I’ve long believed that conservatives have a strange way of thinking when it comes to the federal government. Their positions on three issues — immigration, the drug war, and sanctions — buttress my point.
Let’s start with immigration. Conservatives rail against the large number of immigrants illegally entering the United States. That’s why they ardently support America’s immigration police state that the feds have imposed on people living in the borderlands.
At the same time, however, conservatives support two of the federal government’s programs — the drug war and economic sanctions — that motivate countless immigrants to leave their countries and come to the United States.
For example, Reuters recently published an article entitled, “Rise in Mexican Cartel Violence Drives Record Migration to the US.” The article states:
Reuters obtained previously unreported survey data from the Kino Border Initiative, a large migrant shelter and resource center in Nogales, Sonora, and interviewed 21 migrant families along the border in Texas and Arizona who identified violence — not economic factors — as the primary driver for their decision to leave Mexico. The families represent a shift from the past, when Mexican migrants were primarily men in search of better-paying jobs. Some 88% of the Mexicans who passed through Kino this year said they were seeking to escape violence, according to the center’s interviews with 6,710 people. In 2017, it was the opposite: 87% of the 7,148 respondents to the Kino survey said they were migrating for economic reasons, with only 2% citing violence.
The article points out that the massive violence that Mexicans are fleeing is rooted in Mexico’s drug cartels. It is the drug war that has given rise to the drug cartels. If the drug war were ended, the cartels would disappear immediately, along with the violence they generate. That’s because drug cartels can only prosper in a climate of illegality — that is, in a black market. Once the illegality is ended, the cartels are unable to compete against legitimate companies selling drugs, such as pharmacies and, consequently, immediately go out of business.
Venezuelan migrants crossing the border between Ecuador and Columbia.
If there was ever a government program that has proven to be an abject failure, it’s the war on drugs. Everyone, including conservatives, agrees that despite decades of drug warfare, drug prohibition has failed to achieve its purported end.
So, why not just end the drug war, which would alleviate the immigration crisis?
Answer: Because conservatives are too wedded to the notion that they must continue supporting the drug war simply because the federal government insists on doing so. It’s a classic deference-to-authority mindset. In the conservative mind, the federal government is akin to a god. Whatever it wants must be supported by the conservative, even if the result is contrary to what conservatives want — i.e., a flood of immigrants who are fleeing the violence produced by a decades-old failed federal program.
It’s the same with economic sanctions, which target the citizenry of a foreign country with death and economic privation as a way to achieve regime change in that country.
A perfect example is Venezuela, where the U.S. government, in combination with Venezuela’s socialist economic system, has succeeded in causing massive economic harm to the Venezuelan people with its system of economic sanctions.
The economic catastrophe in Venezuela has caused thousands of Venezuelan people to flee to the United States in a desperate attempt to save their lives from the sanctions that the U.S. government has inflicted on them.
That massive influx of Venezuelan migrants has caused conservatives to go apoplectic. They demand that the federal government “do something” to stop the “invaders.”
There is something important to note about those sanctions: They have failed to achieve regime change in Venezuela. So, wouldn’t the logical thing be to simply lift the sanctions in order to improve economic conditions in Venezuela, which would relieve the immigration crisis?
But of course that’s not what the federal government does. Instead it strengthens the sanctions and forcibly returns the Venezuelan migrants to Venezuela, where they will die or, it is hoped, achieve regime change by replacing the current regime with a U.S. puppet regime.
Conservatives continue to support all this deadly and destructive contradictory mayhem against the Venezuelan people. Again, that’s because they have come to view the federal government as a god, one that does no wrong and, they feel, deserves the loyal and unswerving support of conservatives.
What’s the solution to all this deadly and destructive statism? Legalize drugs, end all sanctions, and dismantle America’s socialist system of immigration controls. That would help put America on the right road — toward freedom, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the world.