Last week the ACLU in conjunction with the Trans Border Institute held a conference at USD titled “Ending Human Rights Abuses at the U.S.-Mexico Border. I attended and came away daunted by the current challenges to more humane immigration policies and energized by all of the smart people who are working on the issue.

An editorial in the June 2nd, 2008 NY Times concludes with the following thought: "Every time this country has singled out a group of newly arrived immigrants for unjust punishment, the shame has echoed through history."

At Radical Immigration we agree with the Times on this. However we feel that the causes of this attitude are more correctable than the editorial staff believes.  The historic reason for excluding others was tribalism which in turn was driven by the need to allocate scarce resources.  Now as scarcity becomes less endemic in the world the tribalism and xenophobia it causes will change toward a more welcoming attitude.  Click here to read more about why Radical Immigration believes the Right to Migrate will win.

This cartoon appeared in the popular press in the early years of the 20th century. The image is certainly supposed to connote a poor Eastern European Jew. Nowadays the image is of a poor Latin American Catholic.

Frank Beard was an extremely popular political illustrator and this imagery helped to create the restrictive immigration laws of the mid 20th century.

We can't let this happen again. The calls for an "immigration pause" are racist as well as being bad for the US economy.

In this new book about the immigration debate Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders by Jason Riley performs an important service. He carefully takes each of the anti-immigrant arguments and presents good data, both historical and current to show why each of them is wrong.