“Open borders” is a straw man. Nobody advocates that.

Oh, really? I do.

The anti-labor and racist effects of giving government the power to discriminate against peaceful workers, based solely on their nationality, should be obvious. If self-identified Progressives are not willing to oppose, on principle, the government’s surveillance, stopping, stamping, recording, searching, restraining, beating, jailing, and exiling peaceful workers who have never done anything to violate anybody else’s rights, based solely on those workers’ nationality and an arbitrary government-imposed quota, then so much the worse for Progressivism.

I think we agree that incremental reforms, where they can be gotten, would be preferable to the status quo. The important thing is to be clear about the difference between (1) supporting incremental measures for strategic reasons, in order to pry whatever limited relief you can out from under a horrid political system, and (2) compromising moral principle by accepting, or pretending to accept, that some kinder, gentler, more efficient form of international apartheid could possibly be just or prudent or excusable. (1) is a perfectly reasonable political strategy, but it is worth nothing, or even less, when accompanied by (2) rather than by a principled moral opposition to the violent punishment of peaceful immigrants.

As Garrison said, “Urge immediate abolition as earnestly as we may, it will alas! be gradual abolition in the end. We have never said that slavery would be overthrown by a single blow; that it ought to be we shall always contend.”