I am for open borders (more or less, with some exceptions we needn’t go into here). I was even quoted in a conservative newspaper’s article headlined “Illegal immigrants have a friend in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” based on a Deseret News article I wrote  (although it didn’t exactly help my thesis that a lot of the comments were along the lines of “get out of my country Mexicans”). You could take John Corrill’s and others’ accounts of how we were treated as impoverished never do-well immigrants and they would not look out of place in some of today’s immigration rhetoric.

This isn’t an economics or politics blog, but to briefly summarize: ever since Evan Phillips convinced me in our eighth grade peer persuasive essay exercise I’ve seen more and more evidence that the conventional wisdom of what would happen if we just let the borders open up tends to be wrong. For example, the “worst case scenario,” where a massive wave of poor immigrants hits our shores all at once, actually happened during the Mariel Boatlift in Miami when Castro let whoever wanted to go to America leave Cuba during a small window, and about 125,000 Cubans settled in Florida, largely in Miami, within six months. While the economic literature on it is still somewhat contested, my understanding is that the consensus is that it slightly depressed low-income wages temporarily, but the massive unemployment predicted by the doomsdayers never materialized. Yes, immigrants take jobs…but they also create jobs, and the Mariel Boatlift helped give us the rich Cuban-Floridan culture (and the best shootout scene of all time in Scarface). 

That’s one example, but a well-versed libertarian economist can give many others. (Bryan Caplain even wrote an highly recommended, easy-to-read graphic novel walking readers through the economic and ethical arguments for open borders.) That being said, unlike the mainstream left I don’t think that any policy that isn’t functionally open borders is racist, and I don’t begrudge others not agreeing with me. (And if you don’t think I’m being fair here, name one suggested policy that would have actually led to less immigration that wasn’t slandered as being racist or heartless; heck, even Mitt’s e-verify was given a hard time). 

However, I think we can all agree that open borders right now is a bit of a pipe dream, but still, I thought a thought experiment of what an American Church would look like if anybody who wanted to (more or less) could come into the United States would be fun. I think I have a better sense of this than most, since for the past 15 years I’ve lived in the kinds of wards the Church publishes pictures of to make us look more diverse than we are. (Literally, I’ve seen my ward both in the Church News and the Ensign). 

More centers of strength for missionary work

I’m not super familiar with all the different takes on proselytizing effectiveness, but it seems reasonable to assume that missionary work is more effective when you have a stable ward as a home base. Plus people wanting to assimilate into America might find the idea of attaching themselves to an American church appealing, so again being flooded with immigrants from all over would be great for missionary work. 

Many more ethnic- and language-specific wards and stakes

Whether the Church should have ethnic-specific (and not just language-specific) wards (e.g. the Samoan or Tongan wards we see in Utah) is a whole post or several. I see benefits to both retaining them and merging them, depending on whether you take a melting pot approach or a multicultural approach. But whatever the case, in an America with a billion citizens from around the world a la Matthew Yglesias a stake could have, say, a Thai, Vietnamese, and Arabic branch along with Spanish, West African French, Tagalog, and English wards. My home stake is actually kind of close to this, with two Spanish wards, several English wards, a French branch, and an ASL branch. 

Differentiation within wards

Even if a group doesn’t break off into their own unit, there could be differentiation within wards. We actually saw this in our Philadelphia ward, where there was a Liberian Sunday School taught by a local paragon of the American Liberian community who apparently was a big deal in the Liberian Civil War (I never got the full story) and brought a lot of others into the Church. The optics weren’t great (“why are all the black people in one class and the white people in another?”), but Liberian English is very different from American English, and it was simply easier for them to understand the lesson if it was being taught by a Liberian. These sorts of decisions about how to accommodate, fellowship, and reach out to other cultures would become much more commonplace and relevant, and not just in wards abutting refugee resettlement areas near big cities. Even outside of classrooms, ministering families are often assigned on ethnic and linguistic lines, with more experienced, say, Sierra Leonese paired with a recent convert Sierra Leonese. People might wince at that kind of assortative assignment, but in my experience it’s eminently practical in terms of fellowshipping and plugging people into a ward. 

Leadership representation becomes more of an issue

Again speaking from experience, when you have a lot of first-generation converts in your ward that are one color and language then you get a situation where everybody on the stand is white and most people sitting in the congregation aren’t. This isn’t optimal obviously, but it’s a trickier issue to deal with than you might think if you haven’t been in that kind of ward, and more often than not the lack of representation is not from lack of trying. Having representative leadership without lapsing into tokenism or asking too much of lower-income people without the resources or time to serve in demanding callings is difficult. Of course sometimes you don’t need leadership affirmative action. One of our Relief Society Presidents was a decades-long convert African American who was a high-ranking State Department official, and she was perfect for the job, but when the racial minorities tend to be recent convert refugees who work insane hours and don’t have cars, you have to be more intentional about representation, it typically doesn’t just happen. And yes, if we had open borders presumably there would be some wealthy immigrants too, but those aren’t the ones that join the Church; they rarely are. D&C 58’s take on the parable of the wedding feast and all that. 

Language becomes more of an issue

Leadership would obviously have to be fluent in English, and (as is the case in our stake) native English speaking return missionaries would be pulled in to serve in leadership positions in wards that were primarily recent converts. Stake patriarchs would benefit from being bilingual (ours is), or you could have a traveling patriarch situation for less spoken languages. (I’m not a big fan of the interpreter option). Finally, what is good for the goose is good for the gander; I had one of those do-it-all stake presidents who I could tell was working on his Spanish and French during his tenure so that he could minister to his wards more effectively. Even if English wards were a plurality but not majority in a stake, English leadership would do well to go the extra mile and at least learn a smattering of the other languages they minister in, and stake conferences would need little mini-General Conference translator booths.   

Better Munch N Mingles

To end on a lighter note, the whole true and living Church thing is great, but as a culture Utah Mormon food is awful. We’re not Mexicans or Thais or even West Africans.  Nobody is going to have a Utah Mormon food truck anytime soon, and our Munch N Mingles could benefit from some immigrant foodways. (I was living in Texas when that politician–I forgot who–quipped that if we didn’t tighten up immigration we’d have “taco trucks on every corner,” and I joked that I was taking that as a campaign promise from the Democrats). 

So again, I’m not holding my breath that we will ever have ten different languages in our stakes and five ethnic enclaves that we pass on our way to work, but some of these issues are scalable and would be relevant on a lesser level if we ever found ourselves in, say, an immigrant-heavy country that wasn’t open borders.