Western governments, the U.S. under Donald Trump leading the pack, are caught in the grip of an anti-immigration fervor, enforcing cruel and degrading laws that violate human rights and undermine public safety. This entire approach toward immigrants is not only immoral but also rests on false economic claims, argues Daniel Mendiola, assistant professor of history and migration studies at Vassar College, in the interview that follows.

Moreover, he says history disproves the claim that the existence of nations depends on closed borders. It is also simply not true that closing borders makes societies safer; Mendiola says only political will is needed for things to be different. But as more people than ever take to the streets in the U.S. to decry federal immigration agents’ inhumane tactics, Mendiola points out that a different world — one with open borders and without militarized policing — is possible.

C.J. Polychroniou: Border security and mass migration have become in recent years a top concern for Western governments. Simply put, they oppose the free movement of people while they enthusiastically promote the free movement of capital, goods, and services. Consequently, they spend staggering sums of taxpayer money on surveillance technology, building walls, fences, detention and deportation centers, and engaging in militarized immigration enforcement practices while also demonizing immigrants.

What do you think are the complexities of mass migration that has turned many Western nations against it? And what does history tell us about mass migration and immigration?

Daniel Mendiola: Well, for starters, there is a lot of misinformation about immigration, and some of it might seem intuitive at first glance, so it kind of becomes normalized. It reminds me of the classic debate between geocentrism and heliocentrism. If you walk outside and look at the sun, it starts in one place and ends up in another, so it kind of seems intuitive that it is moving around us. However, this “commonsense” approach actually draws from a narrow perspective with limited information, and it turns out to be wrong when wider evidence is included. We revolve around the sun!

The immigration debate is similar. Opponents of mass migration bombard us with the idea that immigrants are taking jobs, or using up resources, or causing other social problems, and if all we see are cherry-picked images, it isn’t hard to create the impression that this might be true. Immigrants do often fill jobs, just as the sun does visibly change position in the sky. But that narrow lens is a massive distortion of what is really happening. Immigrants are also buying things, creating jobs, paying taxes, and generally participating in society with all the same positive social and economic impacts as anyone else. The fact that it is an immigrant doing it doesn’t suddenly make having a job and living a normal life something that is detrimental to society.

And by the way, I view immigration as a moral issue before an economic one, so even if immigrants were putting a bit of a drag on the economy, for the sake of bolstering human rights, I would still support open borders. To be a more just society, we could bear that cost. But what is amazing is that this isn’t even the situation we are in. Much like geocentrism, most of the economic arguments against immigrants are based on clear fallacies.

A careful study of history is also critical for getting a more accurate perspective. For example, a lot of politicians will make wild claims (usually with no pushback) suggesting that a country’s very existence depends on having closed borders. This is plainly disproven by history. Most countries in the Americas were actually founded with open borders, and they maintained this practice well into the 20th century. In Latin America, where I focus most of my own research, virtually every constitution defined sovereignty by grounding it in a territorial jurisdiction, yet none of them treated the free movement of private individuals as a threat to this sovereignty. As long as it remained clear which government was in charge where, it didn’t really matter if people moved freely among these spaces.

This is still true today. Think about the border between New York and New Jersey: Hundreds of thousands of people cross that border every day, and yet neither state ceases to exist as a sovereign political unit just because people move in and out freely. International borders would function the same way if we opened them to immigration, and for most of U.S. history, as in Latin America, this was how they functioned. Until the Immigration Act of 1924, borders were open in the sense that, in general, immigrants were presumed permissible unless the government could show that a person fit into a category that made them “impermissible.” The categories making someone impermissible grew with the Chinese Exclusion Act in the late 19th century — the first significant immigration law at the federal level — but the border remained open otherwise to the point that even many Chinese people were still able to immigrate by getting identification documents from other countries first such as Mexico.

On the one hand, the U.S. version of open borders was somewhat by default since it operated in the absence of legal restrictions, as opposed to affirmative protections like in much of Latin America. Nonetheless, there is evidence that even in the U.S., this was an intentional aspect of how the nation was founded. As a colleague of early U.S. history recently reminded me, the Declaration of Independence included the crown’s arbitrary limits on immigration as an example of the tyrannical governance that justified the revolution.

Under Trump’s leadership, the U.S. has taken one of the most aggressive anti-immigration stances on the globe. In fact, his administration has even launched an unprecedented campaign against immigrants with legal documentation and even against U.S. citizens who oppose his inhumane policies. Is Trump’s approach to immigration very different from what Barack Obama and Joe Biden did? I ask this because many people, including Bernie Sanders, have said that Biden, for example, failed to tackle the problem of so-called “illegal” immigration.

Yeah, I’m not 100 percent sure what Bernie Sanders meant by “problem.” There was certainly a humanitarian problem with how much suffering immigrants endured, and a waste problem with how much taxpayer money went into inflicting that suffering. But if he meant that uncontrolled migration was causing some kind of crisis of illegality, that is just absurd.

There is certainly a lot of overlap in what immigration enforcement has looked like across the Obama, Biden, and Trump administrations — largely because we had the same closed-border laws in place across all of those administrations, and each was willing to use the violent capacities of the state to enforce those laws. Some people have even argued that the Obama era in particular brought the border into the military-industrial complex by ramping up collaboration with weapons contractors to put high-tech military gear into the hands of the Border Patrol.

That being said, there are some fundamental differences in Trump’s approach, so it would be inaccurate to say that what is happening now is just more of the same.

The first is exactly what you hinted at, and something that I have written about before: the crusade against legal immigration. The legacies of Obama and Biden are mixed in the sense that, even while using (in my opinion) deplorable tactics against immigrants whose presence had been deemed unlawful, they did take concrete steps to expand who could be considered lawful immigrants. Many of these efforts were blocked by Congress (for example, the DREAM ACT or other legislation including amnesty programs) or by the courts (for example, DAPA: an Obama era “deferred action” initiative that would have given lawful presence to millions of family members of childhood arrivals). However, other efforts did go into effect, such as the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or Biden’s use of parole through the CBP One app (which enabled hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers to start applications abroad and fly into the U.S. safely rather than having to cross a jungle or a desert or an ocean first in order to start an application at a port of entry — which was previously the only method available for the vast majority of legal asylum seekers).

In stark contrast, however, the Trump administration has attacked legal immigration at every turn. The actions are too many to list here, but just to give an idea, Trump officials have: capriciously revoked the legal status of millions of Temporary Protected Status holders and asylum seekers (including almost everyone who entered under Biden’s CBP One parole program); unilaterally banned over 90 countries from getting any future visas at all, including those who should be able to legally apply through U.S. citizen family members; and pressed for legislation that would dramatically reduce legal immigration, even compared to our current extremely restrictive standards.

Moreover, it is significant that this aggressive crackdown on immigrants is part of a larger autocratic project. This is not to say that immigration enforcement is not an end in and of itself for many in the Trump administration. Nonetheless, it is also a vehicle for asserting near limitless powers. The administration would love to have the power to just disappear people to foreign prisons, so they practiced with Venezuelan asylum seekers, though expressly with the intention to create a precedent to do this with U.S. citizens too. The administration would love to just send troops to quell dissent, so they tested this out with anti-ICE protesters, though they also pushed the legal theory that the president could do this anywhere, anytime, for any reason. A lot of people have already written about this administration’s autocratic bent, so I won’t belabor that argument here. But the point is that immigration enforcement is an intentional component of this broader agenda, and there just aren’t any real parallels for that in how Biden and Obama approached immigration enforcement.

Is it open or closed borders that pose a security threat to U.S. citizens today?

There is really no reason to think that closing borders makes anyone safer. Again, just as we might mistakenly think that the sun revolves around the Earth when all we have is a skewed perspective, it might seem reasonable at first glance that if there is a chance an immigrant coming into the country might commit a crime, then blocking immigrants would improve safety. Zooming out, however, there are just a ton of fallacies in this way of thinking. For starters, one of the core tenets of a just legal system is that people should not be punished for crimes they did not commit. If one person commits a crime and they happen to be an immigrant, that is something to deal with on an individual basis. Targeting a whole bunch of other people who did not commit that crime yet also happen to be immigrants is shockingly unjust, in addition to accomplishing nothing in terms of public safety.

A more accurate way to think about immigration is to view it as a type of population growth. When babies are born, we can be pretty confident that some small percentage of them will one day commit crimes. Does that mean that we should ban all babies from being born for public safety? Immigration is fundamentally the same. For both moral and practical reasons, it makes way more sense to just let people live their lives, and then to develop systems to deal with crime on a case-by-case basis as it comes up.

Another way to think about this is to return to the example of the open border between New York and New Jersey. There are people who have committed crimes on the New York side, and there are people who have committed crimes on the New Jersey side. And yet, leaving the border open does not lead to an explosion of crime on either side.

On the other hand, closed borders create all kinds of unnecessary dangers. Similar to how arbitrarily banning alcohol during the Prohibition era led to an explosion of organized crime, closing borders to immigrants has a similar impact. Though in the case of Prohibition, the demand for the illicit products that fueled crime was simply taste — people didn’t need alcohol, but they wanted it. In the case of immigration, however, the demand for border crossing is often driven by the fact that people’s very lives and livelihoods are at stake, so I would argue that the urgency to offer relief is all the more compelling in this case.

One last question: How do you respond to those who say that as long as there are nation-states there will always be political opposition to mass immigration?

The bottom line is that, while exclusionary citizenship rights might be intrinsically baked into how nation-states work, exclusionary borders are not. The nation-state can work just fine without putting limits on the right to move around. Indeed, this is how most American countries functioned until relatively recently, and even in the 21st century, regions such as South America have taken tangible steps to reverse course on the 20th-century trend of closing borders. Indeed, several countries loosened border restrictions considerably in the early 2000s, and Ecuador even added the right to migrate back into its 2008 Constitution.

But the bottom line is that if there is widespread popular support for open borders, there is no reason that nation-states couldn’t implement it. It’s just a matter of political will. And as more people than ever are taking to the streets to protest ICE, this is the time to stress that: Yes! Things can be different.Email