Doors are insensitive.
They just stand there, entirely filling up the entrance to their houses and obstinately obstructing the way without caring who’s at the doorstep. Society would seem a lot more hospitable without doors, wouldn’t it?
Sure, maybe—but society would also be a lot less safe. The insensitivity of a door is precisely what protects you at night.
A homeowner who never let anyone inside his home might be suffering from a severe case of inhospitality. But a homeowner who took his door off its hinges would be suffering from a severe case of foolishness. As your front door is to your house, so your border is to your nation.
A nation that never let anyone come across its border wouldn’t seem to care much for the welfare of those who are suffering abroad. But a nation that lets anyone and everyone inside wouldn’t seem to care much for the welfare of its own citizens.
Some people might wonder why conservatives make such a big deal about protecting the border and make such a big fuss about open border policies. Aren’t we a nation of immigrants, and a country that has historically branded itself as the destination for the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free?”
Yes indeed, we are—but we are also a nation that strives to protect those who are already here. And if we didn’t screen immigrants on the way in, we’d let in all kinds of criminals along with the truly huddled masses. This isn’t just a hypothetical; take a look at the sheer numbers of noncitizens who have been arrested in recent years.
U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has created a dashboard that displays the number of arrests, detentions, expulsions of noncitizens over the last few fiscal years. The simple number of arrests is alarmingly large: between fiscal years 2021 and 2023, ICE has arrested over 387,000 noncitizens in the U.S. That’s a bit more than the population of New Orleans, Louisiana and a bit less than that of Wichita, Kansas.
Now, not all of these were violent criminals. A great many of them didn’t even have convictions or pending charges, but rather were arrested because they broke immigration laws. However, a great many of those arrested did have criminal convictions—about 126,000.
Another 39,000 had pending criminal charges. And over those three years, ICE ended up removing over 134,000 criminally charged noncitizens from the country.
So, not all noncitizens are criminals, but we can conclude from this data that a size-able portion are lawbreakers and do have run-ins with the law while they’re here. And the more we push open-border policies without screening immigrants, the more we welcome in criminals along with the rest.
This shouldn’t prompt us to stop immigration any more than we should super-glue our front door shut. But it should prompt us to exercise a basic level of discernment and discrimination among those who are attempting to enter the country. This simple, straightforward premise is the reason why the open border philosophy fails from the get-go. When you let everyone in, you can know for sure that you are letting criminals in.
The logic we all rely on to secure our own homes applies to securing our country. Sure, there are genuine racists out there, but many people railing against the border chaos are not doing so because they hate those coming in.
Rather, they are very concerned for the safety and welfare of those already here.
