Seeing the large number of immigrants illegally entering the United States, proponents of immigration controls decry what they label the “open border” between the United States and Mexico.
I live in Virginia. I sometimes enter Maryland by crossing the bridge that spans the Potomac River, which forms part of the border between the two states. There is no border-control station at which Maryland officials require me to stop and be subjected to questions and have my vehicle searched. There are also no border patrol agents patrolling the border to ensure that no one is entering Maryland illegally.
That’s what “open borders” means. No border checkpoints. No border guards. No stopping vehicles to examine people’s papers or search their vehicles. Simply unrestricted movements of people across a border.
Having lived more than 3 decades in a border town along the Texas-Mexican border, I can attest that that is definitely not the situation when one crosses the border from Mexico to the United States. When one crosses one of the bridges that spans the Rio Grande, one encounters a massive border-control station, where border guards stop vehicles, demand to see proper papers, and subject both people and vehicles to intensive and intrusive searches.
That’s not all. Since migrants are determined to circumvent those border-control stations, tens of thousands of Border Patrol agents patrol the borderlands to catch, arrest, prosecute, and deport them. These agents have been vested with the power to enter on to private farms and ranches, including those located many miles from the border, without search warrants to search for illegal immigrants.
There are also fixed highway checkpoints that require vehicles that have never entered Mexico to stop, respond to questions, produce papers, and be subjected to a warrantless search.
There are also roving Border Patrol stops and searches, where vehicles are stopped at random and subjected to questioning and search.
There is also a Berlin Wall along the border.
The latest addition is concertina wire strategically placed in the Rio Grande to cut up immigrants or even kill them, in order to deter others from illegally entering the United States.
All this is what is called an immigration police state, which is the exact opposite of an open border. A police state is also the exact opposite of a free society. A police state is what Cuba and North Korea are. Those two communist countries also have highway checkpoints, warrantless searches, and other police-state measures. The only difference is that Americans have been indoctrinated into believing that their immigration police state is “freedom.”
What do we call it then when large numbers of migrants are circumventing a massive immigration police state and illegally entering the United States?
We call it an immigration police state that isn’t working. That is, no matter how much the statists crack down with their immigration police state, their efforts do not succeed in attaining their goal, which is to totally shut down the entry of illegal immigrants into the United States.
What if U.S. officials decide to enforce their immigration police state in a more lax manner, which thereby enables more migrants to illegally enter the United States than what would be the case if the police state was more harshly enforced? You still don’t have open borders. Instead, you have a police state that is simply not being enforced as harshly as before.
What proponents of immigration controls cannot bring themselves to confront and accept is that their immigration-control system and their immigration police state simply don’t work. They’ve never worked. And they will never work in the future. That’s because their system is based on the socialist principle of central planning, which is inherently incapable of working.
But holding up the term “personal responsibility” to an immigration-control advocate is like holding up a crucifix to a vampire. Agghhh! It is their inability to confront and accept the failure of their own statist system that causes proponents of immigration controls to instead blame “open borders” for the immigration chaos that they lament and that their own socialist system of immigration controls has caused.
This article was published by The Future of Freedom Foundation.
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