If the US did not offer welfare, free schools and free healthcare to illegal aliens it wouldn’t matter much how “open” the border was. IMO
If Conservatives and Libertarians got together and ended welfare, ended free schools, and ended free healthcare, then I would absolutely look at the issue of open borders and I would consider relaxing my view on that (full disclosure: I ain't making any promises).
In my experience, Libertarians want to open the borders first. Then, as it becomes politically feasible, they will look into that whole welfare-education-healthcare mess.
I think the order is important, and in my opinion, Libertarians always get it bassackwards.
You would still have illegals taking Americans’ jobs due to the gap in employer taxes and acceptance of substandard working and living conditions.
Not to mention that if they aren’t paying individual Federal taxes and State taxes, they are not paying their share of national defense, judiciary, infrastructure, etc.
So illegals are still a drain on society even if not receiving direct welfare, free healthcare, and free education. Freeloaders.
Immigrants need to participate in society fully — play by ALL the rules, including paying all the same taxes and carrying all the same insurance and generally living like a responsible American.
They do not deserve even as much slack as we cut some American citizens who have several generations of productive contribution behind them. If the bar is not kept high for immigrants, they will never be more than a permanent underclass.
This should be the crux of any immigration process — employment sponsorship, criminal and health background checks, education in the laws and constitutions of state and nation, etc. — as a minimum effort to be sure they will become Americans citizens we can be proud of, and not shadow citizens. “Open borders” means none of this screening is done and can only result in ghettos and criminal subcultures.
“If the US did not offer welfare, free schools and free healthcare to illegal aliens it wouldn’t matter much how “open” the border was.”
That isn’t so, announce to the many hundreds of millions of third world people living on dirt floors and using horse drawn wagons on rutted, muddy, dirt roads with people dying of disease and lack of clean water and sanitation, that they can’t get welfare or free schools but that they can all move to America to live their struggle here with our wonderful infrastructure and western ways, and they will come.
If I had a deadly, poor, sick, life with no hope and was told that I could go to America to see if I can survive without welfare, then I would do it.
For countless other millions of people to find out that they could move here (with no welfare) and that if they were too lazy to work hard that they could always make it with open prostitution, drug selling, and introducing and manufacturing new drugs, along with gambling and more exotic porn and live in a totally open and legal market place of vice and human weaknesses, then they would jump on that offer in a minute.