The Emigration Problem

I’ve been visiting with people lately about the ICE raids. An Instagram video showed a man at Angel’s Tacos in Los Angeles being led away in handcuffs by typically over-accessorized authorities who were wearing masks.

We have visited this business before when in LA and found focused perfectionists trying to keep up with a long line. It was emblematic of a system built for the benefit of “the common good.”

Some point to “common good” as being a goal of redistributionists. But good for all comes from working with nature, or human nature, not fighting it. The common good is benefitted when everyone is allowed to achieve their full potential. 

At Angel’s Tacos scarce resources were most efficiently distributed (long line, good product). Waste affects us all eventually and if all businesses were run like this one the world would be a better place. 

About the time hog prices crashed and our family labor grew up and moved away, the hog business changed. Farmers built hog houses with pits for manure. There was no pollution from manure runoff like in our outdoor lots. Temperatures were regulated with ventilation and costs were low enough to provide cheap protein to the masses.

Companies owned the pigs and paid the farmers to raise them. Once these farmers found out that power washing, vaccinating, sorting, and loading was not as fun as driving a tractor, they hired those things done. The big campers, boats, and winter homes down South show that they can afford to have someone else do the dirty work. It’s pretty hard to find a native white guy doing these jobs, much less fixing a roof or weeding a field by hand.

Meanwhile, south of the border, the drug trade is lucrative enough that it is constantly being fought over. Over 350,000 people have been killed in  Mexico in the war on drugs since 2006. Further south in Central America, European and US banana companies destroyed the family farming system, turning workers into indentured servants with no opportunity for a better life. 

For years the Federal Government has focused on defending borders all over the world, but not ours. Legal holders of work visas were delayed for the planting season because of the crowds of immigrants clogging legal entry into our country. The war industry makes special interests more money than one of peaceful commerce, so our borders were ignored while we ship modern, industrialized terror around the world. 

A farm manager I talked to admires and respects his seasonal workers. They actually have a minimum wage that comes with the visa and have the ability to eventually bring their families. But the process to control the border is so drastically understaffed that desperate people sneak in to escape the lawless hell-holes of Central America and Mexico.

So what do we do now? There was shock at the announcement that the Trump administration has fired 1,000 State Department employees. When I heard this I immediately thought, “What did they do?” They were called diplomats. Why do we have diplomats? Because it’s cheaper for businesses to have taxpayers negotiate trade agreements than to navigate overseas markets themselves. And they can use the power of government to coerce deals. 

This brings us to the purpose of the border. Protection.  Before so-called conservatives took up the anti-immigration cause, it was trade unions that were most adamant about protecting their jobs from low-wage workers. Donald Trump, who was a Democrat up until the Republicans couldn’t find a candidate who appealed to the populist fedupidnous that was sweeping the nation, jumped at the chance to be even more important than he already was.

Our country has developed a propensity for theft through government. Whether it’s a so-called right to health care or education or handouts called crop insurance, it’s still theft. And while it is “our” country, much of the impetus for a closed border is to prevent consumers from getting the best products at the best price. And that is a form of theft. Since it’s “legal”, it’s justified in the eyes of people who dismiss morality as an inconvenience.

The best reason to control the border is illustrated by a short story from a friend who knows people in South Africa. They have an accordion style door in a hallway of their home (like you might see at an after hours storefront in a big city). When asked about this, it was explained that it was another barrier for criminals. His wife was recently robbed in her kitchen.

Maybe the people in the big cities have given up on a civil society. But outside the United States there are cultures that we need to attempt to keep out. The unreliability of foreign criminal records and so forth, makes that difficult.

The farm manager made it clear that for the good of the country we need those beautiful brown people from down South. He said (gross generalization here), “White people are lazy.”

Those who think they are entitled to other peoples’ money need to emigrate.