The Manifest Failure of the U.S. Border-Control System

Reminder: Our online Zoom conference on open borders continues this Monday evening, November 4, with Don Boudreaux,  former president of The Foundation for Economic Education and current professor of economics at George Mason University.  7 p.m.-8 p.m. Eastern Time.  Register here.

Reminder: I’ll be speaking at the JFK Lancer conference and also at the CAPA conference, which are being held on November 22-24 in Dallas. There is also an excellent third JFK conference on the same weekend sponsored by the JFK Historical Group. All three of them are fantastic JFK-assassination-related conferences. I highly recommend registering for all three and then picking and choosing which sessions you would like to attend at all three conferences. The registration prices are moderate and it’s a great way to support three great conferences. I will have some of my JFK books at my presentations to autograph and sell at a discounted price. I hope to see you all there!

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Yesterday the New York Times carried an article entitled “Biden Wanted to Fix Immigration, but Leaves Behind a System That Is Still Broken.” The article pointed out that when it comes to America’s decades-old system of immigration controls, Biden had “big ambitions” for “remaking” it. Like his predecessors, “he said he would secure the border.” That’s not all. “He promised to make the asylum system work. He vowed to protect Dreamers. On the first day of his presidency, he proposed legislation to create a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants. Most importantly, he said he would bridge the partisan divide that has long prevented any overhaul of an archaic immigration system that his aides often describe as a ‘decades-old jalopy’ in desperate need of upgrades.”

Alas, just like his predecessors, however, including Donald Trump, Biden failed to make America’s decades-old immigration-control system work. As the Times article pointed out, “But for four years, most of those goals were stymied by the need to confront a worldwide surge of displaced people fleeing their homes and a determined Republican opposition that seized on scenes of a chaotic border to block action and damage the president politically.”

A question naturally arises: Given that Biden tried his best to make the immigration-control system work, why do right-wing proponents of immigration controls say that he implemented an “open-border” policy?

After all, it is undisputed that throughout the Biden administration, the Border Patrol has continued doing its best to enforce America’s decades-old system of immigration controls. The highway checkpoints are still there. Trump’s Berlin Wall is still there. The concertina wire is still there. ICE is still there. The warrantless searches are still there. The boarding of Greyhound buses is still there. The surveillance towers are still there. The drones are still there. The arrests, criminal prosecutions, convictions, and incarcerations are still there. The forced deportations are still there.

Biden did not do anything to dismantle any of those police-state measures. Moreover, there is no evidence that Biden ever issued a secret order to the Border Patrol, ICE, Homeland Security, or other federal officials to stand down and not enforce federal immigration laws. So, again, why do right-wingers say that he implemented an “open-border” policy?

Of course, it’s possible that many right-wingers who make this claim do not know what a genuine open-border policy is. They see thousands of illegal immigrants are getting through in violation of the rules and regulations and simply conclude from that that Biden has adopted an “open-border” policy. It doesn’t occur to them that the phenomenon simply reflects that their immigration-control system has failed to work.

A genuine open-border policy, at least from a libertarian perspective, is the type of border system we have domestically with respect to the crossing of state borders. No Border Patrol, ICE, highway checkpoints, warrantless searches, Berlin Wall, concertina wire, surveillance equipment, drones, boarding of Greyhound busses, arrests, prosecutions, convictions, incarcerations, deportations, or any other other police-state measures. No restrictions whatsoever on the free movements of goods, services, and people across state borders. That is a genuine system of open borders.

Most everyone would agree that America’s domestic open-border policy — one that is based on freedom, free markets, and limited-government — has worked and still works. No death, suffering, and border police state that destroys freedom and privacy.

Obviously, that is not the system we have — or have had — on the U.S-Mexico border, either under Biden or in the last 100 years. What we have had under Biden is an immigration-control system that he hoped he could make succeed but failed to do so. But the same could be said of Trump’s term as president. If Trump had fixed America’s immigration-control system on a permanent basis, we wouldn’t have the same immigration morass and crisis — and all the lamentation, frustration, depression, and anxiety that come with it — that we have today.

I think what is going on here is that right-wingers see that Biden has not enforced the border police state has ferociously as Trump did. Thus, they view Biden as “weak” on immigration compared to Trump and, for that reason, concluded that he adopted “open borders.”

Consider, for example, Trump’s policy of taking children away from parents who have been accused of entering the country illegally. That’s a brutal, ruthless, and very scary policy for any parent, legal or illegal. Trump figured that if he took people’s children away from them, that would deter other immigrants from illegally coming to the United States with their children.

Biden refused to enforce that policy and, therefore, right-wingers concluded that his “weakness” showed that he was adopting a policy of “open borders,” notwithstanding the fact that he has maintained and enforced other longtime aspects of the immigration police state, including Trump’s Berlin Wall. Like Trump, Biden has even sent troops to the border in the hope of making their immigration-control system work.

I think what some right-wingers would love to see is a border that is as strictly enforced as the East German border with West Germany or the North Korean border with South Korea, with the aim of preventing any more “invaders” from illegally entering the United States, even if doing so requires the use of deadly force. My hunch is that anything less than a border that is manned and enforced by the U.S. military in the same brutal manner that the East German border was enforced — and that the North Korean border is enforced — will be considered by some right-wingers to be an “open-border” policy.

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Reminder: Our online Zoom conference on open borders continues this Monday evening, November 4, with Don Boudreaux,  former president of The Foundation for Economic Education and current professor of economics at George Mason University.  7 p.m.-8 p.m. Eastern Time.  Register here.

Reminder: I’ll be speaking at the JFK Lancer conference and also at the CAPA conference, which are being held on November 22-24 in Dallas. There is also an excellent third JFK conference on the same weekend sponsored by the JFK Historical Group. All three of them are fantastic JFK-assassination-related conferences. I highly recommend registering for all three and then picking and choosing which sessions you would like to attend at all three conferences. The registration prices are moderate and it’s a great way to support three great conferences. I will have some of my JFK books at my presentations to autograph and sell at a discounted price. I hope to see you all there!