but in 1875 an activist Supreme Court miracled the power up out of whole cloth in Chy Lung v. Freeman.<\/p>\n

Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush (some Republicans may remember them) also supported \u201copen borders,\u201d in those words, during the the 1980 Republican presidential primaries. And eight years later, even after mass migrations from Vietnam and Cuba, Reagan still supported \u201copen borders\u201d in his farewell address:<\/p>\n

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\u201cI\u2019ve spoken of the shining city all my political life \u2026. a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That\u2019s how I saw it, and see it still.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Immigration freedom has always been an unalloyed social and economic good. When a politician supports anything less, he outs himself as an enemy of both human freedom and economic prosperity.<\/p>\n

Republican politicians abandoned \u201copen borders\u201d for Joe Biden\u2019s long-time position. Now they accuse him, essentially, of being a closet Reaganite! It doesn\u2019t get much sillier than that.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On February 9, more than 50 Republican members of the US House of Representatives sent President Joe Biden a letter decrying his \u201copen border\u201d policies. Of all the\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":160,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48618"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/160"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48618"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48619,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48618\/revisions\/48619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}