Richard Hanania’s argument: America’s democracy has come under threat from dumb white people so clearly a massive shift in the scale of immigration carries no risks to institutions.

I’m not making a race based argument against immigration (lol!). On no oother issue will you see Richard Hanania arguing that all cultures are the same or that all people are the same. So why this religious presupposition that immigrants as a category are always necessarily net positive?

Aren’t immigrants people? They are obviously not all good or all bad. They have different capacities to contribute and assimilate. The reason American immigration has had a mostly positive story is precisely because of heavy selection, accidental or intended. So it’s ridiculous to extrapolate those outcomes to a paradigm shift.

If anyone can buy a plane ticket to America, then your assumption that immigrants are by definition these virtuous, agentic people who moved heaven and earth to get here is no longer true.

Open borders is a religion, not a rational political argument.