The Lancet just published an editorial that essentially supports unlimited migration — although it doesn’t use that term — and makes no distinction between legal and illegal immigration. From, “Migration a Reality, Not an Emergency:”

Migration is among the oldest facts of human life, yet it is treated as one of the newest emergencies: anti-immigration protests have intensified in the UK and immigration raids have swept US cities. As we mark World Refugee Day, the follow-up Review to the 2018 UCL–Lancet Commission on Migration and Health, published in this issue, renews the Commission’s call for action and asks whether, in a climate shaped by fear, evidence can still drive policy.

The editorial ignores international and national laws. In the United States, for example, to become a refugee, one must apply for entry under that status while still outside the country. Being granted legal asylum is supposed to take more than simply traveling to a location where one wants to reside. Economic migration doesn’t qualify for either refugee or asylum status. In other words, immigrants are not supposed to be able to go to any country they choose and be entitled to stay.

Not that the editorialists care.

The Review finds that migration and forced displacement continue to rise, driven by conflict, climate change, and economic instability. In 2024, more than 300 million people were international migrants, a number that has nearly doubled since 1990—were they one nation, they would be the fourth most populous country. Human mobility is not an aberration or temporary crisis; it is an ineluctable feature of modern existence, yet it is considered an exceptional problem demanding extraordinary measures.

Many millions of people entering a country in a short time, often from different cultures with some refusing to assimilate, most certainly is an exceptional problem! It puts tremendous pressures on existing infrastructure, civic comity, and political stability.

Government leaders have the duty to control immigration and the right to decide which people from which countries they want to allow to immigrate. When they fail in that responsibility, discord results. Not that the editorialists care:

From calls to “stop the boats” to even harsher asylum policies, migration is framed in the language of control, deterrence, and exclusion. Yet migrants are workers and taxpayers, carers and neighbours. In many countries, the very people portrayed as burdens are those staffing hospitals and caring for ageing populations—often the worst paid, in the highest-risk jobs, and with the least access to the care they provide for others. In England, around one in five National Health Service staff report a non-British nationality, rising to more than a third among doctors. As workforces age, societies will depend even more on the people they are currently trying to exclude. These are not arguments to be won but facts already woven into how societies function. The fact that they must still be defended shows how much fear sets the terms above evidence.

Why might that be? Because no distinctions are much made anymore by the political left and libertarian right between legal, orderly immigration policies designed to meet a country’s needs and allowing the multitudes to come crashing into a country uninvited. Because many elites ignore that mass illegal immigration leads to chaos from which they are often personally insulated.  And note that these editorialists express zero empathy for people who resent their communities’ cultures being changed, their schools impacted, their hospital emergency rooms flooded, housing availability constrained, and, in some circumstances, their peaceability and safety threatened.

The editorial ends with a call to surrender to unlimited immigration and have health policies reflect that outcome:

The health community must keep making the case for equity, inclusion, and the right to health—but in a debate ruled by fear, how it is made matters as much as the case itself. That will take courage and leadership. Good policy cannot turn back the clock; it can only meet the world as it is, and as it will be—one in which the health of migrants and the health of all are indivisible.

Yes, a humane society will attend to people’s urgent medical needs regardless of legal status. But that shouldn’t be the end of the discussion. Reducing illegal immigration and deporting people who are here without permission are legitimate policies that benefit healthcare systems, among other salutary consequences.

President Trump effectively shutting the border demonstrates that preventing unlimited immigration is not a futile “turning back the clock” but a matter of political will. The problem is — as the Biden administration’s policies showed — that many with the power to enact and enforce orderly immigration policies want mass migration. And then they decry — and in some places, even criminalize — expressed opposition as racist or xenophobic hate speech.

This editorial epitomizes their political myopia.