The Longer Version
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| Screen shot from the motion picture "Born in East L.A.," prod. Peter Macgregor-Scott, dir. Cheech Marin (Universal Pictures, 1987). |
A shorter version of this essay 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.
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,
In a similar newspaper column from the year 2006, Sowell grumbles,
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 an effective territory of 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,
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. ...people have been pouring across...the border with Mexico... ...we need to 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 becoming naturalized 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. In sorting out the few types of legalized immigration from the majority of types of immigration — all illegal — we will have an overview of the history of immigration. I will go over the history of U.S. immigration law, as I’m more familiar with USA’s laws than I am with most other countries.’
Immigration Versus Prohibition
For the first eighty years of the USA’s existence, all of the barriers to immigrating to the USA were geographic instead of legally instituted. No airplanes existed. To travel to the USA from Europe or Asia, people had to come by ship. Journeys across the ocean were unpleasant and full of physical risks. As early as George Washington’s second year as President, the federal government stipulated that U.S. citizenship was limited to white males. Still, once nonwhite immigrants arrived in the USA, the government was not to deport them. That situation began to change in the 1860s.
Many Chinese people came to California and other frontier states during the Gold Rush. They were often willing to work for lower pay and under harsher conditions than many native-born whites. Hence, these immigrants were accused of stealing jobs “owed” to native-born white men and bidding wages downward. Simultaneously, a gaggle of WASP demagogues screamed that Catholics were from a hostile and alien culture that could not be assimilated into the wider (WASP) culture of the United States. On that account, these agitators demanded governmental controls on immigration from Catholics, lest this alien religion succeed in degrading American culture. From the very start, agitation for governmental restrictions of immigration were about overt racism, labor protectionism, and religious sectarianism.
Throughout the 1850s, states such as California and Arizona enacted discriminatory laws on the state and local level against Chinese immigrants. The first federal immigration restriction was the Page Act of 1875. It constrained the immigration of Chinese women on the presumption that all of them were sex workers. Then came the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which applied to men as well.
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. Nobody is stopping the bleeding across our borders. 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.” We shall see him again employ the metaphor of a very intimidating quantity of liquid flowing everywhere when it comes to the Drug War. Yet, when he talks of illegal drugs as being a large amount of liquid, his prescription is oddly different.
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 are dangerous, and therefore he demands that we take action against this deluge.
a little over a million migrants entered Europe, numbers unlike anything we have seen in past years. The international media cheered on this intake of refugees with rose-colored glasses on, and countries around the globe were pressured to promise to increase their intake of refugees as their populace cheered on the prospect. 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. Towns of one hundred people in Germany were accepting seven-hundred-and-fifty migrants to them, leaving it up to the German people to assimilate to migrants, and not the other way around.
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.”
Immigration Versus Prohibition
For the first eighty years of the USA’s existence, all of the barriers to immigrating to the USA were geographic instead of legally instituted. No airplanes existed. To travel to the USA from Europe or Asia, people had to come by ship. Journeys across the ocean were unpleasant and full of physical risks. As early as George Washington’s second year as President, the federal government stipulated that U.S. citizenship was limited to white males. Still, once nonwhite immigrants arrived in the USA, the government was not to deport them. That situation began to change in the 1860s.
In 1907, Theodore Roosevelt went to Japan where he negotiated the “Gentlemen’s Agreement.” It stipulated that the Japanese government would forbid its own citizens from migrating to the continental United States. The arrangement was convenient for TR. If someone told him that it was inhumane that Japanese people be forbidden from entering the continental United States, TR could reply that this was Japanese government’s doing, not his own. Fortunate for my ancestors, TR overlooked Hawaii, which was then a U.S. territory. Japanese nationals could migrate to Hawaii and then, from Hawaii, migrate to the continental USA. Then came the Immigration Act of 1917, blocking immigrants from what was known as the “Asiatic Barred Zone.” That was everyone extending from Arabia to southeast Asia.
The immigration restrictions against Asians created the first black markets for immigration. Still looking for work, Chinese people paid to have themselves smuggled into the USA through the Canadian border. Once the Canadian border became more heavily guarded, the smuggling routes changed. They decided to come in through the South. The first immigrants to enter the USA illegally from Mexico were Chinese.
In this same era, racist WASPs were fearful of yet another group of people whom they did not consider white enough — Eastern and Southern Europeans, most of whom were Catholic or Jewish. Racist WASPs rationalized their prejudice through the pseudoscience of eugenics, which said that these people were doomed to having low IQs that made them congenitally inferior. Citing eugenics, the Immigration Acts of 1921, 1924, and 1929 emerged. The restrictions of the 1920s instituted national origin quotas. A specific number of people could come from a specific country, such as, say, Lithuania. If a quota allowed for 20,000 Lithuanians to enter the USA one year, and a total 30,000 Lithuanians applied to immigrate, then that was just too bad for the 10,000 Lithuanians left over. They would have to wait until the next year.
Preference was given to aspiring migrants from Northern and Western Europe. With a eugenicist rationale being cited openly, much smaller numbers were allowed to enter from Eastern and Southern Europe. This would be the status quo until 1965.
Thus we find that the very first federal laws over immigration that the USA instituted in peacetime — from 1875 to 1929 — were unabashedly racist in their stated intentions.
And, as to be expected, Eastern and Southern Europeans who were not able to make the quota soon turned to the black market to assist them in getting to the United States.
In the meantime, there was an ethnic group that didn’t face the same type of opposition in arriving in the USA — Latin Americans. Responding to labor shortages during World War II, the U.S. federal government established the Bracero program that incentivized Mexicans to come to the USA on temporary work visas. This continued even after the war, on into the 1950s. The Bracero program was very, very far from perfect, and no one looking at old documents would be surprised to find casually racist remarks about Latinos by officials administering the program. Still, the Bracero program didn’t generate the sort of vehement hostility that we see and hear at the time of my typing this essay.
In the early 1960s, in the aftermath of the Holocaust and amid the growing civil rights movement, center-Left and center-Right politicians were growing increasingly embarrassed about the overt racism of the immigration laws on the books. That led to the bill that eliminated the overt racism but left behind loose ends that inadvertently created the problems associated with immigration restriction and immigrant-smuggling that exist to the day of this writing. That legislation is the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, also known as the Immigration and Nationality Act. With only a few changes since then, it established the status quo that, as of this writing, we find ourselves in.
The Hart-Celler Act removed the overtly racist national origin quotas. No longer would the law say that, since people of Swedish descent were considered more desirable than those of Japanese descent, the feds would let in a larger number of Swedes than Japanese. Unless it is for reasons pertaining to war, terrorism, violence, or trade sanctions, the quota for one country is not supposed to be larger than that of another. However, contrary to the assertions of especially venomous white-nationalists like cult leader Stefan Molyneux and former *National Review* editor Peter Brimelow, the Hart-Celler Act did not open the floodgates for nonwhites to enter the USA unimpeded. Instead, the Hart-Celler Act instituted a new system of limits and restrictions.
The Hart-Celler Act specified that in order 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. And student visas are one method of favoring the upper middle class over the poor when it comes to whom may enter the USA.
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.” This one has an interesting history, as it was originally put in the Hart-Celler bill to placate white supremacists in Congress who otherwise would have voted it down. If you were born and raised in another country, but have family members already in the USA, these American relatives can sponsor you.
Many white-supremacist Congressmen objected to the Hart-Celler Act until the bill’s less-racist proponents suggested a compromise to appease them. The introduction of family reunification visas was that compromise. The idea was that the vast majority of people in the USA were already white. Therefore, if many foreigners wanted to apply for family reunification visas, most of those visas would be going to foreign-born people who were also white. Arguing before Congress, U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy assured the racists that the “ethnic mix of our country will not be upset. . . . In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think.”
Over the past two decades, though, white supremacists have noticed that many awardees of family reunification visas are Latino or of South Asian descent. They have thus taken to disparaging the family reunification visa program as “chain migration.” According to their paranoid model, Latino 1 already in the USA will sponsor Latino 2 to enter the USA. Then Latino 2 will sponsor Latino 3 to enter, and on and on. Through this “chain,” fret the white supremacists, Latinos and Asians are all about bringing their own clan into the USA to replace the native-born whites. Anti-immigrationists such as John Zmirak fault Ted Kennedy for what he said about the USA’s ethnic mix. Their objection is not that Kennedy groveled to racists such as Zmirak, but that his promise to racists that the USA would maintain its white majority is apparently not being kept.
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.
When the Hart-Celler Act abolished the openly racist and openly eugenicist national origin quotas, it established a new rule for placing “caps” on the number of entries. The rule is that a country’s citizens can receive no more than seven percent of all the visas issued that year. Let us say, hypothetically, that the U.S. federal government will only issue a total of 100,000 visas this year. (Thankfully, the number of visas issued is bigger than that.) And let us imagine that 9,000 people in India apply for visas. For simplicity’s sake, we will say that all of them are seeking a degree, have a degree, have a successful business, have American relatives, or are fashion models. Even if all 9,000 of those Indians fulfill those criteria, no more than 7,000 will receive the visas. The other 2,000 are out of luck.
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.
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.
As to the disparity between 23 percent of all visa applications coming from Mexico and no more than 7 percent of visas going to Mexican applicants, I do not think that that discrepancy was consciously intended by those who crafted the Hart-Celler Act. Based on what I know of the situation, and despite the closeness of Latin America to the USA’s southern border, I do not think they anticipated what the situation would be. This was probably an oversight on their part, and I cannot attribute malice to them.
However, I do find moral fault when people are informed of this injustice and then they just brush it off. There have been many instances when I have alerted immigration “skeptics” to this discrepancy. The most frequent response is for them to shrug and say, “Even if the law gives some people a raw deal, that doesn’t excuse them from breaking the law. The law is the law, and they should learn to follow the law.” That sort of response amounts to what is, at best, a tacit callousness on their part to the individual’s right not to live under violent threat. That attitude contributes to there being many more deaths that are painful — even violent —than otherwise would happen. Between 2010 and 2016, the U.S. Border Patrol shot dead thirty-three people trying to enter the USA.
And all this is why so many impoverished people in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East have had to 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.
Operation Gatekeeper
When it comes to illegal migrations over the Mexican-U.S. border, the involvement of black-market dealers and the mafia was further aggravated in the 1990s. Even in the 1940s and ‘50s, during the bracero program, there was prejudice against Latinos. The prejudice even existed in 1980 when, each vying for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush spoke favorably of providing amnesty to undocumented Latino immigrants already in the USA. But that latent prejudice started to become overt in the 1990s and has continued to this day.
The current hostility first became prominent in National Review magazine that decade. It began with essays from Peter Brimelow and John Derbyshire. An anti-immigration screed from the former happened to be the cover story of the June 22, 1992 issue. In it, he made claims that would become routine. Immigrants dragged down the average wage, and refused to assimilate into U.S. culture. In important respects, these accusations were already century-old clichés when Brimelow had them printed — they had already been cast upon Chinese immigrants from the 1840s into the twentieth century. This was one of the early mainstream instances, though, of the accusations being applied to Latinos.
National Review eventually fired Brimelow for his overt racism in 1997 and Derbyshire for the same in 2012. But, as I type this, to this very day National Review still repeats the same stereotypes about undocumented Latino immigrants that Brimelow first put into the magazine.
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| 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. |
Operation Gatekeeper
When it comes to illegal migrations over the Mexican-U.S. border, the involvement of black-market dealers and the mafia was further aggravated in the 1990s. Even in the 1940s and ‘50s, during the bracero program, there was prejudice against Latinos. The prejudice even existed in 1980 when, each vying for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush spoke favorably of providing amnesty to undocumented Latino immigrants already in the USA. But that latent prejudice started to become overt in the 1990s and has continued to this day.
This has placed Jonah Goldberg, who has been National Review’s major editor since the late 1990s, in an especially awkward position. He has publicly denounced the white nationalist movement in general, and he bore a lot of the responsibility in terminating Brimelow and Derbyshire. Yet, after letting those two go, he has in recent years still repeated — and taken for granted as truth — the more popular falsehoods about undocumented Latino immigrants that Brimelow and Derbyshire had inserted into his beloved periodical. In 2010, he had the publication run his conclusion that the evidence shows “that a steady flow of cheap migrant labor depresses wages for poor blacks and other American workers while keeping working conditions grim.”
Starting in 2006 and even into 2017, with some reservations, Goldberg conceded that he agreed that there should be a fortified wall on the U.S. Mexican border. In the latter year, Goldberg omitted that these same calls for a border wall ultimately were the result of the modern American anti-immigration movement that was fired up twenty-five years earlier in National Review by the same two men whom he eventually fired because of their increasingly unsubtle racism.
Incidentally, you can read my refutation here of their charge about undocumented immigrants reducing the average wage and contributing to unemployment among the native-born.
Back in the early 1990s, on the radio Rush Limbaugh took to repeating National Review’s rhetoric, often citing the misdeeds of undocumented Latino aliens as yet another instance of Bill Clinton being a low-quality President. In what would become a familiar taunt against every subsequent U.S. President except Trump, conservatives said that Clinton was weak when it came to securing the border. Stung by the reputation it was getting, the administration tried to appease these critics. It ramped up enforcement through introducing Operation Gatekeeper.
There were already occasions on which would-be migrants had to hire professional smugglers, but they were now a necessity. Marketplace demand for entry into the United States had remained the same, but marketplace demand for smugglers greatly increased. 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). The beginning of Operation Gatekeeper in 1994 immediately brought that up to $700 (worth $1,279 in the year 2021). By 1999, the price was $1,200 ($1,950 in 2021).
Contrary to the image that Lauren Southern tries to project, there was never any relaxation of the efforts of Operation Gatekeeper. On a net balance, U.S. border enforcement has only gained in aggressiveness. That keeps the smugglers in business. 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.
Ironically, although the hardline anti-immigrationists bemoan that undocumented migrants are staying in their host countries longer than ever, this phenomenon is the consequence of the very border enforcement that the hardliners demand. Back in the 1980s, the common practice was for undocumented migrants to make shorter-term visits to the USA. They would come to the USA to work for a few months. 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.
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
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.
Problems are hardly rectified when there are only half-hearted half-measures toward liberalization. In Sweden, someone can be criminally prosecuted by purchasing sexual services but not for selling it. That is supposed to ease the qualms that sex workers have about contacting the police when a client has abused them. But as they have told me over Twitter, sex workers remain dissatisfied with that arrangement. Even if a sex worker cannot be criminally prosecuted, there remains the risk that when she reports an act of violence upon her, police may try to pressure her to rat out the clients who have not inflicted the violence.
Governmental restriction is dangerous for a participant even when that participant is a terminally ill patient seeking to end his own life. Where physician-provided aid in dying is legal, there is transparency. The loved ones of the patient can evaluate how the patient is treated by the doctor administering the aid. If the treatment is not as humane as promised, the patient’s survivors have legal recourse. The same does not apply when a terminally ill patient must go to the black market.
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.
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. Still, because of the strong influence of the Religious Right over many self-described libertarians, at least half of the libertarian movement is hesitant to apply its own Black-Market argument to the last three categories of prohibited activity that I listed.
Religious-Right libertarians insist that getting an abortion is not a victimless crime because there is clearly a person aggressed against — the fetus, embryo, or even zygote. This notion is one that was not always held by evangelical Protestants and rightwing Conservative Jews (“conservative” both politically and theologically), but one that they adopted from rightwing Catholics in the 1970s. That was the decade when members of the three groups united to form the political front that became the Religious Right.
Likewise influenced by the Catholic position, Religious-Right libertarians insist that when a terminally-ill adult obtains a physician’s assistance in committing suicide, it is not victimless. They insist that, by definition, the terminally-ill person cannot be contractually competent enough to make such a decision. They propound that this person, being of unsound mind, is necessarily being exploited by the physician. Religious-Right libertarians are wrong on both counts, but that is beyond the scope of this essay.
As for Sowell and the Religious-Right libertarians refusing to admit that immigration is a victimless crime, it is not all for religious reasons. Among many libertarians influenced by the Religious Right, there are sectarian issues of Christian fundamentalists and far-Right Conservative Jews wanting to ban Muslims immigrants, not unlike the original WASP anti-immigrationists sought to ban the Catholics and Jews of Eastern and Southern Europe. But there are other, more secular, objections as well to immigration. These objections are no more rational than the religious sectarian ones, but they are rationalized because of various other psychological hang-ups.
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.
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.
In 2018, one of the Mises Institute’s economists, Mark Thorton, explained,
An essay that the Mises Institute published on its website in 2001 proclaims,
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 challenges them,
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 five minutes and 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.
The part about dead children is in reference to Ms. Southern — out of her supposed compassion — accusing undocumented-immigrant adults of manipulating and sacrificing their children for financial gain. It is the old “anchor babies” smear all over again. She declares that “it’s no wonder that children are used as pawns for migrants to claim asylum in America, with even the [Trump administration] Customs and Border Patrol commissioner stating in 2020 that migrants view children as a passport to America, even bringing ones that are not their own.”
With Ms. Southern so casual in her accusation that these people thoughtlessly jeopardize the lives of their children, her claims of empathy toward them is exposed as 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.
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.”
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.
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.”
Alcohol and drug prohibition creates more problems than it solves. During alcohol prohibition, circa 1920–1933, beer and wine were virtually non-existent on the black market while spirits of very high potency and high levels of impurities flooded the market. . . . Bribery of public officials was endemic and respect for the rule of law plummeted. . . .The same is similarly true of the War on Drugs. . . . The Iron Law of Prohibition states that prohibition...makes the product more dangerous. . . . America is also home to the largest gang population in the world, largely financed by selling illegal drugs.
Four years earlier, the Mises Institute website posted these words of that same Mark Thorton: “Like the United States, Europe is a large, illegal drug-consuming region, rather than producing region, with similar laws against drugs. . . . So yes, they have smugglers, gangs that sell drugs at the retail level, organized crime, bribery, and corruption, etc.”
There is no denying that the drug trade is a source of revenue for al-Qaida and for armed insurrections the world over. However, had governments not outlawed these substances, profits would not be excessive, and criminals would be looking elsewhere for a quick fix. Had the trade not been outlawed, the $400 billion worth of illegal trade per annum would not be in the hands of a criminal class whose market share is captured with guns.
For such reasons Laurence M. Vance, another Mises Institute writer, agrees.
The war on drugs is a failure. It has failed to prevent drug abuse. . . . It has failed to reduce the demand for drugs. It has failed to stop the violence associated with drug trafficking. . . . The war on drugs has...turned law-abiding people into criminals... The costs of drug prohibition far outweigh any possible benefits.
Mark Thornton speaks for all of his colleagues at the Mises Institute when he articulates the solution: “Moving from prohibition to legalization does not just make the drugs cheaper; it changes everything for the better.”
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.
But where are they when the cold French winter sets in? Where are they when these people are sleeping under bridges and living on the streets? And when we finally figure it all out, we’re going to have a very broken and poor Europe, and a lot of hungry, homeless, lost, and displaced people who were sold a lie. And a lot of very wealthy, evil men [globalists].
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.
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 leftwing YouTube vlogger known as “José” has uploaded a number of videos that point out the mendacious tactics whereby Lauren Southern and her crew disguise their propaganda as journalism. In particular he has a video exposing numerous deceptions in Borderless. Overall, I recommend it. From it, I learned that Borderless’s own director, Caolan Robertson, now admits that Lauren Southern was aware the entire time of how misleading she was being. Yet this exposé by José did not address the most obvious weakness of that movie: the supposed evidence that is presented as if it confirms the movie’s conclusion implicitly contradicts it.
The movie is, 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.
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.
There is only one group of Latino immigrants whom we could say have been legalized simply by reaching U.S. soil. And they do not have this blessing anymore. This group is that of Cuban refugees. As communism wreaked its usual effects in that country, thousands of Cubans fled by boat to Florida’s waters. This led the Johnson administration, to its credit, to support the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966. This allowed Cubans to reach U.S. shores. After having spent a year in the USA, they could apply for U.S. citizenship. This made for excellent PR during the Cold War. It reflected well on the USA and poorly on our communist enemies.
The Clinton administration changed much of this with the Cuban Migration Agreement of March 1996. In a so-called “compromise,” Bill Clinton sought to appease Fidel Castro. The result of the arrangement was the “Wet Feet, Dry Feet” policy. When Cuban refugees were within coastal waters, the U.S. Coast Guard was to catch and detain them. Those who were caught were then scheduled for deportation. However, if these refugees were able to evade the Coast Guard and reach shore, they would gain the asylum that was due them. And on January 12, 2017 — just eight days before leaving office — President Obama announced the cessation of the Wet Feet, Dry Feet policy. From thereon, any new Cuban arrival without papers was to be deported like anyone else.
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.”
The most charitable explanation for Ms. Southern promoting this falsehood is that she is, at best, indifferent and oblivious to realities that might conflict with the white-nationalist and white-separatist narratives she is hawking. Noticing this falsehood gives the lie to the claim by Ms. Southern — and of Glenn Beck before her — of having grown empathetic toward the immigrants’ plight.
Another rationalization advanced in both Borderless and American Mirage is that Ms. Southern’s call to have Western governments grow even more zealous in blocking immigrants is actually compassionate toward the immigrants themselves. This is because, these two propaganda movies propound, these poor people try desperately to enter the West out of having been misled, and for them to succeed in their efforts will actually result in their doom.
One hour and twenty-three minutes into Borderless, Ms. Southern intones, “The truth is they [impoverished immigrants] have been sold a lie [by] human traffickers, the media — how they portray Europe to these people is: it is a paradise. These migrants truly believe they are coming to a paradise.” Ms. Southern then tells us what she wants us to believe is the ugly truth: “...in the other camps we found across Europe, a common sentiment is that it was not the paradise they were expecting, and, in many cases, their life was better back home.”
Following all that struggle, we are to believe that the impoverished immigrants’ lives were “better back home”? The insinuation here, then, is that it is humane for the government to deport these people or, better yet, preempt them from arriving in the first place.
In American Mirage, she repeats that sort of verbiage: “What tends to get lost in the politics of immigration is the hard reality that these migrants are headed on a horrific journey, one that too often leads to nothing but confusion, misery, and death at its end.” Yet if the immigrants judged that life was better back in their countries of origin, they would have made yet another illegal journey back to those countries.
The final line of American Mirage is”...if hope can drive armies of the dispossessed to brave hell for a chance to save themselves, then what choice do Americans have but to hope their country, and those who yearn for its promise, can be saved before it is too late?”
To save those undocumented immigrants, we are to conclude, we must have the State compound its efforts to remove them from the USA or block them. That, in Ms. Southern’s insinuation, is to save the would-be immigrants from their own misinformed choice. That is made clear in what directly precedes Ms. Southern’s final line in American Mirage — a run-on sentence full of apocalyptic imagery. She assures the viewer that she knows how this will all end. The waves of undocumented immigration will continue
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”?
— until the American identity lies abandoned alongside the bodies of [Latino] children in the forests of the Darién Gap while the American order is crushed...;
— until the American economy lies in the gutters of sanctuary cities, rotting alongside the corpses of dead girls;
— until American ideals are frozen out of existence like the homeless American citizens with no resort against elements but an ever-more underfunded and overwhelmed safety net.
Apparently, a single mention of dead children in that run-on sentence was not enough; it needed two.
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.
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.
Beyond Control
Yes, the Traffickers are the proponents of governmental immigration restrict who know that this War on Illegal Migrants cannot be won. But that war also has some opponents who have conveyed, in part, they that know this as well. At first glance, it may seem that Harvard University economist Jagdish Bhagwati, the author of the excellent In Defense of Globalization, knows this. He wrote a piece for Foreign Affairs in 2003 that acknowledged, in its very title, that when we talk about national borders, we are actually looking at “borders beyond control.”
His case turns out to be significantly different from mine, however. He looks at human-rights charities and watchdogs, such as Amnesty International, which he believes to be sympathetic toward the plight of undocumented immigrants, have great influence over how border enforcement is implemented. Were border enforcement to become brutal enough, Dr. Bhagwati argues, to make an actual dent in illegal immigration, the government agents would be shamed publicly by these human-rights NGOs. Dr. Bhagwati continues that the enforcement agencies anticipate this risk, and that this has weakened their resolve and thereby made them unable to be effective against the smugglers.
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!’”
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. But that war also has some opponents who have conveyed, in part, they that know this as well. At first glance, it may seem that Harvard University economist Jagdish Bhagwati, the author of the excellent In Defense of Globalization, knows this. He wrote a piece for Foreign Affairs in 2003 that acknowledged, in its very title, that when we talk about national borders, we are actually looking at “borders beyond control.”
My conclusion is very different. The only governmental activity that could stop a net inflow of migration would be for the United States to render itself less free — and therefore poorer — than the developing countries. Short of going that far, the government becoming even more brutal toward undocumented immigrants would not put a halt to them.
More accurate than Dr. Bhagwati on this matter is Université de Montréal professor François Crépeau who, between 2011 and 2017, 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. These anti-Semites enjoy proclaiming that Jews are hypocrites. Jews are hypocrites, they hiss, because many American Jews denounce Donald Trump’s xenophobia and yet Israel itself has border walls. 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.
Those anti-Semites make the usual evasions about the reality of the situation. First, the main purpose of those border walls is military-related. They are not about protecting native-born Israelis’ jobs from competition or about stopping outsiders’ customs from supposedly contaminating the culture. Insofar as national borders serve any legitimate function, it is to guard against military threats. Were Kim Jong-un to try to send troops into South Korea, South Korea’s government would be right to repel those troops at the border. That is a far cry from people coming over the border to find work in vineyards.
Secondly, the existence of Israeli border walls does receive criticism from Israelis. Yaron Brook, former chair of the Ayn Rand Institute, observes that insofar as a country builds border walls, it is already conceding that it is losing.
Thirdly, these anti-Semites fail to understand the areas where the border walls are and are not effective. That is evident in how they tout the wall on Israel’s border with Egypt. They cite this as a model for the USA to emulate. Yet, when U.S. Democrats offered them the opportunity to embrace the more effectual aspects of the Israel-Egypt border wall, these staunch anti-immigrationists rejected that offer.
Construction of the Israel-Egypt border fortification began in 2010, and was completed in 2013. In 2011, it was 16,000 undocumented migrants going across this border. By 2016, that number dropped to twenty. However, it was not the wall itself that stopped the crossings. It was the electronic monitors, drones, and sensors placed around it. The Egyptian border has a “smart wall,” and its successes had more to do with the “smart” than the “wall.”
In the year 2018, the USA’s Congressional Democrats offered the same to the anti-immigrationists. The Democrats proposed that instead of allocating billions of dollars to erecting a wall, the federal government would spend that money to place more guards, drones, sensors, and electronic surveillance tools around the border. Border experts such as Professor Reece Jones noted that these measures would end up stopping many more would-be migrants than would the wall for which Trump and the Republicans pushed.
In an act of accidental mercy, Republicans and their immigration-skeptic constituents turned down this proposal. They cared more about having a wall — a visible monument to their own hostility — than would a practical measure that would actually do more to bring them the outcome they claimed to want. They were all about the “wall” and none of the “smart.” For that — and that only — we should thank Donald Trump’s supporters.
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. On both sides of that line is what is called the Demilitarized Zone. he prefix de- does not refer to removal, as in “deregulation,” but refers to expansion and execution, as in “defraud.” The Demilitarized Zone has been formidable in stopping people from crossing it 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
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.
After all, Rukmalie Jayakody and colleagues found that between 1994 and 1995, among heads of household receiving welfare payments in the program of Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC; now TANF — Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), 21 percent had used illegal drugs in the past year. That was compared to 13 percent of households not receiving AFDC.
One might say that it is not necessarily that someone was addicted first and then went on welfare. It may have been that mothers went on welfare first and subsequently became addicted to drugs. Even if it is the latter case, though, the presence of the welfare state would be reinforcing, rather than discouraging, substance addiction.
Libertarian anti-immigrationists can point to studies that conclude that federal crackdowns on drugs would not shrink the welfare rolls. A study co-authored by the very same Rukmali Jayakody I cited earlier suggests as much. But those same libertarian anti-immigrationists are selective about which conscientiously conducted studies they admit to be credible. They shrug it off when I show them studies showing that, in the USA, undocumented immigrants are net contributors to the U.S. Treasury; and that, in Western Europe, foreign-born asylum-seekers, too, have been net contributors to public coffers.
Libertarian anti-immigrationists can make a better objection, though. They can point out, correctly, the false premise in citing the correlation between welfare and drug addiction as proof of the need for the government to stamp out illegal drugs. The false premise is in the presupposition that the government is even *capable* of stamping out illegal drugs. But they ought to notice how this exposes their false premise in citing welfare as proof of the need for the government to stamp out illegal immigration. The falsehood is in their presupposing that the government is even capable of stamping out illegal immigration.
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 the Migrants. 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.
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.
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
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,
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.
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.
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 who tout themselves as savvy to the ill effects of the Drug War.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.
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.
[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.
