How many pickup trucks with border guards would we need to ensure that the apple crop in the U.S. rots for lack of pickers? Apparently, a lot more than we have. But more importantly, why have we bought into the Republican framing of this issue that requires ever more guards in more pickup trucks and is doomed to failure?
Laws attempting to force people to act counter to their economic interest do not work. I mentioned apple picking but of course there are many jobs that potential immigrants are anxious to do, many of them in the booming construction business. If you listen to the radios at construction job sites, they are not playing the polka.
Yet, Democrats are drawn into a losing game of discussing how many people were arrested, what increasing draconian policies are being enacted, etc.
Of course, the war on foreign workers is a war on jobs and a sure way to boost inflation.
The government could easily give people permits to pick apples, dig foundations or whatever. Why do we need this extended game of cops and robbers with thousands of agents in pickup trucks chasing people who must walk many miles through the dangerous desert?
The answer is pretty simple: the exaggerated fears of the white underclass. Poor whites do not want blacks and Hispanics, who are willing to work hard, to get ahead in this country. They actually call it the “replacement theory.”
Another way they frame it is that if you aren’t “better” than blacks and Hispanics, you aren’t better than anyone. We may need policies to help poor whites improve their situation. We certainly don’t need policies to try to keep them above non-whites. This is what our current border policy essentially is.
We should also consider drugs in the context of border policy. Everything we have ever spent on the “war on drugs” is a direct subsidy to the drug dealers. All the cops and robbers struggle with drugs weeds out the least efficient competitors and keeps prices high. We don’t really want to know the extent to which cops favor certain dealer organizations to keep neighborhoods stable.
Corn is a life-sustaining food. Heroin is a deadly poison. The government supports corn farmers and tries to punish heroin merchants. Corn costs pennies a pound and heroin hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not a coincidence. We’re not ready to address that problem yet.
But we can take action on fentanyl, a very deadly synthetic heroin that kills many people. The tragedy of our war on drugs is that buyers have no idea how strong their narcotics are, and whether they contain fentanyl. We can provide them with test kits that alert them to dangers.
Let’s get out of trying to mimic Republican talking points and embark on a policy that actually fixes the problem.