Each year, there are millions of people who for one reason or another decide to leave their banana-republic homelands in search of greener pastures. Maybe they can’t find employment, they aren’t safe from bandits or warlords, perhaps their homeland is torn by civil war. In one manner or another, their governments have utterly failed them.

And so they leave.

They quickly learn that they’re not allowed to go anywhere else — at least not for the purposes (i.e., work) they had in mind.  If they “succeed” at crossing unfriendly borders, they’ll likely work for what most Americans would consider less-than-subsistence wages, in conditions that are far from tolerable.

For suffering these injustices they will be villainized, accused of “stealing our jobs.”  (Ironically, if you’re a businessman operating in one of these countries, you’re villainized for “sending jobs overseas,” accused of exploiting the poor and/or depriving good white people your countrymen of employment.)

If caught, they’ll be told, “There’s no room for you, here. Go back to your own country, and if you want to come back here, do it the right way.” Whatever that means.

The “right way” is designed to keep “them” out.

Since only exploiters benefit from restrictive immigration laws (as only exploiters can benefit from slavery), only the exploiters are harmed by free immigration: only those who have been extracting economic rents as a result of the violent oppression of the non-native poor.

Do you want to continue exploiting, continue hurting people?  Or do you want to give them a chance at human dignity?  If you care about the poor, hell, if you care about your own well-being, then you’ve got to have some compassion for those people in the world who have far less than you, they love your freedom, too.

Can you blame them for wanting a tiny piece of it?