Via Michelle Malkin, I learned that there is actually a guy at the Wall Street Journal named Jason Riley who is writing a book called Let Them In:The Case for Open Borders.

Believe it or not, the book has Max Boot, Arthur Laffler, and Lawrence Lindsey talking it up -- which is disturbing, because you have to basically be completely and utterly out of touch with reality and human nature to believe that open borders for the US would be a good idea.

In all seriousness, calling for open borders is every bit as much of a ridiculous idea as calling for anarchy, saying we should replace the police with the honor system, or calling for us to dump the military and defend our country via non-violent resistance.

As the late, great Milton Friedman once said, "It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state," -- and it almost beggars belief that this would have to be explained to educated people, particularly educated conservatives.

To begin with, if you can come into this country, have a baby, and make a far better living for you, your husband, and your child by mooching off the American taxpayers than you could if both of you worked in your home country -- and that would be the case for literally billions of people across the planet -- then an open borders policy would encourage a mass invasion of freeloaders.

That's the biggest difference between the waves of immigration we had in this country at the turn of the last century and the illegal immigration we have today; back then, if you weren't willing to work for a living, you couldn't settle in for a long nap in the social safety net, so it was either sink, swim, or go back to your home country.

Moreover, consider that...

1) The government can't even come close to adequately handling the illegal OR legal immigration system in this country now. What would make anyone think they could handle a greatly increased flow of immigrants?

2) A massive influx of even working immigrants would drive down salaries for American workers and put millions of Americans out of jobs. It's one thing for a multinational corporation to send jobs over seas, but it's another thing entirely for tens of millions of American workers to be put out of jobs in their own country by foreign workers.

3) How many thousands of terrorists who want to kill Americans would inevitably be greenlighted to enter our nation under an open borders policy?

4) Polls show that the majority of Mexican citizens believe that they are the legitimate owners of the southwestern United States. What happens, if say, because of an open borders policy, Mexicans and other immigrants from South America actually come to outnumber American-born citizens in some of the states? History is full of similar situations that turned gut wrenchingly ugly and violent.

You could go on and on with these examples and after this book comes out, I will write something more in depth if it isn't almost universally laughed off, but long story short...

As is, we're having enormous difficult assimilating the flow of illegal/legal immigrants that are coming into our country. Today, we're slowly but surely turning into a bi-lingual nation; foreign countries like Mexico are encouraging their citizens living here to be loyal to them, not us. Cultural tensions have ratcheted up significantly and there are parts of America, Los Angeles for instance, that even foreign papers are now starting to refer to as "Third World cities."

I'll grant you that in some sort of perfect textbook world, where terrorism wasn't a concern, America wasn't a welfare state, and where we did a wonderful job of assimilating people, open borders might be beneficial. But, we don't live in that perfect textbook world -- we live in the real world, and the people who don't understand that are every bit as detached from reality as the commie college professors who believe the only reason that communism hasn't worked yet is because the right people haven't been in charge.