Bernie Sanders:  ‘If You Don’t Have Any Borders, You Don’t Have a Nation’

 “If you don’t have any borders, you don’t have a nation,” far-left Sen. Bernie Sanders told a far-left audience on the Tim Dillon show.

“[Donald] Trump did a better job. I don’t like Trump, but we should have a secure border,” he said on October 22. “It ain’t that hard to do. [Joe] Biden didn’t do it.”

Sanders’ support for borders is a minority view within the Democratic Party, which is now dominated by a cohort of anti-border progressives who prefer to empathize with foreigners than with their fellow citizens. 

The younger progressives have pushed Sanders away from his prior defense of borders, partly because Sanders needs their support in his national campaigns.

In 2015, Sanders dismissed a progressive demand for open borders: “Open borders?” No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal.”

A progressive at Vox.com, Dylan Matthews, explained his progressive horror at Sanders’ pro-American answer:

I was disappointed, if not surprised, at the visceral horror with which Bernie Sanders reacted to the idea when interviewed by my colleague Ezra Klein. “Open borders?” he interjected. “No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal.” The idea, he argued, is a right-wing scheme meant to flood the US with cheap labor and depress wages for native-born workers. “I think from a moral responsibility, we’ve got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty,” he conceded, “but you don’t do that by making people in this country even poorer.”

There are two problems with Sanders’s view on this, one empirical and one moral. He’s wrong about what the effects of an open-border policy would be on American workers, and he’s wrong in treating Americans’ lives as more valuable and worthy of concern than the lives of foreigners.

In reality, borders allow Americans to create “a tight labor market” where employers have to bargain with employees for time and wages on a level playing field.

The tight labor market also pressures investors to invest in innovation, technology, and productivity, so allowing the citizens to earn higher wages every hour.

Clear borders also prevent politicians and business leaders from the temptation to cover up political problems — such as mismanaged education policies or inadequate investment — by importing waves of workers and consumers.

So borders both allow and pressure a nation of employees and investors to solve their shared problems and build shared prosperity.

The progressives’ favor for migrants over citizens was displayed on Wednesday by Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). “The people of San Francisco will continue to stand with the patriotic immigrants who are the constant reinvigoration of America,” said Pelosi.

President Donald Trump has solved the southern border problem created by Biden’s progressives. However, he has not yet dealt with the problem created by airport migrants, legal migration, and companies’ massive use of visa workers, such as H-1B workers.