Our Expanding Immigration-Control Tyranny

One can hope that the tyranny that is settling in on America will cause a critical mass of the American people to engage in some serious soul-searching about where we are as a nation, how we got here, and what we need to do to get our nation back on the right track. It would be tragic if all this accomplished was to encourage Americans to come up with ways to “reform” the tyranny and getting “better” people into public office to manage it.

One of the most important lessons in the loss of liberty is how the federal government, especially the all-powerful national-security branch of the federal government, enlists the support of the American people for measures that destroy their very own rights and liberties.

A good example of this phenomenon is America’s socialist (i.e., central planning) system of immigration controls, which millions of Americans have come to support on the basis that it supposedly protects the nation from invaders, rapists, murderers, drug dealers, terrorists, communists, anarchists, and other scary people. By converting Americans into a fear-filled people, the federal government has been able to destroy their liberty through an immigration police state that accompanies America’s socialist system of immigration controls.

Ever since I was born, this immigration police state (and also the drug-war police state) has existed for people living in the borderlands. I know this first-hand because I grew up on the border and lived almost half my life there. Highway checkpoints, roving Border Patrol checkpoints, warrantless searches, raids, deportations, snitches, and boarding of Greyhound buses to check people’s papers. I saw them all. And later — a Berlin Wall involving the forcible taking of people’s private property, underwater concertina wire designed to cut people up, U.S. troops along the border, Mexican troops along the border, and much more.

But it was inevitable that the immigration police state would never remain only on the border. To “secure” the border and “cleanse” America of illegal immigrants, it would ultimately be necessary to expand the immigration police state nationwide.

That, of course, is what we are witnessing now. The rest of the nation is learning how people on the border have lived ever since I was born — the exercise of omnipotent, immune power to do to people whatever the government decides, including killing them.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, a police state is the opposite of freedom. This is an important point that is often lost of people, including, unfortunately, some libertarians who have come to support America’s socialist system of immigration controls. While immigration-control advocates continue to say they favor “comprehensive immigration reform,” they fail to recognize the utter ridiculousness of that term. Every “comprehensive immigration reform” has always — and will always — come with more measures of tyranny that are stacked on the previous ones. The Trump administration is showing us what needs to be done to “secure the border” and to keep us safe from all those scary creatures.

As I point out in my new book The Case for Open Borders: A Primer, a model for this phenomenon is North Korea. It has obviously succeeded in securing its border with South Korea. But the price is a nation-wide police state — one that, ironically, has made the nation so unattractive that no one wants to enter North Korea anyway. That’s, of course, the direction that America is heading in — an ugly nation that people would rather avoid.

The news media is now reporting that ICE has issued a secret memorandum authorizing ICE agents to enter people’s homes without a judicially issued warrant to look for illegal immigrants. Civil libertarians are up in arms over this — and rightly so. This is the type of thing that the British colonists revolted against in 1776. It’s why our American ancestors enacted the Fourth Amendment.

Yet, this is how Americans in the borderlands have lived all my life. I grew up on a farm on the Rio Grande. The Border Patrol would come onto our farm whenever it wanted — without a search warrant. If we put a lock on our gate, we’d have to give them a key. Otherwise, they would simply shoot off the lock and enter our farm.

How did they get away with this, given the Fourth Amendment? They said they had the inherent power to “control the border.” But the border was the Rio Grande, not our farm that adjoined the border. They could have used boats in the river to “secure the border.” Oddly, whenever they came onto our farm without a warrant, they never demanded to come into our home, but I have no doubts that they could have if they had wanted to.

And it wasn’t just us or any other farm or ranch along the river. They would also trespass onto farms and ranches several miles away from the river — again, with no search warrant. They and the Supreme Court called those farms and ranches “the functional equivalent of the border,” which, needless to say, is one of the most nonsensical rationalizations for tyranny ever developed.

We hired illegal immigrants on our farm, just as many other people along the border did. Those warrantless searches sometimes resulted in arrests of our workers and other people’s workers. What good did those busts do in the larger scheme of things? No good at all. The immigration police state just kept growing, year after year, decade after decade, just like the drug-war police state, until we now see it enveloping the entire nation.

As I have emphasized for 36 years here at The Future of Freedom Foundation — and as I have detailed and explained in my new book The Case for Open Borders: A Primer, there is one — and only one — solution to America’s decades-long, ongoing, never-ending, perpetual immigration crisis, along with the death, suffering, and police-state destruction of liberty that comes with it. That solution is open borders — that is, the abolition of ICE, the Border Patrol and all restrictions on the free movements of goods, services, and people crossing borders. In other words, the same open-border system we have here inside the United States that works and that most everyone supports. It is also the only solution that is consistent with free-market, moral, and religious principles.

This first appeared on Hornberger’s Explore Freedom blog.

The post Our Expanding Immigration-Control Tyranny appeared first on CounterPunch.org.