The worst argument in America’s immigration debate is what is called the existential imperative, which says America’s future — our very national survival — depends on importing tens of millions of foreigners.

Progressives usually frame the existential imperative in moral terms — restricting immigration betrays America’s legacy as an open, tolerant, melting pot of diversity and opportunity. Corporate-friendly Republicans tend to pitch the argument as hardheaded economists: “Immigrants do jobs Americans can’t or won’t do.”

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However, in truth, the existential imperative never really comes from the Left or the Right, but from the top down. Behind the moralizing and faux economic sophistication, it’s just an elitist cudgel wielded to blackmail American citizens out of their rights, sovereignty, and national identity. Indeed, the closer you look at the existential imperative, the more insidious it gets.

Pecksniffian hypocrisy

In the first place, it’s nonsense. The United States is a 250-year-old republic of 340 million people — the third largest nation in the world by population and fourth by landmass. It is home to the most productive, innovative, and generous people in the world. The idea that its economy and society will crumble without the mass in-migration of people who do not share our culture, language, and values is absurd. No one believes that China or India’s future depends on the number of Norwegian nannies or Australian farmworkers they admit.

And let’s be clear: None of the elites espousing the existential imperative argument believe it either. Corporations love open borders out of greed, not patriotism. Low-skilled foreign workers suppress wages, especially when they are undocumented. And our high-skilled visa programs are, by design, little more than white collar indentured servitude. Woke colleges and universities love foreign students because they pay full tuition, unlike American undergraduates. Democrat elites only support mass immigration to expand their voter base (it’s not a coincidence that the only foreigners liberal elites ever turned away are historically right-of-center Cubans).

Remember this the next time you hear a CEO fretting about unpicked lettuce or a politician quoting Emma Lazarus. Behind every assertion of the existential imperative is an institution that materially profits from open borders, usually at the expense of working-class American citizens.

And that’s the real problem with the existential imperative — not its Pecksniffian hypocrisy, but its role in the global elitist project to devalue national citizens and the privileges of citizenship.

Ordo amoris

However much elites feign to clutch their pearls about it, there is nothing controversial in asserting that nations exist exclusively for their people. Ireland exists for the Irish, Kenya for Kenyans, and Brazil for Brazilians. 

The U.S. is no different. Yes, it was founded upon a creed. But it was and is our creed, our nation. The American republic was a nationalist undertaking from the beginning. It says so in the founding charters. The Declaration of Independence asserts universal principles, but only on behalf of “the good people of these colonies.” The Constitution was written for us, “We the people,” to secure the blessings of liberty, not to the world’s “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” but “to ourselves and our posterity.”

Countries are supposed to prioritize their citizens. That doesn’t mean they dislike other people; it simply means they expect their government to prioritize citizens over others.

That’s what Vice President JD Vance was getting at when he spoke earlier this year about the ordo amoris — the “order of loves.” Human affection and obligations begin with those closest to us and ripple out: from family to community to nation and so on. 

That’s what patriotism is. This is why President Donald Trump’s America First branding resonates with Americans. It’s also why similar leaders of similar movements are on the rise across the West. Citizens are sick of self-appointed “citizens of the world” usurping their power, and are reasserting their natural rights.

The war on citizenship 

Globalism and woke-ism, like Marxism before it, have always been anti-citizenship projects. Elitist unaccountability is practically the defining quality of the modern Left. Whether it’s supranational organizations, such as the United Nations, the European Union, and the World Health Organization, or authoritarian power plays, such as judicial activism and Deep State governance, or public-private corruption, such as Big Tech censorship, or even Calvinball “institutions,” such as the “rules based international order,” or unratified climate treaties, everything the Left does these days is designed to bypass or undermine the sovereignty of national citizens and the privileges of national citizenship.

It’s not hard to see why. Progressives want to implement policies they know their constituents won’t support. And so everywhere liberals rule, they A) strip citizens of their sovereignty and B) import foreigners to dilute it.

In blue “sanctuary” cities and states, noncitizens are not only exempted from immigration laws but are allowed to vote in local elections. Under former President Joe Biden, the federal government not only let millions of unvetted foreigners come into the U.S., but his administration facilitated the invasion, with our money, through a vast network of left-wing nongovernmental organizations.

Western Europeans have endured the same kinds of depredations. Their borders have been opened, sovereignty erased, power transferred ever further away from democratic accountability — all against their will and interests. 

Trump, Brexit, the rise of Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Javier Milei in Argentina, and the rising international tide of populist, nationalist conservatism are all reactions to the Left’s war on citizenship. They are long-overdue reminders that nations still ultimately belong to their citizens and that elites work for their constituents.

And not just in government. Corporations could use a refresher on this exact point.

Americans rightly cheer when U.S. firms grow into industrial giants. But there is a difference between being a global business and a globalist business. When CEOs’ pursuits of profits lead them to lobby U.S. policymakers on behalf of foreign partners, or to prefer hiring foreign workers over Americans, they are crossing a very bright line. When they go even further and cooperate with enemy regimes, such as China’s, against Americans’ security, jobs, or privacy, they are not transcending their home nations. Instead, they are betraying their home nation and need to be held accountable for it.

A future of our choosing 

The national pushback against international elites is only the beginning.

It makes sense that the U.S. is ground zero in this fight. More than any other nation, it stands at the crossroads of identity and sovereignty. Yes, it is and always will be a nation of immigrants, but a nation nonetheless.

Citizenship is a privilege granted at the sufferance of each nation for its interests, not a universal entitlement. When we devalue citizenship, we devalue citizens, too. 

BECOMING AN AMERICAN: HOW TO FIX THE LEGAL IMMIGRATION SYSTEM

Of course, new immigrants will be part of America’s future. But its immigration system must be reformed to serve its citizens instead of the other way around. It should admit immigrants who want to join this unique, exceptional nation, not just its economy or welfare rolls. This means welcoming immigrants who create jobs for working Americans rather than competing for them, or immigrants who will give up their sovereignty in their homelands, rather than asking Americans to give up theirs. 

Open borders are a scam. Solidarity and sovereignty are every nation’s existential imperatives. Prioritizing citizens and citizenship is how we recover both.

Rachel Bovard is the vice president of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute.