The immigration crisis taking place at the U.S.-Mexico border confirms three points that I have been making for many years.
The first point is that no matter who is elected president and no matter what new policies are adopted to resolve America’s decades-old immigration crisis, it won’t do any good. That’s because America’s system of immigration controls is an inherently defective system. That’s because it is based on the concept of “central planning,” a socialist concept that involves government planning of immigration.
Central planning is an inherently defective system. Just ask anyone who lived in the Soviet Union or anyone who lives in Venezuela, Nicaragua, North Korea, or Cuba today. There is no way that a central planner can effectively plan the movements of millions of people, especially in the context of supply of and demand for labor in a complex labor market. The result will always be what Ludwig von Mises called “planned chaos.”
What better term to describe what is happening on the border today? What better term to describe what has been happening on the border for decades? On the one side are thousands of people who want to enter the country but are blocked by U.S. agents who are charged with enforcing America’s socialist immigration system. On the other side are thousands of American businesses who are willing to hire them.
The second point is that Democrats believe in immigration controls too. Oh sure, their methods of enforcement are different, but that’s just a distinction without a difference. In fact, President Biden is emphasizing publicly that he is expelling many of the people who are trying to get into the United States. And don’t forget: President Obama, under whom Biden served as vice president, was known as the “Deporter in Chief” for the extraordinarily large number of people he deported.
The third point is that whoever is in office will be at the receiving end of attacks from the other party. That’s one of the consequences of a system that produces an ongoing, perpetual crisis. The other side — the side not in power — always has the ability to attack the side in power for not resolving the ongoing, perpetual crisis.
Of course, you see this phenomenon today. Predictably, conservatives are now on the attack for the immigration crisis that Biden has not yet resolved. They forget the Trump years when America was besieged with an immigration crisis involving a massive number of “invaders.”
One of the silliest attacks that conservatives are leveling against Biden is that he favors “open borders.” They clearly do not understand the concept of open borders or they are simply being obtuse or disingenuous.
Open borders is a system based on freedom and free markets. It is the absence of an immigration-control system, not a different way of enforcing an immigration-control system. It involves the freedom of people to cross borders freely without governmental interference.
The best example of open borders is the domestic United States. People are free to cross state borders. When they do so, they never encounter a border official. Moreover, the state borders don’t disappear simply because people are free to cross them. The people crossing state borders every day could be murderers, terrorists, burglars, rapists, and people with Covid. There are no state systems of immigration controls to monitor, regulate, or control these movements of people. That’s a system of open borders.
It is only we libertarians who favor open borders. That’s because we favor liberty and free markets. It is conservatives and progressives (i.e., “liberals”) who favor government-controlled borders. That’s because they favor immigration socialism and the immigration police state that comes with it.
Meanwhile, amidst all this planned chaos the mainstream press continues with its decades-long lament that if only we had “comprehensive immigration reform,” the decades-long, ongoing, perpetual immigration crisis would be over. That’s a nonsensical pipe dream. An inherently defective system cannot be fixed no matter how many “comprehensive immigration reforms” are adopted.
There is but one way to bring an end to the ongoing, perpetual immigration crisis — open borders. It is the only — repeat only — way to bring peace, prosperity, harmony, life, morality, and liberty to the area of immigration.
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