In an editorial yesterday, the Los Angeles Times called on President Biden to present a “comprehensive” immigration reform plan to Congress in order to fix the nation’s “dysfunctional immigration system.” The editorial then goes on to enumerate several possible immigration reforms.
When are statists finally going to get it? When are they going to finally come to the realization that there is no “comprehensive” immigration reform plan that is going to finally bring an end to America’s decades-old immigration crisis?
In other words, if Congress approved every single immigration reform suggestion set forth in the Times’s editorial, the immigration crisis would continue, and it might even get worse.
I’ll do you one better. Let’s put the top 100 immigration reform experts in the county into one room, along with the Times’s entire editorial staff. Let’s give them the fastest computers in the world. Let’s assign three research assistants to each of the experts. Let them come up with the best comprehensive immigration reform plan in history.
What would be the result? A continuation of the immigration crisis, and perhaps even a worsening of it.
In fact, let’s pull together all the conservative-oriented libertarians who favor immigration controls. Let’s put them into a room with 50 of the top progressives and 50 of the top conservatives in the country, with the aim of producing an ideal comprehensive immigration reform plan.
It wouldn’t make any difference. The outcome would be continued crisis, perhaps even a worsening of it.
There is a simple reason for this phenomenon. It’s called socialism. Socialism produces crises and chaos. For more than a 100 years, there have been people who have tried to make socialism work. They have failed. They will always fail because socialism is an inherently defective system.
America’s immigration system is based on the socialist principle of central planning. The government centrally plans the movements of millions of people across borders, especially with respect to very complex, constantly changing labor markets. The government central planners decide what the overall number of allowable immigrants will be, how many immigrants will be allowed from each country, and what everyone’s credentials will be.
It simply cannot be done. Central planning always leads to what Ludwig von Mises called “planned chaos.” What better term to use to describe America’s decades-long immigration crisis? Just ask all those American farmers whose crops have rotted in the fields owing to a shortage of workers to harvest them.
Unfortunately, socialism brings more than perpetual crisis and chaos. It also brings death and suffering. That’s why there are immigrants who die crossing lonely deserts in the American Southwest, or who die of suffocation in the backs of 18-wheelers that are smuggling them into the country, or who die from drowning in the Rio Grande. It’s why refugees are left to linger in squalor and sickness in refugee camps along the border. It’s why children are forcibly separated from their families, sometimes never reunited again. It’s why so many immigrants live in constant fear.
Unfortunately, that’s not all. There is also the tyranny and the police state that come with a system of immigration controls. Domestic immigration checkpoints, warrantless trespasses and searches of privately owned ranches and farms, boarding of Greyhound buses to check people’s papers, roving Border Patrol checkpoints, violent immigration raids on private businesses, and more.
Not surprisingly, the Times didn’t address the tyranny and police-state issues in its call for “comprehensive” immigration reform. Advocates of immigration controls never do.
There is but one solution to America’s immigration morass: The free market and limited government, which, in the context of immigration, means open borders. I repeat: There is no other solution — no other way to finally bring an end to America’s decades-old immigration crisis. Freedom, free markets, and limited government are also the only way to bring an end to the death, suffering, tyranny, and police state that come with a socialist immigration system.
