Good Intentions Are Irrelevant in Immigration Socialism

As the Austrian school of economic thought has long held, central planning, which is a core principle of socialism, brings what Ludwig von Mises called “planned chaos.” What better term to describe the decades-long, ongoing, never-ending, perpetual immigration crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border that is now expanding nationwide?

As I point out in my new upcoming Amazon Kindle book The Case for Open Borders: A Primer ($.99), the number of immigration central plans is equal to the number of people who believe in America’s socialist system of immigration controls. Some have a central plan to totally seal the border. Others have an “Ellis Island” central plan that will “let in” the vast majority of immigrants. And then there are all the central plans that fall in between these two ends of the central-planning spectrum.

The problem, is I explain in my new book, is that all of these plans vest the federal government with the power to establish a central plan. Once one vests government with the power to determine who will be permitted to enter the United States, one has to accept the distinct possibility that someone else’s central plan is going to be adopted rather than one’s own central plan.

Today there are many advocates of immigration controls who are complaining about President Trump’s central plan and the brutal and vicious way he is enforcing it. What they oftentimes fail to realize is that they themselves, by supporting the overall socialist system of immigration controls, are morally responsible for the outcome that results from the adoption of central plans that they might oppose.

Consider, for example, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, who, as a conservative, favors the federal government’s system of immigration controls. But in her column yesterday, entitled “Stop the ICE Workplace Raids,” she complains about how the system is being run. She wants the Trump administration to stop ICE raids on workplaces. She says that there are countless good illegal immigrants who are making America a better place and that the feds should leave them alone. She just wants the “criminals, thugs and abusers in the country illegally thrown out.”

In other words, her central plan would work differently from Trump’s. Her central plan would target only “bad” illegal immigrants for forcible deportation but permit the “good” illegal immigrations to remain. Under her plan, immigration enforcement would be more enlightened, benign, tolerant, and loving.

But life doesn’t work that way, and neither does socialism. Once people vest government with the power to determine who comes in and who doesn’t, all of them are morally responsible for the outcome of their socialist system, including when a president adopts a central plan that they don’t like.

At the other end of the ideological spectrum, a progressive named Sonia Banker, who serves as the Henry A. Wallace Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, has just written an article entitled “Keep Immigration Raids Out of Schools.” I don’t know if Banker is a supporter of immigration controls or open borders, but I have no doubts that she is expressing a sentiment of many people who favor America’s socialist system of immigration controls but whose own central plans would exempt schools from the police-state enforcement that comes with an immigration-control system.

Again, however, once people delegate to the federal government the power to adopt a socialist immigration control system, they have to realize that it might not be their central plan that is adopted. When it’s someone else’s central plan that is adopted, everyone who supports the immigration-control system is morally responsible for the outcome, even if it’s not what they intended.

Today, there are many people who are complaining about immigration raids on churches. For example, a pastor named Rev. Tanya Lopez recently wrote an op-ed that appeared in USA Today that harshly criticized ICE raids on churches. She passionately wrote, “When ICE agents descend on our neighborhoods, when fear spreads like wildfire, people of faith must be the living water that quenches it.”

But does Lopez favor America’s socialist immigration-control system, and, if so, is she simply complaining that it isn’t being run in accordance with her central plan? She doesn’t say.

As I have pointed out for 35 years here at The Future of Freedom Foundation and as I emphasize in my new upcoming book, there is only one — repeat: only one — solution to ending the decades-old, ongoing, never-ending, perpetual planned chaos along the border, along with the death, suffering, abuse, and ever-widening immigration police state, including violent raids at workplaces, schools, and churches. That solution is open borders — genuine open borders — a system based on economic freedom and free markets — one that involves the abolition of immigration socialism, ICE, the Border Patrol, and all restrictions on the free movements of goods, services, and people across borders.

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