Border Fence

Border Fence is No Solution To Illegal Immigration
By Daniel G. Jennings
H.L. Mencken once wrote “There is always a well known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible and wrong.”*
The well-known “neat and plausible” solution to the illegal immigration crisis is the border fence. That is the scheme put forward by Congressmen and others to build a giant fence along the US – Mexican border from the Pacific at San Diego to the Gulf of Mexico at Brownsville, Texas.
The idea behind the border fence is that a barrier on the border will block all illegal immigrants from entering the United States because the majority of illegal immigrants come in overland from Mexico. Unfortunately, the lure of good paying jobs (by Latin American standards) and opportunity in the United States will still be there. So will the desperate poverty south of the border that drives immigrants north.
If they can’t come in by walking the illegal immigrants will find another way in. Most likely they will turn to organized gangs of human smugglers or coyotes. The fence would encourage illegal smuggling and empower organized crime. Especially organized criminals in league with powerful business interests in the United States.
This would further reward the employers of illegal immigrants because the illegal immigrants would be at the mercy of gangsters. Gangsters who could force them to work for low wages.
Nor would the border fence keep out the real bad guys, foreign criminals and terrorists would still be able to get into the country. After all they have the connections and money to get fake IDs or hire smugglers to bring them into the country. The only people stopped by the border fence would be poor folk looking for jobs. Sadly, the border fence would encourage the creation of networks of immigrant smugglers that could serve as a pipeline to ease criminals and terrorists in their transit into the United States.
The border fence then would be a counterproductive waste of our tax money, not a solution to the problem of illegal immigration. So what is the solution to the illegal immigration crisis?
The best solution to the illegal immigration crisis would be to eliminate the demand for illegal immigrants. If people in Latin America knew they couldn’t find work in the USA, they wouldn’t come here.
Poor Latin Americans can find work in the US because there’s no real penalty for employing illegal immigrants. If instead of wasting our tax dollars on the border fence we Americans enforced the laws against employing illegal immigrants we could end the problem.
Suppose we enforced the federal law to seize the assets of the employers of illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants working at Disneyland seize the place and sell it at auction. Or the racketeering laws if Wal-Mart hires a contractor that employees illegal immigrants indict Wal-Mart’s top executives for conspiring to evade federal laws. Take away the business license of any business that employs illegal immigrants. For a change punish the rich white guys in the expensive suits and leave the poor working class Latinos alone.
Of course this would be far cheaper than the border fence. Make an example of a few wealthy businessmen and the market for illegal labor would dry up. The illegal immigrants would stop coming and the problem would go away.
This isn’t going to happen so we’ll still have illegal immigration and the cheap labor it creates a phenomenon that undermines under national economy. Instead of adopting the latest technology, employers hire cheap illegal immigrants and fall behind in the international competition. Japan meanwhile is developing the next generation of robots and automated machines posing that nation on the cutting edge of industrial production.
For the good of our country it’s time to abandon the neat and plausible solution of the border fence and look for real answers. Unfortunately, our political leaders, their pockets stuffed with cash from the employers of illegal immigrants, have no incentive to do that.
*Taken from “Prejudices Second Series, 1920.”