The war on drugs has been going on for decades. The goal of the war was to prevent people from using illicit drugs. Since the very beginning, the drug war has failed to achieve that end. To deal with this failure, officials have enacted a series of measures designed to make their drug war succeed.
For example, with the active assistance of federal judges, who became ardent drug warriors, they began meting out the highest possible jail sentences for convicted drug offenders. Alas, it didn’t work to end drug use. Oh sure, they succeeded in jailing lots of people for drug offenses but it didn’t make any difference in what they were trying to achieve with their drug war — stopping people from using drugs. As they jailed drug offenders for long periods, new drug dealers would quickly take their place. The cycle would go on continuously, with no victory in what officials were trying to achieve in sight.
Officials concluded that the problem was that some federal judges had not yet come on board and become ardent drug warriors. That’s because some of them were not meting out the highest possible jail sentences. So, they enacted mandatory-minimum sentences, which required federal judges to mete out much higher jail sentences than what they were meting out before. Those higher sentences, they said, would finally bring victory in the war on drugs.
But that didn’t work either. As drug offenders received higher jail sentences, they would be quickly replaced by new drug dealers. Victory in the drug war was always out of reach.
They enacted civil-asset forfeiture laws. This enabled law-enforcement personnel to confiscate large amounts of cash that officials would find in automobiles traveling along America’s roads and highways. The idea was that if someone was carrying a large amount of cash, it had to be from drug dealing. No arrest, trial, or conviction was needed. It was simply a matter of finding the money and stealing it.
Did it work? Nope. Victory in the war on drugs continued to be as elusive as ever, only now there were lots of innocent people who were getting their money stolen.
I could go on, but I’m sure you get my drift. Through it all, the notion was that if we only “cracked down,” the war on drugs could be won. And no matter how much “cracking down” was done, it was never enough. The answer was always “Crack down some more.”
In fact, the ultimate “crack down” occurred in the Philippines, where cops began killing drug offenders on sight. No arrests, trials, convictions, and jail sentences. Just immediate execution. Did this ultimate “crack down” bring victory? Nope. Today in the Philippines the drug war goes on.
What drug-war proponents cannot bring themselves to recognize is that their program simply has not worked and will never work. They also cannot see that the drug war is the root cause of the perpetual drug-war crisis — that is, that drug prohibition is the cause of the violence, drug gangs, drug cartels, drug kidnappings, official corruption, and other negative consequences of drug prohibition. They cannot see the that the only solution to the never-ending drug-war crisis is simply to get rid of the drug war. In other words, if we repeal drug prohibition, the drug-war crisis disappears.
This phenomenon is no different in the war on immigrants. Many decades ago, officials established America’s immigration-control system, which is based on the core socialist principle of central planning. As Ludwig von Moses pointed out, central planning always brings planned chaos, which is what we have had on the U.S.-Mexico border for at least 80 years, along with death, suffering, highway checkpoints, warrantless searches, a Berlin Wall, concertina wire, and a massive police state.
At first, migrants who were trying to save or improve their lives by coming to the United States simply began circumventing the controls. This motivated officials to enact an ever-increasing array of police-state measures, including the criminalization of hiring, transporting, harboring, and caring for illegal immigrants. None of it has ever worked and none of it will ever work, just like in the drug war.
As with the drug war, there is only one solution to the perpetual, never-ending war on immigrants — get rid of the cause of the crisis. That means acknowledging that America’s socialist system of immigration controls has been no more successful than America’s war on drugs. It means bringing an end to America’s socialist system of immigration controls by removing all restrictions on the free movements of people across borders, just as ending the drug-war morass means the removal of all restrictions on what people decide to consume, buy, and sell.