Hoping, Finally, That 2023 Will Be a Happy Stu Year

Stuart K. Hayashi

Since the start of 2020, I have a made a New Year’s tradition of putting up this image on social media. Yet in every case that I have done this, the year ended up being one of devastating loss for me.

Mere months after I first posted the image, COVID happened. I therefore I thought the image deserved another shot for 2021. Then on January 12, my mother died. Twelve days into 2021, and it was already the worst year of my life.

I then decided to re-post the image for New Year’s 2022. This year, my father died.

If I were more superstitious, I would tell you that this image is cursed. But because I’m crazy this way, I’m going to put up the image yet again.

It is as though, every time the pictured fish makes a go of crawling out of the water, some storm sweeps it back in. But Tiktaalik must try again, and so shall I. Curses are not enough to stop me from going through with my plans.

After the past three, here is hoping that finally with 2023 there will be a Happy Stu Year.

Enforcement of the USA’s Southern Border Leads to U.S. Intervention South of That Border

Stuart K. Hayashi

Screen shot from the motion picture "Born in East L.A.,"
prod. Peter Macgregor-Scott, dir. Cheech Marin (Universal Pictures, 1987).

The following is adapted from my longer essay, “The War on Illegal Migrants: A Repeat of the War on Illegal Drugs.” The longest version of that essay is here.  A shorter version of that essay can be read here.


Former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R–Tx) and his fellow writers of the Ludwig von Mises Institute blabber about the need for the U.S. federal government to get tough with guarding the USA’s southern border. They don’t want undocumented immigrants getting through. And Ron Paul and the Mises Institute also gnash their teeth about the evils of the U.S. federal government sending agents to intervene in foreign countries, including those of Latin America.

Yet such intervention is actually integral to enforcing the USA’s southern border. The leftwing journalist Todd Miller writes of how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has vast operations within Latin America, and their purpose is to do exactly the border enforcement that Ron Paul and the Mises Institute scream that they want. These U.S. agents spy on those they suspect of being smugglers or their clients. Then, when they judge appropriate, these agents apply armed force in order to preempt the smugglers and clients from reaching the border in the first place.

Todd Miller notes that, by blocking undocumented immigration in this manner, the USA is establishing, unofficially but in practice, a border that is even farther south than the official one north of Mexico. The border enforcers are, de facto, lowering the USA’s southern border further southward. As Todd Miller phrases it,

The United States has been purposely pushing out its borders, meaning that the border doesn’t end at the US-Mexico southern border. For example, in Puerto Rico, the Ramey sector of the U.S. Border Patrol can patrol a thousand miles to the south of the U.S. mainland. This allows Border Patrol agents, and effectively the Coast Guard and Department of Homeland Security, to patrol around the Dominican Republic and Haiti. So what happened in the January 2010 earthquake that hit Haiti, one of the first U.S. responses was to send sixteen Coast Guard cutters that were right around the coast line of Haiti; they sent an airplane over Haiti with the voice of the ambassador, who was speaking Creole, but asking people not to leave the island while they were digging themselves out of their homes after they collapsed.

So, all of the sudden, the U.S. border isn’t where you think it is. It expands and goes all the way up to the coast of Haiti. [When some Haitians did try to migrate, there were already] detention facilities at Guantanamo to intercept them. Everything’s in preparation.

Here, fans of Ron Paul and the Mises Institute are wont to say, “No, instead of messing around in other countries, the agents should be focused on the U.S. southern border, and the border only.” According to arguments put forth by the Mises Institute itself about other government agencies, nothing about that demand is realistic. Calling for a beef-up in border enforcement only causes more of the international meddling. It is unrealistic to expect that if a federal agency’s authority is enlarged in just one specific area, it will stick only to that one specific area. That enlargement of authority in that one area allows for administrators to rationalize their expansion into various other affairs that, to taxpayers, seem only tenuously related to what the agency’s original task was.

After all, by expanding their reach and jurisdiction, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the Homeland Security Department they work under can all further justify their existence and budgets. It helps them look even busier and more important, which places pressure on the Congressmen holding the purse strings to renew their budgets. With renewed or expanded budgets, there is a reduced risk of layoffs within the departments. The agents maintain job security. But one would think that this would already be known by Mises-Institute libertarians so savvy about how the Drug War and other federal programs engage in “mission creep.”  

Besides, to the degree that the federal government is serious about stopping illegal entries into the USA — something that those in the Mises Institute orbit demand quite zealously — it makes sense to meddle in the countries of the south. Agents can be more effectual in stopping border-crossings by going on the offensive against the smugglers within their countries of origin.

White nationalists try to conjure up the image of impoverished, nonwhite immigrants being a barbarian horde overwhelming an understaffed and underfunded Border Patrol. The reality is that the fervency of the anti-immigrationists has given the USA’s border-enforcement agencies another excuse to introduce upon foreign soil.

Ron Paul and the Mises Institute go on demanding both a closing of the USA’s southern border and that the USA stops intervening in other countries. But as Todd Miller shows, intensified enforcement of the USA’s southern border always leads to more U.S. intervention south of that border.

Fans of the Ron Paul and the Mises Institute also like to say, “You can have open borders or a welfare state. You can’t have both.” Evidence from academic studies happens to suggest otherwise. Here is a much more realistic binary choice: Either you can have the USA’s southern border closed, or the USA can stop intervening in other countries. You can’t have both.

The War on Illegal Migrants: A Repeat of the War on Illegal Drugs

The Shorter Version

Stuart K. Hayashi

Screen shot from the motion picture "Born in East L.A.,"
prod. Peter Macgregor-Scott, dir. Cheech Marin (Universal Pictures, 1987).

A longer version of this essay, which gives more elaboration on the history of U.S. immigration law, can be read here.

Introduction
Many people who call themselves “libertarians” or “free-market capitalists,” such as economist Thomas Sowell and the writers at the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Alabama, advocate that the government allow for almost any action that is peaceful — with one notable exception. They say that even nonviolent activities that receive widespread disapproval, such as recreational drug use and sex work, should be legalized.

These libertarians provide a cogent case that any government’s War on Illegal Drugs cannot be won. Governmental restrictions on recreational drug use and sex work do not stop these activities, but instead push the activity’s participants into involvement in the black market. Therefore, these libertarians conclude, even if the voting majority were right to disapprove personally of substance abuse or sex work, governmental restriction makes such activities more perilous than they otherwise would be. This argument is sound. Yet Sowell and the Mises Institute apparently fail to notice that this very same argument also applies to one of the few peaceful activities that they still want the State to forbid. That activity is the choice to make a long-term migration from a poorer country to a richer, freer one.

The United States and rich Western European countries already maintain systems of strict governmental restriction over whom may enter them and apply for citizenship. These restrictions are enforced by armed government agents. And yet so many putative free-marketers and libertarians propound that, at the very least, these systems of control should persist. Moreover, many of them, including the Mises Institute’s self-described anarchists, shout that these countries’ governments should go farther — clamping down on immigration efforts, both legal and illegal, with an even heavier hand.

Thomas Sowell and these other putative free-marketers ought to notice that they themselves have provided an airtight case against the restrictions they are advocating. That airtight case is the one they advance about crackdowns on recreational drug use. The principles underlying their case for liberalizing the recreational use of drugs apply at least as well to a case for liberalizing immigration.

Thankfully, there are free-enterprisers — notably adherents to Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy — who push back on the anti-immigrationism. In so doing, these people are being logically consistent — “free-enterpriser in favor of liberalizing immigration” is a redundancy.

These free-enterprisers point out that an adult has a moral right to migrate from a poor country to a richer one for job opportunities at least as much as that adult has a moral right to endanger himself through abusing drugs recreationally in the privacy of his own home. These free-enterprisers understand that the morally just policy is for a government to liberalize immigration, observing the right to entry by anyone not demonstrated to pose physical harm to others.

Still, these free-enterprisers usually share a false premise of the anti-immigrationists, to which these free-enterprisers concede. Until some years ago, even as I had long appreciated the libertarians’ black-market argument as it applied to recreational drugs, I myself had not questioned this false premise. The false premise is that if the governments of the USA and Western European countries had the political will to do so, they would be capable of stopping the inflow of Third-World migrants. It was only in late January of 2018 that the magnitude of the truth began to hit me (1, 2). 

Among the persons who call themselves proponents of laissez-faire capitalism, both the pro- and anti-immigration side agree that the resiliency of the black market prevents a First-World republic from ever winning a War on Illegal Drugs. Curiously, both sides also presume that this same First-World republic is able somehow to win a War on Illegal Migrants. The anti-immigration side — especially the self-proclaimed anarchists — always takes the premise for granted. And, as of this writing, it is quite rare to find pro-immigration free-enterprisers who question the premise explicitly. I hope that this essay of mine may change that.

For free-enterprisers, the good news is that as long as some countries are richer and freer than others are, no amount of governmental restriction will stop the flow of migrants. Against the wishes of the anti-immigrationists, some impoverished and nonwhite immigrants will always get through. The bad news is that — just as it is with recreational drug use — though the governmental restriction will not stop the Third-World migration completely, the governmental restriction does compel the migration to change form. It causes the migration to become riskier for all parties than it otherwise would have been. Such bad news is the explanation why, even though the anti-immigrationists will thankfully never thwart all Third-World migration, we should still campaign fervently in favor of liberalizing the immigration process.

This essay will focus on three parties that have, at least one point in time, (1) employed the black-market argument to argue for liberalizing recreational drug use, and (2) demanded that Western governments either maintain their current immigration controls or make them stricter still. The three parties are: (a) Thomas Sowell, Hoover Institution economist and former newspaper columnist; (b) the Ludwig von Mises Institute, an anarcho-“capitalist” think tank headquartered in Auburn, Alabama; and (c) Lauren Southern, a globe-trotting Canadian YouTube vlogger well-known for advancing propaganda in the cause of white nationalism. The first two of these parties, as of this writing, still describe themselves as “libertarian,” whereas Lauren Southern called herself one in the past. She even continued to do so for a while even as she was beginning to introduce white-nationalist talking points into her YouTube vlogs.

 

 
Three Case Studies in Anti-Immigrationism From Supposed Libertarians
Although Thomas Sowell characterizes himself as a libertarian, he is more commonly associated with conservative Republicans. When commenting on social issues such as abortion and immigration rights, he predictably sides with social conservatism. On the matter of immigration he huffs,

When, if ever, are we [native-born Americans] going to close our borders? When will we even take control of our borders, so that we can decide who, and how many, will be admitted? . . . In all the years that have been spent talking back and forth about every conceivable immigration policy ...we could have built the biggest fence of all time, backed up by electronics, boots on the ground and whatever else it takes. . .STOP THE BLEEDING. . . . The fact that the main border that people have been pouring across, at will, is the border with Mexico, does not mean that everyone crossing that border is Mexican. 

There are lots of complicated issues revolving around the open borders — drugs, visas, employers, refugees, crime syndicates, sanctuary cities, amnesty and more. But first we need to stop the bleeding [boldface added].

There are two aspects of Sowell’s rant that deserve special mention. First is that he notes that the smuggling of “drugs” is something connected to undocumented immigration. The drawing of parallels between drug-smuggling and immigrant-smuggling is more apt than even Sowell himself realizes, as we shall see later with what he has to say about the Drug War. The second note to make is Sowell’s use of the words bleeding and pouring to describe the inflow of undocumented immigrants. He likens the immigrants to a dense liquid bursting through, though he insists that this liquid’s flow can and must be ceased — “stop the bleeding.”

In a similar newspaper column from the year 2006, Sowell grumbles,

Most of the arguments for not enforcing our immigration laws are exercises in frivolous rhetoric and slippery sophistry...

If Mexican journalists were flooding into the United States and taking jobs as reporters and editors at half the pay being earned by American reporters and editors, maybe people in the media would understand why the argument about “taking jobs that Americans don’t want” is such nonsense [boldface added].

Note that Sowell once again compares immigrants to a liquid moving all around — they are “flooding into the United States.” Floods cause casualties, and therefore he demands that we take action against this deluge.

In that very same newspaper column, the man gives us this sarcastic crack: “We could solve the problem of all illegal activity anywhere by legalizing it. Why use this approach only with immigration? Why should any of us pay a speeding ticket if immigration scofflaws are legalized after the fact for committing a federal crime?” His invocation of sarcasm to write off any counterargument is of interest here, and we will revisit it when we quote Sowell about the federal government’s War on Illegal Drugs.

As he mostly reached his audiences through a newspaper column, Sowell’s influence had long been limited to print media. But the same message about the menace of undocumented immigrants has been carried into the twenty-first century though videos uploaded onto YouTube. Online videos are a territory for white nationalists especially their darling, Lauren Southern.

In a 2016 video for the rightwing nationalist Rebel News outlet, Lauren Southern said that in the previous year,

a little over a million migrants entered Europe... The international media cheered on this intake of refugees with rose-colored glasses on... The excitement didn’t last long, though, as videos started arising of the situation in Europe. And when we took our eyes away from the numbers [and] charts, real people suffered under what, in their lives, literally looked like an invasion.

How horrifying! But it was not all bad, according to Ms. Southern. In her evaluation, good sense began to prevail. “...the people said, ‘No more.’ People took to the streets to protest, walls were built in Eastern Europe, and migrant-enthusiastic politicians began walking back their insane policies.”

It is for these reasons, she says in another Rebel News YouTube video, that she hand-waves those who “argue that immigration will improve competition in the labor market, and that border controls themselves are just another example of the State tyrannizing individuals. I believe these assertions are misguided, and that there are far stronger libertarian arguments against immigration and against open borders.”

In that latter video, Ms. Southern cites, as examples of credible libertarians who hate the idea of liberalizing immigration law, Hans-Hermann Hoppe and former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R–Tx). Both of those men have strong ties to the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Auburn, Alabama. Of all the ostensibly libertarian think tanks, the Mises Institute is the one that most visibly and vocally opposes the removal of governmental restrictions over immigration, especially immigration from poorer countries to richer and freer ones.

Readers of this blog are probably familiar with the Mises Institute’s antics. In rather Orwellian language that will be understood only by ideological insiders, Mises Institute cofounder and former president Llewelyn H. Rockwell proclaims, “Open Borders Are an Assault on Private Property.” In this essay, he warns, “It is impossible to believe that the U.S or Europe will be a freer place after several more decades of uninterrupted mass immigration.”

Besides the supposed undesirability of impoverished immigrants from the Third World, these three parties — Thomas Sowell, Lauren Southern, and the Mises Institute — share in yet another premise. This second premise is that governmental authorities can — and therefore should — put a stop to all this “mass immigration” of poor people. That is what Sowell means when he says, “In all the years that have been spent talking back and forth about every conceivable immigration policy...we could have built the biggest fence of all time... STOP THE BLEEDING.”

By “we,” Thomas Sowell actually means the national government. The USA’s national government has to “stop the bleeding,” stop the flooding. And yet there is another national problem that Sowell says this same national government simply cannot stop, and should therefore leave alone. That is the problem of people taking hard drugs recreationally and becoming addicted to them.

Here, the reader might object that it is unfair of me to say that crackdowns on illegal immigrants are comparable to drug prohibition. One might say, “Hard drugs, such as cocaine and heroin, are banned outright. By contrast, immigration is not. We hear all the time about people legally immigrating to the United States and being naturalized as citizens. We don’t hear about someone legally snorting a lot of cocaine.”

Actually, the word ban does often apply to immigration. Both “drugs” and “immigration” are broad categories. Many drugs are legal and not banned outright, even if there remain government regulations on how they are sold and consumed. Aspirin and Tylenol are both legal drugs, though there are government regulations on how the quantity of units of these drugs can be sold to a customer at the retail level. Caffeine is yet another legal drug, and that is subject to fewer government controls. Rather, it is specific types of drugs that are contraband, such as opium, crack, and ecstasy.

Likewise, there are only specific, narrow categories of immigration that are legal. We shall sort out the few types of immigration to the United States that are legal, and compare them with those that are illegal.

 

 
Immigration Versus Prohibition
As you might read in the longer version of this essay, the USA’s very first federal immigration restrictions from 1875 to 1929 were openly racist. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 undid many of these wrongs, but inadvertently created some new complications on its own. This federal legislation set the status quo with which we find ourselves today. Despite rectifying many past injustices, it has left most forms of immigration illegal.

For someone to enter the USA for long-term residency, that person must obtain a license to do so. That license is called a visa. It is only under very specific and narrow conditions that a visa will be issued to anyone. A student visa, for instance, can be issued to someone entering the United States to attend a university. Most people who seek university education are already upper middle class.

Another type of visa is a professional work visa — an H-1B. To obtain one, you must be in a very specific line of work. There is a list of jobs for which someone can qualify, such as engineer, medical doctor, or research scientist. Except for one, all of the jobs that can qualify someone for an H-1B visa require a university degree. The one exception is for fashion models. As obtaining a university degree is usually out of reach for the very poor, the requirements for H-1B visas, too, favor would-be immigrants who are already upper middle class. Even work as a fashion model is more strongly associated with the middle class than with those who fall under the United Nations’ definition of “absolute poverty.”

Another category of visas is “family reunification visa.” If you were born and raised in another country, but have family members already in the USA, these American relatives can sponsor you.

One of the few changes to the regime established under the Hart-Celler Act is the addition of a new type of visa. It is the entrepreneurship visa, introduced by the Obama administration. Someone who has established a successful enterprise can also enter the USA legally. Naturally, people who are already successful at business tend to be on the richer side rather than the poorer.

There are some types of visas that go to people who wish to engage in unskilled labor. Those are H-2A and H-2B visas. They only let you stay in the USA for two years. If you want to remain in the USA longer, these visas will not remedy that.

Accordingly, we find that there are only a few types of immigration that are not banned. You may immigrate to the USA if you are a fashion model, got a job because of your having a university degree, are currently seeking a university degree, or have started a successful business. All of those categories favor people who are already at least upper middle class. And you may also enter the USA if you have relatives who are already here.

Let us imagine you are in a different category. Imagine you have no relatives in the USA. And, because you are poor, you have not yet attained success in business or even a university degree. You do not even have the means to seek a degree. Nor are you a fashion model. If all of these circumstances apply to you, you are far from alone — what I have just described is the situation of the vast majority of foreign-born people who seek to enter the United States for the long term. Your prospects of entering the USA are very dim. And they are made worse by yet another rule that has been established since 1965.

There are “caps” on the number of visas released. The rule is that a country’s citizens can receive no more than seven percent of all the visas issued that year. As Mexico is a poor country adjacent to the United States, it is only logical that a plurality of visa applicants are Latino. Annually, an average 23 percent of all visa applications come from Mexicans. As no more than 7 percent of visas can go to Mexicans, this makes for a terrible mismatch.

And the US federal government is terribly inefficient at going through visa applications. As noted by the Migration Policy Institute, for the US federal government to clear its backlog of yet-to-be-examined visa applications would take nineteen years.

Even if you are one of the “lucky” (ha ha) Mexicans who do qualify for a visa, the amount of time you have to wait for it to be processed is ridiculous. The Carnegie Endowment finds that for someone in Mexico who has applied for a family reunification visa, the expected wait time is at least six years.

This is from Stuart Anderson, “Family Immigration: The Long Wait to Immigrate,” National Foundation for American Policy Brief, (Arlington, VA: National Foundation for American Policy, May 2010), 1.

Those who are desperately starving and who are trying to get their families away from drug cartels cannot wait that long.

People who may immigrate legally to the USA this year are the ones who have qualified for all the aforementioned categories and, after that, are fortunate enough to have made the cut once the 7-Percent Rule has been applied. Everyone else — the vast majority of people working to immigrate to the USA — are banned for this year and, very likely, in the many years to come.

Not all drugs are banned. Only specific drugs, such as heroin, are banned outright by the federal government. Likewise, not all forms of immigration are banned. In fact, the majority of immigrants in the United States are in the country legally. Seventy-seven percent of the USA’s immigrants are legal ones. The other 23 percent, however, are undocumented. Most longtime immigrants in the USA came legally, and retain that status. Nonetheless, the majority of types of immigration into the USA are banned, illegal, and prohibited. This is a nationally mandated Prohibition as applied to immigration. The 23 percent of immigrants who are undocumented are a minority, yes, but still a disproportionately large percentage. That percentage being so large reflects the fact of how large the demand is for migration into the USA, and of how, in their tenacity, these people have been able to overcome the barriers put in their path.

The barriers have become especially formidable from 1994 onward. Throughout the 1980s, the average price of smuggling across the U.S.-Mexican border was $300 per person ($750 in inflation-adjusted 2021 U.S. dollars). However, stung by the false accusation that it was too soft on illegal aliens, the Clinton administration intensified border enforcement. In 1994, it started Operation Gatekeeper, placing more guards on the border than ever before. That immediately brought that up to $700 (worth $1,279 in the year 2021). By 1999, the price was $1,200 ($1,950 in 2021). As of my writing this, the price per person ranges from $3,000 to $4,000.

The smugglers reduce their costs and increase their profits by bringing in a variety of different cargo. The smugglers will sometimes even provide a discount to an undocumented immigrant if that immigrant will be a drug mule for them.

Naturally, enemies of liberalizing immigration, such as Glenn Beck and Donald Trump, have taken this detail and spun it to imply that liberalizing the border is just inherently evil. In the June 15 tirade with which he launched his presidential campaign, Trump shouted that Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs.”

The presumption of Trump’s diatribe, shared with much of his and Lauren Southern’s audience, is that undocumented Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs” because, by default, they are just uncivilized, uncouth barbarians. The real reason many of them are “bringing drugs” is that, desperate for a new life, they have to resort to such. They do it after having been denied every better option by armed federal agents, agents enacting the will of voters whose fears of immigrants are stoked by the likes of Donald Trump’s advisors and Lauren Southern.

Recall, too, that Thomas Sowell’s “Stop the Bleeding” newspaper column cited “drugs” as one of the “issues revolving around open borders.” In this particular context, Sowell was relying on “drugs” being stigmatized as bad. If he can get the reader’s mind to associate “open borders” with “drugs,” then, by extension, the reader will also interpret “open borders” as bad. But as we shall see later in this essay, there are other connections between government crackdowns on illegal immigrants and crackdowns on drugs that are not so convenient for the case that Sowell tries to advance against immigrants.

The facts of the red tape and of most forms of immigration being illegal are the reasons why impoverished people in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East have gotten so desperate in their plans to immigrate. These are the reasons for which they put their lives in the hands of black-market operators — including members of the mafia — to gain any semblance of a chance to make a new home in a richer Western country.

Astonishingly, since the middle of this year, white nationalist Lauren Southern has conceded some of the points above, though that concession has not done much to soften her opposition to any liberalization. On June 23, 2022, Ms. Southern told Jordan Peterson’s daughter Mikhaila that aspiring immigrants in Latin America

hear every day of friends or family that will apply to legally [split infinitive] go to America, and they never get a call back — maybe fifteen years waiting in the system, never getting anything because they don’t have the financial support. They don’t have the job background. They don’t have someone there tied to the U.S. that can bring them over. So the idea of legally immigrating is impossible for some of these people.

But then, in a ludicrous inaccuracy, Southern asserts that the US federal government is willy-nilly “legalizing these people. They’re allowing them to live in America after they immigrate illegally.”

Even after Ms. Southern admits that red tape prohibits most people from immigrating legally, she propounds this fiction about no undocumented immigrants ever getting deported. That is her bizarre attempt to insinuate, even after her admission, that she still has some case to make that Western governments have had a disastrously hands-off attitude.

Later in this essay, we will address how inaccurate it is to assert that there is lax enforcement on undocumented immigrants already in the USA. We will also get to the disturbing extent to which Lauren Southern contradicts herself about that. More pertinent at the moment is that in her interview with Mikhaila Peterson, Ms. Southern discussed the manner in which the immigration bans have motivated immigrants to seek assistance from the black market and even the mafia. That is pertinent as it exposes a double standard of Ms. Southern’s when her position on this matter compares to her stated position on the U.S. federal government’s War on Drugs. Worse, that same double standard is also apparent in far more sophisticated thinkers such as Thomas Sowell.

 

 
The Black-Market Argument
Among those who call themselves “libertarians” or “radicals for capitalism,” there are two favorite arguments for legalizing drugs. They are the Individual Sovereignty argument and the Black Market argument.

The Individual Sovereignty argument is that a contractually competent adult has a moral right to do anything that is nonviolent. If consenting adults are partaking in an action that endangers no one but themselves, it is evil for the State to intercede. That is why, no matter how much he might harm himself by doing so, it is wrong for the State to override the choice of a man who abuses drugs in the privacy of his own home. And logically consistent proponents of free enterprise recognize that that logic also applies to the matter of immigration. An impoverished immigrant will lodge on a private plot of land at the landholder’s consent. Even if that immigrant never bothered to seek a visa, these are individuals peacefully minding their own business. For the State to raid this lodging and apprehend the immigrant is to initiate the use of force on peaceful people.

The second-favorite argument for legalizing drugs is the Black Market argument. The Black Market argument applies activities that invite widespread disapproval but, by themselves, do not initiate physical force on any living, functioning, born person who refrains from participating in that activity.

In any case, the Black Market argument is as follows. There is an activity that receives widespread social disapproval but, by itself, does not impose physical harm directly on the third parties that do not approve.The activity is seldom something that a person can perform alone without any help; it usually requires purchasing a supply of something from some vendor.

Because there is such large marketplace demand for this activity, heavy-handed governmental restrictions will never stamp it out completely. In response to the governmental restriction, many participants will seek it out in the underground economy, where there is less oversight and transparency. Therefore, while governmental restriction might reduce the number of instances of this activity occurring, every instance where this activity does occur will be more dangerous for everyone than it otherwise would have been. As participants are doing something illegal, they find that if they are cheated or physically violated by the vendors, they have no recourse. They cannot go to the police and report the wrongdoing, lest they incriminate themselves.

Hence, in the underground economic activity that emerged in response to the State’s restrictions, abuses run rampant. The Black Market argument thus continues that the problems arising from the black-market response to the governmental restrictions ends up causing more damage than the activity itself. Therefore, concludes the argument, the most benign public policy is to repeal the governmental restrictions. Let the matter be legal and liberal.

The controversial activity in question can be (1) drinking alcoholic beverages, (2) imbibing some other dangerous drug, (3) sex work, (4) gambling, or (5) obtaining a gun for self-defense. There are three other categories of this sort of activity that are not widely acknowledged as such by libertarians, such as Thomas Sowell and the Mises Institute’s founder, who express sympathies with the Religious Right. Those three other categories are (5) getting an abortion, (6) in response to a terminal illness, receiving assistance in committing suicide, and (7) immigrating from a poorer country to a richer and freer one.

Politically left-of-center Democrats are more prone to recognize the validity of the Black Market argument when it comes to having access to abortions. Yet they are reluctant to admit that it also applies to having access to a firearm.

For politically right-of-center Republicans, the reverse is the case. They can recognize the validity of the Black Market argument when it comes to owning a gun. But they refuse to apply it to the matter of having access to an abortion.

For additional notes on sex work, abortion, and physician-provided aid in dying, you might check out the longer version of this essay.

Self-described libertarians cite the Black Market argument most often in controversies over liberalization of drugs and sex work. As we shall see, their go-to case study in the principles of this model is that of the Prohibition over the distribution of alcoholic beverages. It was, after all, the popularity of the Black Market argument — not the Individual Sovereignty one — that persuaded authorities in the early 1930s to repeal this Prohibition. Hence, libertarians just love drawing parallels between the prohibition of booze and the prohibition of cocaine.

 

 
Libertarians(?) for the Prohibition of Third-World Immigrants Denouncing the Prohibition of the Recreational Use of Hard Drugs
In his newspaper column in 1984, Thomas Sowell provided his thoughts on hard drugs and on the black market for them. To my knowledge, his stand on the matter has not changed since then. As with the previous quotations about immigration, look for his use of the term flood. Here I quote some of his thoughts from the column.

Drug raids are good politics but they don’t make a dent in the problem. The federal government’s seizure of cocaine is six times what they were a few years ago but the flood of cocaine into the country has continued to be so massive... The ban on drugs has become Prohibition writ large. Like Prohibition, the ban on drugs has been a financial bonanza for organized crime, and its profits have financed the corruption of law enforcement agencies, politicians, and judges. . . .

. . . Drugs are inherently a problem for the individual who takes them, but they are a much bigger problem for society precisely because they are illegal. It is their illegality that makes them costly and drives people to desperation...

When the crusaders finally succeeded in getting the Prohibition[ of the distribution of alcohol,...o]rganized crime blossomed. So did the corruption of the whole political process. . . . Bootleggers sometimes financed the campaigns to ban liquor. Their profits depended on liquors being illegal. Legalization of narcotics would similarly destroy the profits of today’s drug-pushers. There is no way that they can compete with drugs that can be mass-produced cheaply by big pharmaceutical companies. ...this is just one more area where we have to recognize that government has its limits. Ignoring those limits is not only reckless arrogance but dangerous. We finally learned that painful lesson from Prohibition. We need to remember it when it comes to drugs.

Of note is Sowell’s use of the word flood above. Recall when he spoke of Mexican immigrants “flooding into the United States” on account of black-market smugglers. He spoke of these unlicensed migrants as a hazardous deluge of liquid, “pouring” in, and this phrasing was to convey that these immigrants can and should be stopped by the government. After all, we have to “stop the bleeding.”

But observe how Sowell mentions the “flood” in his column about drugs. When it comes to his use of the flooding metaphor about hard drugs and immigrants, both the similarities and differences are revealing. In the drug column, he writes of “the flood of cocaine into this country,” once again across the border illegally. Hard drugs, too, are a damaging deluge. And yet, judging by the rest of the essay in which this term is used, Sowell exploits the metaphor of a “flood” to insinuate that the trade in hard drugs cannot be stopped by the government. Largely because this “flood” cannot be stopped, Sowell tells us, the best we can do is legalize the hard drugs and provide the trade some oversight. That is better, Sowell informs us, than governmental restrictions providing monopolistic control over hard drugs to organized-crime syndicates.

At this juncture, we can revisit Sowell’s sarcastic crack to write off those of us who call for liberalizing the immigration process. He said, “We could solve the problem of all illegal activity anywhere by legalizing it. Why use this approach only with immigration? Why should any of us pay a speeding ticket if immigration scofflaws are legalized after the fact for committing a federal crime?”

This same sort of sarcasm can be thrown back at Sowell to dismiss, just as close-mindedly, his case for liberalization when it comes to drug policy. It could be said, “We could solve the problem of all illegal activity anywhere by legalizing it. Why use this approach only with [illegal drugs]? Why should any of us pay a speeding ticket if [pot-smoking] scofflaws [can be pardoned] after the fact for committing a federal crime?”

Over at the anti-immigrationist Mises Institute, there is much agreement with Sowell about drug policy. Evidence of that can be found here, here, here, and here. Overall, the Mises Institute concludes, “Moving from prohibition to legalization does not just make the drugs cheaper; it changes everything for the better.”

Back when she was still a member of the Libertarian Party of Canada, and before she staked her reputation on white nationalism, Lauren Southern tweeted similar sentiments. Here is one such tweet.

She followed up that, on account of the underground economy being left to supply the recreational drug use that remains in demand, governmental restriction on heroin and such “has been an utter failure like prohibition of alcohol.”

Yet in her two propaganda movies about the black market’s supply of migration services, Lauren Southern oozes an insinuation that completely contradicts the point of these tweets.

 

 
Southern Border
For years, Lauren Southern had been releasing several YouTube videos railing against impoverished immigrants. But it was on May 25, 2019 when she released her first feature-length propaganda movie on the subject, Borderless. She would follow up with that exactly three years and a single day later with another one, American Mirage.

At the end of Borderless, Ms. Southern verbalizes the conclusion that all of the movie’s prior contents were ostensibly to prove. We are to believe that the case studies presented in the movie have directly shown the folly in politically liberalizing the process of immigrating from Third World countries to the West — that is, a policy of “Open Borders.”

At the start of the monologue with which she concludes the propaganda movie, she calls out her ideological opponents. “You know, you have all of these people that are constantly chanting, ‘Open Borders!’, who want to help, who genuinely believe in their hearts they are doing good.” She then asks, rhetorically, where these same open-borders proponents are when their precious immigrants are found “sleeping under bridges and living on the streets.” That brings her to the final sentence spoken in the movie: “The story of a borderless Europe is one where nobody wins.” That is the punchline. It is that Western Europe is being destroyed by liberalization — a policy of Open Borders bringing about a “borderless Europe,” just as it says in the title.

One would think that this conclusion would be demonstrated by the contents the movie. What sort of evidence, then, does Lauren Southern exhibit as proof that an outright Open Border policy is wrecking Europe? The case she makes is . . . that there is a black-market operation in which the mafia smuggles migrants into Western Europe, and many problems result from this being so clandestine.

Just 5 minutes, 47 seconds into Borderless, Ms. Southern already brings up the black market and the mafia. “This [Turkey] is where it is all happening — where the traffickers are collecting the money and sending them off on the boats, sneaking them into trucks and across the border; where all of this begins.” Fifteen minutes in, she goes to a wilderness area where she has brief exchanges with would-be migrants who, at that very moment, are looking for smugglers with whom they can strike deals. 

Twenty-two minutes and 43 seconds in, she asks one aspiring migrant, “Why don’t people apply legally?” He tells her bluntly, “Because in our country, it’s so difficult to have a visa.” One would have hoped that, right then and there, Ms. Southern’s movie would have acknowledged how discrepant the movie’s conclusion about a “borderless Europe” is from what is actually being presented onscreen. But the viewer is in no such luck.

In her sequel, American Mirage, Ms. Southern continues to talk up the underground economy and the mafia. “There is no path [from Latin America to the USA] without them [drug cartels],” she says. “You pay or you die.”

Throughout all this, onscreen Lauren Southern should have asked herself a rather obvious question: since when do black markets emerge in response to an activity being legalized, liberalized, and “Open”?

Then she would need to face the obvious answer: they don’t.

The supposed evidence that Ms. Southern’s movies present as supportive of their public-policy recommendation implicitly contradicts it. The movies are, to employ the slang of Lauren Southern’s former fans, a “self-own.”

On his blog, University of Amsterdam sociologist Hein de Haas states the simple fact that Borderless and American Mirage ridiculously leave unspoken: “It is the border controls that have forced migrants to take more dangerous routes and that have made them more and more dependent on smugglers to cross borders. Smuggling is a reaction to border controls rather than a cause of migration in itself.”

All the rhetoric in Borderless conveys the message that it is an open-border policy, in practice, that brings about the social ills associated with the smuggling of immigrants. That makes as much sense as proclaiming that it was Prohibition’s repeal in late 1933 that was to blame for the speakeasies and bootlegging of the decade prior. 

Southern’s Border Disorder 

In a 2022 video in which she gloats about anti-immigration political parties winning Europe’s elections, Ms. Southern even admits that Western European countries are not “borderless” after all, but are instead enforced by the guns of the government. Still unadmitted, though, is conscious acknowledgement on Ms. Southern’s part of internal contradiction.

No country on this planet has open borders — none. To travel anywhere, you and I both have to bring a damn passport. You have to state your reasons for entry. You have to have your bags scanned. And you can’t just bring bombs and heroin into any country you like. Of course there has to be some border process. This shouldn’t even have to be a debate to begin with.

It is true that “no country has open borders — none.” But how does that square with Ms. Southern concluding her 2019 movie with the line that the continent has destroyed itself by becoming a “borderless Europe”?

We saw that back in 2015, Ms. Southern did acknowledge that black markets emerge in response to governmental restrictions, and that it is an “utter failure” to presume that “prohibition works.”

I do not think this is a matter of Ms. Southern failing to notice that her rhetoric about the black market for drugs undermines her presumption that the State can and should maintain its prohibitions on unskilled Third-World immigration. I would be surprised if it genuinely did not occur to her that the mafia’s smuggling of immigrants is caused by the precise absence of the very same “borderless”/”open borders” policy that she vilifies. It is not a matter of Ms. Southern herself not understanding this. It is that her target audience, her white-nationalist fan base, does not understand, and — more to the point — does not want to understand.

Buttressing the refusal to understand is a set of rationalizations. Even after finally admitting, this year, that intended immigrants in Latin America face so much red tape, Ms. Southern provides another rationalization for concluding, somehow, that U.S. immigration policy is too liberalized. In a June 2022 interview with Dr. Jordan Peterson’s daughter Mikhaila, Ms. Southern insinuates that although governmental bureaucracy does obstruct Latinos from obtaining licenses to enter the USA, it is still the case that once the Latino immigrants have bypassed the border and entered the USA, they are home free. “...they’re [the U.S. government] legalizing these people. They’re allowing them to live in America after they immigrate illegally. So why are immigrants supposed to think any different?”

Subsequent to the federal bureaucracy denying permission forms to aspiring immigrants, we are told, the USA does still have an open-borders policy after all. This is because, as Ms. Southern tells it, the U.S. government refuses to take action against known illegal immigrants once they are already on U.S. soil. Yet the reality is far different.

Consider the Obama administration, which Ms. Southern and her cronies revile as being especially lenient. President Obama, after all, issued an executive order that would defer indefinitely the deportation of people who were illegally taken to the USA as children by their parents. The reality is that Obama’s team enforced immigration laws at least as aggressively as all other presidential administrations. That is why the Obama administration deported over 2.5 million undocumented immigrants.

This year, with Obama’s vice president having taken over, 39 percent of Latinos surveyed in the USA reported how they still worry that someone close to their family might soon be deported.

Contrary to the lie that Ms. Southern advanced to Mikhaila Peterson, Latino immigrants know that being within the USA’s borders does not render them scot-free. The risk of deportation even allows the smugglers and the mafia to maintain control over them. If the immigrants defy the wishes of the smugglers and the cartels, these immigrants can then be reported anonymously to ICE. All this happens because, unlike what Lauren Southern says, the U.S. government is not willy-nilly “legalizing these people.”

In American Mirage, Ms. Southern continues the lie that immigrants have nothing to worry about after getting to the USA. She pronounces, “It is hard to blame illegals for treating America’s migration system with such cavalier contempt. They know they can profit off a system that makes no sense.” As she tells Mikhaila Peterson, “They’re not wrong to think it, because America has been letting it happen for years and years and years.”

In both Borderless and American Mirage, Ms. Southern insists that her call to have Western governments grow even more zealous in blocking immigrants is actually compassionate toward the immigrants themselves. In American Mirage she mentions that there are entire families from Central America seeking entry into the USA, and that they take their small children with them. This puts these small children at risk.The physical journey is taxing, and the families have no recourse if the smugglers and the mafia abuse these children. Predictably, Ms. Southern blames the parents but not the governmental restrictions that made it necessary for these families to take such a risk.

Back in the 1980s, the common practice was for fathers to make several illegal, short-term visits to the United States. They would come to the USA to work for several weeks or months, sending their money back to their children still in Latin America. Then they would return to Mexico for several months. The cycle would repeat. That ceased when Operation Gatekeeper made border-crossings riskier and costlier than ever. Suddenly making the journey became a much larger commitment. From then on, and to this day, the border-crossing has usually been a onetime event. The common plan is to cross the border illegally once and then stay in the USA indefinitely. And that is why these families have to bring their children along and place them in the precarious hands of smugglers.

Ms. Southern’s claims of empathy toward these children is no more than a pretense. She disclosed her final evaluation of them to David Lombroso, a maker of actual documentaries who was covering her, in this manner: “There’s no denying they [impoverished immigrants] had shitty lives. I can have cookies with these people and hear their life story. That doesn’t mean, just because I feel bad in that moment, we need to destroy all borders and allow everyone to come in here.”

But as exemplified by what Ms. Southern had previously said about hard drugs and alcohol, it is not an issue of whether “we” “let” “them” “come here.” The black-market smuggling and its aftermath have emerged exactly because we do not, in her hyperbole, “destroy all borders.” Either impoverished immigrants arrive in a liberalized system, which is the safest possible option for everyone, or they resort to the same black market that has provided drugs and alcohol in the face of similar prohibitions. That’s it.

 

 
Authoritarian Blindness
Time and again, anti-immigrationists such as Lauren Southern cite examples of people being rather flagrant in flouting immigration restrictions. Presenting that imagery, these anti-immigrationists propound it as proof that immigration restrictions go completely unenforced. Such citations reflect — to interpret it charitably — a misunderstanding of the extent of any government’s capabilities. In the 1920s, someone could have just as easily pointed to the great abundance of alcohol and the proliferation of speakeasies as proof that Prohibition was not being enforced. That was not the reality, as noted by the Mob Museum online. Between 1921 and 1925, the Prohibition Bureau confiscated 697,000 stills. From May 1928 to May 1929, agents took control of 11,416 stills, 15,700 distilleries, and over a million gallons of booze.

One can even point to the pervasiveness of contraband items being snuck into places where there is totalitarian government control. Communist governments have placed strict bans on Western media so that they will not contaminate the culture and inspire subversive thoughts in the population. The severity of punishment with which smugglers were threatened in the old Soviet Union did not stop them from flaunting their wealth and their access to foreign media. The same has happened in North Korea since the late 1990s.

In the cases of communistic and kleptocratic regimes, what is happening is known as “authoritarian blindness.” The State trying to monitor and control too many activities at once will stretch its resources thin. Paradoxically, then, the State’s monitoring and spying results in the State’s leaders having less information than they otherwise would have. This problem is especially compounded in dictatorships where the dictator might execute any employee or advisor who tells the dictator facts that displease him. Fearful of being punished violently for speaking the truth, the dictator’s advisors and other employees tell him only what he wants to hear. That contributes further to the dictator’s ignorance of what is actually going on.

In the much-more-liberal republics of the United States and Europe, very petty and vain high-ranking officials cannot inflict reprisals so harsh. They can demote, however, subordinates who provide unpleasant facts. And, when a more-liberal republic creates a government program that imposes a form of heavy-handed control, such as in banning hard drugs, the distribution of alcohol, or most forms of immigration, it faces complications similar to the ones that beset the communist regimes. Even in a more-liberal republic, the government agencies in charge will spread themselves too thin as they try to monitor and control too much.

As long as they enforce heavy-handed prohibitions, these more-liberal republics suffer from — if not authoritarian blindness — authoritarian blind spots. This is why, whether it is communist regimes punishing subversive imports or more-liberal republics cracking down on booze distribution or undocumented immigrants, they cannot bust everyone. Rather, they make examples of some of the offenders. Then the agencies can still look busy and important enough to justify renewals of their budgets and job security.

And, contrary to apologists, this is not a matter of the agencies being understaffed and underfunded, stymied by penny-pinching neoliberals too stingy to allot them full budgetary discretion. No matter how much in money and resources are at the government agency’s disposal, the weaknesses are inherent to the institution itself. That is why even the richest and most powerful empires in global history have collapsed.

Even if immigration-control agencies had a budget of three trillion U.S. dollars every year, there would still be outwitted by smugglers. And, although the U.S. federal government’s immigration-control efforts are not yet that much, they still already receive much more funding than what the immigration “skeptics” assume. We will get to that later in the essay.

 

 
Trumpers and Traffickers
Because the smugglers are consistent in outsmarting the empire of border-enforcing agencies, they are not the ones who are, in the accusatory words of Lauren Southern, “constantly chanting ‘Open Borders!’”

The fact that they are always able to exploit the blind spots of enforcement agencies has made many black-market dealers comfortable with the prohibition that eliminates so much of the intra-industry competition that would otherwise bedevil them. Recall Thomas Sowell’s mention in 1984, “Bootleggers sometimes financed the campaigns to ban liquor.” Recognition of this circumstance is the source of an expression by Bruce Yandle, former executive director of the Federal Trade Commission — “Baptists and Bootleggers.”

Those were the two seemingly-opposite parties that each saw in Prohibition the achievement of their own goals. Baptists supported Prohibition out of some naïve hope that the State really could eliminate the distribution of booze. The Bootleggers knew better — they understood that the Prohibition had been lucrative for them.

Likewise, it can be said that the two main groups most invested in border enforcement are Trumpers and Traffickers. In their rage towards undocumented immigrants, the Trumpers call for more, more, more, more border enforcement, blind to the fact that there will be no end to undocumented immigrants. The Traffickers, like the bootleggers before them, understand that it is the heavy-handedness of immigration controls and border enforcement that keep them in business.

It is therefore fitting that the U.S. Border Patrol was first instituted in 1924 to catch bootleggers sneaking alcohol over the Mexican and Canadian borders.

Today’s organized crime figures, too, notice the parallels. Law enforcement officers made an undercover recording of one mob boss, Salvatore Buzzi, telling another, “Do you have any idea how much I earn on immigrants? They’re more profitable than drugs.”

 

 
Beyond Control
Yes, the Traffickers are the proponents of governmental immigration restrict who know that this War on Illegal Migrants cannot be won. The titlte of a 2003 Foreign Affairs article by Harvard economist Jagdish Bhagwati aptly describes the situation. Far from bringing them under more stable management, the heavy-handed restrictions on immigration results in our having “borders beyond control.”

Someone who understands the matter well is Université de Montréal professor François Crépeau. Between 2011 and 2017, he served as the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants. “All borders are porous,” Crépeau observes, “and democratic borders are more porous than others. Even the Soviet Union had porous borders. . . . I think states have to accept that borders are not meant to stop everyone they would like to stop. . . . If you try to stop everyone you don’t like, the only thing you do is you create underground markets for smugglers.”

He has bold opinions. We recognize that because heavy-handed border enforcement has given smugglers a monopolistic control over Third-World migration, human-smugglers have been able to inflict terrible abuses on their clients. Nonetheless, Crépeau admits that the act of illegally transporting a person is not evil in and of itself — not when it is helping someone escape to greater freedom. He continues that “the people we called the smugglers and we present as terrible criminals today were actually helping people getting out of USSR, and we called them heroes.”

But there actually is one method whereby the national government can regain some degree of control over the border. It is not what the anti-immigrationists would like. It would be for there to be simpler and much fewer rules on crossing the border. It would remove the cap on the number of visas that can be issued annually to people of any country of origin. The default would be for officials to err on the side of granting a visa rather than not granting it. 

To the extent that violent criminals or terrorists are to be kept out of the country, it would be incumbent upon officials to demonstrate that the immigration applicant has a record of violent criminality or ties to terrorism. Insofar as there be any onus on would-be immigrants to prove that they are qualified for a visa, it would only be that they have been tested for severe communicable diseases such as COVID-19 or ebola. And immigration applicants will more readily comply with the rule about diseases if the rest of the burdensome rules, with which they have been saddled for far too long, are finally removed. When, in this respect, there are fewer and simpler rules, compliance increases and there is greater transparency and oversight.

 

 
The Biggest Barrier
In spite of what I have written, many Trumpers refuse to accept that their beloved War on Illegal Migrants cannot be won. Against people like François Crépeau, they chant endlessly “Walls work!” as if repeating that over and over is enough to make it true. Trying to salvage their case against immigrants, they talk out of both sides of their mouths when it comes to Israel.

It is no surprise that among white nationalists, antisemitism is not uncommon. Although they continue to air paranoid conspiracy theories about Israel dictating U.S. foreign policy, the anti-Semites do express some begrudging admiration about those walls. They proclaim that if the USA had border walls, so many problems would be solved. The presence of border walls is one of the few aspects about Israel of which they approve.

The year 2010 saw the start of Israel’sconstruction of a fortification on its border with Egypt. This “smart wall,” equipped with high-tech electronic surveillance, was completed in 2013. In 2011, it was 16,000 undocumented migrants going across this border. By 2016, that number dropped to twenty.

Though an especially sophisticated “smart wall” can seem successful for a number of years at stopping migrants from direct entry at a particular location, it is not so successful in stopping the number of migrants overall. The migrants eventually find a different route. We shall see this with an example in Asia, and we can even find it in the case of yet another much-vaunted Israeli border wall. That is the one separating Israel from the West Bank.

For a number of years, the wall along the West Bank was also successful in blocking Palestinians there from getting into Israel. But eventually Palestinians took alternative routes and underground tunnels. Fortunate for everyone, these Palestinians were motivated to look for work in Israel, not war. In 2016, Palestinian political scientist Khalil Shikaki estimated that Israel had 30,000 undocumented workers from the West Bank. But retired Israeli brigadier general Nitzan Nuriel, who formerly ran the prime minister’s counterterrorism bureau, thought the figure was probably double that amount.

In 2019, London School of Economics international relations professor Anan Gemasky and two colleagues looked into the matter further. The goal was not to find just whether the West Bank barrier succeeded in stopping crossings of this particular border, but whether the barrier was able to prevent smuggling, overall, between Israel and the West Bank. They figured that if fortified border barriers were effectual in obstructing the smuggling of migrants, they should likewise be effective at forestalling the smuggling of automobiles. After all, “it is easier for people than for cars to get around a physical barrier.” Yet the much-respected wall on the West Bank was “ineffective even at stemming car smuggling.”

Also instructive are the world’s two most fortified and militarized border walls — the one separating the Koreas and the one around Melilla. With armed guards all around, the border between the Koreas is known as the Military Demarcation Line. The militarization has been formidable in stopping people from crossing the line directly, but it has not precluded North Koreans from illegally leaving North Korea and illegally entering South Korea. As we have seen with the Israeli border walls, when a fortification stymies people directly, they ultimately find an alternate route.

The common method is for North Korean refugees first to make illegal entries into mainland China, another place where the State acts aggressively toward undocumented migrants. Upon reaching mainland China, they trek to Thailand, Vietnam, or Laos. From any of these locations, they can travel to South Korea.

The world’s second-most-fortified border wall is in located in Morocco. Even after the Spanish government decolonized Morocco, it retained control over two of its cities, one of which is Melilla. Melilla is geographically Moroccan but politically Spanish. Once someone reaches Melilla, that person is considered to be on Spanish soil, and receives Due-Process protections one otherwise would not have. Many people from Sub-Saharan Africa are particularly interested in reaching Melilla. In 2014, this has caused the Spanish government to become especially focused on enforcing the Melilla border. Spain has also been able to pressure the Moroccan government to assist in the border enforcement with armed agents.

The Melilla barrier consists not of one obstacle but several. First are the patrols by vehicle. Second are the patrols by armed guards on foot. Next, there is a series of two fences with barbed wire at the top. Behind the second fence is a ditch that is six-and-a-half feet deep. It is, in effect, a moat. Then there is another series of patrols by vehicle and by guards on foot. If you get past them, you have reached the Spain-controlled side of the border, but there are still more obstacles. You must get through a fence that has a top that oscillates in order to knock you off. From there, you must avoid another mesh of barbed wire. Next is another fence that has a titled roof to make it difficult for you to climb. Behind that is the final fence, a twenty-foot-tall one of metal. Behind that is the final series of patrols by guards on foot and in military vehicles. That is five layers of fences, in total, for one national border.

Despite all of that, some Sub-Saharan African immigrants still get through. In 2016, the Spanish government boasted a 93-percent success rate in keeping out migrants. But that means 230 make it past. Since then, the number of arrivals has grown. In 2021, it was 1,092 migrants would got through the barriers. In 2022, it happened that over 800 migrants were able to cross within a period of two days.

Portentous is Lauren Southern’s inaccurate depiction of the Melilla barrier in Borderless. She mentions only one of its fences, not all five. She also omits any disclosure of the extent of the Melilla barrier’s militarization. The movie’s editing and use of news clips depicts the Melilla barrier as ineffectual, neglecting to inform viewers that the Melilla barrier is far more fortified and sophisticated than what was to be found in the Trump administration’s plans for a border wall in 2018. This was the same border wall that so enthused Ms. Southern’s fan base. There is no discussion of the realization that if the Melilla barrier is as obsolete as Ms. Southern’s own propaganda movie portrayed, then that did not bode well for Donald Trump’s border wall.

There is, however, one wall that has worked consistently. It is the wall that too many an anti-immigrationist has built around his mind to prevent those pesky facts from reaching it.

 

 
The Tax Burden of Drug Enforcement Versus Enforcement of Immigration Restrictions

Throughout the years, I have frequently heard a cliché from people who claim to desire a free society. These are people, by the way, who say they agree that the black market in drugs being facilitated by heavy-handed governmental restrictions is sound evidence that the recreational use of hard drugs is an activity that should be politically liberalized. These people say, “I would support having an open border, except that we have a welfare state. People from the Third World coming here are a burden on taxpayers. For that reason, the government should stop those people from coming here.” Examples are in some of the user comments here, here, and here.

As we have seen, it is silly to humor those alleged free-marketers and help them pretend that stopping Third-World immigration is even an option. People can cite the welfare state as much as they want. As we recognize, for as long as our country is richer and freer than others, there are people who will come here from the poorer, less-free countries — welfare state or not. Our actual choice is whether we will liberalize that immigration system, allowing for there to be transparency and government protection of everyone from violence, or if we maintain restrictions that keep immigration under control by the black market and the mafia.

Of special interest here, though, is the presumption that Third-World immigrants staying in the USA are a great burden on taxpayers. Immigration “skeptics” evade that the far greater burden on taxpayers is the enormous cost of paying for the governmental efforts to lock those would-be immigrants out of our country. Many of these alleged free-marketers disdain the federal government’s War on Illegal Drugs as a waste of taxpayer money. They ought to face that their War on Illegal Migrants surpasses the drug war in their respective annual costs to taxpayers.

In 2013, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) came out with a report showing that in the prior year, the federal government spent more money on fighting illegal immigration than it did on funding all of the five other principal federal law enforcement agencies combined. This year I looked at the budgets of those same agencies. The MPI’s findings from nine years ago still apply to the fiscal year of 2021.

In fiscal year 2021, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA’s) budget was $2.386 billion. By contrast, that of Immigration and Customs Enforcement was $8.346 billion. That year, we find $20.3 billion as the total budget for the DEA; FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF); U.S. Marshals Service; and U.S. Secret Service altogether. Conversely, the total for ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was $24.5 billion. Spending on enforcement of immigration laws exceeded that of the sum of the five other principal federal law enforcement agencies by twenty percent.

If it is true, as libertarians claim, that the amount of taxpayer money spent on fighting illegal drugs is excessive, then the same is to be said of the War on Illegal Migrants.

All those types of prohibition also have comparable adverse effects on native-born U.S. citizens not directly involved in the contraband activity. Libertarians — both pro- and anti-immigration alike — are wont to recount horror stories about the War on Illegal Drugs hurting Americans who have none of the controlled substances on them. The Drug War is responsible for local police departments stocking up on military gear and adopting military tactics. It has allowed for civil asset forfeiture. In these instances, if a local police department announces that it suspects that a particular private item may have been used in a drug crime, it can simply confiscate that item and auction it off. For this to happen, it is not necessary for the item’s owner to be charged with any crime at all. These auctions have become a popular method for departments to raise revenue.

The Drug War also introduced “no-knock” raids. If authorities suspect drugs may be found at a particular residence, they still need a warrant, but they do not always need to announce themselves to whomever lives there. There are instances of them bursting into a residence in the middle of the night and it turning out to have been the wrong home. In one of those cases, it was the home of an elderly priest. The shock of it gave him a heart attack, which killed him.

These are indeed examples of the War on Illegal Drugs causing harm to those who have nothing to do with these illegal drugs. And a similar phenomenon occurs with immigration enforcement.

Rightwingers’ feverish fears of Mexicans crossing the southern border has allowed for an enormous expansion of power for ICE and CBP. They now have jurisdiction over all U.S. land within one-hundred miles of all U.S. borders on land and coast. This has given these agencies control over U.S. states far from the southern border, such as New Jersey, and over more than two-thirds of the U.S. population. As a consequence of this, these are the states, in alphabetic order, where ICE has set up checkpoints to have motorists stopped and searched: “Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont.”

Despite challenges by civil-liberties attorneys invoking the Fourth Amendment, ICE has, for years, been able to get away with conducting these searches merely on “suspicion.” Because undocumented immigrants wisely avoid these checkpoints, the vast majority of people searched at them are native-born U.S. citizens.

Zealotry in the War on Illegal Migrants has led to accidental deportations of U.S. citizens. Mark Lyttle was a mentally-ill man born in North Carolina. He had been jailed for one-hundred days on a misdemeanor. When he was mistakenly listed as “foreign-born,” guards escorted him to a crowd of detainees before immigration judge William Cassidy. Jude Cassidy said that all those who objected to being deported must raise their hands. Lyttle did not. That was enough to get him deported to Mexico. Lost and afraid, he wandered across Latin America. He was eventually identified after being found sleeping on a park bench in Guatemala City.

A Wikipedia entry lists four other case studies of U.S. citizens being deported after having been mistaken for undocumented immigrants. But Northwestern University political science professor Jacqueline Stevens finds that it is actually thousands of such U.S. citizens being deported annually for this reason. Among the tens of thousands of detainees under ICE’s supervision, one percent of them are these U.S. citizens who have been misidentified.

It may be tempting for immigration “skeptics” to say, “No, instead of harassing native-born U.S. citizens, the agents should be getting tough down at the southern border.” According to arguments put forth by the Mises Institute itself about other government agencies, nothing about that demand is realistic. Calling for more of the latter only causes more of the former. it is unrealistic to expect that if a federal agency’s authority is enlarged in just one specific area, it will stick only to that one specific area. That enlargement of authority in that one area allows for administrators to rationalize their expansion into various other affairs that, to taxpayers, seem only tenuously related to what the agency’s original task was.

And insofar as someone wants to catch and deport undocumented immigrants already in the USA, it makes sense for the federal government to monitor native-born citizens. Undocumented immigrants regularly interact with them. Native-born Americans hire these undocumented immigrants. Heavy-handed monitoring of native-born Americans is inseparable from efforts to root out undocumented migrants. As evaluated by Chandran Kukathas of the London School of Economics, the efficacy of policing undocumented migration

depends in the end on controlling not just outsiders but also insiders — citizens and residents. . . . Regulating immigration...means controlling whether or not and for whom they work (paid or unpaid), what they accept in financial remuneration, and what they must do to remain in employment, for as long as that is permitted. Yet this is not possible without controlling citizens and existing residents, who must be regulated, monitored and policed to make sure that they comply with immigration laws.

. . . Immigrants are not readily discernible from citizens, or from residents with ‘Indefinite Leave to Remain’, especially in a multi-ethnic...society. So any effort to identify and exclude or penalize immigrants will generally require stopping or searching or questioning anyone. If immigrants must show their passports at borders, everyone will have to, including returning citizens. If immigrants must present their credentials at internal checkpoints, then everyone, including citizens, will have to do so — if only to prove that they are not immigrants.

Ron Paul and his fellow writers of the Mises Institute gnash their teeth about the evils of the U.S. federal government sending agents to intervene in foreign countries, including those of Latin America.

Yet such intervention is actually integral to enforcing the USA’s southern border. The leftwing journalist Todd Miller writes of how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has vast operations within Latin America, and their purpose is to do exactly the border enforcement that Ron Paul and the Mises Institute scream that they want. These U.S. agents spy on those they suspect of being smugglers or their clients. Then, when they judge appropriate, these agents apply armed force in order to preempt the smugglers and clients from crossing the border in the first place.

Todd Miller notes that, by blocking undocumented immigration in this manner, the USA is establishing, unofficially but in practice, a border that is even farther south than the official one north of Mexico. The border enforcers are, de facto, expanding the USA’s national borders outward. As Todd Miller phrases it,

The United States has been purposely pushing out its borders, meaning that the border doesn’t end at the US-Mexico southern border. For example, in Puerto Rico, the Ramey sector of the U.S. Border Patrol can patrol a thousand miles to the south of the U.S. mainland. This allows Border Patrol agents, and effectively the Coast Guard and Department of Homeland Security, to patrol around the Dominican Republic and Haiti. So what happened in the January 2010 earthquake that hit Haiti, one of the first U.S. responses was to send sixteen Coast Guard cutters that were right around the coast line of Haiti; they sent an airplane over Haiti with the voice of the ambassador, who was speaking Creole, but asking people not to leave the island while they were digging themselves out of their homes after they collapsed.

So, all of the sudden, the U.S. border isn’t where you think it is. It expands and goes all the way up to the coast of Haiti. [When some Haitians did try to migrate, there were already] detention facilities at Guantanamo to intercept them. Everything’s in preparation.

And, again, there is nothing realistic in demanding that U.S. border enforcers operate only on the official border but not south of it. The agents have judged it more effectual to stop the border crossings — what the Mises Institute wants — by going on the offensive against the smugglers within their countries of origin. And, again, enlarging the authority of federal agents for any purpose merely encourages those agents to do largely what they themselves want to do. But one would think that this would already be known by libertarians so savvy to the ill effects of the Drug War.

Ah, but some alleged free-marketers are so flustered about undocumented immigrants supposedly going on welfare that, in the quest to remove these immigrants, they will overlook all civil liberties of native-born citizens being sacrificed. And, despite their railing against intervention in foreign affairs, some fans of the Mises Institute might overlook that stopping Latinos from crossing the USA’s southern border inevitably leads the U.S. government to intervene further south of the border itself. For too many self-described libertarians, the mere potential that another Third-World immigrant or her children might collect welfare is something worth paying heavy-handed policemen to vanquish. Even if the current federal policing of immigration proves costly, it may be said, it would be far costlier to allow migrants to continue adding to the taxpayers’ burden.

First, as I have written elsewhere, repeated studies have shown that undocumented immigrants are net contributors to the U.S. Treasury. They put more money into the system than they remove from it.

Secondly, there is foolish precedent in citing, as an excuse for heavy-handed federal action on immigrants, the possibility that every additional immigrant will contribute to the burden on taxpayers. So many other categories of people can also contribute to that burden. For example, we can just as easily say that our desire to reduce the burden on taxpayers is what justifies the federal government’s heavy-handed restrictions on the recreational use of hard drugs.

It is not a difficult argument to make. The more that people consume hard drugs, the more will become addicted to them. Someone becoming addicted to a drug can interfere with his or her life. That includes his or her employability. Many people becoming addicted to hard drugs can easily contribute to a net increase in the number of people on welfare.

Jacob G. Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation, as well, calls out the double standards. He, too, addresses that police-state tactics inhere in both the War on Illegal Drugs and the War on Illegal Migrants. He, too, is disturbed by the double standard about welfare. It is “a virtual certainty,” he reminds us, “that when drugs are legalized, some drug addicts will use Medicaid to seek treatment. Should we libertarians endorse the drug war until Medicaid is abolished?”

Conclusion: Thomas Sowell’s Wisdom Made Wiser
The good news is that no matter how many governmental barriers are placed, there will always be immigrants from poor countries getting through. The bad news is that a major consequence of the restrictions is the expansion of a black market that renders the remaining immigration to be more dangerous for everyone involved. That is the reason why, although the opponents will never be able to eliminate the immigration from poor countries, it remains vital that we campaign for it all to be liberalized.

Thus we see the folly of the many clichés we hear from those who accept that the War on Drugs is futile but cannot admit the same of their War on Immigrants. They say, “I would support open borders if we had no welfare state. But until such time as the welfare state is gone, we have to have limits.” The obvious answer is to reduce the welfare state. That would be necessary even if there were zero immigration. To that, the reciter of clichés replies, “But the welfare state isn’t going to disappear any time soon.” By now, we see how empty that retort truly is. It is immigration from the poor countries that is not going to disappear any time soon. It is purely wishful thinking for the anti-immigrationist to believe that blocking immigration from the poor countries is even an option.

And then there is the favorite cliché: “You can have an open border or you can have the welfare state. You can’t have both.” People who recite that platitude like to say they oppose the welfare state. And yet, when these people repeat that cliché, it is always their presumption that it is the open border, not the welfare state, that must be given up. These people can shout about the welfare state all they want; impoverished immigrants will get in regardless.

Anti-immigrationists are coming to the moment that they dread, the moment where they must face the actual binary choice. Either there continue to be restrictions on immigration from poor countries, or the country has a reduction in the organized crime that is linked with human-smuggling. You can’t have both.

With that mind, we can return to the quotation of Thomas Sowell where he argues that it is wrong to expect the federal government to succeed in its war on illegal drugs. Using [ ] brackets to indicate our editorial changes, we will see how much the argument still applies if the references to illegal drugs are changed to references to illegal immigration.

This is how Thomas Sowell’s column now comes out.

[Raids on businesses employing undocumented immigrants] are good politics but they don’t make a dent in the problem. The federal government’s seizure of [undocumented immigrants are many] times what they were a few years ago but the flood of [undocumented immigrants] into the country has continued to be so massive... The ban on [most forms of immigration] has become Prohibition writ large. Like Prohibition, the ban on [most types of immigration] has been a financial bonanza for organized crime, and its profits have financed the corruption of law enforcement agencies, politicians, and judges. . . .

[Migrations from a poor country to a richer one might be unwise choices for those who undertake them, but such migrations] are a much bigger problem for society precisely because they are illegal. It is their illegality that makes them costly and drives people to desperation...

When the crusaders finally succeeded in getting the Prohibition [of the distribution of alcohol,...o]rganized crime blossomed. So did the corruption of the whole political process. . . . Bootleggers sometimes financed the campaigns to ban liquor. Their profits depended on liquors being illegal. Legalization of [immigration-as-such] would similarly destroy the profits of today’s [immigrant-smugglers]. There is no way that they can compete [if would-be immigrants can legally enter the USA on their own accord]. ...this is just one more area where we have to recognize that government has its limits. Ignoring those limits is not only reckless arrogance but dangerous. We finally learned that painful lesson from Prohibition. We need to remember it when it comes to [immigration].

That is one of the wisest observations by Thomas Sowell, especially with the editorial improvements added.