Borderline Insanity: My Two Cents on the Illegal Immigration Debate

This is not a discussion of Immigration. Immigration is a regulated activity in which nations screen and permit persons to enter and become citizens. It is a concept codified by law, enshrined in the American psyche, and immortalized on our Statue of Liberty. It is not the topic of this essay.

Every nation has requirements for the legal immigration of foreign persons and their assimilation into citizenship. Some countries base their policies on ethnicity, some base them on wealth or education, and still others base it on ideology. A sure sign of a failed state is one that has no coherent immigration policies or cannot competently enforce them.

In that respect, the United States is beginning to look kind of sad: there are an estimated 10-12 million illegal immigrants in the US, and an estimated 500,000 being added each year. In contrast, the U.S. ordered to be deported, on average, just over 200,000 illegal residents per year over the last decade. Of these, it is estimated that barely 20% actually left the United States.

It is an issue which has heated up in the wake of an Arizona state law, which essentially makes a number of unenforced federal statutes state crimes. The federal requirement for legal immigrants to carry identification, for example, is cited for enforcement under the Arizona statute, yet has been decried by critics, including the President, as being excessive. Given that most of the prominent critics of the law, including the Attorney General, have admitted that they have not yet read the statute speaks poorly of us all.

Many critics have charged this law is racist, as some form of Hispanophobia. Given that more than 80% of the people who enter this country every year illegally are from Central/Latin America, the entanglement with racial politics is unavoidable but hardly intentional. Demographic conflicts are rarely theoretical – the Irish “Troubles”, for example, polarized along both nationalist as well as religious lines, but that did not make the issue one primarily of religion. The illegal immigration issue is similarly not primarily about race. It’s about security and economics.

The southern border of the United States is completely porous, allowing half a million people to enter illegally every year. Amongst those are hard-working honest people, to be sure, but also smugglers, gang members, criminals (both petty and grand), and terrorists. 80% of the cocaine and 50% of the heroin entering the U.S. come in that way. The inability to prevent harmful people from entering the country makes a joke of almost every other security precaution. It’s the kind of thing that makes failed states so chaotic – the government has no legitimacy over large numbers of residents.

Economically, illegal immigration is “death by a thousand cuts.” The government estimates that over 2 million jobs are filled annually by “undocumented workers” rather than citizens, something which clearly impacts on the current 10% unemployment and Welfare costs. It is estimated that over $45 billion are spent educating, medicating, and incarcerating illegal residents, and that another $30 billion or more leaves the US economy each year as remittances to family members back “home.” In Los Angeles, 90% of the outstanding warrants are for illegal immigrants, illustrating how emergency rooms, schools, and courts are being overwhelmed contending with persons who nominally have no claim to the benefits and privileges of legal residency or citizenship.

For all of that, illegal residents account for barely 3% of the US population, and most of them are from south of our borders. This is what essayist Malcolm Gladwell calls “a power curve problem” rather than a bell-curve problem. With bell-curve problems (widely distributed across a population), broad solutions are best. With power-curve problems, the most effective solutions are surgical and specific.

That means that the solutions to our failed-state immigration woes should be specific to our southern borders and to our southern neighbors, something which both the Left and the Right routinely resist for different ideological reasons. Conservatives often view such solutions as “rewarding the unworthy”, and Liberals see them as “targeting the innocent.”

We should all start thinking of it as “exerting our sovereignty,” and taking the necessary and potentially difficult steps to make it a reality. Continuing to do the same thing but expecting a different outcome is, after all, the classic definition of insanity.

David J. Aland is a retired Naval Officer with a graduate degree in National Security Affairs from the U. S. Naval War College.

Oh, THANK you, Mr. Aland. A voice of reason and sanity in an otherwise world bereft of its senses. My head was starting to hurt again with all this talk of ethnic bias and racial profiling. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Geez, just when you figure you’re going to need something much stronger than an aspirin, along comes sanity.

Good article. Very true. We have allowed almost complete flaunting of the immigration in regard to Mexico.

Funny how it works ... that law respecting people abide by the law. The illegals do not. They commit crimes, sexual, drunk driving, fights, drugs, gangs, burglary, home invasions, stealing ,,, etc.

For years the influx was not major. Now it is raised to a national threat level, in regard to allowing them free healthcare, schooling, education, and taking jobs. Food stamps. etc. They send much money our of the U.S.. It results in money not in circulation here, which means fewer businesses amd less workers, etc. Many do not learn English. Drive without licenses, have no insurance and run stop signs as a rule.

Schools teach the children in Spanish.

Anchor babies must be changed by law. We are in Big trouble.

God loves all people of good will that come to Him and desire salvation. Which changes a person inside and they are transformed over time. God bless America, and the lost among the peoples, in Jesus name, amen.

I am convinced that the current number of illegal intruders is much closer to 55 million.

That is far over the 3% referred to in this article.

It is much closer to 16% of the occupants of the USA.

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