For Republicans, their most important issue is stopping Brown and Black skinned people from immigrating to the United States. Republicans have tried everything to prevent them from coming. They have used walls, fancy motion detectors, drone aircraft, satellites, huge increases in the number of border patrol personnel and illegally taking children away from their parents. Even a deadly pandemic, that made travel unsafe, didn’t stop the immigration.

It is amazing what migrants go through to come here They are leaving their ancestral homes and their family and friends (who they’ll probably never see again). On the way to the US, they will be robbed, raped, extorted by police and treated like garbage by the traffickers they are paying to bring them here. Many will die. If they get here, they face very uncertain futures. Illegal immigrants are desperate people. 

Donald Trump will forever be the Republican Messiah for his anti-immigrant rhetoric, his $15 billion unfinished wall (the one he pledged Mexico would pay for) and his other steps to stop immigration. Yet, according to the Cato Institute, in a January 20, 2021 release, “President Trump reduced legal immigration. He did not reduce illegal immigration. “Data suggests COVID-19 had far more impact on the reduction of border apprehensions in 2020 than anything Trump did.” (Border apprehensions are used as an indirect measure of the number of people illegally entering the US.)  https://www.cato.org/blog/president-trump-reduced-legal-immigration-he-did-not-reduce-illegal-immigration

It is time to recognize that all the barrier systems the US uses to stop illegal immigration are ineffective. Additional interdiction methods only make the trip more dangerous for migrants. Desperate people react and overcome whatever is thrown at them. 

India is the fourth biggest source of illegal immigration to the US. An estimated 74,000 illegally immigrate to the US annually. Obviously, walls, Border Patrol, motion detectors and all the rest didn’t stop them. The point is, trying to stop desperate people from finding a way into the US is a wasted effort. 

A far better idea is to understand why people are willing to risk everything to come to the US. Then, fix those problems so potential future migrants want to stay in their native countries.

Why people come to the US illegally

Illegal immigration from Mexico wasn’t at the top of the list of problems President Franklin Roosevelt was dealing with in 1941. In Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms Speech, he was addressing the crisis World War II was creating. During it, he articulated two of the reasons that made people 80 years later so willing to leave their homes and risk everything to come to the US.  The four basic freedoms Roosevelt identified are:

• Freedom from fear
• Freedom from want
• Freedom of speech
• Freedom of worship

Freedom from fear is an over-riding reason people migrate from their Central American, South American and Mexican homes. The fear is the direct result of the US population’s insatiable demand for illegal drugs. The drug money corrupts their governments and the cartel violence sucks everyone into the ever-present violence.

Freedom from want is another major problem. Because of corruption, mostly due to the pervasive influence of drug money, there is little foreign direct investment. Job prospects are bleak and wages are very low because of the lack of job competition. More bluntly, their economies are a mess.

I won’t focus on freedom of worship and speech in this article. They aren’t major reasons for immigration to the US.

How can the US provide basic freedoms to stop illegal migration?

To get at the root causes of why people are so desperate to leave their homes, we need to do two things. 

• Legalize all drugs now considered illegal.
• Establish a free trade zone from the Canadian border to the tip of South America. (Include Canada, if they want to be included.)

Legalize all drugs

Freedom from fear means living in a country that has the Rule of Law. This is not the case in countries controlled by drug money.

Hopefully, we have moved beyond blaming the lawlessness south of our border on those countries. US consumers created the drug cartels. US money gave the cartels the ability to control governments, create lawlessness and eliminate the Rule of Law.

To kill the dragon of violence in Mexico, Central and South America, cut off the dragon’s head. Legalizing all drugs in the US will transform life in those countries. Eliminate the drug money and you eliminate the major part of the violence and corruption that drives people to the US.

Legalizing drugs will dramatically improve life south of our border. It will also be a good thing for the US. We need to recognize reality. The War On Drugs has been an abysmal failure. We lock-up a major drug kingpin like El Chapo Guzman and the drug market doesn’t even hiccup. We fill up our jails with street sellers and the drug market just keeps rolling along. Illicit drugs are readily available in both urban and rural communities. When an addict over doses, we see first hand how ineffective the War On Drugs is. In 2015, the Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates for an end to the War on Drugs, estimated that the United States spends $51 billion annually on these initiatives, and in 2021, after 50 years of the drug war, others have estimated that the US has spent a cumulative $1 trillion on it. For all this, police, DEA and all the rest interdict about 10 percent of the illegal drugs.

We have a great deal of hypocrisy in the US about drugs. Certainly, heroin and cocaine are very dangerous and addictive. The same can be said for alcohol. A person that OD’s on alcohol is just as dead as someone that OD’s on heroin. Just for comparison, approximately 95,000 people in the US die from alcohol related causes annually. In 2020, 91,800 people in the US died from drug involved overdoses. This includes deaths from all illicit or prescription opioid drugs.

For marijuana, I can speak from personal experience. Once while visiting Washington State, I tried legal marijuana in a snicker doodle cookie (I would never smoke the stuff). It wasn’t half bad. Yet, this was a few years ago and I haven’t been driven to keep using the stuff.

On a different level, thousands of US GIs came back from Vietnam addicted to heroin. Only a very small percentage couldn’t kick the habit. Germany used to sell Methylphenidate over the counter. During Germany’s 1940 invasion of France in World War II, British and French generals refused to believe how far German troops had advanced. The German Army provided their troops with Meth and they could fight and march for over 48 hours straight. 

I’m not about to downplay the danger of these drugs. However, for people with addictive personalities, they will feed their addictions regardless of barriers thrown up by government – until or unless they decide to kick their addiction. Those us without addictive personalities, representing 85-90 percent of the population, can use and break away from highly addictive drugs like heroin and nicotine. 

Today’s Republicans are all about, “My body, my choice”. It is time for them to cut the hypocrisy and let people make their own decisions about what drugs they want to use. If Republicans want to cut illegal immigration to the US, destroy the drug cartels by legalizing all drugs and give people south of our border freedom from fear.

Drug War impact in the US

While the focus here is on reducing drug cartel violence in other countries, it is important to understand the impact the War on Drugs has had in the US. We’ve filled our jails with Black and Brown skinned people on drug possession and selling charges. We’ve finally started to figure out that it doesn’t do any good to put someone in jail and give them a criminal record for possessing drugs. It is time to take the next big step. DPA_Fact_Sheet_Drug_War_Mass_Incarceration_and_Race_June2015.pdf

Not only our cities, but also rural areas see the impact of drug violence in the US. Decriminalizing drug sales will stop drive by shootings and gang violence rooted in defending drug sale territories. Legalizing drugs in the US will provide freedom from fear for innocent people caught in the mayhem of drug violence here.

Create a free trade zone

Freedom from want means having a good paying job and hope for their futures. If Hispanics and South Americans have good paying jobs and can provide for their families, that eliminates a reason to come to the US. 

By “free trade zone”, I’m not talking about the bureaucratic morass of trade restrictions and protections that is the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). I’m talking about the kind of trade that exists between Arizona and California. 

Besides reducing immigration to the US, this type of agreement allows all countries to focus on producing what they are best at. This increases productivity which typically leads to higher wages in each country. What an enlarged free trade zone won’t do is increase or decrease our trade deficit. Another bonus in these unstable times is a free trade zone close to home reduces our reliance on China.

Donald Trump’s presidency was a disaster. Yet, we can learn a lot from the Trump presidency. Such as, what not to do.

During his time in office, Trump started a trade war. He implemented tariffs, quotas and renegotiated trade agreements. What did all this get us? From the first to the last year of Trump’s term, US trade deficits with other countries were the second biggest in history (second only to George W. Bush’s). 

Trump simply proved (again) what readers on this website already knew. Trade restrictions or openings have no impact on a country’s international trade balance. Each country’s trade balance is dependent on that country’s net national savings. If we want to lower the US’s trade deficits, lower our government spending deficit. 

Wait a minute…

For Republicans, stopping people of color coming into the US along with maintaining White privilege are their two most important issues. But, is reducing illegal immigration equally important to those of us that aren’t racists?

This is a problem. The US has declining birth rates that will impact us in many ways – none of them good.  From keeping Social Security solvent to keeping our economy growing, we need more people.

Growing the economic pie

A frequent misconception Republicans try to spread is that the economy is like a pie. If the population grows, that just means a smaller piece of the pie for everyone. If this was true, when the US population grew after World War II from 140 million to 329.5 million now, we would all be living in caves and barely sustaining ourselves.  That obviously didn’t happen. Yet Republicans have pulled out their fixed sized pie argument and used it against everything from civil rights to today’s immigration.

White people in the South fought the Civil Rights movement tooth and nail.  Poor White people didn’t have much and they weren’t about to share it with Black people. However, as the Civil Rights movement gained steam, a strange thing happened.

Contrary to expectations, there was no economic apocalypse for whites. The economic pie got bigger as blacks moved into the workforce. From 1960 through the mid 1970’s, wages in the southeastern U.S. rose dramatically compared to the rest of the country.

The newly hired workers had money to spend. This created more economic activity. Local stores were getting more business, so they expanded and hired more workers. The cumulative effect was an expanding economy that became increasingly upscale in core urban areas.

https://www.frugalron.com/frugal-ron/immigration-and-growing-the-economic-pie/

Summing up

We can dramatically slow illegal immigration to the US by making life better in the countries migrants come from. There are economic downsides for the US in doing this. However, thee can be balanced out with the advantages that a large free trade zone would provide.

It isn’t often that government can do things that are Win-Win for everyone.  Ending the War on Drugs is something that helps everyone. Collect tax money from drug sales and use some of that to fund studies to better understand addiction.

Expanding free trade is another win for everyone. If we can do things to improve the lives for people south of our border, that is a very good thing. And a bonus, having fewer immigrants of color coming to the US may make Republicans less unhappy.

Is this practical in 2022? Probably not. Yet, we need to start talking about these kind of solutions now if we ever hope to implement them someday.