Planned Chaos in Immigration

Noted Univision commentator Jorge Ramos thinks that he has the solution to America’s decades-long, ongoing, perpetual immigration crisis. He says the solution is to let in more immigrants.

Wow! Why didn’t someone think of that before now?

In fact, Ramos even knows the number of immigrants that have to be let in legally to finally — finally!! — resolve the crisis: between 600,000 and 800,000 workers per year.

How does he arrive at that number? According to his article in last week’s New York Times, entitled “The Perpetual Crisis at the Border — and What We Can Do About It,” Ramos says that he gets that number from Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who himself, unfortunately, doesn’t say how he arrived at that magic number.

A conservative “solution”

Ramos isn’t the only one who has come up with a solution to America’s never-ending immigration crisis. Christopher Landau, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Mexico under President Donald Trump from 2019-2021, has his own solution. In an article entitled “The Real Reason for the Border Crisis,” which appeared in the Times one day before Ramos’s article, Landau says that all we have to do is crack down on American employers who dare to hire illegal immigrants.

Yeah, let’s just ramp up the felony prosecutions of American employers who are engaged in the purely peaceful act of using their own money to hire hard-working people they want. Hey, just think of all the jobs that will provide to the penitentiary industry.

The real problem is that statists have been so deeply inculcated with the model of socialist central planning that they simply are incapable of understanding that a free market is the only — and I repeat the word “only” — solution to America’s perpetual immigration crisis.

The free market

Naturally, that means open borders — the free movements of goods, services, and people across borders. How many people? That’s up to the natural economic laws of supply and demand.

Consider America’s domestic borders — the borders between the states. They are entirely open. People are free to cross any state border. Every day, countless people cross from Maryland into my state of Virginia, and vice versa. How many? We don’t know. No one keeps count. No one paces the floor fretting over the possibility of too many people flooding into Virginia or Maryland.

Central planning

This is the mindset of the central planner: He knows how many immigrants America needs — along with their qualifications and credentials. He knows how many immigrants should be allocated to each country. He knows the job opportunities in millions of businesses in constantly changing market conditions.

Central planning is a core feature of socialism. It involves what Friedrich Hayek called the “fatal conceit” of the planner, the person who pretends to have the necessary knowledge and expertise to plan economic activities in very complex markets involving millions of people.

It cannot be done. Central planning produces what Ludwig von Mises called “planned chaos.” Just ask anyone who lived in the Soviet Union or who lives today in Cuba or Venezuela. What better term to describe America’s decades-long, ongoing, perpetual immigration crisis?

A police state

America’s socialist immigration system also comes with an immigration police state, one that Landau and other rightwing statists want to enforce ever more fiercely. Domestic highway checkpoints, warrantless trespasses onto farms and ranches, roving Border Patrol checkpoints, violent raids on American businesses, a Berlin Wall, boarding of Greyhound buses to check people’s papers, and federal prosecution of people who assist or hire some of the poorest people in the world — people who are just trying to survive or improve their economic well-being through labor.

But make no mistake about it: Even though President Biden has abandoned Trump’s Berlin Wall and his brutal policy of forcibly separation of children from parents, he still believes in enforcing America’s system of immigration controls.

And so does Ramos. After all, what happens to the people who exceed Ramos’s magic number of 600,000-800,000 per year? The immigration police state comes cracking down on them — or they keep dying in the backs of 18-wheelers, or from thirst while crossing lonely deserts, or from drowning while swimming across the Rio Grande.

Meanwhile, liberals like Ramos will tell us how much they love the “poor, needy, and disadvantaged,” while conservatives like Landau will tell us how much they love “free enterprise, private property, and limited government.”

One solution only

In his article, Ramos repeats the old, tired mantra that America’s immigration system is “broken.” He’s wrong again. It’s not broken. It’s inherently defective. Broken implies that something can be fixed. Something that is inherently defective cannot be fixed. What Ramos obviously is unable to recognize is that socialism is an inherently defectively paradigm. That means it cannot be fixed, whether it’s run by liberals like Ramos or conservatives liked Landau.

The law of supply and demand that comes with a free-market system regulates the natural flow of goods, service, and people, whether they are crossing domestic borders or international ones. By restoring America’s heritage of economic liberty and free markets to the border, America’s decades-long, ongoing, perpetual immigration crisis would disappear immediately, along with the death, suffering, and tyranny that come with America’s socialist immigration system.

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