I am certainly not an Open Borders proponent. I don’t actually know anyone who is, not one. If anyone is actually propounding it, as opposed to having people claim they are propounding it, I haven’t happened across their argument. And no, “I just want to live there” isn’t any more a basis for immigration, though it is how my ancestors and probably yours got here.

Nor am I saying we are in our current state helpless. Otherwise why advocate more funding to control what is happening, more judges, more border patrol. And your word “channel” seems to be the best tactic we have; we just need a way clearer view on how to do that.

I just don’t have the same faith as you that long term our world will actually be organized into nation states in the way we now think of them. Nor even the long term safety of our technological powers, for that matter—we are already fending off cyberattacks on power grids, for example. But that’s a side point. I’m not really worried about some sort of technological apocalypse, however, just wary of the possibility and hopeful that it can be avoided.

I don’t think my view of the (hopefully far) future makes me a doom-sayer, just a different-sayer. “Doom” for me is the total loss of social organization—anarchy. Even the mass influx that may occur despite our best efforts doesn’t have to lead to that. I’m not sure that the nation state is an inevitable form of social organization; I’m more concerned with the idea that there IS a form of social organization than that it take a particular form.

Obviously the idea of the nation state can cause its own particular forms of war—and no, I don’t think there wasn’t war before the rise of the nation state. Our exemplars right now are Ukraine and the Gaza war and the nationalism behind each. I would say that the thing that makes me think about “return to the Dark Ages” is the renewed rise of tribalism as a basis of political identity. And that same urge is destroying nation states as we watch: actual tribalism is tearing apart places in Africa and SE Asia.

I am definitely glad to have lived my 80 years in a democracy and am horrified at the apparent surge of preference for authoritarianism, world-wide as well as in the fevered visions of trumpites. I’m not long term convinced we will have the same political structures in say, 200 years. As long as any such new structures let people live under the stability of some form of rule of law applicable equally to everyone, I’m cool with the idea. That rule is, for me, the root aspiration we need to keep up hope for the future. The loss of that is what I am worried about far more than who comes under it.

"The anti-American Left despises our culture" strikes me as much an overstatement as anything on the Statue of Liberty. There are certainly things I despise about our "culture" but I don't see that as making me anti-American. What IS our "culture?" In what ways is it perfect? In what ways imperfect and in need of change? You can't make broad statements without looking at the devil in the details. I'm I guess center-left, in that I admire a lot of farther Left goals but don't think they can be forced onto the population any more than theocracy can, until the population is ready as a whole to accept them. And so many of what were once "Leftist" goals HAVE been accepted by the population as a whole.