The Ideological Roots of the Open Borders Push

A U.S. Border Patrol agent counts immigrants before transporting them for further processing in Campo, Calif., on March 7, 2024. They were part of a group of immigrants delivered by Mexican smugglers to a remote area of the U.S.-Mexico border to cross and request political asylum in the United States. John Moore/Getty Images

Commentary

Why does the Biden administration want open borders? As a researcher and writer on immigration, that’s the question I often get asked.

Here are the three reasons that I think are behind President Joe Biden’s deliberate border chaos: electoral politics, extortion, and, most insidiously, ideology. I’ll start with ideology and come back to the other two reasons in my next columns.

The most dangerous driver behind President Biden’s open borders is ideological. Policy differences can be negotiated, but as we’re seeing on college campuses, people fanatically committed to an idea can prove intransigent, regardless of the facts.

When you see the word “abolition” used in connection with criminal justice and immigration, you might be confused. Americans rightly associate the term with ending slavery and abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison who were active before the Civil War.

Why are academics, politicians, and race professionals using it in 2024?

Those saying “abolitionist” today have appropriated it for the positive historical connotation it possesses, but they mean something else entirely. To see the roots of their ideology, you have to go back to the dawn of the New Left, as described by Chris Rufo in his book “America’s Cultural Revolution.”

Under their intellectual godfather, German academic Herbert Marcuse, Marxist-Leninists, Black Panthers, the Weather Underground terrorist group, and Students for a Democratic Society gathered.

This leftist alliance believed—as the Students for a Democratic Society magazine Prairie Fire explained—that the United States was founded on genocide, slavery, and racism. Its goal was to abolish the existing capitalist America and build a new society. One element of this was destroying the justice system. The Black Panthers’ manifesto thus called for the release of all black men who were incarcerated, no matter for what crime.

As Mr. Rufo wrote, “[Communist Angela] Davis and her comrades began to call not for the release of individual criminals, but for the abolition of the entire system.”

Ms. Davis said that “a society without racism ... has to be a society without prisons.”

The Black Lives Matter organization adopted the same agenda of “abolition.” The mobs that destroyed a police station and looted Minneapolis in 2020 shouted, “Abolish the police, then the prisons.” The “abolitionist” activists in the Seattle CHAZ commune wanted to abolish the police, prisons, and courts.

BLM founder Patrisse Cullors was crystal clear in this Harvard Law Review essay from 2019: “Abolition means no borders. Abolition means no Border Patrol. Abolition means no Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

The United States is the source of world evil, in her view, and thus has no right to exist as a nation-state nor keep anyone in the world from entering its borders.

Some Biden administration officials seem to share this core belief. Avideh Moussavian, a senior appointee at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, posted on Twitter (now X) “#abolishICE” in 2018 and “cut ICE and [Customs and Border Protection] funding” in 2019.

Another Biden appointee, Claire Trickler-McNulty, undermined ICE from within before leaving for a nongovernmental organization partly funded by the Vera Institute for Justice. The Vera Institute says that “the U.S. immigration system is an arrest-to-deportation pipeline rooted in racism,” wants no detention of people in the United States illegally, and grants millions to nongovernmental organizations defending illegal immigrants.

“Abolition” ideology also has clear links with today’s campus support of Hamas. Take a look at this course taught at Columbia University this spring by professor Mohamed Abdou, titled “Decolonial-Queerness and Abolition in SWAN.” SWANA likely stands for South West Asian and North African people. A sentence from the course description sums it up:

“Using intersectional/assemblage-based theories, what decolonial, gender-based readings and formulations of feminisms/queerness exist that evade the apparent tidiness of European feminist and narrow LGBTQIA categories that characterizes most (non)Euro-American political queer-feminist scholarship beyond the depiction of queer BIPOC as co-opted and duped, colonized pawns of ‘Gay Empire’ towards elucidating critical discussions on identity, agency, subjectivity, and dissidence?”

Parents are paying $90,000 per year for their kids to learn that kind of balderdash. But even if you can’t make any sense of that sentence, you can be sure of what Mr. Abdou means by “abolition.”

Columbia University now resembles Gaza as designed by outdoor equipment retailer Eastern Mountain Sports. Meanwhile, at Princeton University, students briefly set up a camp last week “in solidarity with Gaza to protest Princeton’s role in funding the ongoing genocide,” according to organizers Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta was among the faculty who signed a letter supporting the Princeton students and boycotting Columbia University. He is a “classics” professor who calls his field “equal parts vampire and cannibal” and the foundation of white supremacy and argues that it should be abolished.

Mr. Peralta came from the Dominican Republic as a child, and his family overstayed their visas and became illegal immigrants. Leftist academics such as Mr. Peralta do not like nations or borders any more than they do classical antiquity. In his book “Undocumented,” he wrote, “Demography is a [expletive]. Holla at me if you want me to break it down for you.” By this, he implies that without immigration enforcement, the “global majority”—defined here as everyone but white Europeans—will be able to dominate every country.

What we’re seeing at the southern border and on college campuses comes from the same ideological roots and ends the same way: anarchy.

Reprinted by permission from The Daily Signal, a publication of The Heritage Foundation

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.