Why I Gave Up on Open Borders

[Editor’s Note: this is adapted from The Latin America Red Pill.]

Eyes opened slowly

After traveling and living abroad for many years, I began to realize that I was fortunate to have grown up in a relatively high-trust society, New Zealand, which rested on classical-liberal British traditions. In Guatemala, I attended a conference on how the West developed more than other parts of the world. One of the main takeaways was that economic development rests on coordination and contracts enabled by high-trust, low-time-preference populations.

Correspondingly, low-trust, high-time-preference populations struggle to grow because they have serious barriers to long-term agreements and coordination for major projects. Living in Argentina and then Guatemala drove this point home to me. In both nations, family enterprises reign while public companies and secondary markets struggle to function.

Meanwhile, I observed that the high-trust societies I knew firsthand — chiefly Canada, New Zealand, and parts of the United States — appeared to be faltering. During my years with the John Locke Foundation in North Carolina, we hosted prominent author Charles Murray for a luncheon to introduce his latest book: Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (2013). One of the most important conclusions, although Murray was not the first to note it, was that more diverse communities have lower trust and lower civic engagement.

Such has been the rah-rah adoption of the more-is-better “diversity is our strength” mantra, few people have stated the obvious: diversity, above an optimal level, is a source of discord. That explains the need for an entire DEI industry to overcome a permanent challenge.

My work as a journalist in New Orleans, Louisiana, had also opened my eyes to the unavoidable presence of ethnicity in public affairs. While I did my best to avoid any mention of ethnic identification in my articles, since I believed such labels to be fallacious, this proved impossible. The Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Louisiana hosted important events, and I could hardly not mention the organization’s name.

Further, when covering the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, various organizations came to protests and hearings, some representing the “black perspective.” This smacked me as absurd, since ethnicity had nothing to do with the oil spill, but the ethnic-affinity organizations still showed up. Attending countless district and state education board meetings, colored with foul language and animus, also made clear to me that no one was following my lead and pursuing ethnic blindness.

The icing on the cake came when then-Governor Bobby Jindal proposed a partial amalgamation of the University of New Orleans and Southern University at New Orleans. Both are struggling institutions, but the latter has almost entirely black students and one of the lowest graduation rates in the United States: 8 percent in four years. My naive assumption was that everyone would welcome an end to de facto segregation.

To my shock, the most outspoken opponents were the blacks in New Orleans. I remember receiving all sorts of press releases on the topic. One stated: “The talent that is rightfully ours will leave us.” The black groups wanted segregation. The hint of less of it had them up in arms, and nothing came of Jindal’s proposal.

Facing up to identity politics

Also while in Louisiana, I witnessed ethnic affinities overrule policy debates. When then-President Barack Obama came and spoke at a majority-black university, he was their man — not that anyone knew or cared about his specific policies. This pattern of de facto segregation repeated at countless political and advocacy events.

Whether we like it or not, tribal loyalties run deep in human nature, and they are not going away anytime soon. That is why politicians appeal to identity politics: it is a winning strategy.

On the other hand, resisting identity preferences is a fool’s errand. The story of former Representative Joseph Cao (R-LA) is illustrative, since he is Vietnamese-American. He narrowly managed to get into Louisiana’s second congressional district from 2009 to 2011. Cao upset a black Democrat, William Jefferson, who was mired in countless corruption charges. Incumbent Jefferson won his Democrat primary only because his main rival was a white Hispanic journalist, Helena Moreno, and she failed to impress the largely black voter base. The weight of charges sunk Jefferson in the 2008 general election, and in 2009 he was sentenced to 13 years in prison.

What do you think happened when Cao ran for reelection? He had a clean record and did his best to represent his electorate’s wishes. This included voting for Obamacare in 2010 — the only Republican in Congress to do so. However, Cao lost to black Cedric Richmond by more than 30 percentage points.

Much discussion of immigration, at least in polite society, refuses to honestly address ethnic Balkanization — so it remains the elephant in the room. By placing some topics off limits, we suffocate the discussion and leave observers intellectually stilted. That applied to me, since I had never heard anyone make the case and likely would have dismissed it with a common epithet. Once your eyes are opened, though, you see it everywhere.

The fact is that blacks and Hispanics in the United States are more racially conscious than whites and behave in a more collective or tribal manner, even if that seems irrational to individualist whites. Just ask La Raza (the mestizo “race” or “people”) whether ethnicity matters and why they support policies such as fewer deportations and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants: these policies mean a more powerful mestizo voter block. That is all La Raza needs to know. La Raza, rebranded as UnidosUS in 2017, has an endowment of more than $100 million and revenues of $70 million per year. They defend their community and favor mestizo candidates without the slightest hesitation or shame.

My two years in Houston, Texas, where I completed graduate school at Rice University, also made me aware of how whites are treated when they become a minority. Spoiler: no one cares about whites being a minority.

During the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020, the city removed two statues from Hermann Park, akin to what happened earlier to the Robert E. Lee statue in New Orleans. I used to run around Hermann Park often and was passing by when the Dick Dowling statue came down. This gentleman, who came from Ireland and became a successful businessman in his short 30 years of life, defended Texas from invading Union forces. Given anti-white sentiment, historical illiteracy, and violent intimidation, elected officials tore down his legacy.

The same is happening to William Marsh Rice (1816–1900). His wealth today benefits Rice University students of all stripes. However, since he owned slaves and Rice University was initially for white students, ingrates now want this generous man to be memory-holed.

The end of meritocracy, limited government

The incumbent US vice president was selected as a candidate chiefly because of her gender and race, and she promotes “equity” over equality before the law. In other words, she exemplifies the rising tide of people voting based on identity rather than merit or qualifications. If you think Western nations will retain high trust and meritocracy while opening their doors to the Third World, you have probably never lived in the Third World and have not been paying attention to the demographic demands of non-whites.

New arrivals change destinations to be more like their origins, be that towards Islamic law, socialism, foreign languages, or new recreational activities. This is clear to anyone with his eyes open, but it is documented by Garett Jones in The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left (2022). Ask a Maori what he thinks about his homeland — New Zealand — now having a 30 percent foreign-born population; ask Vancouverites who grew up before the Asian wave of the last 40 years; ask Floridians who grew up in Miami prior to the 1970s. Try living in Miami now without speaking Spanish.

Libertarians started the Free State Project in the mid-2000s precisely because they believed new arrivals would impact the destination. Their unique goal has been, with just a few hundred people, to shift New Hampshire towards liberty. That hardly applies to other migration waves, which typically overshadow the likes of the Free State Project in numbers and impact.

If you doubt the profound consequences of who goes where, consider this 2020 finding from the Barcelona School of Economics. Two researchers, José García-Montalvo and Marta Reynal-Querol, traced the original 20,000 Spanish settlers in Latin America and where they settled, up until 1540. Almost 500 years later, the “locations where a greater number of early settlers had high-skilled occupations currently have a higher level of development than those where early settlers were less skilled . . . .  Specifically, [they] find evidence of persistence in the form of market orientation and entrepreneurial spirit.”

Democrat insiders in the United States know that Hispanics tend to favor stricter gun controls, a higher minimum wage, and a more generous welfare state. The Pew Research Center has consistently reported that Asians, blacks, and Hispanics back broader government intervention and provision relative to whites.

If persecuted white South Africans were arriving at the southern border — eager to arm themselves, build small businesses, and vote for Republicans — Democrat officialdom’s support for open immigration would evaporate. Since the actual arrivals tend to vote Left, the Democrat Party wants to give citizenship to tens of millions of illegal immigrants and make the GOP impotent at the national level.

Yes, social changes stemming from immigration tend to follow ethnic lines. It is not an accident that the top dozen nations for economic freedom are, as reported by the Fraser Institute, East Asian (Japan, Singapore), Northwestern European (Denmark, Ireland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the United Kingdom), or former British colonies (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States).

The number-one spot, Hong Kong, is both East Asian and a former British colony. However, almost 30 years have passed since the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to the Chinese Communist Party, so freedom there is fading swiftly: “Hong Kong’s rating continues to fall precipitously from 9.05 in 2018 to 8.58 in 2022 — nearly half a standard deviation decline in just four years.”

On average, different ethnicities have different proclivities, but this reality remains taboo. For those willing to learn, Charles Murray has written a concise explanation of the cognitive and crime disparities in the US context: Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America (2021).

Whether the changes from migrants are for the better depends on the context. However, if you live in First-World sanity with relative trust, free speech, meritocracy, self-sufficiency, decentralization, honored contracts, private property, gun rights, civility, limited government, and ethnic kinship, open borders will threaten and almost inevitably put an end to all that. The vast majority of the world does not align with those values or practice those habits we take for granted in the First World, so inviting the rest of the world in is a suicide mission.

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