Imagine this blog is a business and you are a stock holder who got in early when I was starting up. The blog is booming and that means the value of the stock is booming. I figure I can capitalize on the boom and start issuing more stock. That’s good for me, but there’s one problem. That dilutes the value of your stock. That would be a crappy thing for me to do to my stock holders, which is why companies tend to avoid doing this.

But, let’s assume I don’t care about my stock holders and I start issuing new stock. One thing that will happen is current stock holders will begin dumping the stock. After all, the value of the stock will most likely decline and the point of buying the stock in the first place is to get something for it, as in a return on the investment. If I keep issuing stock, the price will collapse and the stock will be worthless.

The same logic applies to citizenship. Being a Canadian has value. You get cheap maple syrup, high alcohol beer and good hockey. There’s also the protection of the Canadian government, law enforcement, economic benefits and social welfare benefits. In return, the citizen serves on juries, pays taxes and serves in the military when required. A country is a lot like a company and the citizens are stock holders. It’s not a perfect analogy, but a useful one.

What our rulers seek to do is dilute the value of citizenship by offering it to whoever staggers along.

Rep Luis V. Gutiérrez, one of Congress’ most outspoken advocates for immigrants, on Wednesday called for expanding the Affordable Care Act to cover all of the estimated 11 million undocumented migrants in the United States.

“The goal is to make integration and inclusion real for millions of families that are locked out under current law,” the Illinois Democrat said in a floor speech introducing his proposed legislation.

“As it stands right now, undocumented immigrants are not subject to the individual mandate and cannot buy into health insurance exchanges even if they use their own money.  My legislation will change that.  It says that we stand for inclusion.”

Citing last week’s papal address to Congress (the pope repeatedly urged U.S. lawmakers to follow “the Golden Rule”), Gutiérrez said: “Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you means moving forward with no restrictions on which brother and sister and neighbor we think of as ‘eligible’ or ‘deserving.’”

The Gutiérrez legislation faces long odds in the House, where proposals to overhaul immigration have been stymied by Republicans who insist the federal government must first address holes in border security.

If everyone on earth is eligible for the benefits of citizenship, as long as they get to America, what point is there in being a citizen? More important, why would anyone try to make the country better? The whole point of investing in a company or a country is to make it better. In the case of a country, better for your descendants. If the children of foreigners are going to take from your kids the fruit of your labor, why bother?

That would obviously spill into voting, as doing what’s best for the country would lose all value. Instead, factions would vote in blocks, at war with other factions, for the right to take what they can from whomever they can. That’s assuming people both voting. The only solution to that is authoritarianism where the national government uses force to compel cooperation from and among the people.

That’s what our betters have failed to understand. At some point, people will simply not respond to patriotic appeals or moral suasion. After all, loyalty to the state will have no basis as there is no benefit to citizenship. The relationship becomes purely transactional as both sides try to beat the other in their dealings. The only result of open borders is a Hobbesian world that looks more like the Middle East than Western Civilization.