You couldn’t find a better example of hypocrisy among both conservatives and liberals (i.e., progressives, leftists) than in the area on immigration.
Conservatives love to wrap themselves in free-market, capitalist lingo. They tell us that they are fierce opponents of socialism. Their favorite mantra is “free enterprise, private property, and limited government.” You might even find them quoting Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek.
Yet, all that “devotion” to free-market principles goes out the window when it comes to immigration. Rather than simply leaving people free to cross borders seeking to improve their lives through labor, which is what “free enterprise” is all about, conservatives support an enormous big-government immigration system, one that is based on the socialist principle of central planning.
It’s not a coincidence that there has been a decades-long, ongoing, never-ending immigration crisis, one characterized by an enormous supply of immigrants at the border trying to enter the United States and, at the same time, an enormous shortage of workers to, say, pick crops in the United States. That’s what socialist central planning does. It produces crises or, as the economist Ludwig von Mises termed it, “planned chaos.”
When their socialist system fails to produce its desired outcome, public officials impose and enforce an ever-increasing array of harsh enforcement measures to make it work. As each measure fails to resolve the crisis and the level of anger and frustration rises, the measures become ever more tyrannical. That’s how we have ended up with an immigration police state in the American Southwest, which conservatives say is part and parcel of America’s “free-enterprise system.”
Liberals love to proclaim how they love “the poor, needy, and disadvantaged.” Yet, it is impossible to reconcile that mantra with their support of America’s system of immigration controls. It would be virtually impossible to find a better example of “the poor, needy, and disadvantaged” than penniless immigrants who are fleeing their homelands in an attempt to save or improve their lives through labor. Yet, under the system of immigration controls, which liberals favor, such immigrants are arrested, jailed, and deported.
At the moment, liberals are decrying President Trump’s harsh efforts to enforce this conservative-liberal socialist immigration system. They accuse him of being cruel, brutal, and heartless. And yet, they simply ignore the fact that all that Trump is doing is enforcing the system that they support.
An example of this phenomenon appeared yesterday in the Washington Post in an article entitled “Trump’s Immigration Policies Speak Louder than His Racist, Xenophobic Words” by Post columnist Catherine Rampell. You couldn’t find a better list of Trump’s cruel, brutal, and harsh immigration enforcement measures.
Rampell cites the violent immigration raids that Trump’s people are conducting at businesses and homes across America. She criticizes Trump’s new rule requiring Central American immigrants who travel through Mexico to seek asylum there first as a prerequisite to seeking asylum in the United States. She points out that Trump has his immigration people forcing asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their claims are being adjudicated. She laments that Trump’s policies are having “chilling effect” on the use by immigrants and U.S.-born children of food stamps and health insurance. She condemns Trump’s policy of separating children from parents to deter immigrants with children from coming to the United States. And she decries the “filthy conditions” in the immigration detention centers in which such children are being placed.
Rampell fails to recite the long list of immigration enforcement measures that have come into existence over the decades, all of which have been enacted in the hope that one such measure would finally — finally! — resolve the decades-old, ongoing, never-ending immigration crisis. Immigration highway checkpoints where American citizens are subject to full body searches, including body cavities, even though they have never left the United States. Warrantless searches of private property within 100 miles of the border. Roving Border Patrol stops and searches of vehicles. Felony prosecutions of Americans who hire, transport, or harbor illegal immigrants. Full body searches and cell phone searches of Americans returning from vacation in a foreign country. A Berlin Fence along the border, acquired by stealing people’s land through eminent domain.
So, what does Rampell propose at the end of her article to resolve America’s immigration crisis? She doesn’t propose anything! Silence! Complete silence as to what should be done to resolve America’s decades-old, ongoing, never-ending immigration crisis! Her entire article is simply devoted to decrying, criticizing, and condemning how Trump is enforcing the very systemic immigration controls that both conservatives and liberals support.
Wouldn’t it have been nice if Rampell had submitted her list of favorite immigration enforcement measures that she would endorse to finally resolve the immigration crisis? After all, as a graduate of Princeton and a former economics reporter for the New York Times, she is obviously a very intelligent person. Why doesn’t she show how she would win the war on illegal immigration? Why doesn’t she propose her version of “comprehensive immigration reform.”
There is a simple reason for Rampell’s silence. There is no way to make this socialist immigration system work, at least not without an ever-increasing array of tyrannical measures, which inexorably move America in the direction of North Korea’s enforcement of its southern border. In other words, the conservative-progressive socialist system of immigration controls isn’t broken, as its advocates sometimes claim. Instead, it is inherently defective, which means that it cannot be fixed by anyone. Rampell’s silence on how she would resolve the immigration crisis is an implied confirmation of this critically important point.
The only thing that works is genuine freedom and free markets, which means the libertarian position of open borders — i.e., the free movements of people, goods, and services across political borders. It is the only system that is consistent with principles of liberty, free enterprise, free markets, morality, religion, harmony, and limited government. It’s the only system that will bring an end to America’s decades-old, ongoing, never-ending immigration crisis and all the cruel, brutal, and tyrannical measures that have been brought into existence to enforce it. It is the only system that works.
