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No, I want human beings to be as happy and comfortable as humanly possible. Open borders in a society that is not yet post-scarcity does not lead to that, therefore excess immigration must be stopped, but if we're going to regretfully turn people away we should try to be decent about it, because in an ideal world they should be able to stay if they want. Giving people time to collect their belongings and say goodbye to any acquaintances they might have made during their stay seems like basic decency.
I think of this in Rawlsian and golden-rule terms - were I in the position of an illegal immigrant who's been discovered, I would acknowledge that exiling me is within the rights, and in the best interests, of the body politic, but I would still regard a few weeks' grace period to put my affairs in order as something to which I would feel entitled regardless as a human being, being that two weeks more or less are not imposing a meaningful economic burden on the country the way my continued lifelong presence might (while they make a great difference to my own happiness). If defectors abusing that grace period to escape make it impossible to extend this basic kindness to arrestees who cooperate, then we need a system to crack down and disincentivize such abuse, so as to be able to once again extend that basic kindness to people who cooperate.
How do you square that with Murderers and Thieves that derive enjoyment from their actions?
In this hypothetical, your Ideal World is post-scarcity?. If yes and you would be comfortable with open borders for a post-scarcity USA, how important is the local culture to you?
In the usual utilitarian way - "as humanly possible" includes making trade-offs for the greater good, where we'll sometimes deny Bob what would make him happy because it would involve unacceptable discomfort to Alice. (In Thought Experiment Land you can consequently imagine a utility monster who can only derive pleasure from hurting other people, and who tragically can never be allowed to be happy in a just society; but in the real world, even seriously twisted people are capable of getting their kicks some other way than their preferred vice, and very few preferences for illegal things are truly fixed in a way that can't be satisfied by e.g. roleplay, so the question doesn't really arise.)
If we're talking about a post-scarcity USA in particular, where somehow the States have unlimited resources but the rest of the Earth hasn't caught up, then yes, you'd have a moral imperative to have open borders. I don't value the preservation of the local culture at zero, but human beings' lives come first. That's not a very likely scenario, although it's a morally instructive one and what I had in mind when I said that "in an ideal world" we would be able to take in all economic refugees. (Much as "in an ideal world" where I'm a trillionaire I would be able to give ten thousand bucks to every homeless person I meet without sacrificing an inch of my personal comfort and safety. This is, obviously, a casual, non-rigorous usage of "ideal world", since of course in a truly ideal world there wouldn't be homeless people in the first place.)
In an actually ideal, truly post-scarcity world… well, who knows? Such a world would have such fundamentally different dynamics from ours that I'd be surprised if we keep the same political system at all, never mind the specifics of immigration law. For one thing, if resource shortage is no longer a concern worldwide, is there even much demand for immigration to the US? Somehow I don't think people would be lining up by the million to flock to America and get minimum-wage jobs if they had guaranteed food, housing and healthcare back home. In that scenario, maybe the amount of people who want to move to the US per year shrinks to such an extent that concerns about alterations to the culture become negligible, and at that point it would be churlish to create artificial hurdles out of chauvinism.
Still, conceivably demand remains high and damage to the local culture per marginal immigrant remains constant, even if conditions back home are no worse for the would-be immigrants than in the US by objective metrics. At that point, certainly it would be morally acceptable to decide we want completely closed borders to preserve the "local culture". I don't really know which way I'd vote, but I would be fine with my fellow citizens voting purely based on personal preference and I would respect the outcome of that vote, whatever it may be. Weighing whether we'd rather preserve our local culture than allow safe, healthy, affluent foreigners maximal freedom of movement is a totally different question from the current state of affairs. Maybe the US splinters, with some states being open-borders and others not. I think it might well happen at an even smaller scale, with whole counties becoming vast gated communities some of which are outsider-hostile and others not. That seems like maybe the stablest equilibrium for Utopia.
But then again, would Americans be found to in fact care that much about immigrants' effect on "the local culture" in a world where "immigrants" aren't synonymous with "criminal underclass"? Where they aren't "taking our jobs"? How about if the native population is now immortal and at no danger of actually being demographically replaced? After all, a post-scarcity world is realistically a post-singularity one as well. And what are we even talking about at this point? It's unknown unknowns all the way down.
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Sure. Alright. I can agree to that much.
But for the love of basic sanity, don't let them loose! Give them the bare minimum of time to do those things - maybe a day or two - and keep them under constant watch by at least one law enforcement officer at all times!
Edit: You sneak, you edited your post! Two days or two weeks, that's a question of economics to me - can the relevant law enforcement agencies afford to commit manpower for that long without neglecting their duties elsewhere? But in any event, I have alarm bells going off in my mind when immigrants are just let off the hook, even if just temporarily.
Sorry! I have a recurring issue of looking at what I've just posted and suddenly getting a new idea. For what it's worth the duration isn't a crux for me, "two weeks" was a shot-in-the-dark example. I would still consider two days a massive improvement over "get in the van now".
It's a massive improvement for the illegal alien, I find myself noticing. An acceptable improvement from my perspective is "get in the van now" as a downgrade from "get in the oversized trebuchet now".
Well, it's a massive improvement in terms of overall human flourishing, kindness and happiness, and therefore by my values, a massive improvement in the moral standing of the people doing the expelling.
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