A writer at Substack named David Ferguson writes:
Robert Frost once wrote “good fences make good neighbors.” Very true. Isn’t there any private property on the U.S. side of the border? Doesn’t a property owner have the right to defend his justly obtained property? How about hiring private police to keep intruders from trespassing on your property? The so-called “border crisis” is a massive failure because it does not allow property owners to defend their property.”
Alas, Ferguson has it wrong. Private property owners on the U.S. side of the border have the right, both legally and morally, to defend their property from trespassers.
I know this from personal experience. I grew up on a farm outside Laredo, Texas, a city on the U.S. Mexico border. Our farm was adjacent to the Rio Grande. Under the law, we had the right to keep trespassers, whether American or Mexican, from entering onto our property without our permission … with one exception.
That exception was the U.S. Border Patrol. Under America’s immigration police state, it had the omnipotent, totalitarian, police-state power to trespass onto our property without a search warrant whenever it wanted, and there was nothing we could do about it.
The reason that immigrants cross onto private property is because of America’s system of immigration controls, which makes it illegal for foreigners to enter the United States without official permission. Since it is very difficult and time-consuming (i.e., years) to secure such official permission, immigrants find ways to illegally enter the United States, which lots of times entails crossing the border at unusual places and, in the process, trespassing onto people’s private farms and ranches in the quest to head north.
If the United States had the libertarian system of open borders, there would be no more trespasses onto private property because now immigrants would be free to cross borders normally like human beings. They would be using cars, buses, planes, motorcycles, trains, or any other means of transport, without fear of being busted for doing so. There would be no more reason to be trespassing onto private farms and ranches on the way north.
Ferguson has it right when he says that the “border crisis” is a “massive failure.” But he has it wrong in asserting that it’s a “massive failure” because “it does not allow property owners to defend their property.”
The reason the immigration-control system is a massive failure is because it is a socialist system, in that it is based on the socialist principle of central planning. Any socialist system is inherently defective. That means it cannot be fixed, no matter what “comprehensive immigration reform plan” is adopted. Moreover, as we continue to witness, an immigration-control system comes with death, suffering, and the destruction of liberty through an immigration police state.
The only system that works is a free-market system, which necessarily means the libertarian concept of open borders. It’s also a moral system, given that it comes with life, liberty, vitality, peace, harmony, and the pursuit of happiness.
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