The United States will never have open borders. It may eventually have much higher levels of legal immigration, but only if we reform the system in ways that both strengthen and liberalize it. Those changes won’t happen without an honest reckoning of the costs and benefits of immigration. Their distribution matters just as much as their total amount.

Economists regularly tout the benefits of immigration, as they should. Many immigrants, and most illegal immigrants, are fleeing dysfunction in their native countries. Predatory political institutions and a dearth of capital in these nations make labor unproductive and wages become distressingly low. That’s why immigrants want to come to the United States.

Wages are much higher here thanks to abundant capital and functional government. Immigrants get increased living standards and the protection of law, while native citizens enjoy more goods and services produced by immigrant labor. It’s a win for both parties. Labor economist Michael Clemens argues the wealth destroyed by trapping good workers in bad countries amounts to “trillion-dollar bills [left] on the sidewalk.”

The aggregate benefits of immigration, legal or not, certainly exceed the costs. But this is a top-line result. It overlooks the difficult fact that the benefits and costs — yes, there are costs — of immigration are not distributed equally. The U.S. is currently experiencing the largest surge in border crossings in a generation. Monthly migrant encounters at the Mexico border rose from about 16,000 in April 2020 to more than 206,000 at the end of 2022.

Numbers such as these obviously burden border communities. Resources are scarce. Public infrastructure and humanitarian aid can only help so many. It’s unreasonable to demand that border communities bear the short-run costs while the long-run benefits mostly accrue to others.

As long as there are governments, various stakeholders will squabble over who gets what. Immigration reforms have to pass muster with the various groups that can affect the political process. There are very good reasons to push for changes that permit much higher levels of immigration. But we won’t get there by haranguing the public with abstract cost-benefit analyses. To unlock the promise of immigration, we need a credible strategy to ensure the costs are not disproportionate for any one group.

The politics of immigration often rewards style over substance. Red state elected officials busing or flying immigrants to deep blue sanctuary cities and other upscale communities is a political stunt. But the wailing and gnashing of teeth in the receiving communities, which assumed they could reap without sowing, is also telling . Everybody wants the material benefits that come from immigration. Nobody wants to pick up the tab. Unless we solve this distributional problem, our immigration system will remain ineffective and discriminatory.

The chaos at the U.S.-Mexico border will spoil the public’s appetite for immigration reform if we don’t quickly pacify it. Perhaps counterintuitively, the first step to liberalized immigration is robust enforcement of existing laws. Only a strong government with control of the border can persuade the public it’s safe to liberalize. Border officials need more funding — much more. Grants to border communities to upgrade infrastructure should be on the table, too. We must demonstrate, both to U.S. citizens and immigrants, that we can handle even unexpected migration surges in a safe and orderly manner.

Border control is not an end in itself. The goal is human flourishing for individual citizens and the nation as a whole. Immigration achieves this, but only if we transition responsibly to a liberalized regime. Politics determines the basic laws of the land, which means any attempt to increase immigration that ignores the political process is doomed to fail.

People can chant “no person is illegal” as much as they like. Unless they help border communities by shouldering their burdens, they prove they are immigration restrictionists at heart.

Alexander William Salter is the Georgie G. Snyder associate professor of economics in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University and a research fellow at TTU’s Free Market Institute.