Illegal Is As Illegal Does

I haven’t been following much. Apparently a bunch of asshats demonstrated because the idea of the US actually having some sort of control over the border is offensive to them. I may be missing some subtleties here, but if your country sucks so bad you left and you have the energy to demonstrate and agitate for change, why not try to change the shitty country you left? Go home and make it a better place.

Anyhow, I was reading comments over at GWA.45’s post on the issue. There apparently exists a misconception that we cannot deal with 9 million (or whichever number someone pulled out of their ass this week) criminals. So we should just roll over and let them stay because they’re already here? Screw that. By this theory, once a murder has been committed, we should just let it go. There's other problems with this approach, but am I the only one that thinks giving up isn't the answer?

First off, there’s a time discontinuity here. We don’t have to deal with all 9 million tomorrow. As they come into any contact with officialdom, they get deported. No ifs, ands, or buts. We catch you, you leave swiftly. Tied into this is the recognition that once we catch you here illegally, you don’t come back and apply to be a resident or citizen later. If we can effectively shut off the incoming flow, we can deport the ones here at our leisure. The idea that we need to do something with every illegal immediately is a huge fallacy. It may take a little while, but if we can deport more illegals than can make it in, we'll eventually come out ahead.

Another question that comes up is how we pay for deporting all these folks. I got an easy answer for that one. We determine a figure on how much it costs us to process and deport the average illegal. Then for every illegal we catch, US government aid to the country of origin is reduced by our average cost. The way things are in Texas, Mexico will owe us money shortly. If we can put some of the cost back on foreign governments, especially Mexico, maybe they’ll take some action to help us with the problem.

We're back to a practical problem of libertarian policy. Border control is a legitimate function of the state. I also support the basic idea that people should be free to choose their own destiny. However, open borders are incompatible with a welfare state. Get the welfare state dismantled and we can talk open borders then, mmmkay?

This brings us to anchor babies in the weird place that is my mind. Anchor babies are easy. You need a parent that's a citizen to stay. If both of your parents are illegals, you go home with them. Come back when you're 18. Until then, shoulda had legal parents.

The idea that we should just roll over on border control just because the problem is difficult baffles me and is completely alien to American public policy. Shit, we've been fighting a pointless War on Drugs longer than I've been alive. If we can escalate that to absurdity, surely we can tackle immigration.