Something struck me as odd a few weeks ago when I was going through immigration at the airport in Accra, Ghana’s capital city. I spoke Twi (the major Ghanaian dialect) with the passport control officer who inspected my travel documents. I knew right away that he was from one of the country’s minority tribes because my Twi was more fluent than his. Our skins were equally dark. Nothing could have suggested to him therefore that I was a non-Ghanaian. And yet, when I handed him my passport, he asked whether I had a visa to enter Ghana. I did. He leafed through the passport and found the page with the visa. After satisfying himself that I was properly authorized, he allowed me to proceed to customs control.

I was born and raised in Ghana. The majority of my siblings and their families still live there. Some of them occupy the family house in the small village of Boadua where we grew up. But I became a naturalized U.S. citizen nearly three decades ago, which is why I was traveling with my American passport that revealed my foreign identity to the immigration officer.

Because of the close family ties that I still have to Ghana, I have made numerous visits to the country over the last three decades. Each time I have traveled there, I have had to apply for a visa, and as many times as I have gone through the process, I should be used to it by now. But it always feels quite strange having to obtain authorization to enter the country that I grew up in and I’m still very much a part of.

Every modern state has requirements that foreign nationals must meet before they can enter its sovereign territory. If I were ever detected trying to enter Ghana illegally, I would, without a doubt, be detained and later deported back to America. That would look and feel extremely weird, but the rules are the rules.

America may be a nation of immigrants, but it is a sovereign state nonetheless, and should be entitled, like any other, to enforce its laws of entry.

Quite unfortunately, during the last decade or so, there have been some people on the extreme left of the Democratic Party who have called for de-criminalization of the U.S. southern border. Of the hundreds of thousands of migrants who have come to the border in that period, some were fleeing from various kinds of persecution in their home countries. Many of those people had legitimate asylum claims. However, the overwhelming majority of the rest were people from South America, Africa, Asia and other poorer parts of the world who were seeking better economic opportunities. By insisting on keeping the borders open for everyone, those well-meaning liberals have instead caused them to be shut completely. The result is that there are migrants whose lives will be in great peril in their countries of origin but are being sent back there anyway.

Because I grew up in extreme poverty in Ghana, I always see myself in the Africans, and others, who make those perilous journeys to our southern border. I have a great deal of sympathy for them. If I were in their shoes, I would almost certainly make the same attempt. But that does not negate the fact that the unregulated entry of hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world places a huge burden on the residents of this country, particularly those in the border states.

African immigrants like me who spent their early years in villages and small towns on the continent but now live in places like the U.S. and Western Europe should be quite familiar with this feeling. The poverty that I escaped in Boadua when I left as a young man to study abroad still exists, and is as crushing as ever. Whenever I return to the village nowadays, there is an endless line of people who come to see me for financial assistance. They include extended family members, childhood friends, and others who I have no prior relationships with. Everyone assumes that my pockets are full of dollars. I try to help as many of them as I can since I fully appreciate the situation they are in. But I always know that there is a limit to what I can do. I therefore use my judgment to channel my meager resources to those who have the most critical needs.

Liberals frequently argue that America has a continent-size landmass and hence the space to absorb a lot more people than we seem willing to let in. They also say that our enormous wealth should allow us to admit and provide shelter and comfort to more of those desperate people who are fleeing from economic and other forms of hardship. Those are noble sentiments. But they are unrealistic. Those views demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the immigration problem.

Given the chance, nearly everyone everywhere in the underdeveloped world would come to America. That is the reality. Admitting the thousands in each of the many caravans that approached the border in the last few years wouldn’t end the story. Instead, it would signal that the gates are open, and that would encourage many more thousands to come. The entire system would be overwhelmed in short order.

To me, the call for America to keep its borders open and absorb the constant stream of people trying to cross is akin to someone attempting to drain the Pacific Ocean into the basin of Lake Michigan. That is physically impossible. It may be a Great Lake, but its basin has nowhere near the capacity required to hold all that water from a giant ocean like the Pacific. For the same reason, America has to make choices similar to the ones that I am forced to make when I am in my village in Ghana.

Having said all of that, a heavy dose of realism is required on the part of those on the extreme right of the Republican Party who demand that we deport everyone in the country who came here illegally. It is practically impossible to remove all of the eleven million or so undocumented immigrants, many of whom have lived and worked in America for long periods of time. Most of them have children, young and adult, who are American citizens. And the truth is, that kind of mass deportation would also be extremely unwise. Many of our important industries, such as agriculture, construction, and hospitality, couldn’t function without the crucial labor that these hardworking immigrants have supplied for decades. The economic damage to our nation from such a mass expulsion would be incalculable.

Right-wing Republicans must also show a bit more compassion toward immigrants who are here for more than economic reasons. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court granted permission to the Trump administration to revoke the temporary legal status of over 500,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Most of those people, who are now subject to deportation, had been allowed to remain in the U.S. legally for two years by the Biden administration due to the extreme violence and widespread political oppression in their home countries. It is quite likely that the majority of them are currently holding jobs and contributing to our economy. Can any of us say in good conscience that we are so overburdened by their presence that we have to deport, for instance, the Haitians, to the Hobbesian nightmare that their country is now?

Ultimately, the most durable solution to the immigration problem is for the rich world to find effective ways to help promote socio-economic development in poorer nations. By cutting foreign aid, we are doing the exact opposite. It will never be possible for us here in America to insulate ourselves from the instability that mass poverty elsewhere generates. If people are desperate enough, they will find ways to scale even the most impregnable of barriers. Just as the Democratic left shouldn’t try to defy the laws of physics, people on the Republican right have to know that they cannot disobey the laws of nature either.