In the United States, MAGA nationalists have gotten sick of hearing the fact that the Statue of Liberty 🗽 delivers a clear invitation to immigrants. These MAGA nationalists are immediately reminded of Emma Lazarus’s poem at the statue’s base where it welcomes the world’s tired and poor huddled masses. These MAGA nationalists recite their stock reply that the poem was only added seventeen years subsequent to the statue’s opening ceremony. They then proclaim that this means that the Statue of Liberty did not originally represent the freedom of immigration.
Donald Trump’s presidential advisor Stephen Miller, who is in charge of ICE’s cruel infractions, is among those who provide this revisionist history about the Statue. In 2017, he sniveled, “...the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of American liberty lighting the world. The poem that you’re referring to was added later [and] is not actually part of the original Statue of Liberty.”
That same year, the same opinion came from the late Rush Limbaugh. On the radio, Limbaugh pontificated,
...the Statue of Liberty and the Emma Lazarus poem is a great illustration of how immigration policy and the United States/Statue of Liberty has become bastardized. “Give us your tired, your poor” and so forth literally has nothing to do with the purpose of the United States.
In fact, it’s never been on the Statue. It is inside the pedestal. It was only put there when they put a museum in there. It was not part of the original Statue of Liberty. It was not part of the design. The statue was a gift to the United States from the people of France as a beacon of freedom and liberty. It’s a testament to our Founding and our Founding Fathers, and this Emma Lazarus poem had nothing to do with it. It had nothing whatsoever to do with it!
The poem was put in the pedestal museum because it was used as part of the fundraising for the pedestal. It’s been co-opted by immigration activists and leftists to actually [split infinitive 😣] now represent U.S. immigration policy, which it isn’t.
Actually, the Statue was associated with immigration at least as early as its opening ceremony in 1886 — seventeen years prior to the addition of Emma Lazarus’s poem. At the ceremony, the U.S. President of the time, Grover Cleveland, gave a speech to dedicate it. In the dedication, he alluded to immigration. And the term that the man used is noteworthy.
Anti-immigrationists frequently employ the term open borders as a pejorative. Yet President Cleveland spoke glowingly of how the Statue of Liberty stands before “the open gates of America.”
We know that Cleveland is here consciously alluding to immigration, as it was a topic on which he commented publicly throughout his presidential terms. He had generally wanted to favor immigrants from everywhere, but he was not completely consistent. When gangs of white-supremacists engaged in vigilante actions against Chinese immigrants, Cleveland properly condemned the violence. Yet, sadly, he ultimately capitulated to pressure from the racists and said that ultimately whites and those of East Asian descent could not coexist in the same neighborhoods. He thus relented to calls for restrictions on Chinese immigration.
Cleveland comes across better when it comes to the nativist clamor against other sets of immigrants they hated. At the time, those from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe were not considered white. They were darker-skinned and darker-haired and mostly were Catholic or Jewish, castigated as racially distinct from the lighter-skinned Protestant majority. As most of these immigrants were impecunious and not fluent in English, legislation to discriminate against them involved Congressional bills allowing immigration only from those who could write in English. Fortunately, Cleveland successfully vetoed those bills, explaining to Congress and the wider public,
It is said...that the quality of recent immigration is undesirable. The time is quite within recent memory when the same thing was said of immigrants who, with their descendants, are now numbered among our best citizens. . . .
I cannot believe that we would be protected against ...evils by limiting immigration to those who can read and write... In my opinion, it is infinitely more safe to admit a hundred thousand immigrants who, though unable to read and write, seek among us only a home and opportunity to work...
It is Cleveland’s position on this matter that informs his mention of the open gates of America — gates that, naturally, also should have been open to those from East Asia.
I also appreciate how President Cleveland praised Liberty as the USA’s own pagan goddess, a much better object of worship. Thus, in his public speech at the inauguration for the Statue of Liberty, President Cleveland orates,
We are not here to day to bow before the representation of a fierce and war-like god, filled with wrath and vengeance, but we joyously contemplate instead, our own deity keeping watch and ward before the open gates of America, and greater than all that have been celebrated in ancient song. Instead of grasping in her hand thunderbolts of terror and of death, she holds aloft the light which illumines the way to man’s enfranchisement.
We will not forget that Liberty has here made her home; nor shall her chosen altar be neglected. Willing votaries will constantly keep alive its fires, and these shall gleam upon the shores of our sister republic in the East [France]. Reflected thence and joined with answering rays, a stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and man’s oppression, until liberty enlightens the world [boldface added].
Yes, Liberty has always stood for the application of her principles, foremost of which is the liberty to seek new opportunities in new lands. She stood for liberalized immigration at her opening ceremony. May she continue to stand for it today.
Sorry, MAGA Racists: The USA Was Indeed Founded on Active Intellectual Engagement With Philosophic Ideas, Ideas Which in Logic Ultimately Lead to Acceptance of the Rights of Nonwhite Immigrants
Stuart K. Hayashi
You may ask, ‘How did this tradition get started?’ I’ll tell you. . . . I don’t know. —Tevye, Fiddler on the Roof
Introduction
I notice an internal contradiction in what is said by MAGA white nationalists. MAGA white nationalists shriek that nonwhites, such as engineers from India, are ruining the West by immigrating to it, and therefore they should be barred from entry. In reply, free-enterprisers point out that the MAGA white nationalists are contradicting the Declaration of Independence and the very philosophy upon which the American republic was founded. Bono, the lead singer of the band U2, has turned out to be surprisingly articulate in explaining this position. He began as a conventional leftwinger blaming capitalism for the world’s problems. But, as he says in a speech to Georgetown University, he came to realize that political-economic liberalization is actually the strongest remedy for the Third World’s poverty. And in holding up the liberalizing philosophy of the USA’s founding as his case study, Bono praises the republic as an idea. To quote his own words,
...America is an idea, isn’t it? I mean Ireland’s a great country but it’s not an idea. Great Britain’s a great country but it’s not an idea. That’s how we see you around the world: as one of the greatest ideas in human history, right up there with the Renaissance... right up there with crop rotation... ....that idea, the America idea, it’s an idea, the idea is that you and me are created equal...
The idea that life is not meant to be endured, but enjoyed. The idea that if we have dignity, if we have justice, then leave it to us, we can do the rest. ...
This country was the first to claw its way out of darkness and put that on paper. And God love you for it, because these aren’t just American ideas anymore. ... You’ve brought them into the world. . . . I know Americans say they have a bit of the world in them, and you do. The family tree has a lot of branches. But the thing is… the world has a bit of America in it, too. These truths — your truths — they are self-evident in us.
In 1983, Leonard Peikoff as well made this explicit. The USA, he ascertained, “at root is an ideology. . . . The Founding Fathers explicitly championed a certain philosophy, which they made the basis of America’s distinctive political institutions and national character, and that philosophy to some extent survives among the citizens to this day.” And we free-enterprisers have repeatedly emphasized that this philosophy refutes everything spewed by the MAGA white nationalists.
Hence, the MAGA white nationalists have a rejoinder to us free-enterprisers. MAGA white nationalists stamp their feet and cry out that the USA “is not a collection of ideas.” That’s how failed comedian turned white supremacist Sam Hyde phrases it. In his viral Twitter video with over 21 million views and over 29 thousand retweets, he moans, “There is this disturbing idea...that America is just a collection of ideas.” No, “You have to fight for not...the notion of ‘America as this collection of ideas.’ That’s not what it is.” He dismisses the Declaration and other founding documents as an empty set of words. “You’re not fighting for a paragraph” (emphasis his). J. D. Vance, the vice president under Donald Trump, similarly sneers, “People will not fight for [philosophic] abstractions...”
Rather, MAGA white nationalists such as Hyde and Vance maintain that America consists of two other objects. “America is not just an ‘idea,’” J. D. Vance continues. “It is a group of people with a shared history.” — shared ethnic history. “. . . It is, in short, a nation,” with nation here having a meaning similar to ethnic tribe, such as in how the Huns, Vandals, Angles, Franks, and Biblical Moabites were a “nation.” These are all euphemisms for blood. And Vance would have that although Americans will not fight for “abstractions,...they will fight for their home” — in effect, the soil. Sam Hyde and J. D. Vance would have it that the USA is all about blood and soil. But when they don’t want to admit so explicitly that it’s all about race for them, Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists say the USA is not about “ideas” but traditions (translation: only the traditions associated with those of their own skin color) — what J. D. Vance euphemizes as white Americans’ “shared history.”
As a case study in tradition, Hyde pontificates, “Nothing significant that gets built, gets built on an individualistic scale. The greatest things that get built: cathedrals — and, if you disagree with this, you’re just wrong . . . — cathedrals are built over hundreds of years. They’re built not just by the army of stone masons who build them but by the towns who pay for it.” And he continues, “We have hardwired group preferences, we have genetic memory, we have culture. . . . It’s so deeply embedded in us that carries on for thousands of years.”
And in showing a complete lack of understanding of what culture entails, Sam Hyde adds, “This is not learned stuff.”
This denigration of the Founding philosophy — denying America’s status as an idea — is a new low from the political Right, especially its members who claim to be American. Prior to Donald Trump’s initial run for President in late 2015, the USA’s political conservatives frequently gave lip service to the Founding Fathers. These political conservatives were never consistent. They conveniently evaded the fact that their efforts to unite church and State directly contradicted the words and spirit of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Joel Barlow. But these MAGA white nationalists have given up this old pretense of respecting the Founders. And, I suppose, it is best that they do. It exposes MAGA white nationalists in their fundamental anti-Americanism.
Of special interest to me here is the internal contradiction in proclaiming that rather than “ideas,” America is about “culture” and traditions (“culture” and traditions of white people, apparently). The fact is that culture and traditions are, by definition, learned. More to the point: culture and traditions are expressions of ideas, and therefore traditions ultimately come down to ideas. But these “traditions” that the white nationalists uphold are ideas and abstractions to which they want Americans to pledge passively and unthinkingly. When they deride “ideas,” philosophy, and “abstractions,” what Sam Hyde and J. D. Vance really mean is that they reject the active engagement with ideas that was practiced by Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and the other Founders.
All Traditions Are Customs, But a Tradition Has a Symbolic Meaning That Goes Beyond the Custom Itself
To understand what is meant, we can do something that Sam Hyde has neglected to do: we can bother to consider what is the definition of tradition. Traditions are customs practiced in particular types of settings and on particular occasions, and these customs have become long-established in their respective societies. So far, Sam Hyde and the other MAGA white nationalists would agree. But there is a second part of the definition that they omit. All traditions are customs, but not all customs are traditions. For a custom to be a tradition, there must be an additional component. What else makes an action a tradition is that is a gesture. Culture consists of actions considered important not only in and of themselves but also as symbolic representations of something else important to that society. And all symbolic gestures exist in the realm of ideas.
Consider a traditional Western wedding ceremony. Absent of any formal marriage ceremony, people can form pair bonds. They can form a unit where people live together, pool their assets, and have sex. These can be considered common-law marriages, and the marriage ceremony is not needed for that. Rather, the nuptials are a formalized ritual to codify the pair bond that already exists. The wedding ceremony, like all traditional ceremonies, is a ritual in which people express their appreciation for a set of actions — the pair-bond and all it entails — and is not the actual set of actions being celebrated. The wedding ceremony is not the pair bond but a symbol expressing appreciation for lifelong commitment to the pair bond in question. To phrase it differently, the wedding ceremony is not the marriage but a supplemental performance of the idea of the marriage.
Within this larger symbol are smaller symbols. The bride wears white as a gesture to represent her relative chastity prior to the marriage. The throwing of the bouquet is a ritual symbolizing the idea that other wedding attendants, too, will soon be able to enjoy what the bride and groom get to have.
Eating particular types of food has practical value, and need not have tradition attached to it. But sometimes eating a particular food on a particular occasions is said to have cultural value and be a tradition. When that happens, that particular dish is no longer valued only for the directly practical values of nourishment, nutrition, and the pleasure of taste. Indeed, the dish becomes a symbol of something — something of value in that society — other than the dish itself. And ideas are involved there as well.
The is seen, and tasted, with the tradition of eating turkey on Thanksgiving. Many Americans could prepare a turkey feast almost any other day of the year. But eating this bird on Thanksgiving is a ritual for family members to represent their gratitude for what everything good in their lives, including each other. Hence, the feast itself is not about the turkey as much as it is about the values the ritual represents — again, specific ideas.
Eating any particular cuisine at least in part due to its ethnic history is about ideas. The Japanese diet originally formed because of geographic isolation. Japan is an archipelago surrounded by sea animals, and therefore seafood figures prominently in the Japanese diet. Historically, it was easier to be a fisherman than to try to be like the Steppes peoples and raise livestock. Originally, then, Japanese people ate seafood only for practical reasons.
But with global trade, a rich person in Japan now can theoretically go for long periods of time eating food not caught from the ocean. Often, people eat traditional Japanese food not only for the taste. Those of Japanese descent want to experience something that their ancestors did, such as eat the same food. When non-Japanese people try Japanese cuisine, it has a lot to do with wanting to experience other cultures — the idea is to be exploratory. Eating food from other cultures is an expression of one’s openness to new experiences and new kinds of people. Accordingly, in the modern world the tradition of eating “ethnic food” has a lot to do with ideas.
(As Murray Rothbard-influenced, patent-hating anarcho-“capitalists” often make common cause with white nationalists, some might interject here. In trying to stigmatize intellectual property rights as some form of protectionism and monopolism, this is the point where I have heard them say in their usual churlishness, But a patent or copyright claims you own an idea. If a tradition is an idea, you want a corporation to patent your ethnic traditions? That is a false conflation on their part. Customs and traditions are generalized ideas, as are entire product categories. By contrast, patents and copyrights recognize your ownership over a very specific configuration of your own origination. I have written of that difference here and here and here and here.)
An apologist from the Intellectual Dark Web might chime in, “Yes, ideas are important. But what we object to, is people talking only about ideas that are pie-in-the-sky and not focusing on the actual actions taken to help the American people.” As Sam Hyde says in his viewed-21-million-times tirade, “...America’s not a collection of ideas; America is a people [a race]: Americans.” But for the Intellectual Dark Web to say that its criticism of America-as-an-idea is not about practicability is for the Intellectual Dark Web to whack at a straw man. No free-enterpriser who stresses the importance of ideas does so at the expense of concrete action. The point of ideas is to implement them. A plan — a complex set of ideas — to buy a home is made for the purpose of buying the home. A schematic explaining an invention is drafted to produce units of that invention.
In turn, the Founders drafted the Declaration not to muse idly in a parlor, but to put such ideas into practice. Hence, they produced a social system freer than what it had existed before. And to the extent that such a social system was successful, it was not due to, but in spite of, political collectivists such as Sam Hyde.
Sam Hyde’s cry that “you’re not fighting for a paragraph,” as is J. D. Vance’s pronouncement that people “will not fight for abstractions,” is belied by the very oath required of those serving in the federal government. The President of the United States and personnel of the armed forces do not take an oath to serve and defend Sam Hyde’s white race — “a people.” Nor is the oath for the white people’s “shared history” of which J. D. Vance speaks. Instead, they take an oath to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution — every “paragraph” of it. More specifically, it is that insofar as the U.S. military is employed wisely against genuine threats, the U.S. military fights to defend the sort of civilian life that the “paragraph” describes.
The Choice Is Not Traditions Versus Ideas, But Respectively of Passive Conformity to Some Ideas Versus Active Intellectual Engagement With Evidence
And, of course, even the MAGA white nationalists’ use of the term tradition is a red herring. They don’t value “traditions” in general. They disparage Islamic traditions. Even MAGA white nationalists who are Catholic are unfriendly toward the Catholic traditions of Latinos. The white nationalists only like “traditions” that they associate with their own skin color. And their skin color is just something unchosen that they just have. That is apparent in Sam Hyde’s conflation of skin color with “culture.” To revisit the quotation from earlier, “We have hardwired group preferences, we have genetic memory, we have culture. This is not learned stuff. It’s so deeply embedded in us that carries on for thousands of years.”
Notice Sam Hyde’s equivocation of “culture” with “genetic memory” and that which is innate, “hardwired.” Culture and traditions consist of sets of actions that people enact voluntarily. By definition, they are not “hardwired.” But in the warped (mis)interpretation of Sam Hyde and his many white-nationalist fans, such human actions are as innate and involuntary as skin color. Hence Sam Hyde says nonsensically, “This is not learned stuff.”
To test Sam Hyde’s assertion, you can look at differences in traditions among people who are of the same racial heritage but who live in different parts of the globe. Persons of Korean descent in the USA often behave with different customs — different ideas on what is, or is not, socially appropriate — than do people in North Korea. In the USA, rap music is considered “Black culture.” But rap music was not associated with Black people in the 1940s or 1970s, prior to rap music being invented. Rap music is not as popular among Black people in West Africa as it is in the USA. That is because culture is indeed something that is not hardwired. Culture consists of customs. Every custom had to be invented by some individual. Afterward, other people adopted that custom — to wit, they learned it.
Every tradition began as an untraditional innovation and was therefore adopted for reasons other than “It’s a tradition.” As white nationalists frequently invoke the fall of Rome in misleading ways, a particular historic account from ancient Rome is instructive. Yes, MAGA white nationalists say that the Western Roman Empire fell from being to open to outsiders — (white-skinned) Germanic barbarians — and the modern West will destroy itself through similar openness. By contrast, in an actual ancient Roman debate about openness to foreigners, the emperor Claudius made an important observation about traditions which these same MAGA white nationalists prefer to evade. Tacitus quotes the emperor as saying, “Everything, Senators, which we now hold to be of the highest antiquity [tradition], was once new. . . .This [new] practice [with regard to openness to outsiders] too will establish itself, and what we are this day justifying by precedents, will be itself a precedent.”
This, and every other tradition, was something learned. A tradition might have begun as a practice done squarely for practical value. That was the case of Japanese people mostly eating seafood. But the custom might have begun, from the start, as a symbolic gesture. In either case, what is now called a tradition is called such — rather than only a custom or practice — because it is a gesture representing some value other than itself. Traditions are ideas.
But there are two different approaches we can take to traditions and all other ideas that have ingrained themselves into the culture. We can take a passive-and-uncritical approach to them. Conversely, we can engage with traditions and other long-cherished ideas, which means being critical and selective about them, which requires actual thought.
The passive-and-uncritical approach is to accept a tradition unthinkingly. The insinuation is that the tradition was good enough for my family, and so I should practice it, and there is no more to consider. That is the approach taken by those who say, “You should follow a tradition because it’s our tradition, and that’s that.” A variant that is only slightly more thoughtful, and which was popular among twentieth-century European political conservatives who cite Edmund Burke, is one that goes, The fact that the tradition has lasted so long, into our own day, is already proof that the tradition is time-tested and has served us well. So the fact that the custom has earned the status of ‘tradition,’ means the custom is worthy. In that respect, I am justified in saying ‘That a particular custom is a tradition is justification enough to practice it.’
And, of course, that unthinking approach is lazy. For millennia, slavery was traditional. Slavery was a tradition not merely because of its ostensive practical benefits for the slave masters, but because it represented particular ideas that were convenient for the politically-influential in general. It embodied their larger assumption that those in power have every rightful authority to domineer over others by force. In some Mesoamerican Empires, such as that of the Aztecs, ritual human sacrifice was considered an indispensable tradition. The traditional sermons delivered in the very cathedrals that Sam Hyde extols are all about ideas. And, contrary to Sam Hyde, the ideas in such sermons are due for critical reexamining. That a custom is a tradition, is indeed not justification enough. That brings us to the second approach to traditions.
The second and contrasting approach is to recognize that traditions themselves must be subject to judgment and scrutiny other than “It’s a tradition.” It means embracing the realization that some traditions are good and worth preserving, whereas others are inadequate and due for abandonment, replacement, or at least modification. And that is a major role of Enlightenment philosophy. Enlightenment philosophy calls upon us to examine our traditions and select the good from the bad.
Since the founding of the republic, reading Enlightenment philosophy has itself become a tradition. The fact that the free-enterprise philosophy of the Founders and the rest of the Enlightenment has become a tradition in America is frequently cited by pretentious anti-capitalists as proof that such free-enterprise philosophy is conservative, stodgy, and obsolete. These pretentious people then tout their tired old Socialism and Progressivism as the hip new innovation on the cutting edge, omitting how their verbiage is broadly a repackaging of the political-economic collectivism of medieval guilds that Enlightenment liberal free-enterprise philosophy supplanted.
Contrary to those pretentious anti-capitalists, it is the case that Enlightenment philosophy and Founders such as Thomas Jefferson have told us that free-enterprise philosophy becoming a tradition is not a basis good enough to embrace it. Once again, even these — the best of ideas — must be justified by some other, more-objective standard rather than appealing to “tradition.”
Anticipating our century’s nonsense about tradition-for-tradition’s-sake, Thomas Jefferson elucidated, “...institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, ...new truths disclosed, ... institutions must advance also...” Those who uphold tradition unthinkingly “might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.” And in terms of actually yielding equitable results, his free-enterprise philosophy has held up very well. The free-enterprise philosophy of the Enlightenment, enshrined in the USA’s Founding documents — what Sam Hyde denigrates as just a “paragraph” — is indeed a great American tradition. But, contrary to Friedrich August von Hayek, it is not great on account of being a tradition.
Consider a well-publicized contrast. The MAGA white nationalists’ appeal to American traditions not out of any appreciation for what those traditions represent but out of demand that everyone conform to the norms of the white Christian majority. That is why they throw tantrums about American football players kneeling during the National Anthem to protest police brutality but simultaneously deny that the republic was founded upon “ideas” and denigrate the founding documents as just some “paragraph.”
This is self-contradiction comparable to how similar American rightwingers — there is overlap between they and MAGA — prioritize the American flag over free speech. The American flag symbolizes freedom, including freedom of speech. That includes the right to be on the land of a willing landholder as you burn, in protest, a U.S. flag that is your own rightful possession. Those who would outlaw flag-burning are expressing not appreciation for what the flag represents but instead turning it into a fetish — an expression not of reverence for the American flag’s meaning but as an artifact of mindless idolatry. That is fitting, as mindless idolatry is the most consistent manifestation of MAGA. Thomas Jefferson would shake his head in dismay.
That brings to mind the MAGA white nationalists’ self-contradiction and hypocrisy over free speech and the First Amendment themselves. As numerous private parties were peaceably avoiding them, these MAGA people mischaracterized such avoidance as “censorship,” branding themselves “free-speech absolutists.” That these demagogues denigrate the fact of the republic’s founding in abstract philosophy demonstrates they do not understand or care about the freedom of speech and the First Amendment.
The First Amendment exists exactly because of the American republic being founded upon active engagement with philosophic ideas. The Declaration of Independence invoked the liberal republican Enlightenment-philosophy ideas of John Locke and “Levelers” like Richard Overton that throughout the prior century the Crown had tried to squelch. In the name of such ideas and their further development, the Founders established the First Amendment.
Freedom of speech, contrary to Sam Hyde’s cohorts and to Donald Trump, is not about the visceral ejaculation of every prejudice on whim. Rather, freedom of speech is the processing and exchanging of ideas, a facet of the larger freedom of thought, which is what the First Amendment is supremely about. Among the amendments to the Constitution, this one is the first exactly because the freedom of thought is the one of prime importance — freedom of thought, as we have discussed earlier, gives rise to the freedom of action that is freedom in general. In deriding the USA’s founding upon philosophic ideas, the MAGA nationalists minimize the very basis of the First Amendment that they pretend to cherish.
For a long time, I was under the misapprehension that the opposite of bigotry from white nationalists was: the policy of being open to new ideas. But simply keeping oneself open is too passive. It is too passive to wait for new ideas to come along. The true opposite of bigotry is curiosity. This means proactively pursuing one’s own curiosity — like babies and the Biblical Eve —out of one’s own selfish desire to know. That results in exactly what Sam Hyde fears: engagement with ideas, so much so that an entire republic can be founded upon innovative philosophy. Speaking of Sam Hyde’s precious centuries-long construction projects, the play Inherit the Windputs it very well: “An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral.”
Conclusion: The Nation of the Enlightenment
Ayn Rand has observed the exceptionalism here of the USA’s founding. Sam Hyde’s fellow white nationalists wail that white people have no ethno-state of their own. The reality is that almost all white-majority countries are ethno-states founded by a single tribe. It’s called England because it was founded by the tribe after which it was named, the Angles. Yet another well-known nation is called France because it was founded by the Franks. Inasmuch as these tribes founded a country to maintain their traditions, the founding was based on ideas. But as far as it was about “tradition” per se, it was from an uncritical acceptance of those ideas — of accepting them from one’s elders without question.
What makes America exceptional was not only that it was founded by ideas, but by very conscious examination of, and grappling with, such ideas. Upon separation from England, Americans could have set up a new monarchy because that was the tradition of the people from whom they descended. But upon examining that form of government and comparing it against others, the Founders decided to go with institutions previously tried by the ancient Athenians and the Romans but with the aid of the newest philosophic ideas to make these institutions more liberal than what their Mediterranean forebears had conceived. Ayn Rand notes that whereas these other Western societies, including those of the Greeks and Romans, were a result of “historical accident,” the American republic was from “philosophical design.”
Leonard Peikoff, too, observes, “America is the only country in history created not by meaningless warfare” nor some “geographical accident” in which some tribe like the Angles found itself, “but deliberately, on the basis of certain fundamental ideas.”
Thomas Paine understood how the founding of America was more about innovation than incurious adherence to tradition. In Common Sense, the very pamphlet instrumental to inspiring the American Revolution, he reminded readers, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” And that is what the Founders did.
Migo: “But you want to . . . what? Tear down everything our world is built on?”
Meechee: “It’s not just about tearing down old ideas. It’s about finding new ones.” —Smallfoot
Enlightenment philosophy’s celebration of such curiosity is so vital to the USA’s founding that it is enshrined in our Constitution. A major impetus for the founding document’s codification of the rights to copyright and patent is that, as accurately noted in the document itself, these intellectual property rights reward and thereby “promote the progress of science and the useful arts...” The search for new developments is our American tradition but the new developments themselves, of course, begin as something that is definitionally the opposite of tradition.
Bono is right about America. America never could have become a global leader had it been only a set of traditions and, as Sam Hyde also puts it, “a people” (a tribe). As noted in a very American movie,
People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy, and I can’t do it as Bruce Wayne. As a man [and as just “a people” —S.H.] I’m flesh and blood. I can be ignored. I can be destroyed. But as a symbol? As a symbol I can be incorruptible. I can be everlasting.
Ah, but Donald Trump and Sam Hyde are trying their hardest to corrupt it. The fact that America is an idea is the source of what has made it so important and so powerful for over two centuries, prior to MAGA finally being able to threaten it. As a symbol — an idea — America carries an influence that goes beyond the sum total of its human population, those who are white and otherwise. It is as a symbol — an idea — that America inspires people the world over who are yearning for greater freedom, the exact people whom Donald Trump and Sam Hyde are trying to shut out. That is what the historian James Truslow Adams meant when he coined the American dream. The expression the American dream is just another way of iterating that America is a great philosophic idea. And America is a great symbol and great idea because it is not a symbol and idea only, but enacts its own founding philosophic values to the extent that it finally allows for the liberty of all. It is not those of Latin or Middle Eastern descent, but the ugliness of Sam Hyde and Stephen Miller that needs to be deported.
Both approaches to tradition — the incurious approach of Sam Hyde and the other Great-Replacement white nationalists versus the curious approach of the Founders — involve ideas. But note that the latter involves much more thinking and, hence, ideas play a much more active role. As Ayn Rand noted, the USA was founded not only upon ideas, but upon very conscious engagement with them. And that is why this latter approach to tradition is anathema to Sam Hyde and other white nationalists screeching about a “Great Replacement.”
The verbiage of Sam Hyde and other white nationalists does not consist of actual arguments but instead of a litany of slogans. “Demography is destiny.” “Don’t be a soy-boy.” “Go Woke, go broke.” “You can have a welfare state or you can have open borders. You can’t have both.” “You’re a cuck.” “I was red-pilled.” “It’s White Genocide.” “It’s the Great Replacement.” These amount to thought-stopping clichés. A thought-stopping cliché is a tactic of a dangerous mind-control cult. When they notice underlings beginning to question the cult leader’s arbitrary dictates, the underling’s supervisors recite pithy slogans to them to quell them and preempt them from weighing pros and cons of what they are presented with. The sloganeering is the “cliché” part, and the preemption is the “thought-stopping.” Technically, thought-stopping clichés are themselves ideas, but they are the sort of ideas intended to precluded further thought and further inquiry, as all such rationalizations do. They are stale, simple ideas crafted to discourage people from philosophizing more sophisticated, more advanced ideas into their heads.
Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists, of course, would have us embrace their racism unthinkingly, going as far as conflating customs and traditions and culture as being as inherent as skin color — “This is not learned stuff.” Bothering to examine the facts about culture, tradition, and the learned-versus-unlearned is what immunizes someone against Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists. In that respect, Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists are correct to hate the fact that America was founded upon “ideas.” The fact that some people still bother to think is a fact that prevents Sam Hyde and other white nationalists from winning over the rest of the population, white-skinned and otherwise. And, on at least some implicit level, Same Hyde and the other white nationalists notice this.
It is not mere random coincide that MAGA denigrates the USA’s founding on philosophic “ideas” and also demands that exclusion of persons of other “races.” The first is in service to the second. To recognize that USA’s founding upon “ideas” would lead to renewed attention on what those specific ideas were and are — that, though far from being applied as consistently as they should have been, both back then and now, they were always about cognizance of the equal rights of all human beings to liberty. And this is the liberty that MAGA is denying to dark-skinned people, such as engineers from India, in denying them entry. To acknowledge (1) the USA’s founding upon the ideas of Enlightenment liberty is ultimately to acknowledge (2) the rights of dark-skinned people. MAGA is trying to kill both.
And note that for most of its history, that acknowledgment of the equal right to liberty for all “races” has not been part of the history of white people or the Judo-Christian religious tradition. It was only subsequent to the rise of Enlightenment liberty philosophy, as promulgated by secularists like Josiah Wedgwood, Adam Smith, and Denis Diderot, that particular Christian sects — mostly the Quakers, Methodists, and Unitarians — took a strong interest in abolishing chattel slavery. When Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists uphold most white-people traditions but conspicuously not the Enlightenment-liberal philosophy one, they are able to uphold most white-people traditions while excluding the one aspect of Western Civilization that was singly most responsible for enfranchising all of the nonwhite denizens of that culture.
That, despite the past codification of racial discrimination into the USA’s laws, the Founding philosophy ultimately requires the abolition of such discrimination, is acknowledged implicitly in Sam Hyde’s diatribe. In the diatribe, he proclaims that if many engineers from India migrated to Japan, you would be wrong to think that this could “turn an Indian person into a Japanese person...”, and this also applies to engineers from India moving to the United States. Hyde is still cowardly to say directly that he conflates “American” with “white,” and that their non-whiteness precludes anyone from India from being American. That cowardice is why Sam Hyde instead makes the insipid analogy about how someone from India can never truly be a Japanese national. But Sam Hyde does say directly that immigrants from India “are being used” — by whom exactly, Sam Hyde does not specify — “to replace white people.”
But American independence from Great Britain was not about the racial anxieties mouthed by Sam Hyde and J. D. Vance. The Declaration of Independence did not say that the American colonists had come to interpret themselves as being a different ethnicity or race from those of English metropole, and that, as a separate ethnicity or “race,” they wanted the new republic as an independent ethnostate. No. The American colonists separated themselves from the British government based not on race — not on them being a separate “people” — but on a difference in governing philosophy, on their having different ideas on how the colonies should be governed. J. D. Vance’s assertion that Americans “will not fight for abstractions” would have been news to those who fought in the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence was chock-full of philosophic abstractions.
I have heard similar white nationalists pronounce that the observation that the USA is a “nation of immigrants” is not from the Founding period but only gained currency in the year 1959 when Ted Sorensen and Jules Davids ghostwrote for John F. Kennedy, Sr., a Pulitzer Prize-winning book with that title. As these white nationalists uphold white people’s “traditions” as inherently good, their insinuation is that the recognition of the USA is a nation of immigrants is diminished if the recognition turns out to be relatively new and not-so-traditional after all. That goes along with these same white nationalists lamenting that the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, largely championed by John F.’s younger brother Ted Kennedy, created the USA’s “open border.” As I have written before (1, 2, 3), the Hart-Celler Act did not do that, and, though it liberalized immigration in some aspects, the same bill made immigration more difficult in others.
But the truth is that a good idea is good on its own merits regardless of whether it is old or new. The celebration of America’s immigrants would be worthwhile even if the idea came from 1959 rather than the Founding period.
Yet the reality, as usual, is that these white nationalists are incorrect about American history. The observation that the USA is a nation of an increasingly diverse set of immigrants is one that goes back at least as far as John Adams, the USA’s second president and the brains behind American independence. And in the same observation, Adams acknowledged how the founding had been about active engagement with ideas. Writing in the year 1818, and looking back on how, decades earlier, American colonists were initially reluctant to separate from British rule, Adams commented on how it was active engagement with philosophic ideas that eventually united the diversity in the immigrant populations in this cause. As he verbalized it,
This radical change in the principles, opinions sentiments and affection of the people, was the real American Revolution. . . . The Colonies had grown up under...so great a variety of religions, they were composed of so many different nations, their customs, manners and habits had so little resemblance...that to unite them in the same principles in theory and the same system of action was certainly a very difficult enterprize. The complete accomplishment of it, in so short a time and by such simple means, was perhaps a singular example in the history of mankind.
Adams said it himself — that rigorous philosophizing by a diversity of peoples was “the real American Revolution.” America, at her best, is an idea. And she will remain a great idea to the extent that we uphold and defend this idea against Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, Sam Hyde, and other racist illiberals like them.
On Saturday, January 17, 2026, I added the point about the First Amendment and the quotations from J. D. Vance. On Sunday, January 18, 2026, I added the quotation from John Adams about the American colonies being a collection of diverse immigrant groups.
The Honolulu Star-Advertiser Published My Letter to the Editor
Stuart K. Hayashi
Back in the year 2006, Pablo Wegesend, Reid Ginoza, and I issued a warning to Hawaiʻi in the letters-to-the-editor sections of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and Honolulu Advertiser, before the latter newspaper purchased the former. The warning had to do with the construction of the government-controlled rail system being shoved down everyone’s throat. We warned of the threat of eminent domain being exercised to seize private land for the rail system. My focus was on the chances of citizens being expropriated of their private residences.
For the most part, we find that our warning has come true. The one difference here is that it is not a private residence being taken but instead the site of the Takaras’ family business, Service Printers Hawaii. The specific agency confiscating the land is the one directly in charge of the rail system, HART (the Honolulu Authority on Rapid Transportation). The Friday, November 17, 2023, Honolulu Star-Advertiserran this news as its front-page story. It prompted me to write yet another letter to the editor, which was published on Tuesday, November 21, 2023.
The official Twitter account of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser even sent out a tweet quoting from my letter and linking to the Web version of it.
OPINION: "(HART) invoked eminent domain to dispossess the Takara family of land on which their family business has stood for 59 years. ... That downplays the real issue: freedom and consent versus coercion." ⤵️ https://t.co/okRconMw9a
In the letter, two words I regret are “59 years.” The business was started in 1964 but, upon rereading the Friday article, Mr. Takara said the business was a tenant of the land for “43 years.” Instead of “for 59 years,” I should have said “for decades.”
The Newest Letter
This is what I had sent to the paper:
November 17’s front-page story, “HART Board Approves,” shows HART has no heart.
HART invokes eminent domain to dispossess the Takaras of land on which their family business has stood for 59 years. Rationalizations for eminent domain always mention payment to the victims. That downplays the real issue: freedom and consent versus coercion. Eminent domain is ultimately backed by armed force. Enforcing it in L.A. in 1959 had armed officers literally drag a widow, Aurora Arechiga, from her home.
People assume cities need eminent domain. In January I e-mailed development officials of Carson City, Nevada, about this. They informed me that although the city can enact it, at the time they knew of no instance of Carson City actually exercising eminent domain in its history.
During these holidays, ponder whether slogans about “the greater good” are justification enough, and if passively condoning eminent domain’s brutality is what we truly want.
The Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART) invoked eminent domain to dispossess the Takara family of land on which their family business has stood for 59 years. Rationalizations for eminent domain always mention payment to the victims. That downplays the real issue: freedom and consent versus coercion. Eminent domain is ultimately backed by armed force. Enforcing it in Los Angeles in 1959 had armed officers literally drag a widow, Aurora Arechiga, from her home.
People assume cities need eminent domain. In January, I emailed development officials of Carson City, Nev., about this. They informed me that although the city can enact it, at the time they knew of no instance of Carson City actually exercising eminent domain in its history.
During these holidays, ponder whether slogans about “the greater good” are justification enough, and if passively condoning eminent domain’s brutality is what we truly want.
Stuart K. Hayashi Mililani
With sixteen reader comments underneath the online version, this letter of mine was the second-most-commented-upon letter to the editor of the day. First-place was the one about the Second Amendment, at thirty Web comments.
The next day, the Star-Advertiser published yet another letter denouncing HART’s callous violation of the Takaras’ rights. This one came from Charlene Aoki.
The Letter From 2006 Below is my letter of warning back in 2006. There are two different versions of it.
Pablo Wegesend raised an important concern in his Jan. 28 letter to the editor, but we have yet to see anyone address it.
Wegesend said, “With all the talk about light rail, there is one question that needs to be answered: Who’s going to be forced out of the way to make room for light rail infrastructure?”
Good point. What assurance do we have that the City [and] County of Honolulu won’t exercise eminent domain after selecting a route for the fixed-rail system? I find the very idea that the city might have to resort to condemning people’s houses far more unsettling than any increase in the general excise tax.
We shouldn’t rest easy until the City [and] County publicly promises us, in this newspaper’s op-ed pages for everyone to read, that it won’t forcibly confiscate anyone’s private land when the time comes to construct the rail.
Eminent Domain Don’t Seize People’s Homes for Transit
What assurance do we have that the City [and] County of Honolulu won’t exercise eminent domain after selecting a route for the fixed-rail system? I find the very idea that the city may have to resort to condemning people’s houses over this far more unsettling than any increase in the general excise tax.
We shouldn’t rest easy until the city publicly promises us, in this newspaper’s op-ed pages for everyone to read, that it won’t forcibly confiscate anyone’s private land when the time comes to construct the rail.
If this project requires the seizure of people’s homes, then perhaps it wasn’t such a terrific idea after all.
Stuart K. Hayashi Mililani
As a follow-up to my own, Reid Ginoza had his own March 17, 2006, letter to the editor published over here.
Yes, in 2006, I said, “We shouldn’t rest easy until the City [and] County publicly promises us, in this newspaper’s op-ed pages for everyone to read, that it won’t forcibly confiscate anyone’s private land when the time comes to construct the rail.”
We know what has happened since then. With the rail project, the city government is on the very unscrupulous path of which we had warned. It should reverse course before it hurts innocent people even more than it already has.
Screen shot from the motion picture "Born in East L.A.,"
prod. Peter Macgregor-Scott, dir. Cheech Marin (Universal Pictures, 1987).
The following is adapted from my longer essay, “The War on Illegal Migrants: A Repeat of the War on Illegal Drugs.” The longest version of that essay is here. A shorter version of that essay can be read here.
Former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R–Tx) and his fellow writers of the Ludwig von Mises Institute blabber about the need for the U.S. federal government to get tough with guarding the USA’s southern border. They don’t want undocumented immigrants getting through. And Ron Paul and the Mises Institute also gnash their teeth about the evils of the U.S. federal government sending agents to intervene in foreign countries, including those of Latin America.
Yet such intervention is actually integral to enforcing the USA’s southern border. The leftwing journalist Todd Miller writes of how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has vast operations within Latin America, and their purpose is to do exactly the border enforcement that Ron Paul and the Mises Institute scream that they want. These U.S. agents spy on those they suspect of being smugglers or their clients. Then, when they judge appropriate, these agents apply armed force in order to preempt the smugglers and clients from reaching the border in the first place.
Todd Miller notes that, by blocking undocumented immigration in this manner, the USA is establishing, unofficially but in practice, a border that is even farther south than the official one north of Mexico. The border enforcers are, de facto, lowering the USA’s southern border further southward. As Todd Miller phrases it,
The United States has been purposely pushing out its borders, meaning that the border doesn’t end at the US-Mexico southern border. For example, in Puerto Rico, the Ramey sector of the U.S. Border Patrol can patrol a thousand miles to the south of the U.S. mainland. This allows Border Patrol agents, and effectively the Coast Guard and Department of Homeland Security, to patrol around the Dominican Republic and Haiti. So what happened in the January 2010 earthquake that hit Haiti, one of the first U.S. responses was to send sixteen Coast Guard cutters that were right around the coast line of Haiti; they sent an airplane over Haiti with the voice of the ambassador, who was speaking Creole, but asking people not to leave the island while they were digging themselves out of their homes after they collapsed.
So, all of the sudden, the U.S. border isn’t where you think it is. It expands and goes all the way up to the coast of Haiti. [When some Haitians did try to migrate, there were already] detention facilities at Guantanamo to intercept them. Everything’s in preparation.
Here, fans of Ron Paul and the Mises Institute are wont to say, “No, instead of messing around in other countries, the agents should be focused on the U.S. southern border, and the border only.” According to arguments put forth by the Mises Institute itself about other government agencies, nothing about that demand is realistic. Calling for a beef-up in border enforcement only causes more of the international meddling. It is unrealistic to expect that if a federal agency’s authority is enlarged in just one specific area, it will stick only to that one specific area. That enlargement of authority in that one area allows for administrators to rationalize their expansion into various other affairs that, to taxpayers, seem only tenuously related to what the agency’s original task was.
After all, by expanding their reach and jurisdiction, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the Homeland Security Department they work under can all further justify their existence and budgets. It helps them look even busier and more important, which places pressure on the Congressmen holding the purse strings to renew their budgets. With renewed or expanded budgets, there is a reduced risk of layoffs within the departments. The agents maintain job security. But one would think that this would already be known by Mises-Institute libertarians so savvy about how the Drug War and other federal programs engage in “mission creep.”
Besides, to the degree that the federal government is serious about stopping illegal entries into the USA — something that those in the Mises Institute orbit demand quite zealously — it makes sense to meddle in the countries of the south. Agents can be more effectual in stopping border-crossings by going on the offensive against the smugglers within their countries of origin.
White nationalists try to conjure up the image of impoverished, nonwhite immigrants being a barbarian horde overwhelming an understaffed and underfunded Border Patrol. The reality is that the fervency of the anti-immigrationists has given the USA’s border-enforcement agencies another excuse to introduce upon foreign soil.
Ron Paul and the Mises Institute go on demanding both a closing of the USA’s southern border and that the USA stops intervening in other countries. But as Todd Miller shows, intensified enforcement of the USA’s southern border always leads to more U.S. intervention south of that border.
Fans of the Ron Paul and the Mises Institute also like to say, “You can have open borders or a welfare state. You can’t have both.” Evidence from academic studies happens to suggest otherwise. Here is a much more realistic binary choice: Either you can have the USA’s southern border closed, or the USA can stop intervening in other countries. You can’t have both.
Screen shot from the motion picture "Born in East L.A.,"
prod. Peter Macgregor-Scott, dir. Cheech Marin (Universal Pictures, 1987).
A longer version of this essay, which gives more elaboration on the history of U.S. immigration law, can be read here.
Introduction
Many people who call themselves “libertarians” or “free-market capitalists,” such as economist Thomas Sowell and the writers at the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Alabama, advocate that the government allow for almost any action that is peaceful — with one notable exception. They say that even nonviolent activities that receive widespread disapproval, such as recreational drug use and sex work, should be legalized.
These libertarians provide a cogent case that any government’s War on Illegal Drugs cannot be won. Governmental restrictions on recreational drug use and sex work do not stop these activities, but instead push the activity’s participants into involvement in the black market. Therefore, these libertarians conclude, even if the voting majority were right to disapprove personally of substance abuse or sex work, governmental restriction makes such activities more perilous than they otherwise would be. This argument is sound. Yet Sowell and the Mises Institute apparently fail to notice that this very same argument also applies to one of the few peaceful activities that they still want the State to forbid. That activity is the choice to make a long-term migration from a poorer country to a richer, freer one.
The United States and rich Western European countries already maintain systems of strict governmental restriction over whom may enter them and apply for citizenship. These restrictions are enforced by armed government agents. And yet so many putative free-marketers and libertarians propound that, at the very least, these systems of control should persist. Moreover, many of them, including the Mises Institute’s self-described anarchists, shout that these countries’ governments should go farther — clamping down on immigration efforts, both legal and illegal, with an even heavier hand.
Thomas Sowell and these other putative free-marketers ought to notice that they themselves have provided an airtight case against the restrictions they are advocating. That airtight case is the one they advance about crackdowns on recreational drug use. The principles underlying their case for liberalizing the recreational use of drugs apply at least as well to a case for liberalizing immigration.
Thankfully, there are free-enterprisers — notably adherents to Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy — who push back on the anti-immigrationism. In so doing, these people are being logically consistent — “free-enterpriser in favor of liberalizing immigration” is a redundancy.
These free-enterprisers point out that an adult has a moral right to migrate from a poor country to a richer one for job opportunities at least as much as that adult has a moral right to endanger himself through abusing drugs recreationally in the privacy of his own home. These free-enterprisers understand that the morally just policy is for a government to liberalize immigration, observing the right to entry by anyone not demonstrated to pose physical harm to others.
Still, these free-enterprisers usually share a false premise of the anti-immigrationists, to which these free-enterprisers concede. Until some years ago, even as I had long appreciated the libertarians’ black-market argument as it applied to recreational drugs, I myself had not questioned this false premise. The false premise is that if the governments of the USA and Western European countries had the political will to do so, they would be capable of stopping the inflow of Third-World migrants. It was only in late January of 2018 that the magnitude of the truth began to hit me (1, 2).
Among the persons who call themselves proponents of laissez-faire capitalism, both the pro- and anti-immigration side agree that the resiliency of the black market prevents a First-World republic from ever winning a War on Illegal Drugs. Curiously, both sides also presume that this same First-World republic is able somehow to win a War on Illegal Migrants. The anti-immigration side — especially the self-proclaimed anarchists — always takes the premise for granted. And, as of this writing, it is quite rare to find pro-immigration free-enterprisers who question the premise explicitly. I hope that this essay of mine may change that.
For free-enterprisers, the good news is that as long as some countries are richer and freer than others are, no amount of governmental restriction will stop the flow of migrants. Against the wishes of the anti-immigrationists, some impoverished and nonwhite immigrants will always get through. The bad news is that — just as it is with recreational drug use — though the governmental restriction will not stop the Third-World migration completely, the governmental restriction does compel the migration to change form. It causes the migration to become riskier for all parties than it otherwise would have been. Such bad news is the explanation why, even though the anti-immigrationists will thankfully never thwart all Third-World migration, we should still campaign fervently in favor of liberalizing the immigration process.
This essay will focus on three parties that have, at least one point in time, (1) employed the black-market argument to argue for liberalizing recreational drug use, and (2) demanded that Western governments either maintain their current immigration controls or make them stricter still. The three parties are: (a) Thomas Sowell, Hoover Institution economist and former newspaper columnist; (b) the Ludwig von Mises Institute, an anarcho-“capitalist” think tank headquartered in Auburn, Alabama; and (c) Lauren Southern, a globe-trotting Canadian YouTube vlogger well-known for advancing propaganda in the cause of white nationalism. The first two of these parties, as of this writing, still describe themselves as “libertarian,” whereas Lauren Southern called herself one in the past. She even continued to do so for a while even as she was beginning to introduce white-nationalist talking points into her YouTube vlogs.
Three Case Studies in Anti-Immigrationism From Supposed Libertarians
Although Thomas Sowell characterizes himself as a libertarian, he is more commonly associated with conservative Republicans. When commenting on social issues such as abortion and immigration rights, he predictably sides with social conservatism. On the matter of immigration he huffs,
When, if ever, are we [native-born Americans] going to close our borders? When will we even take control of our borders, so that we can decide who, and how many, will be admitted? . . . In all the years that have been spent talking back and forth about every conceivable immigration policy ...we could have built the biggest fence of all time, backed up by electronics, boots on the ground and whatever else it takes. . .STOP THE BLEEDING. . . . The fact that the main border that people have been pouring across, at will, is the border with Mexico, does not mean that everyone crossing that border is Mexican.
There are lots of complicated issues revolving around the open borders — drugs, visas, employers, refugees, crime syndicates, sanctuary cities, amnesty and more. But first we need to stop the bleeding [boldface added].
There are two aspects of Sowell’s rant that deserve special mention. First is that he notes that the smuggling of “drugs” is something connected to undocumented immigration. The drawing of parallels between drug-smuggling and immigrant-smuggling is more apt than even Sowell himself realizes, as we shall see later with what he has to say about the Drug War. The second note to make is Sowell’s use of the words bleeding and pouring to describe the inflow of undocumented immigrants. He likens the immigrants to a dense liquid bursting through, though he insists that this liquid’s flow can and must be ceased — “stop the bleeding.”
In a similar newspaper column from the year 2006, Sowell grumbles,
Most of the arguments for not enforcing our immigration laws are exercises in frivolous rhetoric and slippery sophistry...
If Mexican journalists were flooding into the United States and taking jobs as reporters and editors at half the pay being earned by American reporters and editors, maybe people in the media would understand why the argument about “taking jobs that Americans don’t want” is such nonsense [boldface added].
Note that Sowell once again compares immigrants to a liquid moving all around — they are “flooding into the United States.” Floods cause casualties, and therefore he demands that we take action against this deluge.
In that very same newspaper column, the man gives us this sarcastic crack: “We could solve the problem of all illegal activity anywhere by legalizing it. Why use this approach only with immigration? Why should any of us pay a speeding ticket if immigration scofflaws are legalized after the fact for committing a federal crime?” His invocation of sarcasm to write off any counterargument is of interest here, and we will revisit it when we quote Sowell about the federal government’s War on Illegal Drugs.
As he mostly reached his audiences through a newspaper column, Sowell’s influence had long been limited to print media. But the same message about the menace of undocumented immigrants has been carried into the twenty-first century though videos uploaded onto YouTube. Online videos are a territory for white nationalists especially their darling, Lauren Southern.
In a 2016 video for the rightwing nationalist Rebel News outlet, Lauren Southern said that in the previous year,
a little over a million migrants entered Europe... The international media cheered on this intake of refugees with rose-colored glasses on... The excitement didn’t last long, though, as videos started arising of the situation in Europe. And when we took our eyes away from the numbers [and] charts, real people suffered under what, in their lives, literally looked like an invasion.
How horrifying! But it was not all bad, according to Ms. Southern. In her evaluation, good sense began to prevail. “...the people said, ‘No more.’ People took to the streets to protest, walls were built in Eastern Europe, and migrant-enthusiastic politicians began walking back their insane policies.”
It is for these reasons, she says in another Rebel News YouTube video, that she hand-waves those who “argue that immigration will improve competition in the labor market, and that border controls themselves are just another example of the State tyrannizing individuals. I believe these assertions are misguided, and that there are far stronger libertarian arguments against immigration and against open borders.”
In that latter video, Ms. Southern cites, as examples of credible libertarians who hate the idea of liberalizing immigration law, Hans-Hermann Hoppe and former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R–Tx). Both of those men have strong ties to the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Auburn, Alabama. Of all the ostensibly libertarian think tanks, the Mises Institute is the one that most visibly and vocally opposes the removal of governmental restrictions over immigration, especially immigration from poorer countries to richer and freer ones.
Readers of this blog are probably familiar with the Mises Institute’s antics. In rather Orwellian language that will be understood only by ideological insiders, Mises Institute cofounder and former president Llewelyn H. Rockwell proclaims, “Open Borders Are an Assault on Private Property.” In this essay, he warns, “It is impossible to believe that the U.S or Europe will be a freer place after several more decades of uninterrupted mass immigration.”
Besides the supposed undesirability of impoverished immigrants from the Third World, these three parties — Thomas Sowell, Lauren Southern, and the Mises Institute — share in yet another premise. This second premise is that governmental authorities can — and therefore should — put a stop to all this “mass immigration” of poor people. That is what Sowell means when he says, “In all the years that have been spent talking back and forth about every conceivable immigration policy...we could have built the biggest fence of all time... STOP THE BLEEDING.”
By “we,” Thomas Sowell actually means the national government. The USA’s national government has to “stop the bleeding,” stop the flooding. And yet there is another national problem that Sowell says this same national government simply cannot stop, and should therefore leave alone. That is the problem of people taking hard drugs recreationally and becoming addicted to them.
Here, the reader might object that it is unfair of me to say that crackdowns on illegal immigrants are comparable to drug prohibition. One might say, “Hard drugs, such as cocaine and heroin, are banned outright. By contrast, immigration is not. We hear all the time about people legally immigrating to the United States and being naturalized as citizens. We don’t hear about someone legally snorting a lot of cocaine.”
Actually, the word ban does often apply to immigration. Both “drugs” and “immigration” are broad categories. Many drugs are legal and not banned outright, even if there remain government regulations on how they are sold and consumed. Aspirin and Tylenol are both legal drugs, though there are government regulations on how the quantity of units of these drugs can be sold to a customer at the retail level. Caffeine is yet another legal drug, and that is subject to fewer government controls. Rather, it is specific types of drugs that are contraband, such as opium, crack, and ecstasy.
Likewise, there are only specific, narrow categories of immigration that are legal. We shall sort out the few types of immigration to the United States that are legal, and compare them with those that are illegal.
Immigration Versus Prohibition
As you might read in the longer version of this essay, the USA’s very first federal immigration restrictions from 1875 to 1929 were openly racist. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 undid many of these wrongs, but inadvertently created some new complications on its own. This federal legislation set the status quo with which we find ourselves today. Despite rectifying many past injustices, it has left most forms of immigration illegal.
For someone to enter the USA for long-term residency, that person must obtain a license to do so. That license is called a visa. It is only under very specific and narrow conditions that a visa will be issued to anyone. A student visa, for instance, can be issued to someone entering the United States to attend a university. Most people who seek university education are already upper middle class.
Another type of visa is a professional work visa — an H-1B. To obtain one, you must be in a very specific line of work. There is a list of jobs for which someone can qualify, such as engineer, medical doctor, or research scientist. Except for one, all of the jobs that can qualify someone for an H-1B visa require a university degree. The one exception is for fashion models. As obtaining a university degree is usually out of reach for the very poor, the requirements for H-1B visas, too, favor would-be immigrants who are already upper middle class. Even work as a fashion model is more strongly associated with the middle class than with those who fall under the United Nations’ definition of “absolute poverty.”
Another category of visas is “family reunification visa.” If you were born and raised in another country, but have family members already in the USA, these American relatives can sponsor you.
One of the few changes to the regime established under the Hart-Celler Act is the addition of a new type of visa. It is the entrepreneurship visa, introduced by the Obama administration. Someone who has established a successful enterprise can also enter the USA legally. Naturally, people who are already successful at business tend to be on the richer side rather than the poorer.
There are some types of visas that go to people who wish to engage in unskilled labor. Those are H-2A and H-2B visas. They only let you stay in the USA for two years. If you want to remain in the USA longer, these visas will not remedy that.
Accordingly, we find that there are only a few types of immigration that are not banned. You may immigrate to the USA if you are a fashion model, got a job because of your having a university degree, are currently seeking a university degree, or have started a successful business. All of those categories favor people who are already at least upper middle class. And you may also enter the USA if you have relatives who are already here.
Let us imagine you are in a different category. Imagine you have no relatives in the USA. And, because you are poor, you have not yet attained success in business or even a university degree. You do not even have the means to seek a degree. Nor are you a fashion model. If all of these circumstances apply to you, you are far from alone — what I have just described is the situation of the vast majority of foreign-born people who seek to enter the United States for the long term. Your prospects of entering the USA are very dim. And they are made worse by yet another rule that has been established since 1965.
There are “caps” on the number of visas released. The rule is that a country’s citizens can receive no more than seven percent of all the visas issued that year. As Mexico is a poor country adjacent to the United States, it is only logical that a plurality of visa applicants are Latino. Annually, an average 23 percent of all visa applications come from Mexicans. As no more than 7 percent of visas can go to Mexicans, this makes for a terrible mismatch.
And the US federal government is terribly inefficient at going through visa applications. As noted by the Migration Policy Institute, for the US federal government to clear its backlog of yet-to-be-examined visa applications would take nineteen years.
Even if you are one of the “lucky” (ha ha) Mexicans who do qualify for a visa, the amount of time you have to wait for it to be processed is ridiculous. The Carnegie Endowment finds that for someone in Mexico who has applied for a family reunification visa, the expected wait time is at least six years.
This is from Stuart Anderson, “Family Immigration: The Long Wait to Immigrate,” National Foundation for American Policy Brief, (Arlington, VA: National Foundation for American Policy, May 2010), 1.
Those who are desperately starving and who are trying to get their families away from drug cartels cannot wait that long.
People who may immigrate legally to the USA this year are the ones who have qualified for all the aforementioned categories and, after that, are fortunate enough to have made the cut once the 7-Percent Rule has been applied. Everyone else — the vast majority of people working to immigrate to the USA — are banned for this year and, very likely, in the many years to come.
Not all drugs are banned. Only specific drugs, such as heroin, are banned outright by the federal government. Likewise, not all forms of immigration are banned. In fact, the majority of immigrants in the United States are in the country legally. Seventy-seven percent of the USA’s immigrants are legal ones. The other 23 percent, however, are undocumented. Most longtime immigrants in the USA came legally, and retain that status. Nonetheless, the majority of types of immigration into the USA are banned, illegal, and prohibited. This is a nationally mandated Prohibition as applied to immigration. The 23 percent of immigrants who are undocumented are a minority, yes, but still a disproportionately large percentage. That percentage being so large reflects the fact of how large the demand is for migration into the USA, and of how, in their tenacity, these people have been able to overcome the barriers put in their path.
The barriers have become especially formidable from 1994 onward. Throughout the 1980s, the average price of smuggling across the U.S.-Mexican border was $300 per person ($750 in inflation-adjusted 2021 U.S. dollars). However, stung by the false accusation that it was too soft on illegal aliens, the Clinton administration intensified border enforcement. In 1994, it started Operation Gatekeeper, placing more guards on the border than ever before. That immediately brought that up to $700 (worth $1,279 in the year 2021). By 1999, the price was $1,200 ($1,950 in 2021). As of my writing this, the price per person ranges from $3,000 to $4,000.
The smugglers reduce their costs and increase their profits by bringing in a variety of different cargo. The smugglers will sometimes even provide a discount to an undocumented immigrant if that immigrant will be a drug mule for them.
Naturally, enemies of liberalizing immigration, such as Glenn Beck and Donald Trump, have taken this detail and spun it to imply that liberalizing the border is just inherently evil. In the June 15 tirade with which he launched his presidential campaign, Trump shouted that Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs.”
The presumption of Trump’s diatribe, shared with much of his and Lauren Southern’s audience, is that undocumented Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs” because, by default, they are just uncivilized, uncouth barbarians. The real reason many of them are “bringing drugs” is that, desperate for a new life, they have to resort to such. They do it after having been denied every better option by armed federal agents, agents enacting the will of voters whose fears of immigrants are stoked by the likes of Donald Trump’s advisors and Lauren Southern.
Recall, too, that Thomas Sowell’s “Stop the Bleeding” newspaper column cited “drugs” as one of the “issues revolving around open borders.” In this particular context, Sowell was relying on “drugs” being stigmatized as bad. If he can get the reader’s mind to associate “open borders” with “drugs,” then, by extension, the reader will also interpret “open borders” as bad. But as we shall see later in this essay, there are other connections between government crackdowns on illegal immigrants and crackdowns on drugs that are not so convenient for the case that Sowell tries to advance against immigrants.
The facts of the red tape and of most forms of immigration being illegal are the reasons why impoverished people in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East have gotten so desperate in their plans to immigrate. These are the reasons for which they put their lives in the hands of black-market operators — including members of the mafia — to gain any semblance of a chance to make a new home in a richer Western country.
Astonishingly, since the middle of this year, white nationalist Lauren Southern has conceded some of the points above, though that concession has not done much to soften her opposition to any liberalization. On June 23, 2022, Ms. Southern told Jordan Peterson’s daughter Mikhaila that aspiring immigrants in Latin America
hear every day of friends or family that will apply to legally [split infinitive] go to America, and they never get a call back — maybe fifteen years waiting in the system, never getting anything because they don’t have the financial support. They don’t have the job background. They don’t have someone there tied to the U.S. that can bring them over. So the idea of legally immigrating is impossible for some of these people.
But then, in a ludicrous inaccuracy, Southern asserts that the US federal government is willy-nilly “legalizing these people. They’re allowing them to live in America after they immigrate illegally.”
Even after Ms. Southern admits that red tape prohibits most people from immigrating legally, she propounds this fiction about no undocumented immigrants ever getting deported. That is her bizarre attempt to insinuate, even after her admission, that she still has some case to make that Western governments have had a disastrously hands-off attitude.
Later in this essay, we will address how inaccurate it is to assert that there is lax enforcement on undocumented immigrants already in the USA. We will also get to the disturbing extent to which Lauren Southern contradicts herself about that. More pertinent at the moment is that in her interview with Mikhaila Peterson, Ms. Southern discussed the manner in which the immigration bans have motivated immigrants to seek assistance from the black market and even the mafia. That is pertinent as it exposes a double standard of Ms. Southern’s when her position on this matter compares to her stated position on the U.S. federal government’s War on Drugs. Worse, that same double standard is also apparent in far more sophisticated thinkers such as Thomas Sowell.
The Black-Market Argument
Among those who call themselves “libertarians” or “radicals for capitalism,” there are two favorite arguments for legalizing drugs. They are the Individual Sovereignty argument and the Black Market argument.
The Individual Sovereignty argument is that a contractually competent adult has a moral right to do anything that is nonviolent. If consenting adults are partaking in an action that endangers no one but themselves, it is evil for the State to intercede. That is why, no matter how much he might harm himself by doing so, it is wrong for the State to override the choice of a man who abuses drugs in the privacy of his own home. And logically consistent proponents of free enterprise recognize that that logic also applies to the matter of immigration. An impoverished immigrant will lodge on a private plot of land at the landholder’s consent. Even if that immigrant never bothered to seek a visa, these are individuals peacefully minding their own business. For the State to raid this lodging and apprehend the immigrant is to initiate the use of force on peaceful people.
The second-favorite argument for legalizing drugs is the Black Market argument. The Black Market argument applies activities that invite widespread disapproval but, by themselves, do not initiate physical force on any living, functioning, born person who refrains from participating in that activity.
In any case, the Black Market argument is as follows. There is an activity that receives widespread social disapproval but, by itself, does not impose physical harm directly on the third parties that do not approve.The activity is seldom something that a person can perform alone without any help; it usually requires purchasing a supply of something from some vendor.
Because there is such large marketplace demand for this activity, heavy-handed governmental restrictions will never stamp it out completely. In response to the governmental restriction, many participants will seek it out in the underground economy, where there is less oversight and transparency. Therefore, while governmental restriction might reduce the number of instances of this activity occurring, every instance where this activity does occur will be more dangerous for everyone than it otherwise would have been. As participants are doing something illegal, they find that if they are cheated or physically violated by the vendors, they have no recourse. They cannot go to the police and report the wrongdoing, lest they incriminate themselves.
Hence, in the underground economic activity that emerged in response to the State’s restrictions, abuses run rampant. The Black Market argument thus continues that the problems arising from the black-market response to the governmental restrictions ends up causing more damage than the activity itself. Therefore, concludes the argument, the most benign public policy is to repeal the governmental restrictions. Let the matter be legal and liberal.
The controversial activity in question can be (1) drinking alcoholic beverages, (2) imbibing some other dangerous drug, (3) sex work, (4) gambling, or (5) obtaining a gun for self-defense. There are three other categories of this sort of activity that are not widely acknowledged as such by libertarians, such as Thomas Sowell and the Mises Institute’s founder, who express sympathies with the Religious Right. Those three other categories are (5) getting an abortion, (6) in response to a terminal illness, receiving assistance in committing suicide, and (7) immigrating from a poorer country to a richer and freer one.
Politically left-of-center Democrats are more prone to recognize the validity of the Black Market argument when it comes to having access to abortions. Yet they are reluctant to admit that it also applies to having access to a firearm.
For politically right-of-center Republicans, the reverse is the case. They can recognize the validity of the Black Market argument when it comes to owning a gun. But they refuse to apply it to the matter of having access to an abortion.
For additional notes on sex work, abortion, and physician-provided aid in dying, you might check out the longer version of this essay.
Self-described libertarians cite the Black Market argument most often in controversies over liberalization of drugs and sex work. As we shall see, their go-to case study in the principles of this model is that of the Prohibition over the distribution of alcoholic beverages. It was, after all, the popularity of the Black Market argument — not the Individual Sovereignty one — that persuaded authorities in the early 1930s to repeal this Prohibition. Hence, libertarians just love drawing parallels between the prohibition of booze and the prohibition of cocaine.
Libertarians(?) for the Prohibition of Third-World Immigrants Denouncing the Prohibition of the Recreational Use of Hard Drugs
In his newspaper column in 1984, Thomas Sowell provided his thoughts on hard drugs and on the black market for them. To my knowledge, his stand on the matter has not changed since then. As with the previous quotations about immigration, look for his use of the term flood. Here I quote some of his thoughts from the column.
Drug raids are good politics but they don’t make a dent in the problem. The federal government’s seizure of cocaine is six times what they were a few years ago but the flood of cocaine into the country has continued to be so massive... The ban on drugs has become Prohibition writ large. Like Prohibition, the ban on drugs has been a financial bonanza for organized crime, and its profits have financed the corruption of law enforcement agencies, politicians, and judges. . . .
. . . Drugs are inherently a problem for the individual who takes them, but they are a much bigger problem for society precisely because they are illegal. It is their illegality that makes them costly and drives people to desperation...
When the crusaders finally succeeded in getting the Prohibition[ of the distribution of alcohol,...o]rganized crime blossomed. So did the corruption of the whole political process. . . . Bootleggers sometimes financed the campaigns to ban liquor. Their profits depended on liquors being illegal. Legalization of narcotics would similarly destroy the profits of today’s drug-pushers. There is no way that they can compete with drugs that can be mass-produced cheaply by big pharmaceutical companies. ...this is just one more area where we have to recognize that government has its limits. Ignoring those limits is not only reckless arrogance but dangerous. We finally learned that painful lesson from Prohibition. We need to remember it when it comes to drugs.
Of note is Sowell’s use of the word flood above. Recall when he spoke of Mexican immigrants “flooding into the United States” on account of black-market smugglers. He spoke of these unlicensed migrants as a hazardous deluge of liquid, “pouring” in, and this phrasing was to convey that these immigrants can and should be stopped by the government. After all, we have to “stop the bleeding.”
But observe how Sowell mentions the “flood” in his column about drugs. When it comes to his use of the flooding metaphor about hard drugs and immigrants, both the similarities and differences are revealing. In the drug column, he writes of “the flood of cocaine into this country,” once again across the border illegally. Hard drugs, too, are a damaging deluge. And yet, judging by the rest of the essay in which this term is used, Sowell exploits the metaphor of a “flood” to insinuate that the trade in hard drugs cannot be stopped by the government. Largely because this “flood” cannot be stopped, Sowell tells us, the best we can do is legalize the hard drugs and provide the trade some oversight. That is better, Sowell informs us, than governmental restrictions providing monopolistic control over hard drugs to organized-crime syndicates.
At this juncture, we can revisit Sowell’s sarcastic crack to write off those of us who call for liberalizing the immigration process. He said, “We could solve the problem of all illegal activity anywhere by legalizing it. Why use this approach only with immigration? Why should any of us pay a speeding ticket if immigration scofflaws are legalized after the fact for committing a federal crime?”
This same sort of sarcasm can be thrown back at Sowell to dismiss, just as close-mindedly, his case for liberalization when it comes to drug policy. It could be said, “We could solve the problem of all illegal activity anywhere by legalizing it. Why use this approach only with [illegal drugs]? Why should any of us pay a speeding ticket if [pot-smoking] scofflaws [can be pardoned] after the fact for committing a federal crime?”
Over at the anti-immigrationist Mises Institute, there is much agreement with Sowell about drug policy. Evidence of that can be found here, here, here, and here. Overall, the Mises Institute concludes, “Moving from prohibition to legalization does not just make the drugs cheaper; it changes everything for the better.”
Back when she was still a member of the Libertarian Party of Canada, and before she staked her reputation on white nationalism, Lauren Southern tweeted similar sentiments. Here is one such tweet.
She followed up that, on account of the underground economy being left to supply the recreational drug use that remains in demand, governmental restriction on heroin and such “has been an utter failure like prohibition of alcohol.”
Yet in her two propaganda movies about the black market’s supply of migration services, Lauren Southern oozes an insinuation that completely contradicts the point of these tweets.
Southern Border
For years, Lauren Southern had been releasing several YouTube videos railing against impoverished immigrants. But it was on May 25, 2019 when she released her first feature-length propaganda movie on the subject, Borderless. She would follow up with that exactly three years and a single day later with another one, American Mirage.
At the end of Borderless, Ms. Southern verbalizes the conclusion that all of the movie’s prior contents were ostensibly to prove. We are to believe that the case studies presented in the movie have directly shown the folly in politically liberalizing the process of immigrating from Third World countries to the West — that is, a policy of “Open Borders.”
At the start of the monologue with which she concludes the propaganda movie, she calls out her ideological opponents. “You know, you have all of these people that are constantly chanting, ‘Open Borders!’, who want to help, who genuinely believe in their hearts they are doing good.” She then asks, rhetorically, where these same open-borders proponents are when their precious immigrants are found “sleeping under bridges and living on the streets.” That brings her to the final sentence spoken in the movie: “The story of a borderless Europe is one where nobody wins.” That is the punchline. It is that Western Europe is being destroyed by liberalization — a policy of Open Borders bringing about a “borderless Europe,” just as it says in the title.
One would think that this conclusion would be demonstrated by the contents the movie. What sort of evidence, then, does Lauren Southern exhibit as proof that an outright Open Border policy is wrecking Europe? The case she makes is . . . that there is a black-market operation in which the mafia smuggles migrants into Western Europe, and many problems result from this being so clandestine.
Just 5 minutes, 47 seconds into Borderless, Ms. Southern already brings up the black market and the mafia. “This [Turkey] is where it is all happening — where the traffickers are collecting the money and sending them off on the boats, sneaking them into trucks and across the border; where all of this begins.” Fifteen minutes in, she goes to a wilderness area where she has brief exchanges with would-be migrants who, at that very moment, are looking for smugglers with whom they can strike deals.
Twenty-two minutes and 43 seconds in, she asks one aspiring migrant, “Why don’t people apply legally?” He tells her bluntly, “Because in our country, it’s so difficult to have a visa.” One would have hoped that, right then and there, Ms. Southern’s movie would have acknowledged how discrepant the movie’s conclusion about a “borderless Europe” is from what is actually being presented onscreen. But the viewer is in no such luck.
In her sequel, American Mirage, Ms. Southern continues to talk up the underground economy and the mafia. “There is no path [from Latin America to the USA] without them [drug cartels],” she says. “You pay or you die.”
Throughout all this, onscreen Lauren Southern should have asked herself a rather obvious question: since when do black markets emerge in response to an activity being legalized, liberalized, and “Open”?
Then she would need to face the obvious answer: they don’t.
The supposed evidence that Ms. Southern’s movies present as supportive of their public-policy recommendation implicitly contradicts it. The movies are, to employ the slang of Lauren Southern’s former fans, a “self-own.”
On his blog, University of Amsterdam sociologist Hein de Haas states the simple fact that Borderless and American Mirage ridiculously leave unspoken: “It is the border controls that have forced migrants to take more dangerous routes and that have made them more and more dependent on smugglers to cross borders. Smuggling is a reaction to border controls rather than a cause of migration in itself.”
All the rhetoric in Borderless conveys the message that it is an open-border policy, in practice, that brings about the social ills associated with the smuggling of immigrants. That makes as much sense as proclaiming that it was Prohibition’s repeal in late 1933 that was to blame for the speakeasies and bootlegging of the decade prior.
Southern’s Border Disorder
In a 2022 video in which she gloats about anti-immigration political parties winning Europe’s elections, Ms. Southern even admits that Western European countries are not “borderless” after all, but are instead enforced by the guns of the government. Still unadmitted, though, is conscious acknowledgement on Ms. Southern’s part of internal contradiction.
No country on this planet has open borders — none. To travel anywhere, you and I both have to bring a damn passport. You have to state your reasons for entry. You have to have your bags scanned. And you can’t just bring bombs and heroin into any country you like. Of course there has to be some border process. This shouldn’t even have to be a debate to begin with.
It is true that “no country has open borders — none.” But how does that square with Ms. Southern concluding her 2019 movie with the line that the continent has destroyed itself by becoming a “borderless Europe”?
We saw that back in 2015, Ms. Southern did acknowledge that black markets emerge in response to governmental restrictions, and that it is an “utter failure” to presume that “prohibition works.”
I do not think this is a matter of Ms. Southern failing to notice that her rhetoric about the black market for drugs undermines her presumption that the State can and should maintain its prohibitions on unskilled Third-World immigration. I would be surprised if it genuinely did not occur to her that the mafia’s smuggling of immigrants is caused by the precise absence of the very same “borderless”/”open borders” policy that she vilifies. It is not a matter of Ms. Southern herself not understanding this. It is that her target audience, her white-nationalist fan base, does not understand, and — more to the point — does not want to understand.
Buttressing the refusal to understand is a set of rationalizations. Even after finally admitting, this year, that intended immigrants in Latin America face so much red tape, Ms. Southern provides another rationalization for concluding, somehow, that U.S. immigration policy is too liberalized. In a June 2022 interview with Dr. Jordan Peterson’s daughter Mikhaila, Ms. Southern insinuates that although governmental bureaucracy does obstruct Latinos from obtaining licenses to enter the USA, it is still the case that once the Latino immigrants have bypassed the border and entered the USA, they are home free. “...they’re [the U.S. government] legalizing these people. They’re allowing them to live in America after they immigrate illegally. So why are immigrants supposed to think any different?”
Subsequent to the federal bureaucracy denying permission forms to aspiring immigrants, we are told, the USA does still have an open-borders policy after all. This is because, as Ms. Southern tells it, the U.S. government refuses to take action against known illegal immigrants once they are already on U.S. soil. Yet the reality is far different.
Consider the Obama administration, which Ms. Southern and her cronies revile as being especially lenient. President Obama, after all, issued an executive order that would defer indefinitely the deportation of people who were illegally taken to the USA as children by their parents. The reality is that Obama’s team enforced immigration laws at least as aggressively as all other presidential administrations. That is why the Obama administration deported over 2.5 million undocumented immigrants.
This year, with Obama’s vice president having taken over, 39 percent of Latinos surveyed in the USA reported how they still worry that someone close to their family might soon be deported.
Contrary to the lie that Ms. Southern advanced to Mikhaila Peterson, Latino immigrants know that being within the USA’s borders does not render them scot-free. The risk of deportation even allows the smugglers and the mafia to maintain control over them. If the immigrants defy the wishes of the smugglers and the cartels, these immigrants can then be reported anonymously to ICE. All this happens because, unlike what Lauren Southern says, the U.S. government is not willy-nilly “legalizing these people.”
In American Mirage, Ms. Southern continues the lie that immigrants have nothing to worry about after getting to the USA. She pronounces, “It is hard to blame illegals for treating America’s migration system with such cavalier contempt. They know they can profit off a system that makes no sense.” As she tells Mikhaila Peterson, “They’re not wrong to think it, because America has been letting it happen for years and years and years.”
In both Borderless and American Mirage, Ms. Southern insists that her call to have Western governments grow even more zealous in blocking immigrants is actually compassionate toward the immigrants themselves. In American Mirage she mentions that there are entire families from Central America seeking entry into the USA, and that they take their small children with them. This puts these small children at risk.The physical journey is taxing, and the families have no recourse if the smugglers and the mafia abuse these children. Predictably, Ms. Southern
blames the parents but not the governmental restrictions that made it necessary for these families to take such a risk.
Back in the 1980s, the common practice was for fathers to make several illegal, short-term visits to the United States. They would come to the USA to work for several weeks or months, sending their money back to their children still in Latin America. Then they would return to Mexico for several months. The cycle would repeat. That ceased when Operation Gatekeeper made border-crossings riskier and costlier than ever. Suddenly making the journey became a much larger commitment. From then on, and to this day, the border-crossing has usually been a onetime event. The common plan is to cross the border illegally once and then stay in the USA indefinitely. And that is why these families have to bring their children along and place them in the precarious hands of smugglers.
Ms. Southern’s claims of empathy toward these children is no more than a pretense. She disclosed her final evaluation of them to David Lombroso, a maker of actual documentaries who was covering her, in this manner: “There’s no denying they [impoverished immigrants] had shitty lives. I can have cookies with these people and hear their life story. That doesn’t mean, just because I feel bad in that moment, we need to destroy all borders and allow everyone to come in here.”
But as exemplified by what Ms. Southern had previously said about hard drugs and alcohol, it is not an issue of whether “we” “let” “them” “come here.” The black-market smuggling and its aftermath have emerged exactly because we do not, in her hyperbole, “destroy all borders.” Either impoverished immigrants arrive in a liberalized system, which is the safest possible option for everyone, or they resort to the same black market that has provided drugs and alcohol in the face of similar prohibitions. That’s it.
Authoritarian Blindness
Time and again, anti-immigrationists such as Lauren Southern cite examples of people being rather flagrant in flouting immigration restrictions. Presenting that imagery, these anti-immigrationists propound it as proof that immigration restrictions go completely unenforced. Such citations reflect — to interpret it charitably — a misunderstanding of the extent of any government’s capabilities. In the 1920s, someone could have just as easily pointed to the great abundance of alcohol and the proliferation of speakeasies as proof that Prohibition was not being enforced. That was not the reality, as noted by the Mob Museum online. Between 1921 and 1925, the Prohibition Bureau confiscated 697,000 stills. From May 1928 to May 1929, agents took control of 11,416 stills, 15,700 distilleries, and over a million gallons of booze.
One can even point to the pervasiveness of contraband items being snuck into places where there is totalitarian government control. Communist governments have placed strict bans on Western media so that they will not contaminate the culture and inspire subversive thoughts in the population. The severity of punishment with which smugglers were threatened in the old Soviet Union did not stop them from flaunting their wealth and their access to foreign media. The same has happened in North Korea since the late 1990s.
In the cases of communistic and kleptocratic regimes, what is happening is known as “authoritarian blindness.” The State trying to monitor and control too many activities at once will stretch its resources thin. Paradoxically, then, the State’s monitoring and spying results in the State’s leaders having less information than they otherwise would have. This problem is especially compounded in dictatorships where the dictator might execute any employee or advisor who tells the dictator facts that displease him. Fearful of being punished violently for speaking the truth, the dictator’s advisors and other employees tell him only what he wants to hear. That contributes further to the dictator’s ignorance of what is actually going on.
In the much-more-liberal republics of the United States and Europe, very petty and vain high-ranking officials cannot inflict reprisals so harsh. They can demote, however, subordinates who provide unpleasant facts. And, when a more-liberal republic creates a government program that imposes a form of heavy-handed control, such as in banning hard drugs, the distribution of alcohol, or most forms of immigration, it faces complications similar to the ones that beset the communist regimes. Even in a more-liberal republic, the government agencies in charge will spread themselves too thin as they try to monitor and control too much.
As long as they enforce heavy-handed prohibitions, these more-liberal republics suffer from — if not authoritarian blindness — authoritarian blind spots. This is why, whether it is communist regimes punishing subversive imports or more-liberal republics cracking down on booze distribution or undocumented immigrants, they cannot bust everyone. Rather, they make examples of some of the offenders. Then the agencies can still look busy and important enough to justify renewals of their budgets and job security.
And, contrary to apologists, this is not a matter of the agencies being understaffed and underfunded, stymied by penny-pinching neoliberals too stingy to allot them full budgetary discretion. No matter how much in money and resources are at the government agency’s disposal, the weaknesses are inherent to the institution itself. That is why even the richest and most powerful empires in global history have collapsed.
Even if immigration-control agencies had a budget of three trillion U.S. dollars every year, there would still be outwitted by smugglers. And, although the U.S. federal government’s immigration-control efforts are not yet that much, they still already receive much more funding than what the immigration “skeptics” assume. We will get to that later in the essay.
Trumpers and Traffickers
Because the smugglers are consistent in outsmarting the empire of border-enforcing agencies, they are not the ones who are, in the accusatory words of Lauren Southern, “constantly chanting ‘Open Borders!’”
The fact that they are always able to exploit the blind spots of enforcement agencies has made many black-market dealers comfortable with the prohibition that eliminates so much of the intra-industry competition that would otherwise bedevil them. Recall Thomas Sowell’s mention in 1984, “Bootleggers sometimes financed the campaigns to ban liquor.” Recognition of this circumstance is the source of an expression by Bruce Yandle, former executive director of the Federal Trade Commission — “Baptists and Bootleggers.”
Those were the two seemingly-opposite parties that each saw in Prohibition the achievement of their own goals. Baptists supported Prohibition out of some naïve hope that the State really could eliminate the distribution of booze. The Bootleggers knew better — they understood that the Prohibition had been lucrative for them.
Likewise, it can be said that the two main groups most invested in border enforcement are Trumpers and Traffickers. In their rage towards undocumented immigrants, the Trumpers call for more, more, more, more border enforcement, blind to the fact that there will be no end to undocumented immigrants. The Traffickers, like the bootleggers before them, understand that it is the heavy-handedness of immigration controls and border enforcement that keep them in business.
It is therefore fitting that the U.S. Border Patrol was first instituted in 1924 to catch bootleggers sneaking alcohol over the Mexican and Canadian borders.
Today’s organized crime figures, too, notice the parallels. Law enforcement officers made an undercover recording of one mob boss, Salvatore Buzzi, telling another, “Do you have any idea how much I earn on immigrants? They’re more profitable than drugs.”
Beyond Control
Yes, the Traffickers are the proponents of governmental immigration restrict who know that this War on Illegal Migrants cannot be won. The titlte of a 2003 Foreign Affairs article by Harvard economist Jagdish Bhagwati aptly describes the situation. Far from bringing them under more stable management, the heavy-handed restrictions on immigration results in our having “borders beyond control.”
Someone who understands the matter well is Université de Montréal professor François Crépeau. Between 2011 and 2017, he served as the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants. “All borders are porous,” Crépeau observes, “and democratic borders are more porous than others. Even the Soviet Union had porous borders. . . . I think states have to accept that borders are not meant to stop everyone they would like to stop. . . . If you try to stop everyone you don’t like, the only thing you do is you create underground markets for smugglers.”
He has bold opinions. We recognize that because heavy-handed border enforcement has given smugglers a monopolistic control over Third-World migration, human-smugglers have been able to inflict terrible abuses on their clients. Nonetheless, Crépeau admits that the act of illegally transporting a person is not evil in and of itself — not when it is helping someone escape to greater freedom. He continues that “the people we called the smugglers and we present as terrible criminals today were actually helping people getting out of USSR, and we called them heroes.”
But there actually is one method whereby the national government can regain some degree of control over the border. It is not what the anti-immigrationists would like. It would be for there to be simpler and much fewer rules on crossing the border. It would remove the cap on the number of visas that can be issued annually to people of any country of origin. The default would be for officials to err on the side of granting a visa rather than not granting it.
To the extent that violent criminals or terrorists are to be kept out of the country, it would be incumbent upon officials to demonstrate that the immigration applicant has a record of violent criminality or ties to terrorism. Insofar as there be any onus on would-be immigrants to prove that they are qualified for a visa, it would only be that they have been tested for severe communicable diseases such as COVID-19 or ebola. And immigration applicants will more readily comply with the rule about diseases if the rest of the burdensome rules, with which they have been saddled for far too long, are finally removed. When, in this respect, there are fewer and simpler rules, compliance increases and there is greater transparency and oversight.
The Biggest Barrier
In spite of what I have written, many Trumpers refuse to accept that their beloved War on Illegal Migrants cannot be won. Against people like François Crépeau, they chant endlessly “Walls work!” as if repeating that over and over is enough to make it true. Trying to salvage their case against immigrants, they talk out of both sides of their mouths when it comes to Israel.
It is no surprise that among white nationalists, antisemitism is not uncommon. Although they continue to air paranoid conspiracy theories about Israel dictating U.S. foreign policy, the anti-Semites do express some begrudging admiration about those walls. They proclaim that if the USA had border walls, so many problems would be solved. The presence of border walls is one of the few aspects about Israel of which they approve.
The year 2010 saw the start of Israel’sconstruction of a fortification on its border with Egypt. This “smart wall,” equipped with high-tech electronic surveillance, was completed in 2013. In 2011, it was 16,000 undocumented migrants going across this border. By 2016, that number dropped to twenty.
Though an especially sophisticated “smart wall” can seem successful for a number of years at stopping migrants from direct entry at a particular location, it is not so successful in stopping the number of migrants overall. The migrants eventually find a different route. We shall see this with an example in Asia, and we can even find it in the case of yet another much-vaunted Israeli border wall. That is the one separating Israel from the West Bank.
For a number of years, the wall along the West Bank was also successful in blocking Palestinians there from getting into Israel. But eventually Palestinians took alternative routes and underground tunnels. Fortunate for everyone, these Palestinians were motivated to look for work in Israel, not war. In 2016, Palestinian political scientist Khalil Shikaki estimated that Israel had 30,000 undocumented workers from the West Bank. But retired Israeli brigadier general Nitzan Nuriel, who formerly ran the prime minister’s counterterrorism bureau, thought the figure was probably double that amount.
In 2019, London School of Economics international relations professor Anan Gemasky and two colleagues looked into the matter further. The goal was not to find just whether the West Bank barrier succeeded in stopping crossings of this particular border, but whether the barrier was able to prevent smuggling, overall, between Israel and the West Bank. They figured that if fortified border barriers were effectual in obstructing the smuggling of migrants, they should likewise be effective at forestalling the smuggling of automobiles. After all, “it is easier for people than for cars to get around a physical barrier.” Yet the much-respected wall on the West Bank was “ineffective even at stemming car smuggling.”
Also instructive are the world’s two most fortified and militarized border walls — the one separating the Koreas and the one around Melilla. With armed guards all around, the border between the Koreas is known as the Military Demarcation Line. The militarization has been formidable in stopping people from crossing the line directly, but it has not precluded North Koreans from illegally leaving North Korea and illegally entering South Korea. As we have seen with the Israeli border walls, when a fortification stymies people directly, they ultimately find an alternate route.
The common method is for North Korean refugees first to make illegal entries into mainland China, another place where the State acts aggressively toward undocumented migrants. Upon reaching mainland China, they trek to Thailand, Vietnam, or Laos. From any of these locations, they can travel to South Korea.
The world’s second-most-fortified border wall is in located in Morocco. Even after the Spanish government decolonized Morocco, it retained control over two of its cities, one of which is Melilla. Melilla is geographically Moroccan but politically Spanish. Once someone reaches Melilla, that person is considered to be on Spanish soil, and receives Due-Process protections one otherwise would not have. Many people from Sub-Saharan Africa are particularly interested in reaching Melilla. In 2014, this has caused the Spanish government to become especially focused on enforcing the Melilla border. Spain has also been able to pressure the Moroccan government to assist in the border enforcement with armed agents.
The Melilla barrier consists not of one obstacle but several. First are the patrols by vehicle. Second are the patrols by armed guards on foot. Next, there is a series of two fences with barbed wire at the top. Behind the second fence is a ditch that is six-and-a-half feet deep. It is, in effect, a moat. Then there is another series of patrols by vehicle and by guards on foot. If you get past them, you have reached the Spain-controlled side of the border, but there are still more obstacles. You must get through a fence that has a top that oscillates in order to knock you off. From there, you must avoid another mesh of barbed wire. Next is another fence that has a titled roof to make it difficult for you to climb. Behind that is the final fence, a twenty-foot-tall one of metal. Behind that is the final series of patrols by guards on foot and in military vehicles. That is five layers of fences, in total, for one national border.
Despite all of that, some Sub-Saharan African immigrants still get through. In 2016, the Spanish government boasted a 93-percent success rate in keeping out migrants. But that means 230 make it past. Since then, the number of arrivals has grown. In 2021, it was 1,092 migrants would got through the barriers. In 2022, it happened that over 800 migrants were able to cross within a period of two days.
Portentous is Lauren Southern’s inaccurate depiction of the Melilla barrier in Borderless. She mentions only one of its fences, not all five. She also omits any disclosure of the extent of the Melilla barrier’s militarization. The movie’s editing and use of news clips depicts the Melilla barrier as ineffectual, neglecting to inform viewers that the Melilla barrier is far more fortified and sophisticated than what was to be found in the Trump administration’s plans for a border wall in 2018. This was the same border wall that so enthused Ms. Southern’s fan base. There is no discussion of the realization that if the Melilla barrier is as obsolete as Ms. Southern’s own propaganda movie portrayed, then that did not bode well for Donald Trump’s border wall.
There is, however, one wall that has worked consistently. It is the wall that too many an anti-immigrationist has built around his mind to prevent those pesky facts from reaching it.
The Tax Burden of Drug Enforcement Versus Enforcement of Immigration Restrictions
Throughout the years, I have frequently heard a cliché from people who claim to desire a free society. These are people, by the way, who say they agree that the black market in drugs being facilitated by heavy-handed governmental restrictions is sound evidence that the recreational use of hard drugs is an activity that should be politically liberalized. These people say, “I would support having an open border, except that we have a welfare state. People from the Third World coming here are a burden on taxpayers. For that reason, the government should stop those people from coming here.” Examples are in some of the user comments here, here, and here.
As we have seen, it is silly to humor those alleged free-marketers and help them pretend that stopping Third-World immigration is even an option. People can cite the welfare state as much as they want. As we recognize, for as long as our country is richer and freer than others, there are people who will come here from the poorer, less-free countries — welfare state or not. Our actual choice is whether we will liberalize that immigration system, allowing for there to be transparency and government protection of everyone from violence, or if we maintain restrictions that keep immigration under control by the black market and the mafia.
Of special interest here, though, is the presumption that Third-World immigrants staying in the USA are a great burden on taxpayers. Immigration “skeptics” evade that the far greater burden on taxpayers is the enormous cost of paying for the governmental efforts to lock those would-be immigrants out of our country. Many of these alleged free-marketers disdain the federal government’s War on Illegal Drugs as a waste of taxpayer money. They ought to face that their War on Illegal Migrants surpasses the drug war in their respective annual costs to taxpayers.
In 2013, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) came out with a report showing that in the prior year, the federal government spent more money on fighting illegal immigration than it did on funding all of the five other principal federal law enforcement agencies combined. This year I looked at the budgets of those same agencies. The MPI’s findings from nine years ago still apply to the fiscal year of 2021.
In fiscal year 2021, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA’s) budget was $2.386 billion. By contrast, that of Immigration and Customs Enforcement was $8.346 billion. That year, we find $20.3 billion as the total budget for the DEA; FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF); U.S. Marshals Service; and U.S. Secret Service altogether. Conversely, the total for ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was $24.5 billion. Spending on enforcement of immigration laws exceeded that of the sum of the five other principal federal law enforcement agencies by twenty percent.
If it is true, as libertarians claim, that the amount of taxpayer money spent on fighting illegal drugs is excessive, then the same is to be said of the War on Illegal Migrants.
All those types of prohibition also have comparable adverse effects on native-born U.S. citizens not directly involved in the contraband activity. Libertarians — both pro- and anti-immigration alike — are wont to recount horror stories about the War on Illegal Drugs hurting Americans who have none of the controlled substances on them. The Drug War is responsible for local police departments stocking up on military gear and adopting military tactics. It has allowed for civil asset forfeiture. In these instances, if a local police department announces that it suspects that a particular private item may have been used in a drug crime, it can simply confiscate that item and auction it off. For this to happen, it is not necessary for the item’s owner to be charged with any crime at all. These auctions have become a popular method for departments to raise revenue.
The Drug War also introduced “no-knock” raids. If authorities suspect drugs may be found at a particular residence, they still need a warrant, but they do not always need to announce themselves to whomever lives there. There are instances of them bursting into a residence in the middle of the night and it turning out to have been the wrong home. In one of those cases, it was the home of an elderly priest. The shock of it gave him a heart attack, which killed him.
These are indeed examples of the War on Illegal Drugs causing harm to those who have nothing to do with these illegal drugs. And a similar phenomenon occurs with immigration enforcement.
Rightwingers’ feverish fears of Mexicans crossing the southern border has allowed for an enormous expansion of power for ICE and CBP. They now have jurisdiction over all U.S. land within one-hundred miles of all U.S. borders on land and coast. This has given these agencies control over U.S. states far from the southern border, such as New Jersey, and over more than two-thirds of the U.S. population. As a consequence of this, these are the states, in alphabetic order, where ICE has set up checkpoints to have motorists stopped and searched: “Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont.”
Despite challenges by civil-liberties attorneys invoking the Fourth Amendment, ICE has, for years, been able to get away with conducting these searches merely on “suspicion.” Because undocumented immigrants wisely avoid these checkpoints, the vast majority of people searched at them are native-born U.S. citizens.
Zealotry in the War on Illegal Migrants has led to accidental deportations of U.S. citizens. Mark Lyttle was a mentally-ill man born in North Carolina. He had been jailed for one-hundred days on a misdemeanor. When he was mistakenly listed as “foreign-born,” guards escorted him to a crowd of detainees before immigration judge William Cassidy. Jude Cassidy said that all those who objected to being deported must raise their hands. Lyttle did not. That was enough to get him deported to Mexico. Lost and afraid, he wandered across Latin America. He was eventually identified after being found sleeping on a park bench in Guatemala City.
A Wikipedia entry lists four other case studies of U.S. citizens being deported after having been mistaken for undocumented immigrants. But Northwestern University political science professor Jacqueline Stevens finds that it is actually thousands of such U.S. citizens being deported annually for this reason. Among the tens of thousands of detainees under ICE’s supervision, one percent of them are these U.S. citizens who have been misidentified.
It may be tempting for immigration “skeptics” to say, “No, instead of harassing native-born U.S. citizens, the agents should be getting tough down at the southern border.” According to arguments put forth by the Mises Institute itself about other government agencies, nothing about that demand is realistic. Calling for more of the latter only causes more of the former. it is unrealistic to expect that if a federal agency’s authority is enlarged in just one specific area, it will stick only to that one specific area. That enlargement of authority in that one area allows for administrators to rationalize their expansion into various other affairs that, to taxpayers, seem only tenuously related to what the agency’s original task was.
And insofar as someone wants to catch and deport undocumented immigrants already in the USA, it makes sense for the federal government to monitor native-born citizens. Undocumented immigrants regularly interact with them. Native-born Americans hire these undocumented immigrants. Heavy-handed monitoring of native-born Americans is inseparable from efforts to root out undocumented migrants. As evaluated by Chandran Kukathas of the London School of Economics, the efficacy of policing undocumented migration
depends in the end on controlling not just outsiders but also insiders — citizens and residents. . . . Regulating immigration...means controlling whether or not and for whom they work (paid or unpaid), what they accept in financial remuneration, and what they must do to remain in employment, for as long as that is permitted. Yet this is not possible without controlling citizens and existing residents, who must be regulated, monitored and policed to make sure that they comply with immigration laws.
. . . Immigrants are not readily discernible from citizens, or from residents with ‘Indefinite Leave to Remain’, especially in a multi-ethnic...society. So any effort to identify and exclude or penalize immigrants will generally require stopping or searching or questioning anyone. If immigrants must show their passports at borders, everyone will have to, including returning citizens. If immigrants must present their credentials at internal checkpoints, then everyone, including citizens, will have to do so — if only to prove that they are not immigrants.
Ron Paul and his fellow writers of the Mises Institute gnash their teeth about the evils of the U.S. federal government sending agents to intervene in foreign countries, including those of Latin America.
Yet such intervention is actually integral to enforcing the USA’s southern border. The leftwing journalist Todd Miller writes of how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has vast operations within Latin America, and their purpose is to do exactly the border enforcement that Ron Paul and the Mises Institute scream that they want. These U.S. agents spy on those they suspect of being smugglers or their clients. Then, when they judge appropriate, these agents apply armed force in order to preempt the smugglers and clients from crossing the border in the first place.
Todd Miller notes that, by blocking undocumented immigration in this manner, the USA is establishing, unofficially but in practice, a border that is even farther south than the official one north of Mexico. The border enforcers are, de facto, expanding the USA’s national borders outward. As Todd Miller phrases it,
The United States has been purposely pushing out its borders, meaning that the border doesn’t end at the US-Mexico southern border. For example, in Puerto Rico, the Ramey sector of the U.S. Border Patrol can patrol a thousand miles to the south of the U.S. mainland. This allows Border Patrol agents, and effectively the Coast Guard and Department of Homeland Security, to patrol around the Dominican Republic and Haiti. So what happened in the January 2010 earthquake that hit Haiti, one of the first U.S. responses was to send sixteen Coast Guard cutters that were right around the coast line of Haiti; they sent an airplane over Haiti with the voice of the ambassador, who was speaking Creole, but asking people not to leave the island while they were digging themselves out of their homes after they collapsed.
So, all of the sudden, the U.S. border isn’t where you think it is. It expands and goes all the way up to the coast of Haiti. [When some Haitians did try to migrate, there were already] detention facilities at Guantanamo to intercept them. Everything’s in preparation.
And, again, there is nothing realistic in demanding that U.S. border enforcers operate only on the official border but not south of it. The agents have judged it more effectual to stop the border crossings — what the Mises Institute wants — by going on the offensive against the smugglers within their countries of origin. And, again, enlarging the authority of federal agents for any purpose merely encourages those agents to do largely what they themselves want to do. But one would think that this would already be known by libertarians so savvy to the ill effects of the Drug War.
Ah, but some alleged free-marketers are so flustered about undocumented immigrants supposedly going on welfare that, in the quest to remove these immigrants, they will overlook all civil liberties of native-born citizens being sacrificed. And, despite their railing against intervention in foreign affairs, some fans of the Mises Institute might overlook that stopping Latinos from crossing the USA’s southern border inevitably leads the U.S. government to intervene further south of the border itself. For too many self-described libertarians, the mere potential that another Third-World immigrant or her children might collect welfare is something worth paying heavy-handed policemen to vanquish. Even if the current federal policing of immigration proves costly, it may be said, it would be far costlier to allow migrants to continue adding to the taxpayers’ burden.
First, as I have written elsewhere, repeated studies have shown that undocumented immigrants are net contributors to the U.S. Treasury. They put more money into the system than they remove from it.
Secondly, there is foolish precedent in citing, as an excuse for heavy-handed federal action on immigrants, the possibility that every additional immigrant will contribute to the burden on taxpayers. So many other categories of people can also contribute to that burden. For example, we can just as easily say that our desire to reduce the burden on taxpayers is what justifies the federal government’s heavy-handed restrictions on the recreational use of hard drugs.
It is not a difficult argument to make. The more that people consume hard drugs, the more will become addicted to them. Someone becoming addicted to a drug can interfere with his or her life. That includes his or her employability. Many people becoming addicted to hard drugs can easily contribute to a net increase in the number of people on welfare.
Jacob G. Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation, as well, calls out the double standards. He, too, addresses that police-state tactics inhere in both the War on Illegal Drugs and the War on Illegal Migrants. He, too, is disturbed by the double standard about welfare. It is “a virtual certainty,” he reminds us, “that when drugs are legalized, some drug addicts will use Medicaid to seek treatment. Should we libertarians endorse the drug war until Medicaid is abolished?”
Conclusion: Thomas Sowell’s Wisdom Made Wiser
The good news is that no matter how many governmental barriers are placed, there will always be immigrants from poor countries getting through. The bad news is that a major consequence of the restrictions is the expansion of a black market that renders the remaining immigration to be more dangerous for everyone involved. That is the reason why, although the opponents will never be able to eliminate the immigration from poor countries, it remains vital that we campaign for it all to be liberalized.
Thus we see the folly of the many clichés we hear from those who accept that the War on Drugs is futile but cannot admit the same of their War on Immigrants. They say, “I would support open borders if we had no welfare state. But until such time as the welfare state is gone, we have to have limits.” The obvious answer is to reduce the welfare state. That would be necessary even if there were zero immigration. To that, the reciter of clichés replies, “But the welfare state isn’t going to disappear any time soon.” By now, we see how empty that retort truly is. It is immigration from the poor countries that is not going to disappear any time soon. It is purely wishful thinking for the anti-immigrationist to believe that blocking immigration from the poor countries is even an option.
And then there is the favorite cliché: “You can have an open border or you can have the welfare state. You can’t have both.” People who recite that platitude like to say they oppose the welfare state. And yet, when these people repeat that cliché, it is always their presumption that it is the open border, not the welfare state, that must be given up. These people can shout about the welfare state all they want; impoverished immigrants will get in regardless.
Anti-immigrationists are coming to the moment that they dread, the moment where they must face the actual binary choice. Either there continue to be restrictions on immigration from poor countries, or the country has a reduction in the organized crime that is linked with human-smuggling. You can’t have both.
With that mind, we can return to the quotation of Thomas Sowell where he argues that it is wrong to expect the federal government to succeed in its war on illegal drugs. Using [ ] brackets to indicate our editorial changes, we will see how much the argument still applies if the references to illegal drugs are changed to references to illegal immigration.
This is how Thomas Sowell’s column now comes out.
[Raids on businesses employing undocumented immigrants] are good politics but they don’t make a dent in the problem. The federal government’s seizure of [undocumented immigrants are many] times what they were a few years ago but the flood of [undocumented immigrants] into the country has continued to be so massive... The ban on [most forms of immigration] has become Prohibition writ large. Like Prohibition, the ban on [most types of immigration] has been a financial bonanza for organized crime, and its profits have financed the corruption of law enforcement agencies, politicians, and judges. . . .
[Migrations from a poor country to a richer one might be unwise choices for those who undertake them, but such migrations] are a much bigger problem for society precisely because they are illegal. It is their illegality that makes them costly and drives people to desperation...
When the crusaders finally succeeded in getting the Prohibition [of the distribution of alcohol,...o]rganized crime blossomed. So did the corruption of the whole political process. . . . Bootleggers sometimes financed the campaigns to ban liquor. Their profits depended on liquors being illegal. Legalization of [immigration-as-such] would similarly destroy the profits of today’s [immigrant-smugglers]. There is no way that they can compete [if would-be immigrants can legally enter the USA on their own accord]. ...this is just one more area where we have to recognize that government has its limits. Ignoring those limits is not only reckless arrogance but dangerous. We finally learned that painful lesson from Prohibition. We need to remember it when it comes to [immigration].
That is one of the wisest observations by Thomas Sowell, especially with the editorial improvements added.
