Immigration Part 3: The Ethical Case for More Immigration

What if I was a different kind of migrant?

Generated by Pixlr image generator using the prompt “a drawing of a person looking up at a tall wall topped with barbed wire”.

In part two of this series, I made the practical case for more immigration. That seemed like a good place to start, since politics is mostly about practical arguments. But it’s not entirely about practical arguments; most of us have a moral compass that guides our decisions. If we could raise our GDP by nuking Angola, most people would surely balk due to a fussy insistence that bathing a country in nuclear hellfire is bad. Ethics aren’t just for Buddhist monks and those killjoy Landers sisters; most of us have ethics in our decision-making mix. So, I think those considerations are worth writing about.

I currently live in DC, but I emigrated from a sparsely populated, undeveloped land south of here called “Virginia”. My town — Great Bridge — is a dry-rub-based economy; we surely hold the record for most barbecue joints per capita. Our exports are live bait and professional baseball players. The closest four-year college is Regent University, a Christian school founded by Pat Robertson, which is great if you want to be a paleontologist but don’t want to study fossils older than 6,000 years. I don’t mean to dump on my home town — there are good people there and you can buy a house with loose change — but as hotbeds of opportunity go, other places are hotter.