The topic of immigration periodically looms in my political imagination. I have never done much about it, however. I once tried to build a website on the topic of “open borders,” but my own inertia doomed that effort (the site only lived about a year).
I’m pretty sure I wrote somewhere, but I can’t find where, that I have sometimes thought that the issue of immigration and open borders will be a new kind of abolition movement. I was gratified to read this post at a blog called spottedtoad, which appears to argue the same idea, more cogently than I ever could. It may fade, but at least at the moment, the issue is becoming more noticeable and more politically polarizing in the US. This is not dissimilar to the way abolitionism took hold of political discourses in the first half of the 19th century.
In the meantime, I leave with that same Herman Melville quote I’ve cited before:
“If they can get here, they have God’s right to come.”
[daily log: walking, 7km]