One of the more entertaining bits of black humor on Steve Sailer’s blog are the stories he posts about how every problem can be solved with more immigration. No matter the problem, someone will have a reason why the solution to it is more immigration. It’s as if our elites have a bizarre form of Tourette’s, where any stimulation causes them to blurt out lines from Emma Lazarus. When the lunacy of their claims is pointed out, the response is usually just a blank stare, suggesting their enthusiasm for open borders is involuntary.

The reason for this is the people championing open borders are not working from a set of facts, or arguments from those facts. Sure, the indentured servant lobbies are thinking in economic terms. The refugee lobbies want the money spigot to remain open, but these are relatively small influences on public debate. The vast majority of people championing open borders have no monetary incentives. They are doing it because they view the issue in purely moral terms. They are pro-immigrant in the same way normal people are pro-life.

Among the cognitive elites, there is a strong social incentive for embracing ever more extreme positions on the popular fads of the moment. It’s how we went so quickly from tolerating homosexuals to embracing mentally disturbed men in sundresses. Similarly, it is how miscegenation went from casual outlier to the only acceptable form of mating. When it comes to immigration, the furthest possible extreme is open borders, so the game is to come up with ever more creative ways of justifying it.

When looking at it in moral terms, it helps explain why both types of Progressive have gone berserk on the issue of immigration. Fundamentally, the so-called Left and the so-called Right share the same moral framework. Both sides of Progressivism embrace an intolerant, smothering set of universal principles rooted in the blank slate. All people everywhere are the same and interchangeable. As Senator Lindsey Graham would put it, people don’t exist as flesh and blood beings, but rather as ideals.

Anyway, it is good to keep that in mind when seeing so-called conservatives make their pitch for open borders. This piece in the hilariously misnamed American Conservative is a a rather bizarre attempt to justify redefining temporary to mean permanent.

That’s why this recent decision will be particularly advantageous for MS-13. Realistically, the federal government will be unable to enforce this immigration policy. Likewise, the vast majority of the 200,000 Salvadorans are unlikely to voluntarily leave. Instead, they’ll live in the shadows as prey for MS-13.

Trump has masterfully used MS-13 as a straw man in the immigration debate. The constant references to this glorified street gang leave the impression that most illegal immigrants are violent felons. It is a particularly artful tactic, given that 80 percent of voters believe that illegal immigrants convicted of a felony should be deported.

However, the vast majority of the 200,000 Salvadorans aren’t violent criminals. Although Hurricane Mitch is listed as their official reason for refugee status, the reality is that a high percentage of these people fled to the U.S. to escape violence in El Salvador.

Those who do return will be much more vulnerable back in El Salvador where MS-13 and their rival, Barrio 18, control large swaths of the country. In turn, assets these immigrants acquired while working in the U.S. will eventually be appropriated by these gangs.

There is a common misconception that a “weak immigration policy” led to the rise of MS-13. In fact, it was the aggressive deportation policy of the Clinton administration that transformed MS-13 into a transnational criminal organization.

You see how this works?

Enforcing the law creates more criminals. This sort of sophistry that has become common, because there is no rational argument in favor of open borders. As Americans have become familiar with the facts, the open borders people are left with mendacity as their only option. Coming up with the most extreme justifications inevitably leads to defending the indefensible, not on merit, but as a form of virtue signalling. Demanding easy access to Americans by bloodthirsty criminal gangs is extreme in the extreme.

This quest for the most virtuous position on the immigration topic answers the question posed in this post by Sailer. If all people are the same, that we’re just interchangeable meat sticks, there can be no moral justification for inequality and diversity. Our elites see diversity as the result of some evil force. Nothing can be too extreme when combating evil. More important, one cannot be seen by his coevals as beyond the pale when he is engaged in combating evil. The crazier the better when it comes fanatics.

It’s also why appeals to reason never work with these people. We are ruled over by fanatics, convinced that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. They are like addicts seeking a high more intense than the one before it. You don’t talk an addict out of his blind quest for the ultimate high. He has to find that limit on his own. That usually means dying in a pool of his own vomit. That’s most likely the fate of our rulers. They will realize they have gone too far just as the trap door snaps open and they begin the drop.