Open borders

It is often said that the reason immigration reform is so difficult is that both liberals and conservatives have some thing to gain by doing nothing. Liberals get potential voters and conservatives get cheap labor but that is not always the case. Here is a different view from Senator Sanders. So 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."