What would happen if the United States suddenly stopped building walls and instead flung open its borders.

But the idea isn't as radical as it may seem. For most of its history, the United States has had, for all practical purposes, open borders.

"Really, the United States was an open-border situation, worldwide, up through the early 1900s -- except for Asians," "There were Asian-exclusion laws. But if you put that aside, it was open borders for the rest of the world."

1. Border Security:
a. Our immigration system is universally regarded as “broken”. If what we are doing isn’t working, why not try something different?
b. There’s a notion that in the 19th and early 20th centuries Europeans immigrated to the US legally. But the word “legally” meant something different than it does now. The US accepted everyone who showed up with few restrictions other than 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and brief examination.
c. People from wealthy families cross borders with ease, so why put such harsh restrictions on people who immigrate to work for paychecks.
d. Putting up the border wall in high-traffic areas has simply pushed crossings into the desert, where more people die.
e. Jailing people for migrating isn't just morally questionable, it's expensive. The clearest beneficiary from this system is the private-prison industry, which receives millions of dollars to jail immigrants on behalf of the federal government.
f. As a result, studies estimate over 5,000 migrants have died from dehydration, exposure or drowning have been found, and many more bodies could lie undiscovered in remote areas. A 2006 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the number of border-crossing deaths had doubled between 1995 and 2005 due to border walls and increased enforcement in urban areas.
2. Agriculture:
a. They work at 52% of our jobs, so they help out our economy.
b. The North American Free Trade Agreement made it easier for business owners to invest in Mexico and for goods to flow freely across the U.S.-Mexico border. But the millions of Mexicans put out of work by these changes weren't permitted to cross the border in search of jobs created here. 

"If you think about it, corporations have open borders, but when you think about workers' rights, family reunification -- you have closed borders.
c. The undocumented population began skyrocketing in the 1960s when the United States started restricting the number of immigrant visas for Mexicans. In 1977, Congress capped the number of such visas for Mexican workers at 20,000, a number wildly out of sync with labor demand.
d. Much of the resentment against undocumented immigrants is rooted in the inaccurate belief that they damage the economy, and the semi-accurate belief that they depress wages in some sectors. 

But that's unfair. Wages for American workers have been stagnant since the 1970s, well before the latest wave of mass migration. And many economists say the destruction of high-paying jobs in sectors like manufacturing has far more to do with globalization, the lowering of tariffs that protected U.S. industries and companies moving overseas. Low-skilled workers rightly angry about