The Folly Of The GOP’s Border Wars, Part 1

Donald Trump wasn’t at the GOP’s primary debate last night, but his baleful influence loomed large. We are revering to all of the idiocy about the so-called Mexican border crisis that was spewed forth by the candidates and Fox News hosts alike, which went even so far as a proposal to send US troops into Mexico!

That was Trumpite immigrant-howling pure and simple. It stems from the Donald’s misbegotten notion that America’s problems are caused by foreigners lurking outside our borders, making it incumbent upon Washington to stop the alleged hordes of illegal aliens at the border and to staunch the flow of foreign goods into US ports, too.

That is ill-informed juvenile nonsense, of course, yet it remains the heart of Trump’s domestic program and, by extension, that of the GOP, too. In fact, foreigner-bashing and “winning again” is nearly all there is.

And it’s not surprising. The Donald is the furthest thing from a thinker or idea advocate. His whole checkered business career was built on attempting to bash and bully his opponents—a modus operandi that he simply escalated to the national and world stage after he entered the political arena.

Still, it is hard to think of any proposition that could be so wrong-headed, so lacking in factual foundation, so confused as to cause and effect and so utterly irrelevant to the underlying ills that actually plague the US economy.

To be sure, we do have too many imports and there are millions of immigrants piled-up chaotically at the southern border. But for crying out loud, those conditions are not evidence that America is being assaulted by evil forces emanating from outside our borders. Instead, they are the spoiled fruit of policy mistakes originating in Washington from the very Swamp the Donald decries.

In a word, the flood of imported goods is due to the Fed’s wildly inflationary monetary policies (as we will address in Part 2), while the teeming hordes at the border are the result of utterly stupid and obsolete Federal laws which prohibit millions of work-seekers from entering US territory in an orderly and legal manner.