Republicans are celebrating President Trump for his immigration proposal, which includes, among other things, admitting into the United State more highly skilled and educated foreigners. Wow! Why hasn’t anyone thought of that before now? Just think: America’s decades-long, ongoing immigration crisis is going to finally disappear because Donald Trump, central planner, has finally come up with his immigration plan.
At the risk of raining on this parade, it isn’t going to happen. As I have repeatedly emphasized over the years, there is no immigration reform plan that is going to resolve the decades-long, ongoing, never-ending immigration crisis. There is a simple reason for that: America’s system of immigration controls is based on central planning, which is a core feature of socialism. And as any citizen of Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, and the former Soviet Union will attest, socialism, including central planning, always produces crises or, in the words of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, “planned chaos.”
What better term than “planned chaos” to use to describe America’s system of immigration central planning? Death, destruction, suffering, fear, perpetual crisis, separation of children from parents, refugees stacked up at the border, violent raids on private businesses, overcrowded prisons, and an immigration police state along the border consisting of highway checkpoints, warrantless searches of ranches and farms, roving Border Patrol stops, and more. If that’s not “planned chaos,” I don’t know what is.
Even if you put Trump and the top 100 immigration experts in the country in a room with the ten most powerful computers in the world, any plan that they come up with would produce more of the same. That’s because socialism, including immigration central planning, is an inherently defective paradigm. Nothing, including Trump’s much-vaunted immigration plan, can make it work.
There is only one — I repeat: only one — solution to America’s ongoing, never-ending immigration crisis: the free market — open borders — the free movements of people, goods and services across borders. There is no other solution. Open borders is the only system that works because the free market is the only system that works. Moreover, a system of open borders is the only system that is consistent with religious, moral, and ethical principles and the principles of individual liberty, free markets, and limited government.