The Case for Open Borders
It seems like ancient history, but it actually wasn’t that long ago when – during the first Trump administration – large protests featured signs that read “no kids in cages” and “no body is illegal.” It is hard to remember that less than a decade ago, Democrats running in their party’s presidential primary were competing over who was more pro immigrant.
Times have changed. President Trump has begun his effort to carry out the largest mass deportation of immigrants in U.S. history. Families and whole communities are stricken with fear.
Meanwhile, the calls to “close the border” or at the very least “tighten” it are coming from all sides of the political playing field. But is there another way forward? What if for our economy and our country to thrive we need open borders, not hyper-militarized ones?
Journalist and author John Washington makes exactly this argument in his recent book, “The Case for Open Borders.” In an interview that took place before Trump took office, we speak with John about why he believes open borders would strengthen our country and better align the United States with its stated ideals of liberty and freedom. Much of what John argues for goes beyond the NYCLU’s policy prevue and we’re not asking everyone to agree with everything he says. But his perspective offers a stark contrast to the vast majority of what we hear about immigration every day, and we think it’s a valuable viewpoint to hear.
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Resources:
Why New Migrants are Good for NYC with Comptroller Brad Lander
Take Action: Protect Immigrant New Yorkers from Mass Deportation
Transcript:
John: [00:00:00] Immigration has been used as both a political football in sort of like the best case scenario or as a means to stir up fear, stir up nativism, stir up hatred, frankly, and xenophobia, and try to lump all of that onto people who are already marginalized.
Simon: Welcome to Rights This Way, a podcast from the New York Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of New York State.
I’m Simon McCormack, senior staff writer at the NYCLU and your host for this podcast, which is focused on the civil rights and liberties issues that impact New Yorkers most.
It seems like ancient history, but actually, it wasn’t that long ago when, during the first Trump administration, large protests featured signs that read, No kids in cages, and no body is illegal. It’s hard to remember [00:01:00] that less than a decade ago, Democrats running in their party’s presidential primary were competing over who was more pro immigrant.
Times have changed. President Trump has begun his effort to carry out the largest mass deportations of immigrants in U. S. history. Families and whole communities are stricken with fear. Meanwhile, the calls to close the border, or at the very least, tighten it, are coming from all sides of the political playing field.
But is there another way forward? What if for our economy and our country to thrive, we need open borders? Not hyper militarized ones. Journalist and author John Washington makes exactly this argument in his recent book, The Case for Open Borders. In an interview that took place before Trump took office, we speak with John about why he believes open borders would strengthen our country and better align the United States with its stated ideals of liberty and freedom.
Much of what John argues for goes beyond the NYCLU’s policy purview, and we’re not asking anyone to agree with [00:02:00] everything he says. But his perspective offers a stark contrast to the vast majority of what we hear about immigration every day, and we think it’s a valuable viewpoint to hear. Before we get started, just a quick note.
That outside guests on this show do not represent the NYCLU and their views are their own. And now I’m joined by John Washington. John is an award winning investigative journalist who writes about the border, climate change, literature, and more. He is a staff writer for Arizona Luminaria and the author of The Case for Open Borders.
John, thank you for joining us on Rights This Way.
John: Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Simon.
Simon: Of course. So, I guess I want to first sort of set the scene a bit here. Can you first talk about how would you characterize the current political environment around the issue of immigration? And what do you think got us to this point where, among other things, you know, Trump [00:03:00] won the election,
and depending on when folks are listening to this, he may already have taken office. You know, arguably his biggest issue was mass deportation and, you know, closing the border, getting tough on immigration. So can, can you kind of give us a sense of where we’re at?
John: Yeah, I would say the politics around immigration, border enforcement these days is pretty putrid.
There is a incredible detachment from reality. And when you compare talking points, when you compare the rhetoric to the situation on the ground, there is a vast and seemingly growing gulf. And being here on the border, going to the border and going to different parts of the border, talking to migrants, In Mexico, in other parts of the world, and then recent and recent arrivals and people have been here for a while.
It is incredible, just again, the vast difference between how [00:04:00] people are experiencing traveling across international boundaries and how people talk about migrants. And how we’ve gotten here is I think we have just untethered ourselves from reality and it’s really unfortunate. I think this has a lot to do with how media works these days. I think it has a lot to do with a lot of other underlying problems that politicians use to foist angst onto immigrants onto what are deemed as the other and immigration has been used as both a political football in sort of like the best case scenario, or as a means to stir up fear, stir up nativism, stir up hatred, frankly, and xenophobia and try to lump all of that onto people who are already marginalized.
And it’s a really sad state of [00:05:00] affairs. But, here we are. I think in slightly more concrete terms, and we could get into the actual sort of brass tacks politics of it, I think that both the left and the right are largely to blame. The right has been largely the ones demonizing, scapegoating migrants for a long time.
The left has sort of come into that role and is really sort of growing into it in, in the last number of years. But also, I think that they have been rather spineless for decades and have been unwilling to stand on principle and have been just using immigration and border politics as a means to their own ends, as an electoral strategy rather than thinking carefully about the actual problems or the actual people who are suffering those problems.
And yeah we get into a lot more detail, but I think that’s sort of the overview of what I’ve been witnessing covering this for a decade or more.
Simon: Absolutely. [00:06:00] Yeah, I think that’s a great summation. And I think with that, with that sort of broad understanding, can you sort of lay out your case that you make in the book for open borders and explain what you mean by open borders?
John: Yeah. So, you know, I think it’s really key, and this is something I’ve learned talking about the book and talking to people who are interested and maybe who have recognized that there is a problem and recognize the humanity of people who are crossing borders and don’t want to just leverage violence against them and try to keep them out of places.
They also are nervous about the idea of open borders, and I think something that can help calm those fears is I’m not talking about no borders. I’m talking about open borders, and there’s a very big difference. Some people advocate for no borders. I don’t see that as politically feasible, but I do see open borders as politically feasible.
[00:07:00] And we have evidence to prove it, is we have regions of the world where there are open borders. You know, maybe not 100%, but much, much more than what we’ve come to realize on, say, the U. S. Mexico border. So, the presumption in an open border world would be that people have the freedom of movement. Let me put it a little bit more clearly.
All people have the freedom of movement. Because a lot of people today do have freedom of movement, including myself. I’m a U. S. Citizen. I can pretty much go wherever I want, whenever I want. You know, I have to fill out some forms and have a passport and make sure it’s up to date and things like that.
But otherwise I can go wherever I please. There are, however, the same time, billions of people who are relegated to poverty, extreme poverty, to political persecution, to the onslaught of climate crises. And if they try to move, they can be arrested, they can be [00:08:00] detained for extended periods. They can be effectively tortured, put in solitary confinement, subjected to grueling conditions in immigration camps.
I’m talking about the United States. I’m also talking about many other places throughout the world, Greece, Libya, you know, many countries. Australia have been implementing this model of holding people because they have had the gall, sorry, the gumption to move and try to find safety or try to find freedom or liberty or whatever.
So the idea behind open borders is that everyone could move if they want to. And some other models that we can look at are places like the United States. We have an incredibly diverse array of cultures, cuisines, languages, and different jurisdictions, different legal jurisdictions and different laws in different parts of the United States.
And it’s annoying, it’s a headache, and you have to go to the DMV, and you have to, you know, sign up for all sorts of things, and when you move from one state to another, [00:09:00] but it’s doable. And so, this idea that people would register when they cross an international boundary. They would enter into the commonwealth of that country, and that is, they would pay into the pot, and then they would be able to receive benefits at some future date.
And that is something that I think is worth pointing out as well. Because right now, even legal migrants do not automatically receive benefits. You have to pay into the pot the way the system works for at least five years to receive any of the, almost any of the welfare, or means tested benefits.
So something like that is the vision that with this book and like a lot of other people as well, I’m just sort of like laying out these arguments, are advocating.
Simon: So in terms of the various arguments that you make, there, there are 21 specific sort of categories you create. And certainly, we’re not gonna have a chance to get through all of those today.
People should definitely check out the book because we’re only gonna get a little taste, even [00:10:00] of the arguments that we do touch on. So I encourage people who are interested in more, definitely get the book. But you know that for the first like 150 years of the United States’ existence, borders were effectively open.
Can you talk briefly about that history and also just lay out your argument that quote, borders had not always been.
John: Yeah. So the key word there is effectively because for some people they certainly were not open for the first 150 years. There were people who still were rejected in various ways, especially along the East Coast for being poor.
People were actually, there were some state led deportation efforts in the colonial era in the United States. And then, there were the beginnings of federal enforcement and that, that started with the Chinese Exclusion Acts in the 1880s. And that was a reversal. And again, that was targeted at a very specific subset of people, people from Asia.
And [00:11:00] it was one of the worst and most explicitly racist, there’s a lot, so I guess there’s plenty to contend with, policies on the books in US history. And, it was a very quick reversal. So just a decade or so before the United States government decided to make it their policy to keep Chinese people and other people from other Asian countries out of the United States, they were celebrating and very dependent on Chinese labor. And that was especially during the expansion west, during the creation of the laying of the railroad. And then as soon as there was a slight economic downturn, and as soon as basically that railroad, that last spike got driven in, all of a sudden, the much needed labor was no longer wanted, and so there was a quick reversal.
But, you know, except for this very important and you can’t miss this part of the thing, until really the 1920s, there was a lot more open migration to the United States. [00:12:00] Most people, if they wanted to, especially if they’re from Europe and even Eastern Europe, though, there was some difficulty and some parts of Northern Europe too, you could get to the United States.
And the presumption was basically that you could do it. And then just thinking about physical infrastructure along the U. S. Mexico border, which changed dramatically over that period to, from, you know, part of Texas and the Republic of Texas, then the slow expansion west, there was no physical barriers stopping anyone from moving. And the way just in reality that a lot of the cities
that are now along the U. S. Mexico border function was open and people moved one way or the other. They raised their animals, they worked, they traded, they bought, they traveled, whatever. And then it wasn’t really until the 1920s or so that you really started to see both some infrastructure and then the creation of the Border [00:13:00] Patrol, which was a hundred years ago this year.
There’s a series of acts that were putting quotas on who could come from what country. And that too was really based on racist ideas. And the way that, I think this is important history to remember too, the way that a lot of the border towns reacted was almost immediate pushback.
So here I am in Southern Arizona and the largest border city in, between Arizona and Sonora is what’s known as Ambos Nogales. So there’s Nogales, Arizona, and there’s Nogales, Sonora, and it really is, or used to be one city until it was cleaved in two by both the law and now the physical barrier.
And when they started implementing the first border controls in the 1920s, people from Nogales, even people from the local government of Nogales said, we don’t want this. We don’t want people being inspected. [00:14:00] We don’t want to have to go through immigration controls. You know what? Actually, we will cede this territory.
And if you just put the border north of us so we can just remain one city, that would be better for us. That didn’t happen, but that was the extent that they were willing to go. They were willing to basically give up their American citizenship, or their, like, their life on American lands, because they did not want to have their city broken into, and yet, that is what happened.
These sorts of stories play out across the border, the U. S. Mexico border, and throughout borders worldwide. Border lands are places of mixture, trade, interesting and creative diversity. And what we’ve done is we’ve turned them into these hyper militarized zones of exclusion. And that has been to the detriment of the cities, the psyche of the people who live in them, and just the culture of the cities themselves.
Simon: And you also make the argument that the immigrants don’t [00:15:00] steal jobs, they create them. Can you explain that please? Yeah.
John: So, you know, one more note on that last question, which I forgot to mention is another, I think, important thing to recall is two other very late additions to what we know today as the sort of the border regime in the United States.
One is the actual wall. And so there really wasn’t any significant portion of wall until the 1990s. There were some bits and pieces. There was a tiny little, basically wire fence in Novales. There was some around between Tijuana and San Diego, but not until the 1990s. That is very recent in this country’s long history.
And then also, something like ICE. ICE didn’t exist until 2003. And people sometimes make the argument, well, how can we exist as a country without a wall around us or without this immigration enforcement regime? [00:16:00] Well, we did for a very, very long time. So, yeah, I think that too is just like remembering how recent, you don’t have to go back very far to see a very, very different landscape on the U.S.
Mexico border. To return to the second question, though, about jobs. Yeah, there’s a lot of popular misunderstanding about this issue, but there is expert consensus on this issue as well. So economists understand, I can pretty much say all of them, there are some maybe ideologues who have pushed back or have tried to find minor exceptions, but economists across the board,
anyone worth their basic fiscal salt, recognizes that migrants are good for economies. And they’re good for economies, especially in terms of employment. You know, the problem is that if you don’t really have a strong sense of economics, you think, well, if someone takes [00:17:00] that job, then an American can’t take that job.
And yet, it, this is what is called in like economic terms, a lump of labor fallacy. It’s that fact that there is, it’s not a zero sum game. In modern economies, jobs beget jobs. The way that the world markets work now is that things are incredibly fluid. Trade in goods is fluid and movement of labor is fluid too.
That’s not always legalized movement of labor. Sometimes it’s, that’s illegalized and exploited movement of labor. Nonetheless, it is constantly moving. That is a reality that border walls and immigration enforcement is not going to truly affect very well. And we can get to the inefficacy of bordering in a moment, but jobs beget jobs.
They just do. And you see that one person will move in and often, and they’ll be doing a job and they’ll be, you know, working, whether it’s construction, whether it’s in a hospital, whether it’s as a teacher, and they have to live somewhere, they have to buy [00:18:00] groceries somewhere, they are going to send their kids to school somewhere. And all of that requires more people to, you know, provide those services, build those things that they’re going to be using, or put food on their table, etc.
So, the counter example actually holds too, and I think that this is something that is maybe often overlooked, is when you take people out of a community, it has a negative impact on employment. So it doesn’t follow the supply demand in a very simple sense. The way that labor economy works. And even in very difficult times,
and there was studies done, right after, right during the Great Depression, when the U. S. Implemented the Mexican Repatriation Act, which rounded up and deported well over a million people, some of them American citizens. And there were studies done in small communities, when people got picked up and deported, it negatively impacted those communities and jobs were lost, not just so the people who were taken and [00:19:00] removed from the country, but jobs were lost for the people who stayed as well.
So the counter example also holds and further supports the point that it’s not zero sum and immigrants are very good for labor numbers.
Simon: Yeah, that is, I think something that often gets lost. And for folks who want a little more context into New York specific numbers and how immigration has impacted the economy,
we did an interview with New York City comptroller, Brad Lander. Great. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes.
John: Can I jump on that about a little bit? So before I came back to Tucson, I was in New York for a while. And, definitely talked to Brad a handful of times about some of these issues.
And this was before there was the recent phenomenon with Greg Abbott busing people to New York. Abbott and others busing people to New York. But, you know, the incredible, just, I don’t know, hissy fit that was thrown by especially Mayor Adams about [00:20:00] 150, 000 people potentially existentially threatening New York City is just, it’s just such nonsense.
And this is a refusal to recognize the immigration history of New York, which has made New York what it is. And, you know, 150, 000 people actually, if you just look at it per capita, and this is something that I, I wrote a bit, a little bit about when this was like in the news more is, there were a number of periods in New York City’s history where per capita the number of people who were coming were far, far higher than the 150, 000 Venezuelans.
And to consider that an actual threat is just, I mean, it’s hateful nonsense.
Simon: Yeah. And related to that, actually, because one of the things that Adam says, and he’s not the only one for sure in New York politics who says this, but one of the things he harps on is that, you know, we’re spending all this money on housing, recent immigrants. It’s [00:21:00] impacting education funding, it’s impacting, you know, all these sorts of taxpayer funds and it’s a drain on the coffers.
Can you explain why immigration and new immigrants are not a net drain on state and local coffers?
John: Yeah. So, you know, first it kind of depends because you can do a bad job of welcoming migrants and you can dole out a lot of money to hotels, and, you know, put out contracts or, you know, sign contracts to for profit companies that don’t have much experience in welcoming migrants. And this is something that happened in New York and elsewhere, and it is continuing to happen.
You know, for profit medical care companies are getting huge contracts. And, you know, I think a lot of it is absolutely overspending. I don’t think that migrants need to be put up in hotels like they were in New York. And I think also one really [00:22:00] key missing factor, and this is something that maybe even Adams came around to, but I know that the governor of New York did, is calling for giving them work permits more quickly.
A lot of the people who were coming were asylum seekers, and it is a really delayed and circuitous and just pounding your head against the wall process to try to get a work permit when you’re an asylum seeker. And giving them out to people who are wanting to work just makes sense. And it’s just like flies against like the sort of the ethos of that a lot of the people supposedly celebrate about, you know bootstrapping American hard work, whatever. So it does cost money.
You know, I think that’s clear. Then I think that should be stated to process people. And yet again, how we do it matters. If you’re going to funnel people through border patrol and ICE custody, that is very expensive. If you’re going to let people go to their families and let people get work [00:23:00] permits and start, you know, making it out on their own, it’s going to be a lot less costly.
Governments, local and federal, are not giving them, gift cards. They’re not flying them places except for extreme, you know, exceptions and very few exceptions. And they’re not putting them up for housing. That difference that there that differs a little bit from the way that refugees are welcomed. But that’s a whole nother conversation. We’re talking and this is what most people were upset about is people coming across the US Mexico border. So, there may be some upfront costs, but again all economists who have studied this recognize that within a few years, people are paying more into the pot than they’re taking. And especially on a generational time scale, the second and third generations are huge net benefits to local and regional economies.
And so, you know, you can knee jerk response and be upset about people coming and think that they’re gonna, you know, hurt your bottom line somewhere, but it’s just not true. And if [00:24:00] you look at the studies and you read through the careful assessments that have been made about these, and one of the key places that I looked at, and this is something that I was very much not first to, there have been scores and scores of papers written on it,
is a relatively high and short increase in the number of people who are coming to Miami in 1980. This is a famous study, a so called Maria boat lift, and there’s been contending back and forth studies of this for years. But when you look at it, 150, 000 people came in a few short months to Miami. That is a lot, especially at the moment of the population of Miami and people did fine.
People who were native to Miami before that were completely okay. And then the migrants themselves benefited hugely. And so it just overall, whatever way you look, you see positive outcomes. And that’s just, again, it’s just that you look at the evidence and that’s what we have.
Simon: Yeah, this actually makes me think of another [00:25:00] argument against immigration that doesn’t hold up in terms of the evidence.
And one of the things you touch on in your book as well, is that, you know, immigrants bring crime. Can you talk about the actual relationship between crime and immigrants? Yeah,
John: I mean, immigrants, like all people, sometimes commit crimes. That’s also something that I don’t think we should shy away from because we’re not gonna be Pollyannish about that.
And yet, to make a sweeping generalization about a group of people, based on the actions of one or two individuals who commit harm, is a real problem. And I think we should have been able to learn the lessons against doing that over the past century or so. But we have this sort of moral carve out about immigrants where somehow it is okay and the national discourse has been just grotesque in using, you know, some absolute [00:26:00] heinous crimes to sweep with a very broad brush
all the people who have come into this country. And when you look at it statistically you see that migrants commit far fewer crimes than native born residents. And you can boil down to a number of different places. Texas, there’s a recent study, I think a year ago, in Texas, and showed, I mean, disparity was huge.
The number of people who commit crimes who are U. S. citizens is far, far higher than recent arrivals. This holds in England. This holds in Germany, which saw political backlash when there was a series of incidents, which seemed to be pretty bad from everything I read about them, and were committed by some migrants.
But overall, crime, especially in places in Germany where a lot of migrants settled, has gone down. And so, again, like, this is this huge gap between [00:27:00] the way that we talk about immigrant communities, the way that we talk about migration, and the reality. And I think there just needs to be a lot more fact checking.
I think that there needs to be a lot more careful reading, careful analysis, and better presentation of the reality of life in this country, in immigrant and non immigrant communities. Right now, it’s just so far from the way that we actually talk about it. It’s just, it’s frankly, it’s disturbing.
Simon: Yeah, I agree. I completely agree. And I also think one of the things you talk about in your book that I don’t think gets as much attention as it should is that there may be people out there who think that, you know, a hyper militarized border doesn’t impact them, right? It’s to keep people out and you just go about your day,
you know, normally as a US citizen or whatever. But you know, New York is a border state and many New Yorkers may not know how, as you put it, quote, dehumanizing border [00:28:00] machinery targets native residents too. Can you talk a little bit about that argument, please?
John: Yeah, you know, you see it a lot more starkly on the U.S. Mexico border than New York. But we have a series of internal checkpoints throughout the southwest United States where, you know, right now, I couldn’t drive very far south without going through a checkpoint. I’m not going to be checked going south, but when I start coming home, I certainly will.
There are people in small towns in Arizona and elsewhere who cannot leave their town, who cannot go to a proper grocery store without going through a checkpoint. They’re U. S. citizens who often get typecast or racially profiled for being brown skinned or darker skinned or maybe having an accent. And they get pulled into secondary inspection, they get harassed, they get stopped, they get slowed down just for [00:29:00] driving down the road.
You know, and like for people who celebrate liberties, liberty of movement, even if it’s circumscribed and just in the United States, people who, you know, are, you know, have a libertarian bent or just celebrate freedom more generally, I think should be appalled by that. And that is, you know, just focusing on sort of the checkpoint issue, but then also when you’re crossing the border, US Mexico border, and when you’re going abroad on an airplane, you know, you are scrutinized. And increasingly, people are subjected to further inspection, to harassment, to surveillance of their technology, or they themselves, their images are captured, their faces is recorded.
Right now, along the Arizona Sonora border, there’s a I’ve talked to a number of War bush relations about this. They say like, we don’t have the manpower, but we know when people cross almost all the time. They estimate that 90% [00:30:00] of the Arizona’s border right now has some detection technology on it. So you can’t move in Southern Arizona, like very close to the border, without you being seen.
What is happening with all those images? What could be done with all those images? What could be done if you are, you know, considered possibly a threat, or an enemy of the state, or you know, even some lesser version of that under a next Trump administration? If you’re a journalist, if you’re a photographer, if you’re a hiker, and you’re out there and maybe you’ve said some things that the government doesn’t like, you know, how could that be used against you?
How could you be further harassed? I mean, I think that the implications for putting in this sort of infrastructure, this surveillance infrastructure, we don’t really have a full grasp of yet. But the possibility is in place to use them against U. S. citizens. And they’re already being used against non citizens very, very much.
Ankle monitors tracking movement. You know, cell phone [00:31:00] technology that tracks your movement and makes you check in. There’s a whole host of things that are almost being like beta tested on immigrants that could be then used in different ways against everybody.
Simon: Yeah, I think that is something that definitely people need to keep in mind, regardless of your citizenship status.
And then the final argument from your book that I wanted to highlight for us here is closed borders are racist. You begin this argument by noting what I think is, it’s simultaneously obvious and it’s also something that gets lost in a lot of the debate around border policy. You write the nationality granted to you at birth
determines whether you are free to move across international borders or are blocked by them. You talked about this a bit before in one of your previous answers, but can you flesh this out a bit?
John: Yeah. So, you know, I think what it comes down to, to me is this idea that we are [00:32:00] very clearly deciding who gets which freedom. You know, over the past century or so, I think that, you know, societies have taken pretty serious strides and to eliminate prejudice and discrimination based on religion, based on gender, sex,
and, you know, a few other categories of things that you can’t change that are part of you. And yet we have left off this one, and it is birthplace. And for that mere fact of where you were born, something you cannot control at all, yeah and this goes back to some of the things I was saying before, you can be subjected to a whole host of abuses and your freedom is limited.
And that the only reason is because you were born in a different place than someone else. And I think that just fundamentally in principle, that seems wrong, right? Like you have less access to safety. You have less access to prosperity, to [00:33:00] possibility, just because of where you’re born. And yet, you also see, and this goes back to specifically your question here, you also see that actually,
it’s not just some people, and it’s not willy nilly. Oh, these group of people who were born this place won’t have these rights, and some others will. It really is drawn very tightly, or very closely along the lines of skin color. And, so you see the global south has much more limited movement in terms of like how they’re allowed to cross into the global north than vice versa.
And then you can kind of drill down even more. And this is something that I looked at pretty closely in a number of articles I did a few years ago, is look at just like in this hemisphere, the treatment of particularly Haitians or black immigrants coming from different parts of Central or South America.
And you see that they are subjected to longer terms of detention. That they have higher bond rates. [00:34:00] That they are deported more quickly and at a higher rate than people from other, from even sometimes the same country, but who are just lighter skinned. I think the history here really matters too, is how borders were drawn in the first place.
You see them in many, many cases drawn by people in power around countries where darker skinned people are living. And this is something that has been enforced and reinforced over the centuries and continues to be implemented. So, yeah, there are very clear, very clear disparities. You know, one thing that always jumps to mind when I start discussing this is how the United States reacted to 9 11.
And this is when we really built up what we know today as the border enforcement regime. The very first immigration related measure that was undertaken after 9 11 was an [00:35:00] express order to not release Haitian migrants without individual consent of deportation officers. So that was the very first thing that was implemented.
So why? Like, Haitians had absolutely zero to do with 9 11, but the crackdown was coming. And they were seen as the first and easy targets, as they have long been. You know, one other sort of more quantitative way you can look at it is asylum grant rates and how people are allowed in or allowed the chance to apply for asylum based on where, what country they’re coming from.
And you see darker skinned countries, again, have far lower grant rates for asylum. It’s just across the board.
Simon: So I think that answer and many of the other topics we’ve touched on have drawn out who is harmed by militarized closed borders. But as we start to wrap up, I’m curious if you can talk about [00:36:00] who benefits from militarized closed borders.
John: Well, there’s a lot of corporations making bank right now. And you know, I’m out there. I’m at the border relatively regularly and there, I almost always see welders because the wall gets cut through because the wall doesn’t really work very well. You can get a saw at Home Depot and you can cut through the dang thing in like 15 minutes, maybe less.
And so, people who have pretty secure jobs in this area are on construction crews doing the remediation work and re welding shut the wall. So they’re benefiting the boondoggle of trying to build further miles of wall up into mountainous areas. These are going to be extremely expensive contracts.
I mean, there could be tens or even more, millions of dollars per mile to build some of these tracks of wall that very likely at this point we’re [00:37:00] going to get built under Trump. People are making a lot off of that. And then the immigration detention industry as well. I mean, people are so excited, chomping at the bit, to start getting new contracts under the Trump administration.
But, it also was happening with the Biden administration. I mean, immigration detention went up a lot. It was at a, you know, relatively historic low when Biden came into office. That was because of Covid. It was under 20,000. I think it was around 15,000. And now I believe we hit, we’ve hit the forties or nearing the forties,
40,000 people at any given time in immigration detention. In the recent months, the Biden administration put out a call for initial proposals for nine new detention facilities in American West. That is going to be a lot of money for contracts, that’s going to be a lot of money for GeoGroup, CoreCivic, and some of the other corporations who run these facilities.
And, yeah, they’re cashing in, and they expect to do a lot more of that coming up. [00:38:00]
Simon: Okay, well, that is good to know and good to, yeah, good to consider and be aware of. Painful to know, maybe. Painful to know, yes. Painful, but important to be aware of. Okay, and then my last two things I want to ask you, John, before we let you go.
One is, if you have any thoughts, you know as a writer, a journalist, and an advocate, how you think we can shift the narrative around migrants and immigration. And also, you know, a lot of this has been doom and gloom, and I think a lot of people listening are probably not in a particularly hopeful headspace, so I realize this is maybe a tall ask, and I know, I’m sorry to hoist it on you, but if you could give us some of your sense of hope, or why you continue to push for the policies you do, and why you think, you know, we could get to a more sensible immigration policy sooner than later.
John: Yeah, two great questions. One is, I think that [00:39:00] especially the left, the American left, need to regrow its backbone. There’s been a lot of debate about how we kind of got into this mess, how Trump was able to win again running on immigration. There was a, you know, much lambasted, but probably also celebrated in some circles, op ed in The Atlantic recently.
And I think the problem has been for a long time that the left has only been playing defense. And they have been very willing to call out the excesses and the cruelty of certain strategies, certain policies, you know, especially under Trump, but not exclusively. I mean, I think the organized left under Obama did a very damn good job, like, holding his feet to the fire and had some wins.
DACA was going on. DAPA was temporarily another one. And yet the politicians have not been really taking that on. I think they have been pushed and [00:40:00] they, I think that’s important to remember, but they have been trying to build political capital by acquiescing to the right’s demands. And what we’ve seen, starting with I would say Clinton, but I think it’s a little bit clearer under Obama, is that that strategy doesn’t work.
He was supposedly going to crack down. He became the deporter in chief, supposedly to be able to pass comprehensive immigration reform. He didn’t pass it. That is effectively what Biden did. Biden came into office singing a very different song than what he’s singing now, or what Kamala Harris was singing when she was on the campaign trail.
He was saying, look, we’re gonna, we’re gonna put a moratorium on deportations. We’re not gonna build another mile of wall. We’re gonna restore asylum. And yet, he didn’t really do any of those things when he came into office. And when he got blowback because people kept on moving, as people will continue to do, he completely caved, and the Democrats completely caved, and they signed on to a bill that was frankly to the [00:41:00] right of some of the initial proposals under the first Trump administration.
So they caved completely. That is not a winning strategy, obviously, because here we are. So, I think, I don’t run campaigns, I’m not a political strategist, but I think that it is important to stand on principle and to speak to principle. If you believe that people shouldn’t be discriminated against just because where they are born, if you believe in the freedom of movement, if you believe that all human beings should have dignity and be able to stay with their families or have a chance at a life, no matter where they were born or what, you know, passport they have, then you need to say that.
And I think that the left needs to embrace this idea that we believe in a more open world that we believe in the freedom of movement. And I think that, you know, of course there’s going to be then, you know, politics that get played. You’re going to have to concede some ground, but that hasn’t been our starting point for a long time.
And we have sort of flirted, I think the left has flirted with some of this. There was a whole [00:42:00] end ICE or abolish ICE campaign that existed for a couple years, and then what happened? ICE didn’t get abolished, and yet that hashtag has completely disappeared. Why? I think it’s because it wasn’t politically expedient anymore.
And so I think standing on principle actually is one of the key missing points of a strategic and organized left. So, you know, that is a little abstract, but I think take that, and then there’s a lot more that you can start to do with it. As for your second question, you know, what hope do I hold or what sort of positive spin can we see in any of this?
I think there’s a couple things. One is people continue to move, and I think that that is inevitable. Even in recent months, you know, in the past year, the number of people crossing the U. S. Mexico border has hugely decreased. But that’s not because people are fine and safe in their homes. That’s because a lot of people are bottlenecked in [00:43:00] Mexico or in different parts of Central America.
That may look to politicians like a win or something, but that is not dealing with the underlying issue of people being forcibly displaced from their homes. And I think if you blinker yourself to not be able to look beyond the border wall, then you’re going to not only miss the reality that is currently taking place that people are still uprooted, people are still in transit, but you’re also probably going to see that explode down the road or, you know, spill over down the road.
These people are going to be, continue to move, and especially with climate change. People will continue to have to find new places to live. And so that didn’t sound very hopeful, but I’m getting to it in a moment, is the resilience, the fortitude, the courage of people who are moving. They are incredible in many regards. They are facing some of the harshest [00:44:00] reality right now and they are pulling through and they are surviving and they are, you know, and if they come to this country or if they settle in another, they are making those places more vibrant, more diverse, more interesting, and they’re making a life there. And this is something that,
you know, there is a lot of doom and gloom, but when you are on migrant trails, or when you’re spending time in migrant shelters, it’s not all just, you know, people sort of tearing out their hair. It’s people just being people, and people being goofy, and people, you know, having fun, and falling in love, and raising their kids, and doing things that people do. And seeing that, I think, and recognizing the humanity that constantly inspires me. And that they’re able to do it and they do do it in the face of extreme hardship in the face of the brunt of state enforcement that is like just trying to throw everything out them to keep them out of a place. And yet they’re sweet they’re great.
And [00:45:00] I think that is something that is lost that humanity. That is forgotten, rather, is that humanity and because it’s not lost, it’s always there and it’s always present.
Simon: Well that is a great place to leave it. Thank you so much, John Washington, for joining us on Writes This Way. And the book is The Case for Open Borders.
Pick it up wherever books are sold or in your local library. Thank you so much, John. We really appreciate it.
John: Yeah, thank you Simon. Really appreciate the
Simon: talking. Thank you for listening. You can find out more about everything we talked about today by visiting NY clu.org, and you can follow us at NY CLU on Instagram.
Twitter and Facebook. If you have questions or comments about rights this way, you can email us at podcast at nyclu. org until next time. I’m Simon McCormack. Thank you for fighting for a fair New [00:46:00] York.
