Great post on Clarissa’s Blog today.

I’m driven nuts by folks who rant against the injustice of having to compete on the job market with candidates who have a PhD from an Ivy, an independent income, a supportive spouse, a helpful thesis director, etc. And in the same breath, these very folks loudly denounce the nation-state and call for open borders, which would mean that thousands of talented, hard-working colleagues from Peru and everywhere else would be on that same market immediately, willing joyfully to take on conditions of labor that none of the current contenders would be able to survive.

She is herself an immigrant, but recognizes that the “open borders” stance is not tenable for a society.

The “open borders” rhetoric, though, is just demonstration of mood affiliation. Hardly anyone one really means it. Those who do mean it most often are those who wouldn’t be harmed by it, or need the cheap labor for exploitation and then disposal.

Open borders and ideas like it are a way of virtue signaling, but a particularly hypocritical one: it means that relatively well-off people are willing to harm millions of Americans so they can feel better about themselves.

I guess that’s not so unusual, really, but in this case it’s particularly egregious and obvious what’s going on.