Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, immigration is not a big burning issue in the presidential race. There is a simple reason for that: Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden believe in America’s system of immigration controls. Their only difference between them is over the enforcement measures that come with that system.
Alas, needless to say, that is also the position of the mainstream media. That’s why there has been no pushback on immigration in the presidential race. Don’t expect any, especially in the remaining presidential debates.
There is a simple reason for America’s decades-long crisis in immigration. America’s system of immigration controls is based on the socialist principle of central planning. As everyone in socialist countries will attest, central planning produces crises. A good term for such crises is the one that Ludwig von Mises applied to the results of central planning: “planned chaos.” What better term to describe America’s decades-long, ongoing, never-ending immigration crisis?
Trump and his Republican cohorts love to proclaim their support of “free enterprise” and “free markets.” Yet, free enterprise and free markets mean enterprise and markets that are free of government control and interference. A system of immigration controls is the opposite of free enterprise and free markets.
Biden and his Democrat cohorts love to proclaim how much they love the poor, needy, and disadvantaged. Yet, undocumented immigrants are among the poorest people in the world. They want to come to the U.S. to sustain and improve their lives by working for American employers who wish to hire them. Because of immigration controls, some of them die crossing lonely deserts or the Rio Grande or traveling in the back of 18-wheelers. If they survive the journey, they live under the constant specter of being discovered, arrested, incarcerated, fined, and deported.
The fact is that Democrats love immigration controls as much as Republicans do. President Obama himself was known as the nation’s “Deporter in Chief,” to the great pride of his Democratic cohorts. Trump of course has done everything he can to assume that mantle, even if he has violated his campaign pledge to build his beloved wall along the border and make Mexico pay for it.
There is only one system that is consistent with life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness, morality, life, religion, ethics, free markets, and free enterprise. That system is open borders — free trade and open immigration — the dismantling of all governmental restrictions on trade and immigration and the abolition of all departments and agencies that enforce them.
Open borders is the only system that can and will bring an end to America’s decades-old, ongoing, never-ending immigration crisis. But don’t hold your breath waiting for either Trump or Biden to endorse open borders. They, like their Republican and Democratic cohorts, are just too wedded to central planning and other aspects of socialism.