The CATO Institute, like all Libertarian institutions, has a bizarre set of priorities. It begins with a set of mostly reasonable principles and then proceeds to prove that Aristotle is right: you can take any virtue and turn it into a vice by being too extreme.
Courage, taken too far, turns into recklessness. Empathy, taken too far, turns suicidal. Hygiene, taken too far, turns into OCD. And so on.
It’s not always the case that when some of something is good, more is necessarily better.
CATO’s advocacy for mass immigration is an example of this tendency to ignore real-world implications of taking a “principle” too far.
David Bier is CATO’s Director of Immigration Studies and testified before Congress about the wonders of illegal immigration, using, of all places, Fairfax County as an example of just how wonderful unlimited migration is for the county.
CATO Institute advocate for mass immigration: “Give up on the mass deportation fantasy. One in five Fairfax residents is someone who could be deported or lives with them. It would destroy neighborhoods.” pic.twitter.com/1sftJihg2h
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) May 14, 2026
Having just written about the demonic practices in Fairfax County that have led to countless illegal immigrants committing horrific crimes without consequence, I was taken aback by Bier’s flippancy about the issue and his unwillingness to consider the unintended consequences of his policy preferences.
Most of us, on hearing that 20% of Fairfax County, the bedroom community of our nation’s capital, are “deportable” or live with somebody deportable, recoil. Even though most are not actively committing crimes, that concentration of migrants distorts how the people who govern our country view the world. The people who govern us don’t live like us, and that explains why they don’t share our concerns.
If one in five is deportable, that probably explains why housing costs are artificially high. That probably explains why Fairfax County’s values differ so significantly from those of the rest of Virginia. That explains why the County has a two-tier criminal justice system that allows predators to roam the streets.
Bier sees that as a good thing.
The great success of Fairfax, Virginia highlights the value of immigration to the country. One third of the population is foreign-born, and nearly one-half of the residents are from immigrant families—double the national averages.5 Over 100,000 Fairfax residents are illegal immigrants, and nearly 20 percent of the county is here illegally or lives in a household of someone here illegally.6
Mr. Bier portrays Fairfax as a utopia. Low crime, great prosperity, a wonderful quality of life.
I’m not going to go into all the arguments that people have made about how Bier distorts statistics. It is pointless, and many others have gone through the exercise. Bier cherry picks, mashes together high-wage/high-skill legal immigrants, and foreign workers with illegal immigrants who commit crimes without consequence, as if a Japanese woman working for a technology company is comparable to a multiple felon who Descano allows on the street to rape and murder are in the same category.
If you doubt my characterization of Bier’s statistical manipulation, I will give just one example from his testimony before Congress:
Many Americans’ jobs directly depend on illegal immigrant workers. For instance, there are 33 million US-born Americans who are managers or supervisors for over 8 million unauthorized immigrant workers.
Only in government could 33 million people manage or supervise 8 million employees. And I doubt that even a government program could manage a 4-1 manager-to-employee ratio, but Bier expects us to swallow that statistic.
I am a fan of immigration, in principle, although the current LEGAL immigration system we have is insanely stupid, actively preferring to import low-education relatives of low-education immigrants. We don’t enforce our no-welfare-for-immigrants policies, meaning that we often import people to become dependents of the state.
But even still, immigrants DO bring new blood into the country, and immigrants play an outsized role in our entrepreneurial economy. Many of our most successful entrepreneurs are immigrants who found their home countries too stifling to succeed.
And it’s true that many illegal immigrants share that entrepreneurial spirit, working hard and contributing to society. We should reform our immigration system to encourage such people to come, and to weed out the parasitical class.
But Bier’s testimony shows how distorted the priorities of the open borders crowd are. Obviously, it is not healthy to have a society in which one in five people is from elsewhere. There is a limit to how many immigrants a society can digest at any one time. Otherwise, even the positives can turn negative.
There can be too much of a good thing. And even “good” illegal immigrants are of a class of people who, on balance, do many bad things. Protecting “good” illegal immigrants has meant that we also invite in evil illegal immigrants, and Fairfax County shows you why.
Canada has seen its housing prices skyrocket as Trudeau opened its borders, leading to a cost-of-living crisis. We have seen similar, if not usually as dramatic, housing cost spikes, leading to a generation that doesn’t believe they will ever afford a home.
You can’t tell me that importing tens of millions of migrants in so short a time is unrelated. That is physically impossible.
There is a reason that Americans, who have been incredibly generous to migrants, are fed up. They want people like Bier to quit lying. Open borders are a problem, not a solution to America’s woes.
Editor’s Note: Democrat politicians and their radical supporters will do everything they can to interfere with and threaten ICE agents enforcing our immigration laws.
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