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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.

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,........

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