Tear Down That Wall! (Part 2)
The bedlam, human deprivation, family separations and lawlessness rampant on the Mexican border, which is the stock and trade of Fox News, has one cause alone: Namely, Washington’s utterly stupid and perverse border control regime and so-called War on Drugs.
The proof for that is evident in a simple thought experiment. What would happen if these counter-productive projects of state aggrandizement and political opportunism were eliminated completely and, instead, accompanied by a sale of the Donald’s Wall for scrap and its replacement with 40 “guest worker” welcome stations located approximately every 50 miles along the US/Mexican border?
The answer is that America’s economy would boom. And rather than being greeted by the hobnail boots of the DEA and Border Control officials and shunted off to what are essentially concentration camps, immigrants seeking work and a better life would be welcomed by job fairs and private recruitment agencies prepared to offer them signing bonuses, transit and jobs with employers all over the country.
The truth is, the overwhelming share of immigrants come to the border looking for work but find no employers or their agents offering jobs because it is illegal to hire illegals. But that’s downright perverse in a country that has a huge and growing demographic deficit and a rapidly shrinking native-born work force, as we documented in Part 1.
In short, the correct border policy would be a massive, organized Guest Worker Program that could regularize the flow of imported workers to America’s labor-short places of economic production. As long as these imported workers got their guest worker permits stamped by their employer they would have the same freedoms to live their lives as do American citizens.
And as we indicated in Part 1, such guest worker permits would also have a built-in mechanism for the attainment of citizenship. That would include a requirement for regular employment by the head of household over an extended period of time, perhaps 5-8 years; and also the one-time payment of a citizenship ascension fee of say $25,000 per family.
The fact is, the overwhelming share of migrants now being hounded on the border would accept that deal every day of the week and twice on Sunday. After all, they come here to engage in honest work and peaceful commerce. Harsh, sometimes violent law enforcement, is just a perverse artifact of a border enforcement policy based on politics and lies, not the basic principles of a free society and needs of a productive capitalist economy.
So the question recurs: Why do we continue deporting willing foreign workers when we should be aggressively importing them?
The answer is two-fold, risible and emanates largely from the Trumpite GOP. In its crudest form, the latter hold that immigrants coming through Mexico will vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. So the anti-immigrant howlers have no compunctions about deploying the law-enforcement arms of the state for the purpose of their own electoral advantage.
At the same time, the Trumpites egregiously recast the border issue as one of crime and violence, when its actually about freedom of peaceful commerce and capitalist prosperity.
Needless to say, there’s not a shred of truth to the immigrant crime meme beyond
cherry-picked anecdotes about horrendous murders and assaults by illegals, which
prove exactly nothing. That’s because there is a small fraction of every sub-population which consists of thugs, criminals and misanthropes.
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