Whence cometh the conviction, in America and even more in Britain and Europe, that open borders is the only moral immigration policy? Of course, not everyone believes that, and many who do stop short of saying so. But the contrast between the rhetoric and policies of the first two decades of the century and those that have prevailed since President Donald Trump’s election is unmistakable.

Former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, like the George Bushes, professed to want to enforce immigration laws.

Careful projections of the illegal population estimate that it peaked at about 12 million in 2007, fell to about 10.5 million in 2019, then increased by about 4 million during the Biden administration, which essentially opened the borders to the point of paying for illegals to live in New York’s Roosevelt Hotel.

The impetus for this policy came from something other than the usual elite economic argument that, as population growth is slowing, advanced countries need more workers to maintain economic growth. That something else can be summarized in the phrase “Orange Man Bad.”

There is another element here, seen more prominently in Europe. And that is the conviction that barring people from your country who are different, in ancestry or customs, from the preexisting population is invidious discrimination.

It’s likely true that a flood of mostly illegal immigrants, like those welcomed by the Biden administration, will tend to have a higher proportion of violent migrants than among legal immigrants.

But that is a problem orders of magnitude greater in Britain and Europe, where very much larger shares of immigrants, from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, are Muslims. Many are quite ready to assimilate to European mores. But many are not.

An example is the scandal of Britain’s “grooming gangs,” often long-settled immigrants from Pakistan and Afghanistan, who sexually abuse and enslave adolescent working-class English girls.

For at least two decades, this oppression has been largely ignored by Britain’s political parties, local and national police forces, national press and certainly by the TV-set-owner subsidized BBC.

This oppression of women and violation of human rights is virtually unknown to American liberals.

Political parties that campaign for restrictions on immigration are treated as pariahs with which established parties must never allow in coalition governments.

Germany’s AfD, which is currently tied in the polls, is treated with particular scorn by the two main parties, which, between them, capture less than 50% in polls. Within AfD’s ranks are some with nostalgia for Germany’s Nazi past, and the nation’s leading parties deserve respect for their commitment to renouncing Nazism and making reparations for the Holocaust.

But it’s not apparent that AfD’s policy of restricting the inflow of immigrants, or those of Eastern European democracies like Poland and Hungary, which are decried by unelected European Union leaders, is the moral equivalent of Nazism. Excluding people with different cultures and attitudes from your country is not the moral equivalent of murdering all your Jews.

Those leaders who treat the two as morally equivalent are captive to bad ideas. They have been taught to divide the world into oppressors and the oppressed, to cast immigrants as virtuous victims and their own citizens as culpable oppressors.

From these delusions, most ordinary Americans, including recent legal immigrants and their offspring, and large numbers of ordinary Britons and Europeans, seem happily immune. Perhaps in time, their common sense will dissuade the elites of their “luxury belief” in open borders.