Why I'm Not Worried About Illegal Immigration

Illegal immigration has been a hot button issue during the recent news cycle with Trump getting elected and many former libertarians jumping on the nationalist bandwagon. Me personally, I remain libertarian, and I reject the notion that illegal immigration is a serious problem for freedom. I don't think that it's going to cause the demise of Western Society as some are saying. I can’t exactly speak to the situation in Europe because I've never even set foot there, but as for here in the U.S., I’m certainly unconvinced of that anyway.

I come at this from a rule that I've developed over the last decade or so of looking at societal ills. Now that I've connected many of those dots over that time period, I just short circuit to the question: "How is the government helping to cause this problem?" It's a very good question to ask because it's almost always the case that it is in some way.

So I look at the illegal immigration problem and ask how government is causing it. Well, first off, they've created the problem in the first place by making a group of criminals out of people who simply want to live in a new place. They haven't said, "come here freely, unless you want to violate the rights of our citizens." They've instead said, “you can't come here at all unless you get our permission, then when you do get here we'll help you violate the rights of our citizens if you vote for us.” You see the problem in this scenario isn't immigrants, the problem is the government. Without the government program called legal immigration, we wouldn’t have created these incentives for ne’er-do-wells to come here and screw us over.

I've heard the argument that if we let illegal immigrants come into the United States, they're going to illegally vote Democrat, along with their now legal children who will vote Democrat as well and then the socialists are going to politically overwhelm us. Having lived in Southern California over the last decade, I can say that I've met my fair share of people who come from Central and South America. Some of them are even illegal immigrants. As far as their belief systems go, it's been my observation that they resemble the conservative rural catholic people I grew up around in Upstate New York a lot more than your typical bleeding heart "liberals," who from urban and suburban areas here and vote Democrat. So what's the problem with them then?

Well, in my opinion the problem isn't with the immigrants, it's a problem of marketing. In many libertarians' quest for tribal solidarity with conservatives, they found the need to reject the very libertarian principles that held them all together in order to create an 'other' to fight against. Instead of trying to sell libertarian principals to these people that are the "enemy" of freedom, they've decided to be nationalists and exclude them from the discussion altogether, all but ensuring that the immigrants will in fact be the enemy and vote against them.

What's most insane about this whole libertarians-gone-nationalist thing is the notion that we're going to take a government program that's designed to keep people out of our borders, and use that to shrink said government. In keeping with the rule I talked about in the beginning of this post, I must ask another question: "Does the government have a strong track record of shrinking government when it is tasked with doing so?" The answer is a resounding NO.

The USA was created as an experiment in small government, in which government itself would be hacked by the founders with a constitution that will cause it to limit its own power. Well, we've all seen the results of that. It ended up being the largest, most powerful government that was ever conceived by man. It's pretty safe to assume at this point that with most of what the government sets out to do, it will end up doing the opposite in the end. Declare war on poverty, you get more poverty. Declare war on terrorism, you get more terror. Declare war on drugs, you get bigger problems with drug addiction. This immigration issue will be no exception. Just like you can't make your economy stronger by stealing from the wealthy people and giving it to incompetent politicians, you're not going to shrink big government by growing it in some areas. This is the classic Republican line that has grown government in areas like “national security” and the police state while doing nothing about the welfare state and other leftist encroachments upon freedom. It is simply just being extended to the immigration issue.

That said, I cannot, and will not support the idea that a clamp down on illegal immigration is going to amount to a hill of beans in the quest to shrink big government. In fact, I think it's ultimately going to grow it in ways we haven't foreseen. This isn't because I have some crystal ball and I can see the future. No, it's because I've studied the past and I've seen this story before. It always ends the same way.

Image sources: Flag and Constitution