I grew up on the border between the United States and Mexico.  I was a minority in El Paso where Spanish speakers were the majority.  I enjoy Spanish as my second language and I like Mexican culture, including architecture, cuisine, and art.  I’m used to periodic controversies erupting from illegal immigration and I’m used to the perennial presence of migrants.  I recognise that immigrants bring labor and talent to the U.S..  But the current controversy over immigration has roots in globalism instead of erupting out of concern for immigrants as individuals.

Neoliberals use borders differently.  To a neoliberal who owns a multinational business under the juristiction of many different courts in several different nations, a border is how corporatists can escape reprisals for causing harm.  When a corporation has operations in several nations, prosecution for crimes against persons and property is hard for litigants to accomplish.  There are interstitial judicial spaces between nations that allows corporations to escape judicial prosecution.

Also, globalists strive to acquire access to a variety of international resources through the use of capital.  They can use factories in foreign nations to assemble products and they can get cheaper labor there.  Likewise, bringing immigrants to the United States allows transnational corporatists to reduce wages that they pay to those immigrants and also reduces the value of American work and workers.  In particular, American scientists and engineers have lost value for their services when foreign scientists and engineers have been brought here from abroad.  Although we periodically hear that there is a STEM shortage in the U.S., there are plenty of unemployed American scientists and engineers who continue to be replaced by foreigners who do the same job for less money.  The IT industry has abused H1-B visas in order to import cheaper computer and science workers from abroad.

Making borders less effective allows global corporatists to utilize cheaper labor and sometimes allows them to escape labor regulations because foreigners avoid bringing attention to labor issues, even when illegal practices should change.  The idea of a world without borders benefits neoliberals because it gives them greater access to the world’s resources– even to the world’s workers.  While nation states often recognize natural rights, and while nation states often have coherent laws to regulate workplace fairness and safety, neoliberals can escape the cost of safety, fairness and better pay by utilizing open borders (obtaining cheaper labor abroad in foreign nations) and evading nation-state jurisdiction (by utilizing nervous foreign workers at home, and middlemen managers abroad).  Some foreign workers that come to the U.S. are impoverished and require welfare which allows corporatists to pay them even less.  Neoliberals are happy to externalize the costs of foreign workers.

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