By Jacob G. Hornberger
There is one good part of President Trump’s war on immigrants: He is proving a point I have long been making — that to win the war on immigrants, it is necessary to destroy freedom in America. Thus, with his war on immigrants, Trump is unwittingly putting Americans, including pro-immigration-control libertarians, in an interesting quandary: Should one continue to support America’s system of immigration controls even though it means forever giving up hope of living in a genuinely free society or should one instead support a system of open borders with the aim of achieving a genuinely free society?
I lived on the U.S.-Mexico border for some 33 years. During that time, I, along with everyone else in the borderlands, experienced what it’s like to live in a police state. As I detail in my upcoming Amazon ebook and audiobook The Case for Open Borders: A Primer, that immigration police state included such police-state measures as warrantless trespasses and searches of ranches and farms on or near the border; internal domestic highway checkpoints that subjected travelers to interrogation, documents examination, and warrantless searches; roving Border Patrol stops and searches; the criminalization of hiring, transporting, and caring for illegal immigrants; forced deportations, and more.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, a police state is the opposite of a free society.
Moreover, as we have learned over the decades, a police state inevitably comes with a system of immigration controls. This is a point that many pro-immigration control libertarians have never wanted to confront. Over the decades, each police-state measure the feds have adopted to prevent unauthorized entry into the United States has obviously failed to achieve its aim. Rather than repeal that police-state measure, however, what the feds have done is just stack more and more police-state measures on top of the previous ones, thereby building and reinforcing the growing borderlands police state.
As I have long maintained, it was just a matter of time before the police state in the borderlands would expand nationwide. There was really no other outcome, given that all the borderlands police-state measures clearly were not achieving their aim of sealing the border. Why, not even the construction of Trump’s Berlin Wall through the stealing of people’s property through eminent domain, or the militarization of the border, or Mexico’s militarization of its side of the border have been enough to win the war on illegal immigration.
President Trump is proving this by now expanding the borderland police state to the rest of the nation. He’s proving that only through such a nationwide expansion can the war on immigrants be won. That’s why he now has U.S. troops occupying Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and is now threatening to order the military occupation of Chicago and other cities across the land. That’s, of course, on top of the immigration raids on private businesses, the warrantless trespasses and searches of private property, the seizure of people in public areas by masked agents in civilian clothes using unmarked vehicles, and other police-state measures.
For those Americans who are finding this militarized way of life uncomfortable, don’t forget that that is how Americans in the borderlands have been living during our entire lifetimes.
Where does it end? Maybe with an economic collapse owing to federal out-of-control spending and debt, combined with some concocted or provoked foreign war. In the case of some government-induced “national emergency,” Americans can forget about protests and demonstrations. Those things don’t happen when troops are occupying cities and communities all across America. Those soldiers will faithfully follow orders to forcibly put down those protests and demonstrations in the name of maintaining “law and order” and keeping Americans “safe” from the “terrorists.” And don’t count on the federal courts to enforce things like habeas corpus, the First Amendment, or due process of law because the Supreme Court will never buck the national-security establishment, especially during a national “emergency.”
Is it possible to totally seal the U.S.-Mexico border? Of course it is. North Korea has proven that with its sealed border with South Korea. But notice the price for doing so: a police state that exists not just on the border but that instead encompasses the entire nation. In the process, North Korean society has been converted into a society that is so ugly and unfree that very few people desire to move there.
President Trump is making the choice clear for Americans, including pro-immigration-control libertarians: Which shall it be: “safety” and “security” with a system of immigration controls along with the immigration police state that comes with it or a system of open borders and the principles of freedom and free markets that come with it.
