The New and Improved Sam Spade Good Post Gallery.

[TDAS04]

The left has to choose. Either you have universal healthcare or you let the whole world into the country. Can't have both, not in the long run. But emotional stories about children always work wonders for the immigration lobby.

Ultimately however, this fails the morals of most thinking leftists. Most left-wingers want equality of opportunity, to allow all people to reach their potential and provide for their families regardless of the situation they are born in; and the reality is the global border regime (in the long term) entrenches division and, yes, toxic identity politics.

Emotional stories are useful because it serves to personalise a grim reality that we chose to ignore. I know why we all wince, and some people here splutter and complain; it's really no different from the guilty feeling you get as a Westerner when you read about third world sweatshops. If we are to accept that hard borders are not just a present aberration, but a permanent fixture of society; we have to accept these stories - people's entire lives altered and ensnared by pen-pushing bureaucrats, families pulled apart by arbitrary decisions by elites, people who have not done anything "wrong" from a moral standpoint being considered criminals and the entrenchment of global inequality and poverty -  as a permanent reality.

And I'm not saying that's inherently wrong. Maybe you've weighed up the options - you believe a welfare state will immediately collapse upon looser borders (rightly or wrongly, although it is hilarious how often people will state this as a FACT while providing no actual evidence), and this is worth the aforementioned, err, problematic realities of borders. That's fair enough. But it's not a good look to choose to be blind because you find reality inconvenient.