It’s no surprise to me that so many people who live on or near the U.S.-Mexico border, including Democrats, voted for Donald Trump for president. Whenever there is ongoing, never-ending chaos and crisis, people look to “the man on the white horse” — that is, the dictatorial “strongman” — to bring “law and order” and “stability” to the situation.
For at least 80 years, there has been ongoing, never-ending, perpetual crisis and chaos along the border. With each passing decade, it has gotten worse and worse. Notwithstanding the border police state that has arisen over the decades to address the crisis and chaos, in the past few years there have been waves of illegal immigrants and people seeking refugee status crossing the border and entering the United States. In other words, massive chaos and crisis. Trump and his Trumpsters call the illegal immigrants and refugees “invaders” and “occupiers,” much like when the U.S. military unleashed massive death and destruction with its invasion and occupation of Iraq.
To deal with this crisis and chaos, U.S. officials have responded in predictable ways: by building a Berlin Wall along the border, forcing refugees to remain in Mexico to await their status hearing, separating children from their parents, refugee camps, taxpayer-funded hotel rooms and meals, concertina wire, U.S. troops, and more.
And all that is on top of the decades-old police-state measures to deal with the ongoing, never-ending, perpetual crisis and chaos — that is, the highway checkpoints, the warrantless searches of ranches and farms, boarding of Greyhound buses to check people’s papers, federal prosecutions for hiring, transporting, harboring, or caring for illegal immigrants, roving Border Patrol checkpoints, and more.
What many people do not realize — and oftentimes do not want to realize — is that all this crisis and chaos is rooted in America’s immigration-control system itself. That’s because the system is a socialist system, in that it is based on the socialist principle of central planning. As the free-market economist Ludwig von Mises observed, socialist central planning produces “planned chaos.” What better term to describe America’s ongoing, never-ending, perpetual immigration crisis than “planned chaos”?
Consider, for example, those hotel rooms that have people so upset. What else are U.S. officials supposed to do given their system? Their prison camps are overloaded. They won’t let these people work because they don’t have “green cards.” Moreover, letting them work would mean letting them go free. They don’t want to do that. So, what are they supposed to do with all these people they are taking into custody — let them and their children sleep out in open-air penitentiaries in the middle of winter?
People who live on or near the border (and elsewhere) see all this “planned chaos” and become exasperated by it. After all, they have lived with it for at least 80 years. And nothing has worked to alleviate it. In their minds, there is only one thing to do: vote for the man on the white horse — the strongman — the man who will employ dictatorial measures that will finally — finally! — bring peace and stability and law and order to the border.
Never mind that the man on the white horse — the strongman — is going to destroy freedom in the process. That doesn’t matter. It will be worth it because he is promising to bring peace and stability and law and order. Finally, things will return to “normal” on the border, even if people are now living under a totally militarized police state.
As we have stated for 35 years here at FFF, there is only one — repeat only one — solution to America’s ongoing, never-ending, perpetual immigration crisis and chaos. That solution is freedom and free markets. That means open borders — genuine open borders, which entails the complete dismantling of the Border Patrol, ICE, and all restrictions on the free movements of goods, services, and people across borders. I repeat: There is no other solution, if one wants to live in a genuinely free, peaceful, prosperous, and harmonious society.
But I would guess that 99.95 percent of people along the border have never heard, much less considered, the case for open borders. That’s because there are still so few people, including libertarians, making the principled case for open borders. And no, making the case for “letting in more immigrants” is not making the case for open borders but instead is making the case for President Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s approach to the immigration crisis and chaos — that is, keeping the socialist central-planning system and its police state intact but simply “letting in” more immigrants.
Whatever else might be said about Donald Trump, he is a very astute politician. He knew that he could seize upon the immigration crisis to induce people to vote for him if he promised them that he, the strongman, would resolve the crisis with harsh, dictatorial measures. Given that people are not aware of the concept of genuine open borders, the choice for them boiled down to: the continuation of the crisis under Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump cracking down with harsh, dictatorial measures and supposedly bringing an end to the crisis.
Permit me a small digression. In 1970 Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile. Since he was a socialist/communist, U.S. officials immediately deemed him to be a threat to U.S. “national security.” Rather than assassinate him, however, they decided to induce the Chile’s military-intelligence establishment to violently remove him from office as a threat to Chile’s “national security.”
To ensure public support for the coup, President Nixon ordered the CIA to secretly make the Chilean economy “scream.” The idea was to have the CIA do everything it could to produce economic chaos and crisis within Chile, including bribery to bring about a nationwide trucking strike. In that way, people would be much more likely to support a “strongman” who would exercise dictatorial powers to end the economic crisis that the CIA was secretly helping to produce.
That’s what is going on with people in the borderlands and, for that matter, in other parts of the United States. They’re seeing the ever-worsening 80 years of crisis and chaos that America’s system of immigration controls has brought but do not realize that it is the federal government’s own socialist immigration system that is producing it. So they willingly and eagerly sacrifice their rights and liberties to the man on the white horse — the strongman — just as the Chilean people did with their embrace of strongman Augusto Pinochet.
