I’ve noticed a weird issue with left-of-center people and immigration. Apparently, both of these are true:

1. Most left-of-center people don’t support open borders.
2. Advocating anything short of open borders is unacceptable.

I was observing in my constitutional law class that people were really suspicious of any attempt to deny benefits or privileges to non-citizen immigrants or even merely to illegal immigrants. Welfare, the right to work as a police officer, the right to work as a public school teacher… even the right to vote.

(I did learn something very surprising to me: that many if not most states in the 19th century allowed non-citizens to vote. This was done to encourage migration and settlement, especially to the west. Arkansas was the last to abolish statewide non-citizen voting, in 1926.)

This was just one example, but allowing all non-citizens to vote of course goes even further than open borders alone. (Indeed, my objection is that guarantees of legal equality between citizens and non-citizens act to discourage people from letting immigrants come in the first place.) And while it’s theoretically compatible with harsh restrictions on legal immigration and draconian deportation measures… I get the feeling those aren’t too popular, either.

Of course, maybe the answer is that I’m just wrong about premise 1. Maybe most people on the left do support open borders. (For those who are unfamiliar with my positions, I support it from a libertarian perspective.) But that would be very surprising! At least in one sense, they sure don’t act like it.

Proposals that frame this explicitly, as in Bryan Caplan’s “Let Anyone Take a Job Anywhere” seem to be very radical and unpopular, even with audiences that would seem to lean quite left. People are not very comfortable with the idea of boatload after boatload of Haitians coming to our shores to look for better opportunities. I don’t get the feeling that they would vote for that if you put it in front of them.

Or maybe I’m wrong about 2, and there are coherent positions short of open borders that are broadly acceptable on the left. But… what are they? It’s all well and good to talk about encouraging high-skilled immigration, but that means somehow using the law to exclude people who don’t qualify to come, including deporting people who come in despite not being authorized.

On the one hand, I think it’s somewhat silly to talk about “abolishing ICE” as a radical position, since that venerable organization was established only in 2003. But I get the feeling that the proposed alternative isn’t to give the job back to the old INS… It doesn’t seem like any method of actually enforcing immigration law is acceptable.

Maybe a coherent position is to have some kind of global “wet foot, dry foot”. We put guards on the border (but no walls) and try to catch people sneaking over. But if you make it across, you can stay? Maybe you have to hide out for a year and a day, medieval-style?

It’s just weird. And I’m not making this as a rhetorical point. I am just deeply confused about what the center-left wants. It’s like the mirror-image issue with conservatives, who oppose “big government” but support every particular big-spending program.