It’s Southern Border-Style ‘Policy’ That Immigrants Are Escaping

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has taken to blaming the Republicans for problems associated with a surge of immigrants at the southern border. Republicans have hit back. One editorial asserted that “Blaming the surge on Republicans evades years of failed policies.”

Without taking sides, it should be obvious to Republicans that “failed policy” is a redundancy of sorts. We’re talking government after all, and government policies are but the substitution of the knowledge of the few for that of the marketplace itself.

Applied to the southern border, naturally the policies have failed. Central planning of a market phenomenon always fails. Which is no insight.

At the same time, some readers will no doubt reject the assertion that human beings massing at the southern border is a market phenomenon, but if not, what is it? Really, what explains the paucity of humans north of the United States desperately trying to get to the U.S.?

Hopefully the implied point is sufficiently illuminating. Though not Singapore, Canada’s economy is largely free and sufficiently prosperous such that the desperation to exit Canada isn’t so great.

South of the U.S., and right on down to Venezuela at the very least, let’s just say there’s too much “policy” of the economic kind. And where there’s an excess of central planning, there’s invariably an outflow of people in search of the much greater opportunity that exists where policy isn’t so ubiquitous. That’s the United States. People have been coming here to cure their poverty for as long as the U.S. has existed, and surely before that.

Which is evidence yet again that this human migration to the U.S. is a market phenomenon. Even those who seek more border-patrol enforcement, a wall, or both, might agree. Figure that Haiti doesn’t have a “problem” of desperate people trying to make their way there, but the U.S. generally always does. It’s markets at work.

Conversely, let’s call central planning the ultimate wall. Though invisible, it guards against the arrival of people better than any wall of any size ever could. Just the same, free markets and freedom ultimately overwhelm any wall, or any kind of border enforcement.

Which is a not-so-insightful way of saying that it’s free markets borne of a lack of economic policy exerting their powerful pull for human capital from countries defined by a lack of free markets, and way too much policy. Think about it. Before Maduro and Chavez in Venezuela, was Venezuela’s loss of human capital nearly as substantial? Hopefully the question answers itself.

In being answered, ideally it can be said that people generally do best economically where rules and regulations concerning commercial matters are the lightest. Yes, people do best in locales where policy is least apparent.

Applied to the U.S., its market economy is in so many ways a beautiful picture of human cooperation. At the same time, how ironic that the chaos and misery at the southern border resembles what it’s like in the countries that would-be U.S. immigrants are trying to escape.

Why aren’t Republicans talking about this? Why aren’t they showcasing the always and everywhere failure of policy? Just as a policy meant to regulate the number of laptop computers, cars, and chips imported into the U.S. would amount to overwhelming failure, so do efforts to centrally plan people.

Which means we can end the chaos at the southern border in one of two ways: either mimic the economic policies of the countries migrants are exiting so that the U.S. is no longer attractive, or legalize work in the free-market U.S. so that wages and prices can dictate who comes to the U.S., and where. Anything else is central planning.

Author

  • John Tamny

    John Tamny is a popular speaker and author in the U.S. and around the world. His speech topics include "Government Barriers to Economic Growth," "Why Washington and Wall Street are Better Off Living Apart," and more.

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