Open Borders: Lesser Threat to Life and Property Than the Trump State

LISTEN TO TLR’S LATEST PODCAST:

By Zach Foster

President Donald Trump was the target for sharp criticism after enacting a temporary, but ongoing ban of immigration from predominantly Muslim countries.  While President Trump has certainly earned his share of criticism for hostility to immigration, Americans shouldn’t forget that the Democrat Party plantation hardly cares for immigrants either.  Both parties want a central strong state and naturally oppose the libertarian concept of open borders.  It’s still a hardly-spoken of secret on the Left that President Obama’s administration deported 29% more undocumented immigrants than George W. Bush’s administration.

Immigration: America’s Economic Secret Weapon

Democrats will oppose open borders just as easily as the most conservative Republican.  Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both voted for the Secure Fence Act of 2006.  Democrat Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren just recently introduced a bill that removes the per-country cap on H1-B visa applicants, but it also more than doubles the minimum salary of applicants to $130,000.  If passed, the only other way applicants can get their H1-B visa is for the company hiring them to pay the government an extortion fee of 200% the applicant’s annual salary.  Therefore, companies would be paying three times for the value of one highly skilled worker.  This economy-killing legislation could have been pulled straight from a chapter of Atlas Shrugged.

Physicist Michio Kaku claims that the ongoing Information Revolution has a weakness, and that weakness is America’s educational system.  “If the stupid index of America keeps rising every year… how come the scientific establishment in the United States doesn’t collapse?  America has a secret weapon: that secret weapon is the H1-B.  Without the H1-B… forget about Google, forget about Silicon Valley.  There would be no Silicon Valley without the H1-B.”  Anyone who’s toured Silicon Valley knows that this legislation passed into law would devastate the countless small tech startups, running on meager investments and hope, looking to hire someone less expensive than an American with heavy student loan debt.  If it weren’t for the H1-B visa, the United States would not have its first immigrant First Lady, the beautiful and magnificent Melanija Knavs!

Nonetheless, the Right wants President Trump to build that wall!  Unfortunately, the Secure Fence Act of 2006 opened up at least 140 eminent domain lawsuits by property owners whose private property was violated or scheduled to be violated by a large fence and frequent Border Patrol traffic.  For President Trump to build his wall, which Americans are paying for through high tariffs on Mexican imports (like food, alcohol, and American brand cars), the federal government will have to resort to eminent domain.  US citizens both Anglo and Hispanic live on the southern border, and their property will be violated by the construction of this wall.  If Americans want to put a stop to the illegal immigrant foot traffic and littering in the South Rio Grande Valley, then they need to remove the incentives for immigrants to risk their lives crossing as automatic fugitives.

The Deadly Cost of Strict Immigration Control

The Institute of Race Relations reported the individual cases of nearly a hundred immigrants in the UK who committed suicide between 2005 and 2010 after their requests for asylum and residency were denied.  The Mises Institute reported the suffocated bodies of 72 Syrian refugees trying to enter Austria, found in an abandoned transport truck in August 2015.  Reuters reported that as of August 2015, at least 2,600 Libyan refugees fleeing the ongoing civil war in their own country have died trying to illegally enter Greece and Italy by sea.  In October 2016, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported at least 3,700 migrants total had died making the journey from the war-torn Middle East to Europe.  This would bring the total death count for Middle Eastern migrants to be over 10,000 since the Arab Spring became the Arab Winter.

There’s also a severe humanitarian crisis happening on America’s own borders.  America has a long history of violence on its national borders, between banditry, organized crime, and hundreds upon hundreds of racially fueled homicides.  Open borders won’t change that fact.  Nonetheless, US policies like drug prohibition and strict immigration control have resulted in episodes of violence so appalling, they’re even more outrageous for having been preventable.  The drug cartel watchdogs at the Narcosphere reported in 2012 that at least 5,700 homicides in the US between 2006 and 2010 were directly attributed to violence over illegal Mexican narcotics being distributed in the U.S.  This is attributed in part to the federally-imposed War on Drugs and in part to restrictive immigration policies that give the cartels incentive to recruit US citizens to do their dirty work, especially Mexican-Americans.

Another series of preventable murders happened on Mexico’s border with Texas.  NPR reported in 2014 that 18 police officers in San Fernando, Mexico were being investigated for their complicity in the Zetas Cartel murdering 193 Central American migrants.  The cartels make a regular practice of exploiting migrants who are trying to get to the US illegally because restrictive US policies make risking their lives for a better future easier than waiting for a foreign bureaucracy to grant them permission to pursue that future.  Moreover, libertarians with “Republican Stockholm Syndrome” who oppose open borders like to throw around statistics or anecdotes about undocumented immigrants committing these crimes and those crimes.  But they never talk about immigrants who stick to a code of ethics.

In 2010, 72 Central American migrants were slaughtered by gunfire on a ranch near San Fernando, near the Texas border.  They were on their way to the U.S. to earn a better living than what was available back home when they were picked up by the Zetas.  Similar to modern governments, Mexico’s paramilitary drug-trafficking organizations use coercion to recruit new foot soldiers when economic incentives aren’t getting the job done.  72 men were “offered” employment as hitmen or drug mules for the Zetas Cartel.  The migrants refused.

Knowing they were doing so at the cost of their own lives, 72 “illegal aliens” were gunned down with their hands tied behind their backs.  They had enough conviction to refuse to be murderers and drug traffickers, and they died for sticking to their principles.  We know this because a 73^rd man, 19 years old, was wounded but played dead long enough, and stumbled to an Army highway checkpoint and survived to bear witness of 72 men dying for doing the right thing.  Had these men or any of the other 265 migrants murdered at the San Fernando kill site between 2010 and 2011 been able to simply approach any one of the multiple CBP Ports of Entry near Laredo or Brownsville, and enter under an open borders policy, they would still be alive today.

Another series of deaths on America’s conscience are the European Jews turned away by the federal government during the reign of the Third Reich.  In one incident in 1939, the St. Louis and its over 900 Jewish passengers were turned away at Miami and sent back to Europe.  Over 1 out of 4 Jews on the St. Louis were later murdered in the Holocaust.  Hundreds of Jewish refugees on the SS Drottningholm were turned away in 1942, after the mass killings had already started. In 1938 alone, over 125,000 Jews and targeted ‘undesirable’ people applied to American consulates for asylum.  Most were denied, since the national cap for Germany and Austria was 27,000.  No one knows how many of them died in the Holocaust.

Open Borders: Less Lethal

The deaths of turned-away refugees are many in a long line of preventable deaths caused or led to in part by restrictive U.S. immigration policies.  Furthermore, American homeowners and business owners will be affected by eminent domain once President Trump makes his not-paid-for-by-Mexico cement wall a reality.  The pro-Trump crowd can cling to their xenophobic statistics, but it won’t bring back the thousands upon thousands of people who have died immigrating away from danger and extreme poverty.  Their deaths were ultimately preventable.

The best solution is an open border.  Open borders won’t translate into mobs of desperate migrants trampling the South Rio Grande Valley. It’ll translate into immigrants entering through legal ports of entry, passing a background check, and having their biometric information collected in a national immigration database.  They won’t qualify for entitlement programs, but they will have the privilege of living and working in the U.S. at will.  When they leave the country, they’ll ‘check out’ in the national database.  If Americans still fear crime by immigrants, their solution lies in voluntary association (in neighborhood watch groups) and practicing the Second Amendment.  If libertarians truly believe in a minimal state or no state at all, then they must stop depending on government to solve these tough problems.

WATCH TLR’S LATEST VIDEO: