Chapter 1: Get It Together: Troubling Tales from the Liberal Fringe

The Open Borders Professor

When you think “open borders activist,” you probably think: angry purple-haired twenty something, probably with daddy issues, screaming at an ICE agent. Political radicalism is driven by a profound unhappiness with life and, ultimately, with one’s place in the world—a rebellion against a system that’s made you miserable and a demand that it change to suit you better.

Hard-left activists get hysterical when things don’t go their way. Pure anguish. If they could only tax the rich, open the border, or abolish private property, their personal unhappiness would be slayed. Radical politics is a projection of one’s fears, insecurities, and inadequacies: I’m not the problem. Society is. There’s a famous scene from The Simpsons featuring Principal Skinner saying, “Am I so out of touch? No. It’s the children who are wrong.”

Stereotypes have exceptions, and Joe Carens looks like one of them. The University of Toronto political science professor seems friendly for a lefty—he’s clearly amused to be talking to an off-air Fox News host, but his amusement isn’t condescending, which is good since I enjoy being the condescending one. On its face, his background is about as normal as you could imagine: “I grew up in the United States as a middle-class Catholic kid,” he tells me. An Irish guy from Boston. Like most Massholes, he loved hearing himself talk.

Joe is described as “one of the world’s leading political philosophers on the issue” of immigration. His book The Ethics of Immigration is popular in academic circles (meaning nobody’s read it). But I read one of his essays. Joe argues, “borders should generally be open and people should normally be free to leave their country of origin and settle wherever they choose. . . . On what moral grounds can we deny entry to these sorts of people? What gives anyone the right to point guns at them?”

Our conversation begins. “I’m turning seventy-eight in a couple of weeks,” he says. He has a thick but well-kept white beard and a shock-white head of hair. He’s a smile-talker, so at least we have one thing in common. As a young man in the late 1960s, he studied theology at Yale Divinity School. “Then my religious beliefs changed,” explained Joe. “I stopped believing in God.” A theology school that turns Christians into atheists—not a good look for Yale. He couldn’t drop out of grad school because “I’d be drafted.” He either had to go to jail or to Canada. Instead, Joe dodged a bullet and switched majors. He was able to remain at Yale and study political science. While he was there, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on campus. Joe missed it. He confessed this was one of his biggest regrets in life. “I wasn’t tuned in.”

From there, Joe “taught at Princeton for a few years, and then moved to Toronto for a job where I’ve been for the last thirty-seven years now, which worked out really well for me,” he says. In 1968, he married “a fellow graduate student . . . in the Divinity School. We stayed married for thirteen years. Then I really fell in love when I was teaching at Princeton with a fellow Princeton professor” (the feminist theorist Jennifer Nedelsky).

“By then, my wife and I had . . . we hadn’t separated, but we were at odds,” Joe says. “I got divorced and got remarried. And that’s stayed. So I’ve been married to [Jennifer] since ’85. So quite a while now.” To recap, Joe stopped believing in God, avoided Vietnam, got divorced, married a feminist theory professor, and moved to Canada, where he pushes open borders. Trudeau, you can keep him.

Along the way, Joe became convinced that the concept of borders—the lines we draw and enforce to delineate where sovereign states begin and end—was fundamentally unfair. Joe’s dream is kind of a goo-goo one-worldism à la the hippie movements of the 1960s. “We’re all vulnerable in various ways,” he says. “What this whole topic reveals is a kind of fundamental problem with the way in which the world has been organized. It’s just not fair to everybody. And we have a responsibility to transform it.”

Joe sounds like a child. “Life isn’t fair,” I explain. “It’s not fair in nature, sports, business, anything. Why base your political philosophy on something that doesn’t exist?”

“Well, it depends on what you mean by political philosophy, and it depends on what you mean by it ‘doesn’t actually exist.’ So the ‘life’s not fair’ slogan, it depends on how that’s used.” I suddenly realize I am interviewing the Canadian Bill Clinton.

“Babies, you, and the people you care about are vulnerable. So, of course, you do what you can to protect them, but you feel angry when people hurt them. We want to live in an order in which people are treated fairly.” Joe’s ‘baby’ talk would make sense later when I found out about his childhood.

When it comes to fairness, I personally consider first what’s fair to the American people, not what’s fair to the world. Unchecked illegal immigration isn’t fair to American workers or American taxpayers. Joe clearly isn’t putting America First.

The paradox of Joe’s open-borderism is that he appeals to American values to substantiate his claim. “Let’s think about the fundamental values that America is based on,” he says. “I was brought up learning about the Statue of Liberty. ‘Give me your tired, your hungry, your poor, your masses, yearning to live free.’ So that was a powerful image of what the country stood for, which I think has been lost in recent years.” Joe’s just made the case for a world without borders by appealing to the values of a particular nation—which, by its very nature, exists within borders. How did this guy get into Yale?

“Would you be okay with millions of Americans walking across into Mexico claiming citizenship, starting to take jobs from Mexicans, dominating their local politics, throwing money around? Mexico wouldn’t think that was fair. Do you think that’s fair to Mexico?” Joe doesn’t want to entertain my hypothetical. He only traffics in his own hypotheticals.

“We have different notions of what the theoretical argument is and how the relationship between hypotheticals and principles works,” he says. Now I’m annoyed. Pure sophistry. Joe pivots. “If we lived in a just world, the problem of controlling immigration would disappear because the truth is most people would rather live in the communities in which they grew up. They speak the language, and that’s where their friends and family are.” Bingo. But then Joe plays the blame game. “We’ve constructed a world in which it is not fair to most of the people who live in it that they feel desperate to leave home.”

“Who constructed the world where people in Guatemala don’t want to live in Guatemala?” I ask.

Joe says, “That’s a complicated question. . . . I try not to engage in those debates.” What?! The highly esteemed political science professor says he “just wants people to reflect.” The professor hasn’t reflected. He just wants others to. Yes, he has tenure.

Joe argues we must “transform the conditions of the global order so that life is reasonable for the vast majority of people where they are born and grow up.” He’s arguing for a liberal utopia, where every country is equal, and nobody wants to migrate, but if some do, they should have the legal right to waltz across the border and claim a different citizenship. I’m smelling some segregation in the air. Joe’s perfect world is one where people born in Zimbabwe stay in Zimbabwe? No integration? Everyone stays put? Is Joe not for diversity?

“It’s a better solution to change the conditions where people live and to reduce the pressures for people to move. And again, I don’t think the United States could [say], ‘Okay, we’re committed to that, and we’ll do that tomorrow.’ That is not the argument at all. It’s getting people to take seriously that aspiration.” But if it’s impossible, naïve, and detrimental to American prosperity—why should we? And if America put its own citizens on the back burner and tried to make life fair and equal in every other country in the world, what would that look like? Would our friends in the Middle East like that? How about China? Hey, Beijing, step aside while Uncle Sam makes your society more fair. Relax, this will only take a minute.

Has the distinguished professor thought any of this through? Of course not. “I’m a political theorist,” he says. “I’m not focusing immediately on debates about public policy.” Okay, Joe, you tell us the world should be fair, and we’ll do the heavy lifting. Joe is trying to imagine a world where if you’re born in either Baghdad or Boston, life is so good that no one ever wants to leave. Oh, and everybody has the same standard of living. When you ask Joe how he’d restructure the world to make things more fair, he says, “That’s outside my area of expertise.”

What is your expertise, Joe? Joe says, “I’m a philosopher.” I started college as a philosophy major at Trinity College. Then I had a professor like Joe, and I switched to history.

How are you going to get people to stay in their own country when the United States keeps offering illegal aliens free stuff? Joe won’t answer. He accuses me of cross-examining him. As I follow Joe’s logic, American taxpayers should pay for housing, food, and college tuition for foreigners . . . in foreign countries.

The abolition of borders in practice, Joe admits, isn’t something we’re going to see anytime soon. It’s “not something that can be done overnight,” he tells me. “I’m not saying, ‘Oh, well, the solution to our problems is open the borders today.’ . . . I mean, there are some proposals on the table, but the idea would be to say, you know what? We have a responsibility to try to move in the direction of change.” Move in the direction of change. Bold.

I try pinning Joe down for the last time. “If someone’s in the country illegally and they get a DUI, should they get deported?” Joe says I’ve abstracted two items. Round two. “What happens if someone sneaks across the border and makes it to San Antonio? Cops catch them. No ID, speaks no English, lies to officers. They’ve been working for cash under the table at a big corporation, driving down wages, sucking up resources from the local community. What do you do with them, Joe? Send them back or let them stay?” Joe says he doesn’t understand the question. He adds that I’m “characterizing the migrant in a negative way.” I apologize to the imaginary migrant.

Joe says, “I don’t want to play that game.” It’s not a game, Joe! It’s the reality of what’s going on!

Joe’s response to pragmatic objections is to zoom back out to the cruising-altitude level. “I just keep insisting, the open borders argument, I say this repeatedly in everything I’ve written and everything I’ve said, is not an argument about what public policy ought to be tomorrow,” he maintains. He doesn’t have the perfect plan because a plan for implementation requires engagement with reality, and reality gets in the way of the utopia that exists at the level of academic abstraction. Joe’s detachment from reality is purposeful. He’s against “focusing on what’s possible in the world.” What he’s about, he says, is “stepping back and seeing something fundamentally wrong with the overall structure of things and how can we move gradually in that direction.”

At this point, I’m convinced Joe the Plumber (RIP) was smarter than Joe the Professor. You don’t need to have a PhD to think the world would be better if we all had it good. What do we do with that bit of common sense? Everything out of his mouth is a vague generality. But Watters doesn’t quit. “Okay, Joe, you’re the president. You’re not a professor anymore. You’re a person, you’re in charge, you’re going to do things differently. What are the top three issues you’re tackling?”

“We need to address the issue of climate change, and the United States is the problem.” Oh boy. Never mind that China is the world’s largest carbon emitter; Joe isn’t convinced that having America as the world’s superpower is good for the world as a whole. Imagine if Canada was the superpower? The second big thing Joe says we need to address is the problem of racism. (Also gender, equality, and sexuality.) He wants same-sex relationships to be acceptable worldwide. Remember, Joe is now the president of the United States, and global gay marriage is a top issue. And finally, number three, the big thing Joe wants to do differently is fix income inequality. Joe says he wants to give more money to Third World countries. Sometimes they steal it, but who cares? Joe wants capitalism to benefit poor countries.

I’m not mad at Joe. I’m disappointed. When he had the chance to step up to the plate and really show me something, he whiffed. An Ivy League–educated professor who’s spent decades reflecting on the major issues of humanity, Joe gives me boilerplate. Climate change, racism, and income inequality. How do we solve these problems? Joe doesn’t know. A job is waiting for him at MSNBC if he wants one. Even sadder, Democrat politicians are heavily influenced by professors like Joe. Pointing in the direction of fairness and virtue . . . without a workable plan to get there . . . while slamming the status quo as inherently unfair . . . is what the shallow left represents.

Wait a second. Joe is pretty privileged. Pretty elite. Peak privilege. What’s his role as a privileged person to help the vulnerable?

“Joe, do you feel guilty about your white privilege?”

Joe admits he feels a little guilty about his privilege. Ivy League–educated, straight, white male, able-bodied tenured professor living comfortably in North America. Joe says he does feel conscious of his privilege, and he “doesn’t deserve it.”

“I’m a white male, but I don’t want there to be male privileges,” he declares. “My wife is a feminist theorist, so I am deeply committed to gender equality.” He doesn’t explain how he demonstrates his commitment to gender equality. Maybe he does the dishes, and his wife mows the lawn, I don’t know.

Joe says he sees racism every day in academic life, “in all kinds of ways.”

I didn’t know the University of Toronto was awash in racism. It’s weird since it’s likely staffed entirely with progressives. I ask Joe how he fights racial injustice at his university. He claims he confronts it. I ask for an example. Joe’s example wasn’t what I expected.

Joe explains that a fellow professor was turned down for tenure, and he’s helping them with the appeals process. Not really the Selma March. I ask if this professor was black. No, Joe says, but “they identify as a person of color.” How does Joe know they were rejected for tenure because of their race? Joe doesn’t know, and admits “they might have been turned down for other reasons.” So Joe’s assuming they were denied tenure because they were a person of color? Unclear. But Joe is an ally of a professor who identifies as a person of color on a tenure track.

It appears Joe’s asking the entire world to restructure everything to be more fair, but Joe’s not doing much in his own life to fight injustice at all.

Does Joe have another example of how he personally fights injustice? He digs deep and scratches his bearded chin. Aha! Yes, he does!

Someone was going to be appointed to a position at the law school, but “some donors objected because that person had written about Palestinian human rights.” I ask, and yes, Joe concedes they were Jewish donors. After this kerfuffle at the law school, a report was written. Joe wrote a critique of the report. How many critiques have you written about internal law school reports summarizing squabbles with Jewish donors? I didn’t think so. These are the brave sacrifices political science professors make in Toronto.

I ask Joe what his thoughts are on Israel, and he says, “Look, I have lots of Jewish friends.” Careful, buddy. “Look, I think Israel’s got deep problems now, and the treatment of Palestinians . . .”

You know the rest.

Joe’s guiding principle—a constant refrain throughout our conversation—is fairness. He longs for a world that’s fair. “What I try to say is, look, if we find ourselves in a world, we have to reflect upon whether we think the institutions that exist, however they came about—are these just or fair or are they not? And if they’re unfair, we should try to change them to make them fairer. So that should be the question. The world you find yourself in, you didn’t create it no matter who you are, but you have to decide whether you’re going to perpetuate it or change it.”

I have a hunch something happened to Joe. That something might be why he’s focused on fighting unfairness.

I take a shot. “Were you ever molested as a child?”

“I’m not one hundred percent sure. I think I was sexually abused. I do think that happened, but I don’t have clear memories. I’ve been in therapy, so it’s not something I can point to. This happened to me at this time, but it did affect my stance in the world, I think.” A Catholic priest is “one possibility, but I haven’t got the specifics about it,” he tells me. “So it could have been a family thing. I’m sure it wasn’t my father, but there was an uncle who’s a possibility. I’m not sure. I do think it was probably connected to that because I have a psychological aversion to being in Catholic churches. That makes sense, psychically, in that connection.”

A renunciation of God after an alleged assault inside of a Catholic church would explain a yearning desire for fairer institutions. A fair institution would protect the most vulnerable. Babies are vulnerable. Was Joe molested as a baby? Who else is vulnerable? “Your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.” His striving for strong institutional protection under the banner of universal amnesty makes sense in the repressed memory of an alleged Catholic Church–related child sexual assault.

When people experience trauma, they often remove themselves from reality. It’s too painful. They have to detach to protect themselves. Joe’s aversion to the unfairness of the here and now; his preference for abstract possibility over practical reality; and his focus on what could be over the nature of what is are all functions of a man who finds comfort in a world of dreams, rather than the world as it is. It’s a compelling dream, in the final analysis. But it remains just that—a dream.