More Misinformation form the Media:
Since its founding, the U.S. has been at its worse when it works to keep people from becoming citizens. . . . “A nation without borders,” Donald Trump has warned us, “is not a nation at all.” . . . Truth is that the nation’s prosperity has long rested on the labor and resourcefulness of immigrants . . . and that those who most loudly denounce a “nation without borders” are likely the descendants of immigrants who were themselves harassed for their origins, faith, and lifeways at some point in the past. We would do well to recognize that in a global economy such as ours, where the movement of people and goods are the lifeblood of our sustenance, a nation’s security is at best maintained not by walling itself off but by lifting the prospects . . . of working people around the world. – America is Better Without Borders, Steven Hahn, Time 11/1/16
Fact Check: This editorial typifies corporate media’s promotion of mass immigration: airy vacuous platitudes which are supposed to sound oh-so-moral, emotional manipulation, and factual distortion. We have always become worse when we decided to limit immigration? Hardly. The most outstanding case in point was the immigration restriction law of 1924.
The massive wave of immigration prior to that time, mainly from Europe, was balkanizing our country and impoverishing our working classes. The sharp reduction in 1924 greatly remedied these problems. As the numbers from abroad subsided, the immigrants already felt increasing incentive to assimilate to the American mainstream. Reduction of immigration also reduced downward pressure on wages, for natives and immigrants alike. During the next five decades, immigrants and their descendants Americanized and rose into the middle class. Restriction was a great success, and it aided rather than hindered prosperity.
The fact that some immigrants were harassed for origins, faith, and lifeways was unfortunate, but it was mass immigration that exacerbated social tensions by making natives feel threatened by the numbers arriving. A moderate level of immigration helps to promote goodwill between natives and immigrants in the course of bringing them together.
A “nation without borders” is a nation without the ability to limit immigration to reasonable levels for the common good. In that situation, as Trump observed, it ceases to be a nation at all, but merely a geographic area where the native inhabitants have no control over the kind of society they want to have.
The claim that we are now “global” is a partial truth, advanced in such a way to distort the full truth. No one is suggesting that we have no trade or immigration. We can be open to the world to the extent that it is genuinely beneficial to our country. But this is not to say that because some openness to the world is good that we must be completely open to the extent that we have no borders. As a nation may certainly show benevolence to foreigners, but not at the expense of its own citizens. America isn’t better without borders. With no borders, America is no country at all.