Open Door Policy

If conservatives want to untether themselves from the worst suppositions of anti-immigrant malice and disassociate themselves from scenes of armored vehicles rolling down American streets or masked soldiers violently snatching up day laborers, they need to stop relying on the evidence-free anti-immigrant rhetoric that Mark Krikorian and the think tank he leads have been spouting for decades, including in his review of my book The Case for Open Borders (“Mi Casa Es Su Casa,” Spring 2025). The drip-drip of scapegoating immigrants for all our society’s ills has helped set the groundwork for militant antipathy toward migrants and the flailing, lawless crackdowns announced by President Trump and pushed by Stephen Miller. As a society and as a democracy, we need to walk back from the cliff of executive power consolidation and looming authoritarianism. Sane, humane, evidence-backed conversations about immigrants will help us do that.

Moreover, if supporters on the right want to pursue sound fiscal policy, they should reverse our harshest immigration laws and let people who want or need to migrate, do so. Any serious economist looking at the facts recognizes, as I lay out at great length in my book, that more migration is a short-, medium-, and long-term good for local and national economies. No less a conservative icon than Ronald Reagan called for such freedom in 1980:

Talking about putting up a fence…. Why don’t we work out some recognition of our mutual problems, make it possible for them to come here legally with work permit, and then, while they’re working and earning here, they pay taxes here. And when they want to go back, they can go back. And they can cross, and open the border both ways by understanding their problems. [Emphasis added]

There’s a lot to unpack and refute in Krikorian’s review. I’ll focus on one of his more exaggerated and unsupported claims: that the Biden Administration “effectively opened America’s borders,” which he says “happened because the people in charge of border policy didn’t believe in the legitimacy of borders.” And yet at the start of this year President Biden’s Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas touted the “tough consequences for those crossing the border unlawfully” and boasted about removing or returning “more individuals than in any year since 2015.”

Krikorian refers to “9 or 10 million foreigners who had no legal right to enter” during Biden’s term but doesn’t mention that around 5 million of those were legally processed or that nearly all of them were in some form of removal proceeding or only had temporary status, meaning the government was likely going to eventually remove millions of them. Yearly averages of border crossings fluctuate, with well over 1.5 million people apprehended along the U.S.-Mexico border in the late 1990s. Does Krikorian claim we effectively had open borders then?

To set the record straight, here’s what the Biden Administration did along the border:

• starting in May 2023 and expanding in summer 2024, blocked nearly 100% of all asylum claims for people who crossed the border outside a port of entry, even as they were simultaneously blocking people from accessing those ports of entry (with some exceptions or extraordinary long and dangerous wait times) to ask for asylum;
• continued to repair broken pieces of the border wall and close gaps in the wall;
• increased spending on and sought to expand immigration detention;
• deported a higher percentage of border crossers than Trump did in his first term;
• continued to separate families for no other reason than the fact that they crossed the border;
• increased expulsions to Mexico (the most people the first Trump Administration expelled in a month was just over 75,000. Within his first year in office, Biden more than doubled that number, expelling more than 200,000 people in July 2021);
• tried to speed up the processing and deporting of immigrant families;
• sent 1,500 National Guard troops to the border.

I do not list these facts to defend the Biden Administration. In my book (both literally and figuratively) they are accusations of gross misconduct that should be prosecuted as human rights violations. Still, they not only undercut Krikorian’s baseless claim but show how Biden, the Democrats, and the Left more generally gave Trump the tools plus material and ideological support for the worst of what we’re seeing today.

So, if Krikorian despised what the Biden Administration actually did, he would despise severe border restrictions—just like proponents of open borders do. Instead he peddles the same straw-man argument conservatives have been using for years: claiming that Democratic leaders are for, or have instituted, open borders, and then denouncing the misrepresented status quo.

John Washington
Tucson, AZ

Mark Krikorian replies:

The Biden Administration’s supposedly hawkish efforts at border enforcement were in fact half-hearted half-measures taken only when someone looked at the calendar late in the term and realized an election was coming up and the border disaster was going to carry Donald Trump back to the White House. This wasn’t even a case of two steps forward, one step back; it was more like a dozen forward and a half-step kind of sideways.

Writers like John Washington can say the quiet part out loud, but politicians in a system of representative government can’t be that explicit. Instead of saying the words “open borders,” the Biden Administration and elected Democrats merely asserted that everyone in the world has the right to cross the U.S. border and say the word “asylum,” and that the president has the authority to let in anyone he wants, in any number, for any reason. If you don’t want to call that “open borders,” explain to me how “unlimited immigration” is any different.

It’s interesting that one aspect of my review Washington doesn’t “unpack” is that open-borders advocates like him, for all their surely sincere denunciations of global capital, are in fact its unwitting cat’s paws. Like climate crazies in Europe who think they’re saving the world but are really just pawns in Russia’s energy strategy, open-borders leftists in this country are integral to the business model of cheap-labor corporations.

Some honest introspection by the open-borders Left would seem to be in order. The cheap-labor business model, enabled by the post-national Left, worked for many years. But the Biden crowd’s mistake was in trying to boil the frog too quickly. The result has been the “anti-immigrant malice,” “flailing, lawless crackdowns,” and “looming authoritarianism” that John Washington rails against. We should hope for the return of an older, more responsible, pro-American Left that promotes the interests of American workers and taxpayers by supporting tight borders and low levels of legal immigration.

Ronald Reagan, Union-Buster?

Henry Olsen uses the events recounted in Andrew E. Busch’s Ronald Reagan and the Firing of the Air Traffic Controllers (“Flying High,” Spring 2025) as a real-life case study in presidential leadership. Olsen does so in order to give readers a better understanding of this virtue in action and to help them better assess President Trump’s current efforts to reshape the Republican Party and American politics, as his predecessor did so successfully.

Although the review neatly highlights Reagan’s preparedness, boldness, shrewd negotiating, and media savvy, Olsen never mentions the wider, unforeseen repercussions the president’s hard-nosed actions had. Beyond putting an end to an illegal strike by federal workers, Reagan’s besting of the air traffic controllers led to a steep eroding of union power more generally and the rapid decline of the Rust Belt towns that benefited from their protections. Some embittered blue-collar workers would forever blame him for their woes rather than join the “Reagan Democrats” and further expand the GOP’s big tent.

Donald Cencarik
West Kewaunee, WI

Henry Olsen replies:

Mr. Cencarik’s letter repeats the oft-stated contention that President Reagan’s firing of the PATCO-represented air traffic controllers kicked off an era of declining union membership. It’s true that union membership as a percentage of the private sector labor force has declined significantly since 1981. Blaming Reagan’s action rather than changes in the broader economy, though, seems a reach.

Even a pro-union president would have been hard pressed to support union membership levels as American firms faced fierce competition from foreign competitors. It’s not Reagan’s fault that steel and auto manufacturers, for example, could not maintain their dominance in the face of competition from Japanese and other companies. Nor is it his fault that most foreign firms that created new factories did so in non-union states. Old, union-dominated states lost power as non-union ones (often in the South) gained.

Nor does Reagan’s action explain why employees in newly ascendant firms, like Microsoft and Apple, remain largely ununionized. Those people seem unpersuaded by union arguments that their remuneration and working conditions would be improved by joining a union.

The PATCO scenario should be understood for what it is: a clear decision to validate the rule of law rather than bend to union threats. Reagan should be celebrated for that rather than condemned for subsequent events that were largely the result of a market economy.

First, Do No Harm

In his review of Sally Pipes’s The World’s Medicine Chest, Tevi Troy adopts the tidy libertarian narrative that meddlesome government regulators should step aside and let “vilified” pharmaceutical companies innovate (“Good for What Ails Us,” Spring 2025). That’s all well and good—I’m certainly grateful for the benefits of modern medicine and a system that rewards life-saving breakthroughs—but Troy overlooks other “real-world consequences” when “First, do no harm” is replaced by an unfettered “First, make money.”

It’s downright bizarre that pharmaceutical companies push prescription drugs in slick advertising campaigns to the general public, promising relief and euphoria and ending with a call to “ask your doctor about” their latest product. Or that the companies employ bubbly, attractive young sales reps to aggressively push their latest innovation on doctors, offering incentives to boost the numbers of prescriptions given. The opioid crisis manufactured by the Sackler family for their own enrichment at the expense of families, communities, and lives is only the most notorious example of what can come of turning care into a business.

Elizabeth R. McCullough
St. Petersburg, FL

Tevi Troy replies:

I am glad that Elizabeth McCullough recognizes “the benefits of modern medicine and a system that rewards life-saving breakthroughs.” About that, we are on the same page. As for pharmaceutical advertising, I think it should be permitted on free speech grounds, but I believe—and have stated publicly—that the pharma companies have hurt themselves and their reputations by engaging in it, at a cost far higher than whatever revenue they have made from such advertising. As for Purdue Pharma, they have done terrible damage to this country and destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives with their actions, but that one company is not representative of the industry as a whole. Treating the entire pharma industry as if every actor is Purdue would do immense harm to American patients, and prevent both “the benefits of modern medicine” and the “life-saving breakthroughs” Ms. McCullough supports.

Mark Twain, Meet Harry Jaffa

Christopher Flannery’s look at Mark Twain and how he is remembered opens with a quote from William Dean Howells that Twain was “the Lincoln of our literature” and concludes that Twain’s “reverence for the highest things” made him “as much a philosopher as a humorist” (“Pure Gold,” Spring 2025). The great scholar of Lincoln Harry Jaffa, too, called Twain a “great and wise philosopher” (and his Tom Sawyer the “master of the noble lie”). Certainly Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper and Pudd’nhead Wilson, each hinging on switched identities, bring to light the difference between nature and convention. They even dramatically underscore the great self-evident truth that all men are created equal! But I wonder if Twain’s time-travelling A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court goes too far in portraying the triumph of progressive science over medieval (Christian) superstition, or ends up giving too much credence to the rightful rule of expertise, to make Twain an honorary West-Coast Straussian.

Herbert Mayer
Williamsburg, NY