According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, after federal immigration-control officials charged five Mexican citizens with the deaths of four illegal immigrants from drowning, including two children, Shawn Gibson, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego, stated, “Smugglers often treat people as disposable commodities. Yesterday’s heartbreaking events are a stark reminder of the urgent need to dismantle these criminal networks driven by greed.”
Gibson has it partly right and partly wrong.
He is correct in pointing out that “smugglers treat people like disposable commodities.” But he ignores something important — that U.S. officials also treat illegal immigrants as garbage. Just ask any of those immigrants who are now residing in that torture-based “terrorism confinement prison” in El Salvador, thanks to their illegal deportations at the hands of U.S. immigration officials.
Gibson is also correct in pointing out the “urgent need to dismantle these criminal networks driven by greed.” But he ignores something important: It is impossible to do so because the immigration-control system that Gibson is part of guarantees the continued existence of this black-market activity. That’s what the economic law of supply and demand is all about.
Most importantly, Gibson fails to point out that he and other proponents and enforcers of the federal government’s system of immigration controls are morally responsible for the deaths of those immigrants, including the dead children. When Gibson and other federal officials point their fingers of blame at the people who were transporting those immigrants, they need to remember that they have three other fingers pointing back at themselves.
It is the federal government’s immigration-control system that gives rise to a black market in illegal smuggling and transportation of immigrants. If their federal immigration-control system didn’t exist, immigrants would be free to enter the United States like human beings by walking or driving across an international bridge or other official crossing point.
By making it illegal for immigrants to freely do that, immigrants seek other ways to enter the United States to work, with the aim of saving or improving their lives and the lives of their families, including their children. That’s how black markets operate. Make a peaceful activity illegal and immediately unsavory people who don’t give a hoot for the welfare of their customers come into existence to offer their services. The harsher the crackdown on illegal immigration, the more dangerous and more expensive the illegal black-market alternatives become.
Of course, we have seen this picture any number of times. Just recently, two men were convicted in San Antonio of illegally transporting immigrants who died from heat in the back of their tractor-trailer. In that case, we heard the standard indignant denunciations from U.S. officials — the same types of denunciation issued by U.S. immigration-control official Shawn Gibson.
Of course, none of these federal people ever take moral responsibility for what they have wrought — and continue to wreak — with their rotten, corrupt, immoral, and evil immigration-control system and the horrific and deadly black market that comes with it. The fact is that federal officials are as responsible for the deaths of these innocent people as the human smugglers they condemn.
This article was published by The Future of Freedom Foundation.
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