this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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The leading reason to oppose immigration is racism. But people are embarrassed to admit it. Nobody opposes anything because it's illegal.
You can force anyone to admit they don't care about what's legal by simply asking what if we changed the law?
Not to counteract that there is definitely a decent amount of racism involved, but isn't your point about law changing hypotheticals basically useless? If the government changed any law making any currently illegal immoral thing legal, wouldn't anyone not care about what's legal? And just because something is legal doesn't make it right. Some states still have legal child marriage, that doesn't mean anyone should like it and there should be mass efforts to make it illegal.
There is definitely a middle ground between open border immigration and what is happening now. Not everyone who is against illegal immigration is racist, and I would hesitate to even attempt to claim racism is a majority reason. It's has become a thought-terminating cliche the same way "woke" or DEI is for the Right.
I both love and hate asking this question to anti-immigration chuds.
100% of the time, the first answer is "Well it wouldn't be legal, we need laws to keep people out."
And then you go "Okay but what if they DID legalize it, would you be accepting or not?"
And then it's 45 minutes of arguing with someone about what a "hypothetical" is and what it means to imagine something, because they don't actually have an answer, the choices are to say they will oppose the system and oppose the government or that they would be fine if the law changed, either way makes them look bad by their own flimsy values, so they will stick to spinning around the definitions of words and what's "real" or not.
Shouldn't that be an easy question to answer though?
If a supermajority left-wing government changed immigration law to free and unrestricted passage across borders, making anyone who sets foot on US soil is legally a resident if they wish and further entitled to a pathway citizenship if they want it, then that would be the law and must be followed.
Anyone would still be free to run their campaign on changing immigration law back, or to something else. Economic and societal performance under that hypothetical law change would determine if a supermajority of "change immigration law to XYZ" then gets elected to do that.
There is always a possibility that putting no or too few limits on immigration causes irreversible damage to a country before course correction can happen, but the same is true for extreme polarization and unresolvable political divide.
I used to have that perspective too.
In my older age I'm completely in favor of an entirely borderless world. I know that's unrealistic in our lifetimes but I understand a lot more now about how much of our actual division and fear of "flooding people" in one direction or another is entirely socially constructed and cemented by capitalism, so while I know that we currently live in a world of borders, my firm belief is that people should be free go where they want, and governments need to learn to respond. Got too many people flooding in from country X? Lets go see what's happening in country X that's making people leave and fix the situation. The only time you should look at your neighbor's plate is to make sure they have enough.
When you say that you don't want "too many" people from other places, you're saying that your own value as a person is higher than theirs, that your culture is more important, that you're too scared to adapt to change that will happen anyway. And yeah, this has become policy now so here we are.
I am less and less compromising on this attitude too, because in my decades, every time we cede too much ground to conservatism, their fear and anxiety towards change turns the compromise into walls and barbed wire all over again.
I am not going to expect us to get that world overnight, but I will always advocate for fewer immigration controls and greater international support and partnerships, even if we go back to how it was in whatever years when the markets were flourishing and you could enter a country with a smile and a nod, I still will push for us to tear down barriers between building much larger communities.
So yeah, we will have borders and checks and security and all that lip service to logically unnecessary systems from thousands of years, but I think we need to keep the end-goal of not needing it as our collective, shared value.
A peaceful and united world without borders would be awesome. I wish I could be as optimistic as you, but when we have so many examples of one culture completely wiping out another I can't get there. Tibet is a "recent" example, all Native cultures in North and South America are more. Most of Africa as well.
I do think that not all cultures are equal because all cultural institutions are not equal. Child marriage, caste, women's rights, LGBT rights, etc. are components that make up cultures, and everyone thinks their culture's interpretation of these is superior and should be enforced as the norm. This will be THE blocker for a united one world society without borders.
Looking into why there are too many people coming from country X to fix those problems, no matter how generously you are trying to make sure their plate has enough, will invariably run into cultural clashes with fixes. International solidarity and support should increase, but at what point is that cultural colonialism? Can for example Sharia Law coexist perfectly with liberalism? Can a society made with conflicting ideas about autonomy exist?
You might enjoy the phrase "Constitutional border protection." The US had no immigration laws whatsoever for nearly a century, and none are in the Constitution, so it's fun to push the same button that right-wingers do with the Second Amendment, but for immigration.
The Constitution is not the totality of law nor was it ever intended to be. It is the guide rails that establishes the scope that the rest of the legal system exists within.
How would framing immigration in comparison to the Bill of Rights even push the same buttons as the Second Amendment? The Constitution grants Congress the authority and requirement to protect the country and to set naturalization law, which is immigration. There is, as you said, no constitutional right to become an American citizen.
Piss off right-wingers with Due Process, because Constitutionally everyone on US soil or in US custody for any reason, and that means Everyone with a capital E, is covered under Due Process.
I really don't get our country.
"We found this nation to welcome the world's masses, anyone seeking freedom and democracy, we will create the jewel of the world everyone will want to be part of!"
"Wait no, we meant like... some of you, sometimes. We're good now, yeah, there's tons of space left and land that we ahem own now, but we like it kinda empty so we can film truck commercials in the mountains."