The Debate That Wasn’t

A Recap of the Immigration Debate in Dallas

On Thursday, April 11, 2024, The Majestic Theater in Dallas hosted a peculiar debate. The headline was quite clear and had an already obvious answer. “Should the United States Close Its Borders?” was the resolution to be debated by the panel that night in downtown, off Elm Street. At this event hosted by The Free Press and sponsored by FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), attendees could be forgiven for walking into the theater and, upon grabbing the information pamphlet, assuming that they had traveled back in time. The debate that would follow would be the same kind of debate you could find online: people speaking past each other, studies cited with no question as to the methodologies or conclusions, and many instances of playing the hatchling or outright lying.

The feeling of time travel would be something I would mention to my friend as we got our drinks and sat in the back. We had already passed by graying White Boomers passing out literature with sandwich signs talking about migration, sponsored by some sort of NGO. The NGO’s name I couldn’t recall, but whenever I see the word International my mental association goes to the Internationale and the wretchedness that comes with it. Settling in, my mind went to the ticket price, something I was trying to justify to myself as we listened to the PA ring overhead. It spoke of how those who might find certain terms offensive were welcome to leave, because, of course, debate was about the “open exchange of ideas.” That and “Free Speech Doesn’t Take Sides” were platitudes that really put the 2015 mood in the air.

What followed was then a short video talking about the immigration debate in the United States, particularly the failure of the Biden administration and the numbers of people who had crossed the southern border. Bari Weiss was then introduced, to fanfare and applause, as my friend and I chuckled that we were “not on Twitter anymore.” I was half expecting Milo Yiannopoulos to emerge from backstage as Bari Weiss joked about how she was hated by both the Left and the Right, for being “not-woke” but also “a lesbian with dual loyalties.” If this was what constituted the liberal, open marketplace of ideas in America in 2024 over the most important issue in America, then this was but a confirmation to me that the marketplace of ideas is just as fake as so much of the American economy. The debaters themselves were introduced shortly thereafter, which is partially why I wanted to go: half the performers have me blocked on Twitter, and I was praying that there would be Q&A.

On the affirmative for closing America’s borders was the odd couple of Ann Coulter and Sohrab Ahmari. Coulter, someone whose work I have read since I was 15 years old, I still have somewhat of an affinity toward, even if many call her “Ann Coalter” nowadays. Her book Adios, America was an eye-opening read for a politically interested teenager; this was only compounded when I would finish high school and go to college in El Paso. Her partner, of sorts, or at least someone who was on the affirmative as well, was Compact Magazine founder Sohrab Ahmari. Ahmari, an Iranian immigrant and convert to Roman Catholicism, is seen as one of the leading members of the “Common Good”-focused Post-Liberals alongside Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule. He is a progressive and someone with whom I’ve disagreed publicly. You can read my review of his book Tyranny, Inc. in the 4th Issue of the Mars Review of Books. It’s a sad state of affairs when Ahmari was the most competent and well-spoken performer of the four debaters.

The other side was the commonplace coalition of the Libertarian-Progressive alliance, with Nick Gillespie of Reason and Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks. These two would be the ones I would be arguing against if I had been on stage, when in reality throughout the debate it was myself and my friend arguing into the void as if we were Boomers yelling at our radios and television sets over what was being broadcast. (I’m sure there’s a joke to be made that I paid for this, and I willingly accept that.) It was an expected, but a pretty idiotic, showing about immigration, with everything from the “food” argument to the invocation of the Holocaust within the first sixty seconds of the opposition’s opening statement.

So, let’s get the gist of the debate from the four of them.

Ann Coulter: Coulter argued very off-the-cuff and made the point that you can’t replace America with other people. Her words were (albeit with coded language) no different from anything one might have heard from Richard Spencer nearly ten years ago, arguing that immigration from non-European nations has not been a good idea, and essentially that civilization is incommunicable. From terrorism to national identity, it was a blast from the past to hear how talking points that I and so many heard years ago have now broken into the mainstream. She was quick to point out that America’s welfare state does indeed benefit illegals, and that pre-1970s immigration had many actually repatriate back to their home countries simply because they couldn’t make it in America — something that plainly doesn’t happen anymore.

Sohrab Ahmari: While Ahmari stated that his arguments originated from Michael Lind’s work, most of his arguments could be found in Philip Cafaro’s book How Many Is Too Many?: The Progressive Argument for Reducing Immigration into the United States. (It’s not a bad book; I’d recommend reading it.) However, Ahmari came off like a Persian Cesar Chavez, arguing about slave labor, corporate arbitrage, and how heterogeneous workplaces make it hard for labor to organize. Ironically, the point about heterogeneous workplaces was something I criticized him for in his own work, but I suppose that was the closest Ahmari was willing to go when talking about race. Coulter did most of that for us, anyway.

Nick Gillespie: Gillespie had the run-of-the-mill Cato Institute talking points about immigration, and was quick to defuse any real topic concerning which he had no answer with a joke about Trump or being a libertarian. The only argument that had any semblance of ground was that a distinction needs to be made between simple visa overstay and not shutting the border down. Yes, the welfare state should have a wall around it; but we can have that wall in addition to a very physical, literal wall around our borders.

Cenk Uygur: I have very little to say here, as there wasn’t much of a performance — just the usual trope that everyone in America is a descendant of immigrants (the WASPs would like a word with you) and that we should consider the food, or such exceptions to the rules as Steve Jobs’s father or Elon Musk. Also, Uygur claimed that immigrant populations commit less crime than the native-born population, but this argument ignores America’s obvious racial statistics about crime. A relevant consideration that even Ann Coulter pointed out was that the government doesn’t keep accurate racial or immigrant-based statistics, and groups have to comb through the data themselves in order to illustrate just how bad the problem actually is.

I don’t recall the words per capita being used, national security was mentioned only very briefly, and no one like Laken Riley or Mollie Tibbetts was name-dropped at all. This debate, like all such spectacles, was surprisingly calm and without anything actually inflammatory. The debate ended with the debaters listing off books to read, and the only really surprising suggestion was Ann Coulter’s: Camp of the Saints. “It’s an actual banned book, but you should read it,” were her remarks.

The debate ended there, with the side of Ahmari and Coulter as the winner, but not without some minds being changed for keeping America’s borders open. If two midwits like Nick Gillespie and Cenk Uygur can change the minds of Americans to be more in favor of open borders, then what can I say other than that we are truly in trouble? The real debate should have been about passive-aggressive versus aggressive remigration and deportation, but America’s diversity (i.e., citizens with dual loyalties and no true assimilation happening anymore) is proof of that. I went back to my friend’s apartment, where we went live for a little bit to discuss our initial reactions. You can listen to that here.

I know that The Free Press has done other debates, such as the one over the Sexual Revolution last year with people like Louise Perry and Grimes, but it was odd to step outside of my political ecosphere bubble and see what the rest of America (or perhaps concerned liberal America) was reading and interested in. Hearing Ann Coulter sound like Richard Spencer circa 2015 raises the question about where the “Discourse” is going and the delay between online discussion and the real-world ecosystem. It would pay to be reflexive and note that Weiss has one of the most popular Substacks on the planet, and she too is an online Culture War participant in the disaffected liberal camp. Nevertheless, if this is what passes for debate and a “Free Press,” then perhaps I’ll stick to my ideological priors and what I can observe with my own lying eyes: the Celebration Parallax, NGOs of all stripes making a killing off the Great Replacement, and America’s national cohesion being wrecked by foreign conflicts and people who shouldn’t be here making a mess about them.

The border should’ve been shut years ago, and the time for debate has long since passed.