Short of murder, rape, torture, slavery or unjustified imprisonment, one of the worst things a government can perpetrate or condone is confining people to desperately poor parts of the world where they are doomed to poverty, when being allowed into rich parts of the world—even if totally denied any safety-net aid—they would be lifted to a dramatically better standard of living.

Treating people as malefactors because they desperately want to come to a reasonably-well-run country such as ours is cruel. There may be morally adequate policy reasons to limit the number of people who can come to our nation at any one time, but if so, we should feel quite apologetic about having to do that.

The easiest way to reduce illegal immigration is to dramatically increase the amount of legal immigration that we allow. It is important enough to do so, that almost any political concession that makes it possible to pass legislation to dramatically increase the amount of legal immigration is worth making.

There is a moral illusion highly relevant to many debates about how we treat desperately poor people in other countries. That illusion is that having nothing to do with a poor person, or effectively deterring them from showing up on our doorstep absolves us of moral responsibility, while we bear a large share of the responsibility of all the suffering in their lives as soon as we have dealings with them. As, at least in principle, a Utilitarian, this makes no sense to me. Within the scope of actions available to us, we bear moral responsibility for the consequences of the choices we make compared to the consequences of the choices we could have made. If someone is worse off because of our actions (such as not allowing more legal immigration), we bear moral responsibility for that, even if we never have and never will meet them.

There are many morally charged issues of public policy. To my mind, the moral weight of immigration policy exceeds the moral weight of all other issues that have been seriously debated in the United States in the last four years.

Middle-aged, non-college-educated white folks have been dying more deaths of despair, in Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s phrase. These folks should not be looked down on. They need to be helped. But keeping legal immigration low is not the way to help them. Even if it really did help them (which it doesn’t, other than reducing cultural discomfort and perhaps helping out job prospects for high-school dropouts), helping one human being a little bit by hurting other human beings a lot is not OK.

Just as we look back aghast at those a couple of centuries ago who spoke of liberty but owned slaves, those in future generations will look back aghast at those who spoke of compassion and human flourishing but shut their hearts to the plight of those exiled by the accident of their birth from the land of the free and the home of the brave.