catholicworldreport.com
2026-03-07
Effectively, open borders are a bad idea. That's true whether they result from explicit policy or from failure to enforce the law effectively.
The population of the world outside the United States is about 8 billion. Of that number, it appears that about a billion and a quarter would like to emigrate from their home countries, with around 230 million picking the United States as their top destination. A great many more would no doubt accept the United States as a second, third, or fourth choice.
It's not clear what people would actually do if anyone with a ticket could hop on a plane and move here. Puerto Ricans have been able to do that as long as there have been plane tickets, and two-thirds of them now live on the mainland. It seems that open or largely open borders would bring far more immigrants here than the 50 million or so now present.
That would be disastrous for a variety of reasons. For one thing, it's unlikely that the resulting aggregate of very different populations, without common memories and habits of cooperation to hold them together, could maintain an orderly political system involving extensive public participation. Such societies have not been common. They can exist most easily when people are generally comfortable, and the government does very little, as was long the case in America. Or if the society is united by a long history and deep cultural ties, as was the case in Western Europe until quite recently.