A jury in San Antonio, Texas, recently returned a guilty verdict against two men — Armando Gonzales-Ortega and Felipe Orduna-Torres — for the role they played in the deaths of 53 illegal immigrants — 47 adults and 6 children. The victims died while being transported in the back of a tractor trailer where temperatures reached 150 degrees. The defendants are scheduled to be sentenced on June 27 and will most likely receive a very high prison sentence.
According to the New York Times, Craig Larrabee, a special agent in charge for Homeland Security Investigations in San Antonio, stated, “The disregard for human life shows how human smugglers prioritize money and profit.”
Unfortunately, however, Larrabee failed to point out that it wasn’t only Gonzales-Ortega and Orduna-Torres and other smugglers who bear moral responsibility for the deaths of those 53 people. So do U.S. officials who continue to support and enforce America’s decades-old immigration-control system — a system by which the federal government centrally plans the movements of people across international borders and criminalizes the unauthorized entry into the United States by foreigners.
In an immigration system based on freedom and free markets —that is, a system of genuine open borders, like the system that we have within the domestic United States — those 53 people would be alive today. That’s because they would not have been traveling in the back of that tractor-trailer. Instead, they would have been traveling in the United States like normal human beings. They would have been traveling in buses, cars, or planes.
By having an immigration-control system that is based on the socialist principle of central planning and by criminalizing the unauthorized entry into the United States, U.S. officials have brought into existence a black market consisting of human traffickers of illegal immigrants. With no socialism and no criminalization of unauthorized entry, there would be no human traffickers of illegal immigrants.
Thus, while Gonzales-Ortega and Orduna-Torres bear legal responsibility for the deaths of those immigrants, they share moral responsibility for those deaths with U.S. officials, whose immigration-control system has brought into existence a black market for human trafficking that ultimately resulted in the deaths of those 53 people.
As we have been maintaining for 35 years here at The Future of Freedom Foundation, there is but one solution to the death, suffering, chaos, and perpetual crisis on our international borders. That solution is open borders — that is, the free movements of goods, services, and people across borders. I repeat: There is no other solution.
Mark my words: So long as America continues to maintain its socialist central-planning system of immigration controls and its fierce enforcement, there will continue to be a black market in human trafficking and more deaths of innocent people. Moreover, there will continue to be criminal prosecution of human traffickers as well as righteous pronouncements by federal officials who will fail to recognize the role that their immigration-control system plays in such deaths and suffering.
