The False Dichotomy of Modern US Foreign Policy - and Real Alternatives to It.

As a follow-up to the discussion of immigration and the pointing out of the recent reversing of polarities in regards to this issue between supposed liberals and conservatives, I thought I would point out a few unfortunately obscure scientific and historical facts surrounding foreign policy: an issue integrally tied to immigration that has also seen a shift in polarities in recent decades, and one that has left American voters without a scientifically valid choice between the major parties whatsoever.

The modern foreign policy debate seems to dwindle down to a false dichotomy between Democratic and Republican Party lines; with both alternatives so deeply flawed that debates tend to quickly degenerate into mudslinging, leaving the American voter with the abysmal choice of which is the lesser evil. The choices in question, for those who live under a rock, are globalist institutionalism in the case of the Democrats, and George W. Bush style unilateral nationalism when it comes to the Republicans.

The criticisms of both are familiar to most Americans who are even marginally interested in politics, but for the sake of convincing those who honestly believe one is in any way more redeemable than the other, it helps to review them and why, even when approached with the noblest of intentions, they are simply incompatible with reality.

Nationalism:

George W. Bush's ineptitude as an orator and PR-retaining politician left him open to some of the most brutal and accusatory criticisms of a president in US history. But leaving all the colloquial conjecture about implied racism, ethnocentrism, Christian fundamentalism and other liberal buzz-words to muck-raking clowns like Michael Moore, it is important to determine what about GWB's policies led to the disastrous consequences they resulted in, and more importantly, what historical trends and figures they resembled.

George W. Bush's stated position on the Afganistan and Iraq invasions, as well as his discourse on other threats to US security such as North Korea, Iran and Syria, always adopted a sort of liberal humanitarianism rather than brutal ethnocentric supremacy. In attempts to garner support for his invasions, Bush Jr. didn't limit himself to pointing out that these countries were dangerous because they housed terrorists; he went into detailed descriptions of the dictatorial brutality of both the Taliban and Saddam Hussein's Ba'athists, insisting that these governments' refusal to cooperate with global institutions and radical anti-US sentiment did not represent the will of their people, and that the goal of our invasions was not only to eliminate the threats both presented and harbored by these governments, but to rebuild those countries in a way that guarantee a better life for their citizens and security for the rest of the world. My purpose here is not to judge whether or not GWB believed in this rhetoric - dubbed "nation-building" - or had ulterior motives, but it is difficult to make a case that ethnocentrism was any sort of driving force behind it, even if some of his supporters hold him in high regard due to their own ethnocentric convictions.

The problem with this type of foreign policy, and it is far older than many Bush supporters tend to realize or admit, is that it has an historical tendency to accomplish the exact opposite of what it intends to do. You will recall from Premise 2 that even the most brutal totalitarian dictatorships rule through compliance rather than coercion, although non-compliance becomes far more costly in a repressive environment and thus conditions must be far worse in order for it to happen. In consistency with this premise, the grand majority of brutal dictatorships come to power through feverish popular support, even if not by means legitimately accepted by the system they replace, and then succeed in making non-compliance far more costly by the time it may be turned on them. This feverish support is most often a form of non-compliance against the status-quo they come to replace, often quickly forgotten in light of the successors' own brutality, but instrumental in their coming to power. Adolf Hitler was formally elected Chancellor of Germany TWICE, popular first and foremost for his stark German nationalism that opposed the Weimar government's acceptance of Germany's status as a secondary economic power to the winners of WWI. Many of the radical communist elements of the Cold War era - the Viet Cong, Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas - although coming to power through force, nevertheless had powerful popular support and were seen as the only alternative with the power to take on the oppressive and unaccountable status quo that preceded them. Our modern enemies are no different. The subversive elements of the Saudi government that relentlessly fund and abet terrorist groups, including Al Quaeda, openly admit that their #1 enemy is the Saudi monarchy due to its having sold out the country's national sovereignty to the west. Saddam Hussein, who let's not forget was a US colonial puppet for over a decade before he became a thorn in our side, was also very high on their enemies list. As for Iran's assinine and unapologetic Islamic theocracy and its smaller Shi-ite extremist offshoots like Hamas, they too initially garnered support as alternatives to what locals saw as the US puppetry of their governments, particularly the Shah, and by some accounts were aided by the CIA in seizing power to avoid the alternative of a Communist insurgency doing so. Soviet puppet dictatorships, like mid-1900s Egypt, equally made the list of these insurgencies' targets.

Whether the governments these elements replaced or hope to replace were deposed legitimately or violently, they share one common element, and that is that every one of them was either installed by an earlier version of foreign intervention, or at the very least kept in power by it long after it had any domestic legitimacy. Weimar Germany was the product of Allied Powers Treaties in the 1920s. Most Latin American governments brutally opposed by Communist insurgencies - including those deposed by them - were the descendents of Creole revolutions that declared their independence from European powers. The original United States only guaranteed political participation and proprietary rights to land-owning white males, a normal phase of development for the late 18th century that slowly expanded these rights in later decades to other sectors of the population. It is no surprise then that many other American governments shared the US's legalized political and economic inequality at their inception. The difference was that when the indifferent hand of natural selection showed up in the form of political elements seeking reform and rights guarantees within the bounds of the systems in place, the US and Western European powers - many of the latter still under the control of accountability-devoid monarchies or aristocractic legislatures - threw their weight behind the incumbent systems in an effort to protect the economic interests of their domestic corporations, usually in the form of force. Similar patterns are observable in East Asia and the Middle East, in these cases in the form of domestic nationalist and economic rights elements' decades of fruitlessly seeking not necessarily independence from European Empires, but the recognition of their proprietary rights and equal participation in the political system (recognition of labor and agrarian unions as legal organizations, ending tax code loopholes for foreign corporations, etc.); efforts thwarted often violently by governments protecting the interests of their corporations.

I am not here to discuss the morality of the colonial policies mentioned above nor that of the reactionary brutality of the zealot revolutionary elements these ultimately bred. But the former as a response to peaceful political efforts at reform, often in unapologetic compliance with foreign interest, tends to bolster the popularity of the latter, often laced with religious extremism as in the case of Islamists or class warfare extremism as in the case of Communist guerillas during the Cold War. And interestingly enough, the rhetoric used by the colonizing governments undertaking these policies was often similar within the context of their time to that used by George W. Bush - a need to preserve cultural civility in the face of the brutal savagery of the adversary. There is no apology for the Viet Cong or for Al Quaeda, they deserve every bit of negative press they have received and far more, but what the bearers of the status quo neglect to mention is that the sociopathy of these elements only becomes popular enough to pose any real threat to civility and safety as a result of decades of the corruption of their predecessors and the repression of those who opposed them civilly, often quielty upheld and encouraged by the foreign governments these animals so fervently oppose.

Some moderate neo-cons will concede that past imperialism has created these problems, but make the argument that now that we have created these enemies for ourselves, it is our responsibility to ourselves and the entire world to stop them. In terms of intent, this may not be a bad principle to adhere to, but in practice, nation-building simply does not accomplish this. Saddam's Iraq was a brutal and anti-American dictatorship, but one thing it was not was any sort of Muslim theocracy. Since its destabilization, Islamic Fundamentalists have sprung up in Iraq like mushrooms in shit, fed resources by established Islamists like the Iranian government and elements of the Saudi, and fodder for their violence by the economic instability caused by decades of foreign (our) involvement. Most Iraquis, according to statistics as well as accounts of veterans who have been to Iraq, detest the idiots running around blowing themselves up, but are also wary of the US presence as they see it as responsible for this phenomenon. They want self-government that keeps the fundamentalist criminals under control, but realize that upon the withdrawal of US troops, this can only be accomplished through the election of a new Saddam that is able to take on them and the support they receive from foreign Islamist governments, who have now successfully grown into a colonizing force of their own. The Taliban in Afganistan were an example of colonization by these same powers following a decade and a half of a Cold War front that left a weak and unpopular government in charge. In the Cold War era, parallels could be drawn between such countries and Viet Nam, Nicaragua, Cuba, Peru, Guatemala, and just about any Cold War front. Even where the US government succeeded in keeping the insurgents from toppling its puppet government in place, not one case exists in which it was able to eliminate them completely in light of their support from established Communist dictatorships (the USSR, China, and later Cuba). Chasing them around the Asian and South American jungles in which they hid became an insatiable toilet for US resources, and the excesses required to expedite this a non-expendable source of young and bitter displaced souls that became fodder for their ranks. Meanwhile, the real enemy in Moscow had every opportunity to exploit this wastefulness. A similar parallel can be drawn surrounding the pre-WWII stand-off between the Allied Powers of the West and Stalin's USSR and Hitler's Germany; in which hysteria on the part of more democratic western states (US, UK, France) regarding the looming deposition of monarchic governments in secondary European powers (Spain, Italy, Portugal, various Austria-Hungary successor-states) resulting in the coming to power of Stalin and Hitler sympathizers caused the former to futilly fund the monarchies and attempt to keep them in power. This gave the opposition no choice but to turn into violent militias seeking support from the USSR and Germany, and just about every single state in this category eventually fell into the hands of a brutal totalitarian dictatorship that resembled Germany and the USSR even if it did not support them; all while the real enemy sat in Moscow and Berlin, mobilizing their resources for war and acquiring fodder from these bughunts, openly admitting to an agenda of global domination.

If there IS any need for military action against dangerous regimes, the regimes that qualify would be the new colonizer hopefuls that prevent places like Iraq and Afganistan from governing themselves, undoubtedly created by our own foresight-devoid meddling, but arguably the source of the threat that becomes more powerful every time we waste our resources on the fallacy of containment. However, as will become evident in the following discussion, even such intervention is not necessary.

Globalism:

In contrast to nationalism, far fewer arguments are made that challenge the humanitarian nature of diplomacy and attempts to solve international crises through treaties and other institutions. If anything, popular detractors from Obama's attempts to employ the UN in dealing with Iran, just as detractors from JFK's dealing with the USSR and FDR's dealing with the USSR, Hitler's Germany and Imperial Japan before them, tend to paint these policies as treason and the surrendering of American sovereignty to the will of dictators who wish to destroy our way of life. Yet in a sense, globalists agree with the nationalist ideals of GWB described above, they just seek out a different approach to accomplish the same goals. Institutionalists attempt to reach out to the constituencies of these murderous governments, hoping to instill in them the sense that we are not the enemy and are willing to appease their "way of life" (that their government dictates) but in return they must become less radical and accept ours. The obvious problem this approach is oblivious to is that these governments do not represent their constituencies in any significant form so any attempt to appease them by appeasing their government breeds indifference at best and hostility at worst. Furthermore, the majority of these governments have their domestic media on a tight leash and do not allow foreign media in their countries, allowing them to edit and censor the words of our leaders and continue to make the west appear as the enemy. However, these obstacles are only in the tip of the iceberg.

The real problem with institutional globalism is that, like nation-building and often in parallel to it, it tends to accomplish the opposite of its intention. International institutions, whether formal organizations like the UN or treaties and pacts, lack any significant power of enforcement. Put simply, the murderous regimes who enter into agreements not to build weapons or support insurgencies in exchange for humanitarian aid to their starving populations and the disarmament of their adversaries have absolutely no real incentive to follow through on their end of the deal. The USSR consistently cheated on every arms and non-proliferation treaty during the Cold War, just as it and Hitler's Germany continued to fund insurgencies in unstable European countries and build weapons in the pre-WWII days, while the naive suckers on the western side of these treaties foolishly adhered to them. It is naive to believe that modern Iran and North Korea do not continue to actively pursue nuclear weapon programs, or that Islamist governments do not find ways to funnel money into insurgencies in places like Iraq and Afganistan. When caught red-handed doing so, as has happened to every government mentioned multiple times, they respond by making a speech peppered with inconsistencies that make our most inept politicians sound credible, and then proceed to enter into a new treaty that makes additional demands on the west in exchange for them adhering to what they have already signed onto. It is silly to even bring discussions of morality or honesty into this picture - these are criminal governments accountable to no one that have no incentive to follow through on their promises, only a complete idiot would believe that they will do so anyway.

The fundamental problem of the above scenario is one few people in the modern US are familiar with, and it is also the reason nation-building is neither a necessity in light of globalism's failure nor an alternative to it. Put simply, another consistent trend among totalitarian regimes is an abysmal economic incompetence. Despite a wealth of natural resources unmatched by any country in the world, the USSR's 70 year history was peppered with shortages, famines, disastrously low GDP per capita and standards of living; along with the secondary effects of sky-rocketing black markets and organized violent crime. Iran is more homogeneous and less restrictive economically, but it too significantly underperforms its capacity of productivity when its natural resources and wealth are taken into account. There is no need to even point out the colossal economic failure of places like North Korea, Cuba and Hugo Chavez's Venezuela - photos of famined children are the trademark association with these countries for most Americans, and somehow no one asks the question how these governments stay in power with all their natural wealth and such abysmal distribution. The correlation of militance and economic failure is not coincidental. Even if it does not nominally declare itself a state-run economy, a totalitarian regime has an inherent need to bring many sectors of the economy under its unilateral control to prevent the growth of opposition and freedom of expression. Government-run economies are colossally inefficient, and simply cannot mobilize their resources in a way that allows them to build a world-class military and avoid famines at the same time. Need I point out that the United States' commitment to a free market economy, despite our disastrous experiments with government involvement in certain economic sectors, has allowed us to never fail to accomplish both at the same time, even during prolonged military conflicts like WWII?

Premise 2 suggests that after a decade or two of allowing famines in order to build weapons, even the most heavily brainwashed and idealistic population becomes wary of their government and in light of starvation and extreme shortages of other necessities, non-compliance becomes less and less costly. This is why, after a decade or two of arms races, the dictators in charge of these crippled economies tend to approach their sworn enemies in search of arms treaties in exchange for hand-outs. Joseph Stalin managed to acquire a nuclear bomb for the USSR, but the 7 years following his death in 1953 were some of the most desolate in the USSR's history - a result of both agricultural and industrial sectors of the economy crippled by lack of sound economic mobilization, brutal executions of professionals to instill compliance, and an infrastructure destroyed by corruption and unaccountabiliy due to a system that left no incentives to the contrary. Eisenhower - a WWII General who had witnessed the Soviet military with his own eyes and was well-aware of that regime's incompetence - refused to enter into any deals with the USSR, and by 1960 the country was literally on the verge of famine-driven dissolution. In globalist JFK, Nikita Chruschev saw the opportunity to exchange disarmament and limited emigration for humanitarian aid, and the array of treaties in the ensuing decade was what allowed the USSR to sustain itself, and the eventual deposition of Chruschev by the Brezhnev regime. When Brezhnev died in 1982, the USSR again saw its impending dissolution by means of shortages and famines left behind by his incompetence, but Reagan refused to accomodate Gorbachev's bid for a new treaty in 1985 - agreeing to humanitarian aid but refusing any kind of arms argeement, essentially telling Comrade General Secretary that the US and its flourishing free market economy would build all the weapons we wanted, and he and his bankrupt socialism were welcome to try to keep up. Gorbachev is documented to have admitted in the same meeting that this was the end of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent domino effect by which it fell apart in the next 6 years proved him right. Had Reagan accomodated Gorbachev, who was admittedly not a hard-liner and somewhat well-intentioned, Gorbachev would have in all likelihood been deposed by the next Stalinist extremist in the same way Chruschev was. A half-ass attempt at this occured in the final months of the USSR in 1991, but by this point the citizens were so disillusioned with the regime that nobody, not even the military, supported the failed coup, which lasted a measley four days. Other examples exist on a smaller scale, with modern dictators Saddam Hussein, Hugo Chavez, Kim Il Jong, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and others all having routinely received various forms of aid for their starving masses and struggling economies in exchange for various concessions and treaties that they have no incentive to follow. The result is a weakened defense for the United States and our allies as we sheepishly follow the agreements while they do not, and just enough empowerment for them to keep arming themselves and meddling in the affairs of other countries without having to worry about their own populace deposing them in famine-driven riots.

The ALTERNATIVE

And THAT is the alternative to both globalism and nationalism that allows the defeat of totalitarian aggressors. This notion of letting them choke on their own economic incompetence may seem oversimplified or far-feteched, but history shows us time and again that it is the only reliable and permanent means of neutralizing a threat.
Interestingly enough, until recent decades at least one major party in the US has always advocated this take on foreign policy - at least openly, while the other major party typically opposed it with ideas collectively called "progressive," which often meant nation-building and globalism in parallel - FDR's dealing with the USSR and Hitler's Germany in the 1930s an avid example. The party positions on this have not always been the same. Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, was the progressive of his time, but later in the 20th century Democrats like Wilson, FDR, JFK and LBJ took to this mentality. Their opposition - William H. Taft, Calvin Coolige, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan - were by no means saints or strict adherents to non-interventionism, all of them can be traced to funding pro-US coups against governments perceived as threatening (a la Pinochet's Chile) and meddling in other countries' affairs in a somewhat nationalist fashion. However, the difference is that most of these administrations did so in secret because their constituency at the time would not have supported it, and that covert interventions or even very limited overt ones like Reagan's one-night bombing raid on Grenada waste far fewer resources and typically have smaller long-lasting effects. Regardless of this, there is no apology for their breaks with the philosophies they ran on - they mostly qualify as covert nationalism and have backfired in the same ways qualitatively as did overt nationalism, just sometimes on a smaller scale. Their successes are the examples in which they adhered to their non-interventionist models, like the Eisenhower and Reagan policies described above.

"Isolationism," by the way, does not refer to this type of foreign policy - it was a term used by more liberal progressives to accuse FDR of using globalist tactics but not military intervention against the USSR and Hitler's Germany in the 1930s.

The blurring of party lines by itself has always been a reality in this country, but the virtual elimination of a representation of this option by either major party over the last two and a half decades has seen a prolonged period of dangerous and destablizing policies in the international arena. Modern elements that seek to change major party philosophies from within, particularly Tea Partiers and their closer affiliation to the Republicans but stark contrast to the neo-conservative status quo, owe their popularity in part to this lack of real choice between the major parties, of which this foreign policy false dichotomy is but one example. These elements are correct in pointing out that the foreign policy prescribed by Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers is this exact non-interventionism, as described by his "Good relations with all nations, entangling alliances with none". The enemies of the original United States were the mind-numbingly self-righteous European monarchies that had the world divided into poorly controlled colonial holdings, and Jefferson realized that their incompetence and unpopularity at home and in these holdings would not allow them to compete militarily with the flourishing free market capitalism of the United States. He would turn over in his grave at both nation-builders referring to their meddling in other countries' affairs as "capitalism," and globalists' and insurgencies' citing their opposition to these policies as "dismantling capitalism". Capitalism implies that the government stays out of the economy, and this includes the economies of foreign countries even if our corporate interests are invested there. The labor elements in those countries are perfectly capable of instilling reform to gain fair market condition agreements from their foreign employers - a perfectly acceptable bargaining component of capitalism. Their government and ours using force to keep this from happening eliminates any qualification for the situation being called a free market, and often breeds the militantly anti-free market elements that mistake corporate cronyism for Jeffersonian capitalism.

It is true that nationalism and globalism, even in their crudest forms, do attempt to offset certain losses for their constituencies. Namely, even the most ethnocentric nationalism can be seen as beneficial to the country engaging in it - moral arguments notwithstanding, preventing people in less developed countries from competing with our corporations in a free market fashion allows our corporations to make better profits, which contrary to popular belief usually do translate into a higher standard of living for us - lower prices, higher tax revenues, capital gains for domestic investors, etc. Similarly, globalism attempts to circumvent both the necessity for violence - whether war against the agressor or violent domestic revolution - and famines and extreme shortages; humanitarian goals that many people consider important to their self-interest in the modern world and can save our military's lives and resources. However, seeing as science seeks optimal solutions and accepts that perfect ones are impossible, these policies have to be weighed in a cost-benefit analysis of their actual impact rather than their intent, and the myriad of historical examples illustrate their abysmal results. Nationalism bolsters the popularity and power of violent opposition, which eventually ends up costing the colonizing country far more in resources than it saves in the short term by offsetting competition; and globalism may forego harsh economic and social conditions to some degree, but it also perpetuates them for far longer abroad and exponentiates the threat the governments responsible for them present to the country engaging in these policies. Self-interest dictates that people will compete for their personal gain, and will turn to violence for this purpose if necessary; furthermore, in the case of totalitarian brutality already in place, some internal violence is often required to depose it and is a necessary cost to prevent it from causing many more problems. Policies that don't take these trends into consideration are unrealistic - regardless of their intent - and result in far greater costs, both economic and social, to the constituencies they try to protect. I urge you to fire politicians who have a track record for supporting such policies, and avoid hiring new ones that promote them.

Border Control - The undocumented failure of hysteria-fed government intervention.

Presented without all the insipidly catchy political buzzwords used by both sides of the spectrum, the idea that a human being living in one place on Earth needs the express, written permission of another human being to relocate - regardless of whether this means a few blocks or to another continent, - if he is able to sustain his own existance in the new location, seems like the absolute worst brand of tyranny imaginable to most people. But, interestingly enough, the issue of immigration control both in the US and in Europe tends to span party lines, and even some of the most blatantly anti-government people I have come across personally seem to believe that on this issue, the government is doing too little rather than too much. The arguments in favor of immigration control presented by every type of supporter and from every perspective, although very different in their reasoning and backing, tend to fall into two basic categories.

The first category are concerns associated with simple, ignorance-induced hysteria. Arguments that fall into this category claim uncontrolled borders leave the door open to terrorists, criminals and foreign spies, that immigrants suck up government benefits intended for tax-paying citizens, or even cultural arguments that immigrants do not "assimilate" and end up subverting the culture of their destination country. While the concerns voiced by these arguments are very serious, science has proven time and time again that neither lack of immigration control or failure of immigration control is correlated with any of these problems, nor has it ever been, anywhere.

The second category of arguments in favor of controlling immigration is made up of more scientific, usually far less hysterical concerns that really do correlate with immigration, although the legal status of it tends to have little correlation with them in either direction. The arguments in this category would include questions with no easy answers related to immigration, such as laws regarding labor law enforcement, taxation and electoral representation that are fair to both them and native-born residents, and a variety of other intricate legal details that are very difficult to apply to undocumented residents and pose potential threats to both them and the country they are coming into. It is rare to hear these arguments in the media or any type of public discourse, because as we have discussed numerous times, they fall under scientific questions rather than ideological hysteria, and the former does not have nearly the entertainment potential of the latter. However, the general trend with these seems to be that, while they are real concerns, their existance has been brought about by decades of excessive regulation, particularly the 20th century obsession of western governments with documentation. They are a clear case of what libertarians like to call the government breaking the citizens' legs, and then giving them a crutch and saying that without it, they couldn't walk.

To address the hysteria category, all that is necessary is to cite a few facts that dispel the catchy but ridiculous myths many Americans accept on faith without ever considering checking the source for themselves.


Myth 1 - "DANGEROUS ILLEGALS"

It is not difficult to instill hysteria in people by pointing out that unsecured borders allow terrorists to get into the country undetected, along with the older breed of hostile foreigners called spies or saboteurs. And of course, generic brand violent criminals - rapists, murderers, robbers, etc. - can cross the border with the same ease. However, inconvenient facts demonstrate that Americans should not lie awake at night worrying about this "potential risk" concern:

- No known act of international terrorism or war on US soil to date has been committed by an immigrant who illegally crossed a US border, EVER. A relative few Islamists who have committed acts of terrorism on US soil in the last 2 decades had overstayed their visas; 4 out of the 19 9/11 high-jackers fell into this category, the rest of them were LEGALLY in the US on a variety of visas intended for students or tourists. However, one more time, EVERY ONE of them entered the country legally.

- There are equally no documented cases of sabotage by an illegal immigrant, not even a visa overstayer. Espionage is a reality in every country, but it is a direct action of a foreign government, one that often does not want to appear hostile. It is absurd to think such governments do not have the resources to circumvent immigration laws to place their spies, and the majority of espionage worldwide is committed by those legally in the country. In any case, the issue of espionage rarely comes up in this debate anymore, and it is not qualified as either an act of terror or war.

- Non-political criminals are, of course, a problem; but if someone is going to attempt to rob or murder me, I really fail to see how their legal presence in this country will make my experience any more pleasant. Furthermore, there is no data that indicates immigrants, legal or illegal, have any greater potential to commit violent crimes. Statistically speaking, there are as many violent criminals among them as there are among legal residents of the US. We already HAVE laws that forbid violent crime, and the way law enforcement tracks a documented resident with no prior criminal history is hardly different from the undocumented - they don't have databases handy of the photographs, fingerprints, and other biometrics of every person living in the USA, and must rely on forensic investigation to find these people. If an illegal has a criminal history in the US, the prior information is avaialble just as it would be on a legal resident. If the government didn't waste its limited resources trying to establish potential criminal algorithms and actually used them to enforce laws, it might have a better success rate.

- This lack of a case for open borders being dangerous has one final irrefutable fact to support it. The first policies to introduce any sort of government-enforced immigration control occurred in this country in the late 1800s, a full 100 years after its inception. Until that point, literally anyone could cross any US border without the requirement of any sort of identification or anyone's permission, even citizens of foreign regimes the US was at war with. The greatest example of this is the open US-Mexico border during the Mexican-American War of the 1840s, during which 10,000s of Mexicans fled into the supposedly hostile and unwelcoming United States to escape the tyranny and economic incompetence of the government of Antonio de Santa Ana. The period between the final decades of the 19th century and the Cold War era saw quotas on certain ethnicities such as the Chinese and Japanese Exclusion Acts, and then the Alien and Sedition Acts which introduced the first general background and health examinations. However, these policies were still not aimed at anyone specific, and until the ethnic quotas were met, the only real barrier to admittance would be carrying an infectious disease, as is obvious from readily available statistics from Ellis and Angel Islands. Despite this, we have seen an exponential INCREASE in political crimes since the closing of our borders, and every one of them committed by someone who entered the country legally. The system is NOT working.


Myth 2 - ILLEGALS AND THE WELFARE STATE

It is amusing in a spooky way to see people widely revered as hardcore conservatives or republicans, including media pundits and politicians, attempt to make illegal immigrants the scapegoat for the failure of the welfare state. Fiscal conservatism or free market advocacy, which these people like to advertise themselves as in favor of, is by its nature fervently opposed to government participation in the economy. This means opposition to every kind of socialized service - health care, social security, public transportation, public housing, etc. - and every kind of corporate welfare and corporate bailout, like megabanks that drive themselves into bankruptcy and drag the entire country down with them. If you are not opposed to these things, you have no business calling yourself a fiscal or free market conservative, regardless of what political party you belong to. I, being a real advocate of free markets and the government staying out of the economy, agree completely that the welfare state is a colossal failure, but let's examine the facts that show blaming illegal immigration for this is the equivalent of re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

- Most illegal immigrants DO PAY TAXES. Employers in the United States are only required to verify status by seeing one of a number of federal documents and copying the information - no federal law exists that requires verifying these documents as legitimate or current. The most common document that qualifies is a Social Security Card, and a huge black market for such counterfeit documents exists for this purpose. THIS - not hanging out in front of a home-improvement store looking for day labor - is the modicum by which the majority of illegals in the US are employed. Once a migrant fills out a W4 form and submits a counterfeit SS card, they have income taxes witheld like any other employee in the US. Furthermore, most of these people have many dependents and lead fairly modest lives, which would qualify them for a variety of tax credits and returns, but they do not dare file a tax return in April to claim these because that is an almost surefire way to be identified and deported. Income tax also includes the collection of social security, medicare, and a variety of other witholdings that, unless these people somehow become documented by the time they might qualify - they will never see a penny of the benefits of. And that is only income tax - there are also property taxes, sales taxes, gas taxes, death taxes, estate taxes, transportation taxes, I could go on but I believe you get the point.

- Having paid more than their share in taxes by the mechanism described above, it becomes absurd that not being documented makes these people an extra cost on social services such as public education, health care, and so forth. However, some studies legitimately point out that they are more prone to the use of such services, the most common example being the higher proportion of illegals that end up in emergency rooms due to untreated routine conditions. Just as documented residents, they end up in this position because they have no health insurance and don't seek medical care until they are on the verge of dying, at which point the government picks up the hospital tab when they go to the ER. However, health insurance politics being a separate issue, it is important to point out that illegals' proneness to this situation is created by the government. Namely, employers may not care about legal presence, but health insurance and a variety of other privately rendered services can be very difficult to obtain for undocumented migrants even if they are willing to pay for them. This is due in no small part to the over-regulation of these service industries which is openly advertised as a "barrier" to illegal immigration, a "barrier" that only ensures tax payers pick up the tab for things these people could afford on their own.

- It is also worthwhile to note that one does not HAVE to be undocumented to be paid under the table, or to have no health insurance and end up in the ER for which the tax payers end up paying, or to have children in school who don't take advantage of the resources spent on them when their parents haven't worked a day in their lives to pay the taxes that support this.

I have already addressed the failure of the welfare state in my rant on collective responsibility, and the economic argument that cites it in favor of closed borders is nothing more than an excess of this failure. This is further supported by the fact that the blanket closing of US borders and requirement of entry visas and documentation began in the US only as recently as the 1960s - non-coincidentally at the same time JFK introduced the Great Society, an abysmal welfare state package that immediately required closed border policies to exclude immigrant free-loaders, at least on paper. Documented or not, welfare state policies may be intended to help the needy, but in reality end up rewarding free-loaders. That which is rewarded multiplies, and free-loaders can be long-time residents, or they can be attracted from elsewhere - not only other countries but other STATES within the US with less social welfare. At the end of the day, I don't want my taxes wasted on supporting anyone that could support themselves, their legal status in the country does not make this any cheaper for me. A true fiscal conservative has no problem with undocumented immigration, because an economic system that does not support free-loaders will attract only those that are able to support themselves, and such people are not a drain on the economy or taxes.


Myth 3 - NON-ASSIMILATION

It is clear that immigrants, legal and not, often come into this country speaking foreign languages and very little English, have a variety of cultural and religious customs that are not widely practiced in the US, and may in some cases maintain some relationship with the country from whence they came. While these are no doubt realities of immigration everywhere in the world, history proves that the fears associated with them are absurd.

- Cultural non-assimilation has been a harped-upon theme of anti-immigration lobbies for the entire 200+ years this country has existed - non-anglos in the early 1800s, non-protestant Western Europeans in the bulk of the 19th century, non-Christians in the late 19th and early 20th (Eastern European Jews, Chinese, Japanese), South Americans and other East Asians through the bulk of the 20th century, and Middle Easterners and Muslims nowadays, although the previous group is still heavily on the list. The hysteria is always the same - that soon we won't speak English, that soon we won't be able to find the traditional food and other cultural epithets that we like, that soon the religious values of these people will outweigh the ones that dominate the US and reflect in politics. Yet after 200+ years of more immigration than has probably occurred in the rest of the world in its entire history combined; we still speak English, Protestant Christianity is still the most common religion in the US and our politics reflect it far more than any other cultural value, and cultural epithets have graciously accomodated new additions without forgetting what was there previously. Moreover, with every new wave of immigration, the 2nd or 3rd generation descendents of the previous wave tend to become naturally accepted Americans - and why shouldn't they? They don't speak a word of the language of their origin country, they've never been to it, they are no more familiar with its customs than the average American, even the religious practices they may subscribe to, while sharing a name, are fundamentally different from the ones there. The bottom line is, assimilation is a 2-way street, and immigrants tend to absorb the culture they immigrate into far more than they infuse theirs into it, but to the extent that the latter happens, I fail to see any kind of threat. What is more American than a pepperoni pizza (Italy), a hamburger (Germany), FRENCH fries, Taco Bell, and Anime?

- Political non-assimilation, as in the concept of retained relationship to wherever they came from, is also nothing new, despite popular belief. The argument I hear all too often is that immigrants 100 years ago left everything behind and came to this country with nothing but the clothes on their backs - escaping tyranny and committed to learning English and working hard to earn a living, whereas modern immigrants come here to leech off the welfare state, send the money they earn back to their families in their home countries, and parade their foreign flags with pride. With the exception of welfare state leeching which was not possible 100 years ago and which has nothing to do with immigration, as we have already discussed, these supposed disparities are simply the omission of inconvenient facts that do not support the theory. Modern immigrants still come to the US to escape the conditions in their own countries, which may not necessarily amount to tyranny, but often constitute economic failure and lack of opportunity. When they immigrate in this way, they retain their cultural identity, are active in their immigrant communities, and continue to attempt to participate in the events of their countries of origin. They do this because they have loved ones and other vested interests in those countries still threatened by the criminal and inept governments they came here to escape - it hardly constitutes loyalty to said governments, particularly governments openly hostile to the US such as those of Iran and Cuba, refugees from which within the US tend to most radically support the deposition of. Even waving the flag of their country of origin - common among Mexican immigrants and cited as non-assimilation - is often a celebration of vested interest in that culture rather than a loyalty to its government. I have yet to meet a Mexican person on either side of the border who was FOND of the Mexican government. Immigrants from 100 years ago shared all of these tendencies - attempting to help their loved ones back home any way they could and actively advocating opposition to the mind-numbing ineptitude of the monarchies they ran from, and often displaying their commitment to the liberation of their origin countries from these despots with what Americans mistook for foreign patriotism. Political criminals, terrorists, and saboteurs fall under the category of dangerous illegals rather than a cultural non-assimilation threat, and with that exception, the threat has little credibility.

Even for those not convinced by my arguments that the only problems with illegal immigration are caused by excessive government intervention, the scientific fact remains that immigration control is not any kind of achievable reality. Not every country has an issue with people wanting to get in illegally, but the handful that do experience this have yet to find any effective means of keeping the migrants out. This is true in southern Europe with decades of failed attempts to curb crossings from northern Africa and the Middle East, and even in places most Americans don't often think are attractive to illegal migrants like Mexico or Russia. Russia is a political and economic disaster, but nevertheless more stable and safer than many of its former Soviet compatriots, particularly in Central Asia, making it attractive to many people fleeing from those countries. Mexico does not only have an issue with being a way point on the road to the US, but is a final destination of many illegal immigrants from its own neighbors to the south, the economic conditions in their own countries compared to Mexico's being roughly the same as Mexico's compared to the US. Despite how tiny Mexico's southern border is compared to its border with the US, and despite both these countries' governments' longstanding and blatant disregard for accountability and human rights, illegal migrants continue to pour in by the truckload.

Accepting this reality brings me to the discussion of the more serious issues concerning immigration, those not often addressed in the media, which have little to do with hysteria and more to do with the very real problems created by immigration's relationship with the status quo.

I have already addressed the problem of the welfare state attracting free-loaders rather than those willing to contribute to the economy, and I have discussed at length the impossibility of excluding anyone from the welfare state in a previous post, so with these two realities, the curbing of the welfare state simply has one more argument in favor of it. The relationship with the welfare state, however, is an extension of a greater problem with over-regulation's combustible interaction with immigration. The most prominent contributor to illegal immigration from Mexico, for example, is one hardly any American thinks of, and it is the policy of farm subsidies. The federal government heavily subsidizes large agricultural producers in the US and has done so since the 1930s, a policy introduced by FDR during the Great Depression as an incentive to grow LESS food so that it may be sold at a profit. I may address this policy in greater detail in a later post, but suffice it to say it significantly reduces the production costs of food in the United States. The 1990s saw the introduction of NAFTA, which allows imports and exports to cross the US-Mexican border without any kind of tariffs. Mexico's economy would make its domestically grown food far cheaper than food imported from the US, but the subsidies (at the expense of US taxpayers, mind you) allow US agricultural corporations to sell their products in Mexico at such low prices that the domestic industry simply cannot compete. As a result, many of Mexico's farmers abandon their farms and migrate - often illegally - into the US, where they sell their formidable skills to the same agricultural corporations on this side of the border, usually semi-documented with counterfeit papers. Furthermore, what makes these migrants so attractive to US employers, including but not limited to agriculture, is their cheap labor. Labor costs do not only amount of wages, although migrants do often perform the same work at a sub-market wage; but also benefits and most importantly indemnity for injuries, a harsh reality in many of these industries in which these migrants are employed. When a migrant is injured or killed on the job, even though legally he or his family are entitled to indemnities, legal procedings carry a very high potential risk of deportation. Similarly, illegals are far more likely to keep their heads down in terms of collective bargaining for the same reasons, making them far less likely to unionize, demand pay raises or benefits, or collectively stand up to unexpected lay-offs and unfulfilled employer promises. This is the origin of the 'job-stealing illegal' stereotype, as well as the 'abused illegal' stereotype that many liberals cite as a drawback of NAFTA and in support of amnesty. However, it is important to look at the realities of this situation rather than listen to loud and incoherent ideological banter from either side of the political spectrum.

- Illegals' cheap labor does take away jobs that documented residents could otherwise hold, but hiring documented residents to do the same jobs would exponentiate labor costs, raising the prices of whatever they may be producing.

- The availability of illegals in such great numbers, which drives down labor costs to the same extent as their illegal status, is attributable to economic policies almost a century old that no one knows about, and that only a very small special interest - agricultural corporations - benefits from.

- The cheap labor costs of illegals owe far less to their willingness to work for lower wages and far more to the ridiculousness of US labor laws, many of these put in place through the advocacy of the same elements that whine non-stop about abuse of illegal laborers. Minimum wage laws, for example, effectively do not allow documented residents to take a job at a sub-minimum wage - this presents a far greater risk for the employer than hiring an illegal - so naturally this places illegals ahead of the competition. Similarly, indemnity laws as well as unemployment, disability, and other costs employers are forced to pay, as well the tyranny of unions, makes hiring legal workers ever more costly.

What becomes evident is that the situation is a clusterfuck of big government policies colossally divorced from reality that have been heaped upon each other for 8 decades. As has always been the central theme of this blog, it is also evident that it is impossible to force anyone to part with their profits or voluntarily accept higher costs when other alternatives are available, and that the government resources required to enforce laws intended to accomplish this tend to exceed the savings the laws hoped to create. The answer, then, seems to be not to succumb to the fallacy that a colossally inept bureaucracy is more fit to determine what is fair and apropriate than the millenia-tested system of the free market. End farm subsidies so that mega-corporations have to pay their own production costs, repeal insane labor laws that make your own laborers unprofitable for your businesses to hire and let them bargain with each other for what is a fair market wage and benefits package, and eliminate the requirement of "right to work" in this country so that no matter where a laborer comes from, he is subject to the same reasonable protections as a domestic laborer - reducing both his proneness for abuse and capacity for unfair labor competition. The government thinking it can beat the principle of natural selection manifested in the free market always ends the same way in every historical example - natural selection "beating" back the country that does not hold said government accountable for its ineptitude.

The final issue to be addressed is the issue of citizenship and electoral representation. The United States Constitution says NOTHING about immigration or border control. The reason for this is simple - the idea of border patrol or closed borders would have been as alien to the Founding Fathers as ideas like socialized or even regulated health care and federal income taxes (yes, I just said that). The lack of implication is simply a result of lack of precedent - the concept did not occur to them. However, the Constitution also originally only gave the right to vote to white, land-owning males, and seeing as every adult citizen is now enfranchised, the idea of open borders and abolition of documentation raises a very real question of when migrants become eligible for citizenship or voting. It would be absurd to allow anyone present in the country at the time of an election to vote - a potential empowerment for foreign interests to flood the country with electoral saboteurs through open borders. However, it would seem the various amnesty programs introduced through the last half century have already created a logical precedent for how this could be done. Simply put, just as citizenship currently requires a mandatory time period of legal residency, it could require proof of a mandatory time period of residency and employment. As already discussed, the ideas of dangerous foreigners and cultural take-over associated with this are simply absurd, and the welfare state would need to be scaled back along with a number of other unrealistic laws before it can be implemented.

The bottom line of this argument is the irrefutable historical fact that people move toward economic opportunity in a free market system, whether that economic opportunity is created by a lack of tyranny or the availability of resources. These movements have a tendency to be accompanied by bouts of hysteria of the already present population, but no examples exist of laws that attempt to interfere with it succeeding at stopping it or even effectively curbing it. Their typical accomplishment is a colossal waste of resources that benefits a tiny special interest and a general reduction in standard of living for both the residents and the migrants. The government makes a piss-poor judge of who belongs where, and has an abysmal track record of enforcing its own decisions in this respect - do yourself a favor and fire it from this responsibility once and for all.