Reopen the Golden Door

Repeal The Immigration and Nationality Act: immigration restrictionism is the Slave Power of the 21st century

Silvaria Lysandra Zemaitis

17 Apr 2026 — 10 min read

In 2025, 31 people died in the custody of ICE. In 2026, the count has already reached fifteen—and it is only April. Nearly every one of those deaths, as with nearly every death in ICE custody, would have been prevented with adequate medical care and humane treatment. And this is almost certainly an undercount—ICE systematically “releases” near-dead detainees to have their deaths occur “not in custody.” And this is “merely” the fate of those “undocumented” persons who make it across the border and fail to slip into the shadows of American society—those who don’t fare far worse. Since 1998, at least 8,000 migrants have died trying to cross the border from Mexico to the US. This is, again, considered an undercount.

Just in the last year and three months, we have seen abuses and depredations that shock the conscience. The murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in the name of immigration enforcement. The deportation of migrants, many of them legally in the United States, to the CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador. Pregnant victims of sexual abuse herded into an unsanitary camp in Texas, seemingly to ensure those pregnancies are carried to term. And these build on the horrors of the first Trump term—forced hysterectomies performed on detained women at the Irwin County Detention Center, calling back to late 19th and early 20th century sterilization campaigns. But it would be a grave mistake to presume that these horrors began with this administration.

Every administration since 1996 has expanded the size and scope of the deportation state. It was a Democrat, Bill Clinton, who signed IIRIRA, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act, which dramatically expanded the size and scale of immigration enforcement. The 8,000 migrants who died trying to get to the US border died as a direct result of Clinton-era border policy, including IIRIRA and Operation Gatekeeper, which deliberately funneled crossings into lethal desert terrain. Bush used the post 9/11 national security obsession to create DHS, including ICE. The 287(g) program deputized local and state police as interior enforcers of immigration restriction. Obama, who was known as “Deporter-in-Chief”, removed more people via immigration orders than any president in history, and expanded the practice of family detention. “Kids in cages” was an Obama policy.

Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, was an Obama appointee. He won a Presidential Rank award for extraordinary service.

This is how the system works. This is what immigration law does.

This is what “border security” means.

When a society declares that a person’s presence in the United States is illegal per se—not based on due process, but on birthplace, then you create a class of people who are bound by the law but never protected. You create a subordinate caste that is at the mercy of both private and state power—they can be exploited without recourse, they cannot rely on police protection, they cannot get medical care. And it creates a class of people whose deaths are an intended goal of public policy.

Thousands dead, as an explicit policy goal. All of it costing the American people billions of dollars a year—ICE alone received roughly $70 billion in the 2025 reconciliation bill—billions that could be used for the actual health and actual welfare of its citizens. And for what?

Allegedly, we must do this because of wages. Increasing the supply of labor will depress wages for “native-born” workers, we are told. But aside from the fact that this is an over-simplification at minimum (wage effects are localized and temporary, and more than compensated for by increased demand, as the Nobel-winning work of Peri and Card shows), even if we did accept this incorrect premise, even if it were true, what is this but a rehash of the framing of slavery as a necessary evil? Is there no other way to protect one group of workers other than to inflict this kind of human suffering? Or is this merely a way for the powerful to deflect attention from their ballooning share of the nation’s wealth?

Some argue this is needed because too many migrants would strain our infrastructure. Supposedly it would cost too much. Again, a misrepresentation of the facts, but even beyond this, do we have no other means of addressing this? Shall we really close our eyes to a vast wasteland of human suffering merely because it may be difficult or temporarily uncomfortable to alleviate that suffering? What does it say about our moral framework? About our lofty claims to moral responsibility?

Some argue for security risks; and yes, it may make sense to, after affording a migrant the same due process rights all of us have, say that a given migrant cannot stay within our borders. That does not necessitate a vast network of torture camps and mass surveillance and systematic neglect.

Some argue that immigrants “undermine cultural cohesion.” This is not even worth addressing; cultures have changed for the entirety of human history, and will continue to change. And this has been foundational to the American experience—every new immigrant group, from Irish people, to Jewish people, to Chinese people, and everyone in between, has been vilified as a threat to American culture and the American way of life, and in every case, the vilifiers were wrong.

It is more appropriate to ask what we have lost than what we gain from immigration restrictions.

What have we lost?

The moral turpitude (itself a term of art deployed against migrants, but more appropriate for the entire system), by itself, should be a damning case against the idea of restricting immigration. The human suffering it generates should condemn it alone. But beyond that, the economic case is damning, and the lost wealth represents human suffering in its own right.

Economists such as Michael Clemens have persuasively demonstrated that immigration restrictionism is one of the largest drags on the global economy in existence. Even a five percent increase in worker mobility would have the same economic impact as a global regime of universal free trade; removing all immigration barriers could double the size of the global economy. But how? Simply put—workers are more productive in wealthy economies. This flows back into tax revenue, into labor supply, into aggregate demand. The reality is that immigration creates more demand—more jobs to fill that demand—than it supplants.

But ultimately, the case against the immigration regime is moral. On a fundamental level, the freedom to work and live in a place of one’s choice is a human right. It is an intrinsic violation of liberal democratic principles to use state violence to infringe this right. This is even more salient when one considers the element of desert. What did you do to deserve the immense quality of life from being born in a wealthy developed country as opposed to a poor developing country? Why does being born in San Diego versus Tijuana, or Brownsville versus Matamoros, mean that you have a right to a certain quality of life that your Mexican counterpart does not? What gives Americans the right to point a gun at them and say, “turn around, or die?” Carens (1987) stated it bluntly—citizenship in a wealthy developed country functions as effectively feudal peerage. It, like slavery, is a moral stain on the American body politic, and like slavery, it corrupts that body politic in tangible, visible ways.

Kukathas (2021) lays out the real-world impact of “the border.” The border is not just the Rio Grande, or the international waterline. It is nationwide, constant surveillance and enforcement. From employment, to education, to even marriage—marriages between citizens and non-citizens are heavily scrutinized—“the border” represents a constant, ever-present demand that any given person prove their right to be here at any given time. This administration asserting that everyone must carry immigration papers on their person at all times, or risk deportation—the “papers please” regime—is simply a logical extension of this. And indeed, it could be said that Trump is the first president to take immigration law to its logical conclusion—as we have seen in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and Minneapolis. One looks to the Anthony Burns case (1854) to see the parallel—Slave Power enforced against an escaped Black man while abolitionists lined the streets. In both cases, the law demands compliance, and the will of the people is rendered inert.

One must realize that a legal framework that requires a fascist to fully realize is itself fascist.

And it corrupts our society in many other ways. Immigration enforcement is a category of law that supersedes nearly every institutional check. Immigrants in detention get limited or no due process. Employers, landlords, and educational institutions must enforce immigration law via the I-9 and E-Verify. And now, ICE has a Stasi-like tip line to report “illegals”. It has degraded the constitutional framework, directly fueling the expansion of the imperial presidency, the destruction of asylum law, the practice of indefinite detention without trial, and the use of military assets to facilitate deportation, all without due process.

And not only did immigration restriction warp American politics around it—it was and is the entire driving force for American fascist politics. And today it is now being used to justify the breaking of American institutions.

It is important to understand that the institutions tried to mollify the restrictionists, but nothing was ever enough. Not the 1996 IIRIRA. Not DHS and ICE. Not Obama’s deportations. None of it was acceptable. None of it was enough for immigration restrictionists. They wanted mass, indiscriminate deportations. They wanted to impose a specific demographic configuration by force. All justified by the ideological framework of “border security.”

This is all analogous to the South’s insistence that the North enforce slavery. It maps cleanly onto the outrageous Dred Scott decision that essentially imposed Slave Power on the entire country. It recalls how every political decision was made in the context of “does it help or hurt slavery.” The framework of “border security” operates on the same implicit hierarchy of “some humans count more than others” that “states' rights” did. And it is enforced with the same violence, even against those supposedly in the favored demographic. Charles Torrey, a white man, died in a Maryland prison cell in 1846 for helping slaves escape. Alex Pretti, a white man, was shot dead by ICE agents in 2026 for defending an immigrant. The words changed. The statutes changed. The fundamental “crime” did not—solidarity with those the law declares subhuman, with the penalty being death.

None of this is to say that immigration restrictionism is as horrifying as slavery. But the horrors are real.

Make no mistake, they are of the same fruit. America, at first, did not have immigration restrictions for the most part. No papers, no visas, no quotas. People came to live and work. Immigration law as we know it emerged purely in the context of racism. First came the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, targeting West Coast Chinese laborers. Then the 1924 national origin quota system, explicitly by proto-fascist Klansmen and eugenicists to preserve “Nordic racial purity”. Then the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act—the INA, authored by a fanatical nativist and antisemite. While the 1965 Hart-Celler Act was a mild deviation from the pattern, it left the overall repressive architecture in place, to be expanded and iterated on in future moments of racial panic.

Just as in 1861, an obsession with maintaining a racialized caste system has brought our country to the brink of disaster. Just as in 1861, “the border” has woven violence and exploitation into the very sinews of our nation. Just as in 1861, there is no room for moderation, as even the moderates learned.

Immigration law is built on fascist assumptions, with fascist rationales. It cannot be reformed. It must be abolished. The fruit is rotten, and the tree must be hacked down.

The demand is simple and two-fold. Repeal the McCarran-Walter INA, in its entirety, with all its riders and expansions. Repeal the Homeland Security Act, abolishing ICE and DHS and separating its other agencies into appropriate departments. While some might advocate a less radical solution, such as returning to the INS, this is a trap—INS performed the same function, under the same architecture. The system cannot be reformed. It must be destroyed. The only immigration controls should be conducted based on a due process adjudication of threat—violent felonies, and active terrorism designations, as well as facilitating a speedy, humane registration process for civic integration. In a true emergency case, such as a pandemic, temporary travel restrictions may be justified, with a high amount of scrutiny, given the precedent of how emergency powers have been abused to extend restrictions beyond their justification. The billions we spend on immigration enforcement should be redirected towards real human priorities, as well as integrating migrants into our society. In short, we must offer a presumption of welcome to all migrants, including undocumented persons already here, to live and work here.

As you are reading this, there are children separated from their families, prisoners being beaten and abused, and sick people dying in detention cells, and the United States, having declared these human beings “illegal”, is spending tens of thousands a person to keep these people locked up in horrifying conditions, in order to return them to even worse conditions in the places they fled. Meanwhile, American citizens are being murdered by unmasked thugs in the name of “border control”, while an ever tightening surveillance net—one now even extending to our airports—tightens the noose around the neck of Americans. It is an atrocity. It is a depravity. It is a moral abattoir. And it must end.

Fling back open the golden door and let its light shine once again into the world. Repeal the INA.

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!