Moral Purity and the Open-Border Test: Would Gen X and Boomer Progressives Still Cheer at the End of Their World?
Andrew Devine's recent Daily Sceptic piece argues that Left-leaning Boomers (born 1946–64) and Gen Xers (1965–80) in Britain were conditioned by the race politics of the 1960s–90s to treat any criticism of immigration as equivalent to racial hatred. In those decades, opposition to the far smaller inflows of the time often came from overtly racist quarters. The result, Devine writes, is a Pavlovian response: faced with today's radically larger, faster, and more culturally distant flows, many progressives of those generations still hear only the National Front skinhead of the 1970s. Music, sport, and shared youth culture of the era reinforced a simple inclusiveness that worked reasonably well when numbers were limited and most newcomers came from cultures compatible enough to integrate into a still-dominant host society. That conditioning now blocks discussion of resource limits, security risks, and differences in cultural fit, between, say, long-settled Indian Sikhs or Middle Eastern Christians and recent arrivals who openly reject core liberal norms.
The same pattern appears in Australia and other high-trust Anglosphere countries. Support for expansive migration has functioned for many white progressives of these cohorts as a status signal: proof of moral elevation above the "racist" past. The actual policy consequences, housing shortages, strained services, wage effects in lower-skill sectors, and parallel societies, are treated as secondary or as evidence of insufficient further commitment.
Suppose the principle is applied without limit or selective exemption, exactly as proclaimed. Open the borders of the UK and Australia immediately and permanently. Admit billions over a few year, the scale required to match the global population that progressive rhetoric has sometimes invoked as a moral claim on Western prosperity. Assign university places, professional jobs, and housing by lottery or first-come preference rather than by existing networks or credentials. Fill the civil service, media, academic departments, and NHS or Medicare roles accordingly. Do not stop when the native majority becomes a minority, when high-trust institutions erode, or when crime and welfare patterns shift toward those of the source regions. Continue until the demographic and cultural composition reflects the open-border ideal rather than the conditions that made the ideal seem costless.
Would the generation that adopted open borders as a badge of purity be content in their final years? Evidence from already-visible patterns suggests cognitive dissonance would dominate for most, not cheerful acceptance. Elites and professionals within these cohorts have already shown the capacity for selective application: they support high inflows while living in white low-density suburbs, sending children to selective schools, and opposing local densification that would house the newcomers near them. When numbers become large enough to affect their own property values, pension systems, or personal safety, the response has often been private exit (to more exclusive areas or abroad) paired with continued public affirmation of the principle. Full implementation would close the exit ramps. Housing queues, hospital waits, and competition for remaining high-status positions would no longer be abstract statistics; they would be personal.
Historical and comparative cases offer limited comfort. Rapid demographic change without corresponding cultural convergence has repeatedly produced declining social trust, higher crime in some groups, and political backlash, outcomes documented in parts of France, Sweden, and certain British cities. Progressives of the Boomer and Gen X cohorts have tended to attribute such outcomes to insufficient anti-racism education or to residual native prejudice rather than to selection effects, cultural distance, or sheer scale. That attribution can be maintained rhetorically for a long time, especially among those insulated by wealth or location. Once insulation fails, the options shrink to reinterpretation ("this is still better than the alternative"), quiet withdrawal from the argument, or rare public revision. Very few of the most vocal open-border advocates of earlier decades have publicly revised their views even after measurable declines in cohesion; the psychological cost of admitting the conditioning was wrong appears higher than the cost of continued dissonance.
The thought experiment therefore tests sincerity more than it predicts happiness. If open borders were truly a non-negotiable moral absolute rather than a status good calibrated to comfortable levels of diversity, the resulting society would be accepted as the just price. Most evidence from the behaviour of the cohorts in question: residential sorting, school choice, and the rapid shift from "refugees welcome" to silence or deflection when local effects appear, suggests the absolute is not absolute. Cognitive dissonance, maintained by selective attention and the residual status value of the original position, is the more probable end state for those who remain. The populations they invited would, of course, face the practical results regardless.
