There are 2 Solutions to Our Border Problem— Asylum for Illegal Crossers, and Amnesty for the Backlogged
Because as Usual Biden Fears Emasculation by the GOP and Fox whose Clout with “Workers” Biden Envies, Title 42 Isn’t Going To Change At All
“Deterrence is difficult. From the early 1990s, the US has invested tens of billions on border enforcement. Fences have gone up. They have been festooned with sensors, complemented with drones. The consequences for unauthorized entry have been tightened and loosened and tightened. They didn’t convince millions of migrants to stay home.
“It will take months to see whether the Biden administration’s new shot at the problem will succeed. It’s not even clear what counts as success. Reducing migrant encounters at the border to 650,000, as in the last year of the Trump administration? Maybe just preventing an immigrant surge. Getting Governor Abbott to put away his helicopters may suffice. “This could be a turning point,” Selee said. “I just don’t know where it is a turning point to.” —“Biden’s Wall Won’t Work Any Better Than Trump’s” Eduardo Porter ~ Bloomberg
“The dreaded post-Title 42 surge didn’t come. In fact, encounters between Border Patrol agents and migrants dropped 50 percent after the ordinance was lifted. But that’s not to say everything is fine. The Biden administration has now put in place a new — and harsher — set of border measures, which may or may not survive a legal challenge from immigrant rights organizations and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Behind all these maneuvers and stopgaps, the United States has no coherent immigration policy, and politicians have little motivation to discuss the issue honestly. Along with the rest of the world’s wealthy countries, we contort our laws so we can duck our treaty obligations to receive refugees.
But we don’t talk about that; instead, we talk about the border. Our southwestern frontier is not simply a geographic region; it’s a concept into which we stuff all our trepidation and disingenuousness about immigration, asylum and the economic future. We dress those complicated questions in stories of smuggling and encounters with migrants, illustrate them with images of exhausted foreigners and agents with badges.”
“Title 42 has failed on its own terms. Crossings have increased. Illegal crossings have increased. Evasions of Border Patrol have increased. The outcomes speak for themselves. Unfortunately, the president’s plan now involves largely recreating those failed conditions by banning asylum under different statutory authority and deporting more people to Mexico where they will have little option but to attempt to cross illegally again.” — David J. Bier, “Title 42 Failed. It Should not be Extended in any Form” ~ Cato Institute
A Good Thing Happens
Several weeks ago, Title 42–the inhumane and illegal (by international law) regulatory policy contrived during the pandemic, because of the pandemic, under the Trump administration, giving the government unilateral power to expel migrants and refugees, seeking haven and opportunity, albeit illegally, in the so-called land of the free—formally at long last, expired.
Thank God.
While arbitrarily detaining and deporting vital human capital with human rights, it also incentivized more illegal immigration. It’s absurd that people may still vote for Trump because of his harsh stance on immigration, when… while making legal immigration harder by lowering the cap on visas, Trump made illegal immigration more popular and widespread!!
Why I Scorn “Border Security”
Now besides wokeness, the one other topic conservative Republicans love to pontificate about, at intervals puffing their chests and fake crying (whichever suits their interest) is “border security.” That’s all they seem to want, “border security,” why, to address the “border chaos,” when they’re not taking advantage of the Dobbs decision naturally to enact the harshest conceivable abortion restrictions they can get away with.
Border security judging by the way they go on about it, is more important than inflation, pandemic spending and even crime, it seems to me, for God knows what reason: my personal theory is it’s the hypersensitive conservative pride that considers it an assault on their American identity to have to share the land they inherited with foreigners, not because they pose any substantive quantifiable threat, but mainly because they’re foreigners. Because they’re undocumented, that makes it sufficient in itself, to lose all your shit and freak the fuck out. Note that the cloudy talk about drugs, murder and human trafficking always follows and surrounds the point that they’re illegals; it doesn’t precede the fact. The irrational feeling, not helped by Fox, that the aliens have landed drives most of this.
I met this one hilarious lady with some of the most overwrought nerves I’ve ever encountered publicly, not long ago, who clearly watched way too much Fox, and she blurted, her eyes darting back and forth, ‘it’s so bad,’ or ‘it’s so terrible’ or something. What’s so terrible? I put gently with my superficially understanding commercial facade. “Everything!” she exhaled breathlessly. Then I stood witness, bracing myself as she unleashed a flood of disconnected tidbits of speculation about “the border” and “fentanyl.”
You see the same concern about the integrity of national borders in Europe. Ironically in pursuit of that chimerical fantasy of a strong border though, in America at least, Donald Trump set in motion what under Joe Biden, has become a great big, fat case of border insecurity, if not instability.
Border security by the way, is a fairytale—that is, of mythic wide, southwestern, pristine, dry horizons and quaint prairie towns, full of innocent townsmen like in Westerns—which is never going to materialize in reality. The reason is, the border is way too fucking big to secure, and people want to come here way too badly. An impenetrable border would require a level of resources that we simply cannot sustain. It would demand from the National Guard what we do not have room for in the broken federal budget, whose discretionary spending we have already sought to cap. Not to mention we already have 20,000 some odd illegals detained in facilities down there. And hundreds of thousands recently—and 2 million over the past few years—have attempted crossing the border illegally. We have been apprehending thousands a day. What do we think that the 1500 troops Biden sent down recently are going to do about it? We barely have a navy to compete with China in the Pacific ocean, let alone a fleet to guard every port from the specter of Guatemalan and Haitian families. How would we insure against corruption? And a border wall is an absurdity in which Trump himself probably doesn’t even believe. It would, and it will, never get built. The project is too expensive and again, the border is too long!!
Why You Should Think of the Migrant Crisis Through the Economic Terms of Supply and Demand, and Supply Chain ‘Bottlenecks’
The US is a big god damn country and people who want to come to the greatest country in the world, no matter how restrictive the immigration policy, will find ways as they always have, and it will not be pretty, and it will be less pretty, the harder you try to make it. Criminalizing illegal immigration and mass deportations requisite to secure the border in conservative Republican terminology, would just stoke demand for illegal immigration insanely and squander funds and resources we cannot afford to spare. However…
If we did a crazy unpopular thing and legalized illegal immigration—if we gave every illegal migrant asylum by fiat—then immigration wouldn’t be illegal, and we would not have to waste a cent on border security. Although I’m really critical of the Obama presidency, I think perhaps the one thing Obama did that wasn’t a failure, in addition to the Transpacific Partnership, was DACA, granting asylum by executive order to immigrant children.
Compare that rather modest, still underwhelming, gesture of benevolence: to Biden’s current policy which is to detain and expel illegal immigrants on sight unless they are at credible risk of persecution in their home countries. Whatever “persecution” defined by the government is. And what about victims of severe poverty, like Guatemalans or Venezuelans, or natural disasters? The central American region was recently rocked by two hurricanes. And what about people who are otherwise OK but just want better lives for themselves? Don’t they count? Why shouldn’t they? What about single unmarried, able-bodied men who don’t want to live and work in horrific countries like Haiti, who just want American jobs?
“In Matamoros, Karen Martínez, a 34-year-old shopkeeper who fled death threats in Honduras after her husband was gunned down by extortionists last November, said she plans to stay in Mexico.
Last month, thinking she could get asylum due to a credible fear of danger, she crossed the river with her four children, but all were returned to Mexico by U.S. authorities.
Ms. Martínez has since been trying to get an appointment through the CBP One app, but her phone broke down recently.
“I can’t risk crossing and being sent to Honduras where my life has been threat-ened,” said Ms. Martínez, who is living in a makeshift tent by the Rio Grande.
“I feel powerless,” she said. “I ask God to help me get an appointment. I want to go to court and present my case.”
— Juan Montes, “Migrants Wait Along Southern Border as New Rule Goes Into Effect” ~ Wall Street Journal
Under Biden’s new Title 8 policy, barely any different from Title 42, immigrants who want asylum, lest they get deported for crossing illegally, are therefore being coerced to apply for asylum online, using the Customs Border Protection app. Because we don’t have enough judges to process the applications, so many people are waiting in backlogs for asylum that it can take 5 years or longer for the US government to hear their individual cases. People whose claims have waited the longest get first priority. Meanwhile they’re forced to wait an interminable period and to endure some of the very circumstances they have risked life and limb to escape already, because Biden expects them to wait in Mexico, if not just to relocate there to take some of the strain off our broken system— Mexico, Northern Mexico specifically and creepy dangerous places like La Ciudad Juarez where the mutilated bodies of tens of thousands of women, and counting over the decades, have been uncovered, and people get kidnapped, raped, extorted and murdered on a daily basis, where the narcos who have bought off the government are financially extorting the local people and in perpetual war with each other…
This is UNAMERICAN!!
There are two easy things we can do to solve the immigration problem, unconditional asylum for illegal immigrants entering the US, and amnesty for everyone backlogged waiting for their applications to be processed. These basic reforms would stop the humanitarian catastrophe of dangerous border crossings while putting immigrants on the path to citizenship, leaving no one out of the nation who wants in. There is nothing to lose, not counting the indefensible shame, the hypersensitive selfish pride of conservative Republicans.
Indeed America needs immigrants as labor and capital, as much as immigrants need America literally as a lifeline. As a result of demographic change, mainly declining fertility rates, with a rising elderly population retiring without replacement by younger generations, paired with expanded welfare rolls, so a greater and greater share of young men have begun eluding work for decades, the tax base is shrinking and job vacancies are proliferating, even as the size and expense of government programs has drastically increased, and mandatory entitlements have become, without question at this rate, unsustainable.
How the Politicization of Race and Class Impairs our Ability to See Clearly how to Deal with Individual Human Beings and Capital
For conservatives and moderates on immigration, “border chaos” is a tragedy. For progressives, the snowflakes, of course it’s only because of how we’re not being nice enough to races that aren’t white, with the tacit racist assumption that members of nonwhite races are morally superior to white people, just because they’re not white, because of their brown skin color conferring on them a special moral value. For the America first hard right, on the other hand, which is just as embarrassing, immigration somehow undercuts the blue collar white working class, whom they try to delude you are the industrial backbone of the country rather than just a voting bloc to which the political class is enslaved, whom the right babies to the same extent progressives baby black people. Nationalists think ridiculously that one’s national identity confers unique moral status, to the exclusion of other people hailing from other countries. Just because of your citizenship that supposedly makes you superior morally to other people without citizenship, but what the hell is citizenship or your national identity but a sentimental stubborn attachment to an arbitrary line on a map and a bunch of documents, passports, licenses and social security numbers?
The Ideology of Strong Borders is Antidemocratic in Principle
That is to say, even if immigrants were taking blue collar jobs, rather than creating new ones, it would still be immoral to me to limit immigration on those grounds, in principle. You are not entitled to demand that your government save your job or protect your industry for you. You nationalist serfs!!
The real tragedy has nothing to do with either race or class. As a decidedly heartless neoliberal I could give less of a damn about both. Even if racism persisted as much as progressives think, or the middle class were really “dying” as much as the hard right thinks, race and class antagonisms I would deliberately pretend do not exist, because they are unamerican, unseemly wedge issues that I know opportunistic politicians from Josh Hawley to AOC, and their abetters like Steven Bannon and Ann Coulter, only fabricate to get elected and foist upon us backwards and divisive agendas (in spite of the facts anyway that racism has rapidly disappeared from society over the last couple generations, and the class divide has narrowed and wages have actually grown and class inequality measured by income has decreased!)
It helps no one to target any race or class or identity for special treatment. It harms everyone. Margaret Thatcher famously wisely denied that nonsense— “There is no society. Only individuals.” With those strong words, she propagated the neoliberal philosophy highly conducive to peace and prosperity which the facts under her leadership and Reagan’s show. Today’s conservatives, calling themselves national conservatives (“natcons”) want both border security, so dramatically reduced immigration, and a strong economy at the same time. But you can’t have a strong economy without immigration. Indeed according to Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute in a recent newsletter, the prosperity we reaped in the latter half of the 20th century, had largely to do with a dramatic influx of mass immigration, accelerated no doubt by Reagan’s decision to work with Democrats to grant amnesty to 3.2 million illegal immigrants.
I would also add the hypocrisy astonishes me that conservatives want to build a wall when to think that you can fix a problem just by piling money on it: is Bidenomics 101. But perhaps on account of how little they talk about the cost of living, conservatives don’t care about the price of of things anymore. It doesn’t matter how much you spend in the MAGA era, not if you’re a strong leader like Trump or Ron Desantis. In the MAGA antiwoke but very pension friendly worldview, it’s a measure of manly strength to completely disregard the budget. Like when Trump told Paul Ryan to fuck off, saying that social security wouldn’t run out while he was in office. Bad ass.
Immigration = Individual Liberty= Flexible Labor Markets= Capital= Productivity = Resounding Growth
The actual tragedy of current immigration policy and attitudes is the economic growth we’re missing, because of how we’re deporting and detaining, and turning away all the free labor whose absence over the years has enormously increased America’s unarguable relative economic stagnation. We are in particular need of increased immigration now due to high inflation.
Part of the reason inflation is so sticky is because of a tight labor market. High employment and too many job vacancies put upward pressure on inflation, because workers demand higher wages without competition, and employers give their employees higher wages, because they have no choice and the profit motive for which we can’t blame them. In other words, the precious workers the right and left fawn over so much, without competition, are highly damaging to the economy and their own interest as consumers. Moreover the tight job and labor markets are mortally complicating the Fed’s ability to fight inflation. The fed can only do so much raising the costs of borrowing when people not banks or companies, are pushing prices up on their own simply by nature of existing without competition (i.e. unimpeded consumer spending), because working citizens have virtually monopolized the labor market—leaving the Fed with little choice but to raise rates so much so as to manufacture a recession to bring prices down, as they should without any supply side reforms.
Mass Migration is Just Creative Destruction and Disruptive Innovation that Benefits All
Immigration regardless of the social cost, should be embraced come hell or high water. If foreigners flood and engulf border towns, even if it were to involve indefinable “chaos” as collateral damage, that’s a small but necessary price for reducing punishing 5% inflation, in my view.
The right is not racist when they say Mexican gangs are smuggling in Fentanyl and children are being trafficked and sexually and/or financially exploited. Those things are happening, but that’s only because we have made immigration so hard for desperate people who would get murdered or starve to death in their home countries. Haiti, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, Cuba. These people are not making this life-threatening journey, crossing the Darien Gap, for no reason, and our broken immigration system leaves them at the mercy of criminals, smugglers and traffickers.
I actually know immigrants from Latin America are good people. In the grocery store where I work, near predominantly Hispanic/latino Huntington Station Long Island, every day I ring up countless latin American immigrants who can barely speak any English at all. I am good friends with my El Salvadorean boss and my other Latin American coworkers. One of my favorite customers is an old cultivated multilingual Haitian lady named Suzanne who left Haiti during the bloody 80s. She’s a sweetheart.
Pedro Tonito says he could no longer bear watching his young daughter cry from hunger or his teenager go without meals.
Venezuela had effectively collapsed, finding work was impossible and he felt increasingly helpless. Tonito, 43, and his wife, Adriana Joselin Sanchez Padilla, knew they had to flee.
And so began their six-month journey north, a perilous trek through swamps and raging rivers, covering their children’s eyes from the sight of bodies of other migrants who died along the way. From Caracas to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, then to El Paso, Texas and ultimately New York City, surviving machete-wielding gangs, threats of extortion and all in the knowledge they may just be turned away at the border.
— Nadia Lopez, “We Didn’t Have a Choice, One Family’s Perilous Journey from Venezuela to NYC”
Foreigners from the Global South Are Better People than We Are
Ironically I find these people, migrants, immigrants, whatever they you want to call them, are more traditionally American than native-born Americans are. They are quiet, humble, hardworking, well-mannered, friendly, self-interested, self-sufficient, culturally conservative and individualistic. They are also more conservative even than nativeborn white conservatives. Latin American men are much more masculine than white American men. The women are more feminine and meek than white women. Latinos or Hispanics are more pious and actually religious rather than just culturally religious or religious nationalists. Their families are more closely knit and more numerous than ours, and they parent better. They are stricter and firmer with their kids. And they are in better shape than we are. Rather than play video games and shoot AR-15s, latin americans play sports like baseball and soccer. They also eat better than we do. They’re always buying avocados, papayas, malanga, and Yucca, in bulk. In fact I will say that if progressives are exceptionalists about black people, then I am an exceptionalist about latinos!! They are the one ethnic group that deserves more from America, (if it were fair to essentialize, or in any judge people, according to their ethnicity which it isn’t!) That’s because they earn it, and they never complain. They don’t want more government. They just want space. Opportunity, not control. These people don’t pop opioids for illnesses that they exaggerate to get prescriptions that psychiatrists overprescribe, unlike white working class “Silent Majority” Trump-waving, entitlement fiends, almost homosexually attached to the sense of an identity Trump malignantly lavished on them. Those who on Long Island a lot of us refer to simply as “Spanish” actually work, however, because they pay for their groceries with hundred dollar bills, and come into the store with sweat dripping off the moustaches of their stoic brown unassuming manly faces, and paint stains on their work trousers.
Carolyn Cole Los Angeles Times
I think all you have to do is look at their faces to see they’re not bad people.
The right isn’t wrong about the gangs and bullshit though. But the thing is radically liberalizing immigration, meaning clearing the backlogs by giving applicants amnesty, and giving the undocumented illegals documents would stop all of this, while also having a dramatically positive effect on inflation, reducing wage and price inflation. I am not making a case for open borders here, although I am certainly an proponent of open borders. Rather I am making a case for regulatory overhaul of the immigration system. We can’t have a properly open border without lifting restrictions on the human right simply to move place to place without government, or mobs of unionized workers as lobby groups, or belligerent populists and their obstreperous voting blocs moreover, telling you where you can and can’t go, on account of your possessing or failing to present a bunch of stupid documents to corroborate your humanity to government agents and bureaucrats.
Fentanyl is a Demand Problem, like Obesity, Smartphone-correlated Teen Suicide, and Gun Violence
Conservatives worry they’re bringing in crime. No. They are actually desperately trying to escape violent crime in their countries of origin. They say they’re bringing in Fentanyl. No. Drug-obsessed American opioid addicts and their dealers are bringing in fentanyl, because Americans are enamored with drugs. Just like we have so much gun violence, because everybody has a compulsion to buy a gun, and everyone is so insecure and feels so threatened all the time they always feel like they have to wield it, and everybody is so fucking fat because all they do is eat, and we pollute the atmosphere so much because everyone needs to buy a massive Chevy suburban or a Cadillac Escalade, and everyone has a fucking mental disorder they have to pop pills for, because all we do is scroll and swipe and brag and boast and hilariously envy each other and pity ourselves, only when we’re not strutting and bragging and boasting ourselves…
It is just outrageous that morbidly obese, lazy, addicted white native-born Americans popping pills, and waddling around like penguins but 3 times the size, and collecting transfer payments and buying absolute garbage ultra-processed food with their SNAP benefits have the arrogance to blame migrants for their own moral failure to be individually responsible and better their lot without complaints. Or that conservatives can be so dumb as to say that immigrants, not progressive lawmakers, are causing crime. The real crime is the consequence of cutting police funding and bail reform laws, the Black Lives Matter movement, and progressive prosecutors who don’t charge criminals because of a deranged radical left principle of “disparate impact,” whose moral idealism is killing scores more ethnic minorities than it keeps out of prison. The real crime is internal to the country, not coming in.
Just Because You Don’t Have Room for Them is No Excuse to Keep Them Out
And progressives and conservatives alike are freaking out about the migrants “straining resources” in their cities. But who said anyone had to provide for them? If we just gave them the documentation necessary to get jobs, they wouldn’t all be idling around. Stop taking care of them or busing them around the country to get on tv, and stop wasting government funds. Give them a god damn visa and let them, or even make them, work— like with the GOP’s work requirements for Medicaid eligibility attached to the House, “Limit Save Grow Act,” passed the other week. Or bus them around. I’m fine with that. If they’re clogging your streets, bus them around. Fine. If you do it to get on tv like Ron Desantis that’s disgusting, but otherwise it’s fine. That they are “straining” municipal budgets is no excuse to keep them outside the border. New York should just get rid of its Right to Shelter Law for instance. If they cost a lot to take care of, stop caring for them then. They don’t want to lounge around; they want to work. Give them a work permit and let them go. My dad who lives in New York City, said to me this weekend, so Jay would you just let them pitch tents and set up tenaments in Central Park then? New Yorkers wouldn’t want that, he said. I don’t care, I rejoined. Fuck progressive New Yorker NIMBYism. They’re supposed to be a “sanctuary City.” Progressives should love it if immigrants all pitched thousands of tents across Central Park. They let homeless people live on the street already and prosecute guys who try to subdue them if they’re violently mentally ill. Why should progressives—and my dad is one of them—care if some genuinely good migrants who want to work camp out until they got jobs? It would be the height of hypocrisy if they let the Jordan Neely’s of the world roam free, while they bar out migrant laborers. Tenements to me anyway would be a sign of a country’s economic potential, as they were 150 years ago.
In Brief Praise of the Massively Productive Late Nineteenth Century when Enterprising Industrialists, Not Lobby Groups like MAGA or BLM or Net Zero, Before the New Deal, Ran Everything and the Standard of Living Rose Like Crazy
In the nineteenth century, contrary to the 21st, immigrants poured off steamships, and they got jobs almost immediately. There’s a great video, part one of his “Free to Choose” series, where Milton Friedman, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant himself, talks all about it. You can find it on Youtube.
After telling us how an Italian family as a representative example of the American dream, made their success by passing the wealth of their economic opportunities down the generations, he says with regret, however, “…in the past 50 years we have been squandering that {our} inheritance by allowing government to control more and more of our lives instead of relying on ourselves.”
Also if you have a Wall Street Journal subscription you should definitely read, Amity Schlaes’ and Phil Gramm’s editorial “The ‘Gilded Age’ Myth, Then and Now” in which they debunk the progressive myth that the capitalist excesses of the nineteenth century exploited cheap labor and created massive inequality that only enriched a few at the expense of the many. They neoliberally submit,
“Between 1870 and 1900, America’s inflation-adjusted gross national product expanded by an unprecedented 233%. Though the population nearly doubled, real per capita GNP surged by 90%. Real wages of nonfarm employees grew by 53%, and life’s staples, such as food, clothing and shelter, became more plentiful and much cheaper. Food prices plummeted by 174% and the cost of textiles, fuel and home furnishings fell by 70%, 65% and 70%, respectively. The illiteracy rate fell by 46% and life expectancy rose 12.5%. Infant mortality declined by 17%.
As American capitalism blossomed, some got rich. In 1892 there were 4,050 millionaires, with less than 20% having inherited their wealth. The rest created it and in the process reduced poverty, expanded general societal prosperity, and made it possible for millions of immigrants looking for opportunity and freedom to find both. That mattered little to progressives, who were so obsessed by the 4,050 millionaires that they turned a blind eye to the 66 million Americans whose economic well-being improved faster than any people who had ever lived on earth.”
Indeed the Gilded Age, wasn’t only the golden age of capitalism. It was a Golden Age of true Gladstonean liberalism. It was dynamism. It was globalism. It was a golden age of mass migration and limitless international travel, ensured by the maritime might of the British imperial navy and their regime of free trade.
At Ellis Island they gave you papers. They didn’t ask for them. They didn’t give a damn who you were or wherever the hell you came from. They didn’t give two shits who you were. They even gave you a name if they couldn’t pronounce yours, just to move your butt through to the American labor market, waiting for you. Immigration authorities sought as quickly as possible to make you more employable!! They checked you for venereal disease and maybe they quarantined you for a little, but then they shoved you the hell on through. Customs agents basically said welcome to America, now get lost. They made it easier, not harder to immigrate. Because in the nineteenth century before class and race became politicized in the progressive and civil rights eras respectively— Americans didn’t give a damn.
And nor should we.
— Jay