When it’s time to go home, the circus manager has a trick up his sleeve, just to get people off the property: turn off the rides.
The U.S. is something of a circus today, so policymakers may want to take the cue.
This applies especially to illegal immigration on the southern border, which is increasingly being acknowledged as a major problem. While it may be interesting to learn, say, that this past month more Venezuelans than Mexicans were nabbed coming north (and, presumably, more not caught), the big picture truth is that since taking office President Joe Biden has presided over a huge increase in the overall illegal flow of economic migrants.
Switch off the subsidies and surely the rate would go down.
But what are the subsidies?
A recent article in The Epoch Times explains: “Identification cards for illegal immigrants are increasingly being issued by non-government organizations (NGOs) to help [border-crossers] establish a foothold in U.S. cities and access services they can’t get through federal programs.”
The programs are mainly in blue cities and states, and thrive under the imprimatur of DEI: diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Often called “community IDs,” these instruments seemingly out of Monopoly, the board game, “are accepted by police departments, school districts, and food programs” across the country.
What’s worrisome is that “the federal government grants billions of taxpayer funds to NGOs that help illegal immigrants who cannot usually access federal programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).”
This makes the problem not one of “free immigration” but of subsidized immigration.
And that can, at least theoretically, be much more easily slowed. Stop giving money to NGOs to support this traffic. Existing taxpayers deserve at least that.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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4 replies on “Community Chest”
That is common sense, which is why it will never happen.
In addition to denying federal funds to these organizations, can we also consider making any and all contributions to these NGOs no longer tax-deductible? Those who want to fund illegal immigration should foot the entire bill themselves.
In a liberal order — and, no, I am not going to play along with “progressives” nor with conservatives in the misuse of “liberal” — immigration controls as such do not exists. Those within a liberal jurisdiction can transact peacefully with any peaceful party, including with aliens.
The present problem is exactly that the state, an institution of violence, has made the transactions with immigrants violent; they are offered goods and services secured by state violence.
Virtually everyone understands that the American economic system cannot produce enough to support the nearly eight billion people on the planet. The only things that prevent that attempt, in the face of a combination of a welfare state with open borders are transportation costs and rival opportunities outside America. But, at present, the only things that spare us ruin are transportation costs, because too many people of Central and South America live in nations the systems of which have been wrecked by technocratic administration; for those people, no better opportunities exist.
The US helped to lay the foundation for this chaos, by throwing-in with the right-wing of the socialists in order to oppose Communism, by continuing and escalating the drugs war begun by the “progressives”, and by failing to provide a proper example of a liberal economic order.
The US welfare state is in any case unsustainable in the long run even without large-scale immigration. The leftist Cloward-Piven strategy willfully accelerated the social corrosion, with a hope of forcing the economy to adopt a more thorough-going and overt socialism, but even without that connivance, no welfare state can last indefinitiely.
Democratic activitists had been drawing large-scale immigration on an expectation that the dependent immigrants would become clients of the Democratic Party. Moreover, immigrants were steered disportionately to communities that had been Republican strongholds, as a way of punishing those communities. But Republican officials have been re-routing those immigrants exactly to Democratic strongholds, with their especially spendthrift welfare programmes. Ruination has thus more swiftly threatened these communities upon the Republican strongholds.
The proper response is indeed to tell immigrants not that they will be given no material help, but that they will be given no such help from the state. If they cannot support themselves and cannot find private sponsors to help them, then they should have no reason to come here.
But if indeed they will support themselves or be supported by private charity, then no barriers should be placed in their ways.
There’s no such thing as “illegal immigration.” See Article I, Section 9, Article V, and Amendment X of the US Constitution, as well as Madison v. Marbury. The federal government is forbidden by “the Supreme Law of the Land” to regulate immigration. Any “laws” which purport to do so are void and owed no respect by anyone.