Who Would Trade Liberty for Security?

Benjamin Franklin famously stated, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Who would do that? Who would be willing to give up a life of freedom in exchange for being kept “safe,” even temporarily or permanently?

What if every American citizen today were confronted directly with this question: Are you willing to sacrifice your freedom in exchange for temporary safety?

My hunch is that the vast majority of Americans would say, “No way! I consider my freedom too important to exchange for temporary safety.”

Yet, that is precisely what Americans have done and continue to do in the area of immigration.

Decade after decade, border restrictions have grown to such an extent that the borderlands along the U.S.-Mexico border are now a police state. Each time a new police-state measure has been adopted, it’s because the previous police-state measures failed to achieve the goal.

What is the goal? To prevent foreigners from entering the United States without official permission because a small minority of them are dangerous.

With the adoption of each police-state measure, I suspect that most people didn’t realize that their freedom was being destroyed. That’s because people kept their focus on achieving the goal — no more foreigners entering the United States illegally. The goal became so predominant in people’s minds that whatever the federal government needed to do to achieve the goal was considered okay. What people fail to notice was that they were gradually trading away their liberty for temporary safety from the “illegals.”

When I was a kid growing up in the border town of Laredo, Texas, it was not a federal crime to hire an illegal immigrant. We hired illegal immigrants on our farm. We weren’t the only ones in Laredo doing that. Other ranchers and farmers did the same. So did housewives, who hired them as maids, nannies, caretakers, gardeners, and handymen. In fact, as it turned out, countless other Americans across the country were renting, hiring, selling to, and interacting with illegals. That’s reflected by the fact that more than 10 million illegals are now living in the United States.

That obviously meant that the police-state measures that had been enacted, all of which served as destroyers of people’s freedom, had not worked to achieve the goal of stopping illegal entry.

One day, someone got the bright idea of making it a federal criminal offense for Americans to hire illegal immigrants. That was considered to be the surefire way to achieve the goal. After all, if immigrants could’t get jobs, they would no longer come to the United States.

Americans who hired illegal immigrants were now subject to criminal prosecution. Yet, that major police-state measure still didn’t succeed in achieving the goal. Foreigners continued coming into the United States illegally and getting jobs, only now there was one more major police-state measure in place — on top of all the others that preceded it — such as highway checkpoints with warrantless searches, warrantless searches of ranches and farms within 100 miles of the border, random warrantless searches of vehicles near the border, warrantless searches of American citizens returning from abroad, and more.

Recall the Berlin Wall that President Trump constructed along the border. Recall all the hoopla and debate over the wall. Recall all the opposition to the wall, especially among people who were losing their property through eminent domain. Recall all the injuries from people falling from the wall. Recall all the ecological damage from the wall. Everyone was told that a wall would finally accomplish the goal. But what happened? The wall failed to achieve the goal.

Instead, the border police state has now gone nationwide, with assaults on critically important aspects of a free society, such as due process of law and habeas corpus. That’s important because it shows that all those police-state measures in the borderlands failed to achieve the goal. In other words, people traded away their liberty but didn’t get the “safety” they thought they were going to get.

Thus, today it has become obvious that to (possibly) achieve the goal, it is necessary to destroy due process of law and habeas corpus. Most every legal scholar in the land would agree out that these two protections, which stretch back to the Magna Carta, are absolutely essential to a free society.

Yet, there are actually Americans who say, “So be it. We have to achieve the goal. Nothing else matters.” In fact, if freedom were to be totally destroyed through a fully empowered dictatorial presidency that finally achieves a totally sealed border, my hunch is that there are actually some Americans who will say, “The loss of our liberty is worth it because we achieved temporary safety.”

But will it really be worth it? I say no. I’m with Ben Franklin. I say liberty is too valuable to trade away for “safety,” either temporary or permanent.

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