Vice President Kamala Harris is on her way to El Paso, Texas, to study America’s decades-old immigration crisis. Apparently she hopes that she is going to be hit with some sort of brilliant insight while visiting a city on the U.S.-Mexico border that will finally bring an end to the crisis.
It’s not going to happen. No matter what Harris sees and no matter who she talks to, it won’t make any difference. America’s decades-old, never-ending, perpetual immigration crisis will continue.
There is a simple reason for that: America’s immigration-control system is the root cause of the crisis. That’s because it is a socialist system, given that it’s based on the socialist principle of central planning. Federal officials plan, in a top-down, command-and-control fashion, the movements of millions of people in a very complex labor market. It cannot be done. Central planning produces what Ludwig von Mises called “planned chaos.” It reflects what Friedrich Hayek called the “fatal conceit” of the planner.
There is one — and only one — way to bring an end to America’s decades-old immigration crisis: by adopting freedom and free markets. There is no other way. All the trips to the border by federal officials won’t do the trick. A 100-foot high Berlin Wall won’t either. Neither will the reenforcement of the federal government’s immigration police state along the border. The only thing that can end the crisis is freedom and free markets.
Freedom and free markets mean the free movement of goods, services, and people across borders — i.e., open borders, which necessarily means the dismantling of America’s immigration-control system. No more Border Patrol. No more immigration service. No more customs at the border.
Think about the United States. Every day people cross state borders without encountering any government officials. It is a peaceful, harmonious, and prosperous system. No one even keeps count of how many people are crossing state borders. Everything is left to freedom and the free market.
Could every American suddenly decide to move to New York City? Of course. That’s certainly possible. So, does that mean we need to enact laws to restrict the number of Americans who can move to New York City? Of course not. Most Americans don’t wish to move to New York City. If they did, the prices there would soar even higher than they already are, which would, as a practical matter, restrict people’s ability to move there.
The same principle applies to the United States. Most people around the world have no interest in moving to the United States. The backlog of people trying to enter the United States makes it look that way. Thus, the immigration control crowd has an irrational fear that with open borders the whole world would come to the United States. But actually the backlog that makes them have that fear is due solely to America’s socialist system of immigration controls. That backlog would immediately disappear with open borders and America’s system would immediately become as peaceful, harmonious, and prosperous as it internal system of open borders.
It’s the same with trade. No American paces the floor in consternation of the trade deficit between Texas and Florida or between any other states. It just doesn’t matter to people. What difference does it make? The same principle applies to nations. Just leave people free to trade with whomever they want. No consternation is needed.
With open borders, no immigrant has to become a citizen. Citizenship requirements can be made as stringent as federal officials want. If immigrants want to apply for citizenship, they would be free to do so. Or they could simply retain their citizenship and visit or work and be free to return to their countries any time they want, freely crossing back and forth across the border, just as people do with state borders inside the United States.
The ongoing, never-ending, perpetual immigration crisis has become a political parlor game. When a Republicans is president, the Democrats go on the attack, arguing that the crisis is the fault of the Republicans. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to predict what Republicans would say about the immigration crisis when Biden became president.
Make no mistake about it: the immigration crisis will continue under Biden no matter what he does. So will the deaths, suffering, deportations, raids, checkpoints, and police-state tyranny along the border. To bring peace, prosperity, and harmony to El Paso and the rest of the U.S. borderlands, there is only one way to do that: by adopting the principle of open borders.
The post Harris’s Trip to El Paso Won’t Solve the Immigration Crisis appeared first on The Future of Freedom Foundation.
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