Amidst outrage over illegal immigration, some self-identified conservatives who see a bright side to open borders have been speaking up.

“These are economic migrants,” said Jason Riley, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, speaking at the Cato Institute. “We have the jobs. They need the work. Let them come legally.”

Riley is one of several conservatives who dissent from the movement as a whole on the issue of illegal immigration. He argued that there are substantial economic motives for legalizing aliens and referred to border control as “Soviet-style central planning.”

“The case for open borders is pretty straightforward. It’s the case for letting the free market decide who comes into this country,” Riley said.

Conservative author Michael Barone also called for “labor laws to work more in tandem with markets” and claimed that there is historical precedent for the recent influx of Latino immigrants, pointing to the enormous Irish immigrations during the 1850s and the German immigrations of the eighteenth century.

“In fact, we are not dealing with something unprecedented, but something we have faced before,” he said.

Open border conservatives like Riley and Barone tend to identify closely with the libertarian wing of the movement and approach the issue from a small-government perspective. Many of them work at libertarian think-tanks like Cato and the Reason Foundation. Continued...