Tucker Carlson on Open Borders – The Future of Freedom Foundation

Note: Today, Wednesday, October 23, at 11 a.m. Eastern time, I will be on Ernie Hancock’s podcast “Declare Your Independence” to discuss the wrongful conviction of libertarian bitcoin advocate Ian Freeman. Click here to listen in LIVE. We will post a link to the podcast later.

Reminder: Our online Zoom conference on open borders continues on Monday, October 28, with Benjamin Powell, director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University and professor of economics at Texas Tech University’s Rawls College of Business. 7 p.m.-8 p.m. Eastern Time. Register here.

Reminder: I’ll be speaking at the JFK Lancer conference and also at the CAPA conference, which are being held on November 22-24 in Dallas. Both of them are fantastic JFK-assassination-related conferences. I highly recommend registering for both and then picking and choosing which sessions you would like to attend at both conferences. I will have some of my JFK books there to autograph and sell at a discounted price. I hope to see you there!

*****

During the four years of the Biden administration, conservatives have steadfastly maintained that President Biden has adopted a policy of “open borders.” A recent example of this phenomenon involves Tucker Carlson, one of the most renowned and intelligent conservatives in the country.

Carlson recently sent out a promotional email for a documentary entitled Line in the Sand, which addresses what he calls “America’s illegal immigrant crisis.” The documentary details “undercover journalist James O’Keefe’s stunning journey to the United States through Central America with the cartels.” Carlson exhorts people to watch the video (which requires a paid membership in Tucker’s organization) to “discover the secrets of our open border that Washington’s establishment doesn’t want you to learn.” (Emphasis added.)

As I read Tucker’s promotional email, I asked myself: How can such a smart guy really believe that the “illegal immigrant crisis” is the result of an “open border”? After all, Tucker attended boarding school and then got a B.A. in history at Trinity College in Connecticut. He has had an illustrious career in journalism, including stints at New York magazine, Reader’s Digest, CNN, PBS, MSNBC, Daily Caller, Fox News, and others. He now hosts the highly successful Tucker Carlson Network.

Bottom line: Carlson is one smart guy.

So, how can he genuinely believe that the reason there is an “illegal immigrant crisis” is because President Biden has adopted a system of “open borders”?

First of all, let’s establish the genuine meaning of “open borders.” Open borders is the system we have inside the domestic United States. The borders between the states are completely open. People are free to cross state borders back and forth without control, monitoring, inspection, or vetting.

In other words, there are no governmental control stations at the state borders. No federal or state agents stop people who are crossing the border to ask for identification. No searches of persons or vehicles at state borders. No state border patrols. No government walls along state borders. No concertina wire. No separating children from their parents. No state highway checkpoints to determine whether a person has crossed into a state without official permission. No criminalization of hiring, transporting, harboring, or caring for illegal entrants into a state. No warrantless searches of ranches or farms on or near state borders.

That is a system of open borders — genuine open borders.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, that is not the system we have on the U.S.-Mexico border. Instead, we have an immigration police state, one that is designed and intended to deter and prevent people from entering the United States without the official permission of the federal government. This immigration police state is characterized by various police-state measures, such as fixed highway checkpoints, roving Border Patrol checkpoints, thousands of Border Patrol and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents, warrantless searches of farms and ranches within 100 miles of the border, boarding of Greyhound buses to check people’s official travel documents, a Berlin Wall along the border, concertina wire, the criminalization of hiring, transporting, harboring, or helping illegal immigrants, and more.

So, how can a smart guy like Carlson (and other conservatives) say that there is a system of “open borders” on the U.S.-Mexico border when it is obvious that there is actually an immigration police state along the border, which is the exact opposite of open borders?

One possibility is that Carlson doesn’t know what the genuine concept of open borders means. But I don’t buy that. He is much too smart a guy not to recognize the difference between the system of open borders we have inside the United States with respect to state borders and the immigration-police state that we have on the U.S.-Mexico border.]

Another possibility arises to explain Carlson’s mindset — that he believes that President Biden has ordered immigration officials, including the Border Patrol and ICE and all other immigration enforcement officials, to stand down and immediately stop enforcing U.S. immigration laws.

But I think he’s also much too smart to believe that. After all, if such an order had been issued, it would have been made public by now. More important, the Border Patrol and ICE have continued to brutally enforce America’s immigration-control system during the entire Biden administration. In fact, according to Reuters, “Biden is now deporting more people than Trump.” The article quotes Biden as saying “Today I’m announcing actions to bar migrants who cross our southern border unlawfully from receiving asylum.” Biden has also continued building Trump’s Berlin Wall. He has also sent troops to the border to help enforce America’s immigration-control system.

Even if one disputes whether the number of deportations have been higher under Biden than they were under Trump, which some conservatives have done, there is no doubt that America’s entire immigration-control apparatus is still in effect and that Biden continues to enforce this system, albeit in a different manner than Trump. For example, Trump implemented a policy of separating children from their parents as a way to deter families from illegally immigrating to the United States. Biden has rejected that particular enforcement measure. But a difference in enforcement of an immigration police state is obviously not the equivalent of a genuine system of open borders.

So, what is really going on here with Carlson? I believe that the answer lies with fear. Carlson, like other conservatives, is deeply fearful of being attached to a government program that has proven to be an abject failure and that will always be a failure. Therefore, to avoid having to confront that fear and deal with it directly, Carlson and other conservatives go off on a delusional lark that claims that Biden has adopted a system of “open borders.”

Consider the goal of the immigration-control system that Carlson and other conservatives, including Donald Trump, favor. It’s the same goal that Biden, Kamala Harris, and other liberals favor. They all favor an “orderly” immigration-control system — one in which everyone dutifully stands in line for years until his number is called — one in which no one enters the country illegally.

Okay, that’s their goal. But their system has never worked because no matter what police-state measures are adopted to enforce it, immigrants circumvent them. And no one can deny that over the decades, U.S. officials have adopted ever-increasing, ever-harsher police-state measures to make their system work — to make their system achieve its goal of an “orderly” system in which everyone stands in line for years until his number is called.

For 34 years here at The Future of Freedom Foundation, I have been emphasizing two critically important points about the decades-old, ongoing, never-ending immigration crisis that Carlson laments in his promotional email.

Point Number One: America’s immigration-control system has never worked, it still doesn’t work, and it will never work. This reality is what Carlson and other conservatives simply cannot bring themselves to accept.

Point Number Two: The only solution — repeat for emphasis: the only solution — to America’s decades-old, ongoing, never-ending, perpetual immigration morass is open borders — genuine open borders — that is, no more Border Patrol or ICE, no more Berlin Wall along the border, no more highway checkpoints, no more warrantless searches, and no more restrictions on the free movements of goods, services, and people, back and forth, across borders.

The problem is that conservatives just haven’t wanted to believe me. They are too scared to admit and acknowledge that their system cannot work and that it will never work — that it is incapable of achieving their goal of an “orderly” system in which everyone dutifully stands in line for years waiting for his number to be called.

In fact, it’s worse than that. What Carlson and other conservatives cannot see is that it’s their very own immigration-control system that gives rise to things that they lament, such as immigration cartels or black-market immigration transporters.

Rather than take responsibility for the failure and destructiveness of their very own system, Tucker and other conservatives blame the decades-old, ongoing, never-ending, perpetual immigration crisis on “open borders,” despite the quite obvious fact that we have long had a brutal immigration police state along the border rather than the system of open borders that we have between the states.

Why is my Point Number One important? I think that confronting their fear and accepting reality would provide Carlson and other conservatives who favor immigration controls with an internal sense of peace. By confronting their fear and dealing with it directly, no longer would they live their lives in a constant state of anxiety, depression, angst, worry, anger, rage, and despair over the “immigration crisis” that is caused by their very own system. They would simply resign themselves to supporting a system that they know just doesn’t work and will never work.

We’ve seen this phenomenon in the drug war, another statist program that conservatives have long favored. I think many proponents of the drug war have come to the realization that their program will never work. No matter how many drug busts there are and no matter how many prosecutions and convictions there are, drug warriors have come to accept that the drug war will never achieve its goal. Drug warriors are now willing to live with that reality. In the process, while they still aren’t able to bring themselves to embrace drug legalization, they no longer get angry and filled with rage over the fact that the drug war never has worked and never will work. They’ve just come to accept failure and live with it.

Moreover, once someone, including a smart person like Tucker Carlson, recognizes that the statist program he favors is a failure and will always be a failure, there is always a possibility that he will embrace my Point Number Two — that there is only one — repeat only one — solution to America’s decades-old, ongoing, never-ending, perpetual deadly and destructive immigration morass — open borders — genuine open borders.

*****