Last election season as morally and emotionally exhausting for many.
I thought it was pretty funny.
One of the most intriguing aspects of the whole thing was that in the space of about one year, the notion of purely open borders or even more to the point, the notion that the whole planet had a right to live within the boundaries of the United States of America became a frequent implication of talking points on the right and left.
I was even more intrigued by Bernie Sanders’ claim that such an idea was ludicrous. Steve Sailer recounts it here:
Bernie Sanders: Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal.
Ezra Klein: Really?
Bernie Sanders: Of course. That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States….
Ezra Klein: But it would make…
Bernie Sanders: Excuse me…
Ezra Klein: It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn’t it?
Bernie Sanders: It would make everybody in America poorer—you’re doing away with the concept of a nation-state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that.
The article cited above is pretty good. In it, the idea “that American citizens should get no say in who gets to move to America because huddled masses of non-Americans possess civil rights to immigrate” is called the “zeroth amendment.” It’s a clever name.
I mean, it may turn out that groups who wish to freely associate are wrong to exclude anybody ever, but few college safe space groups wish to be as open to outsiders as members of such groups wish for American borders to be.
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