“White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday discussed the brutal slaying of five people in Texas,” the New York Post whines, “without noting the fugitive accused of the heinous crime is an illegal immigrant who had previously been deported four times.”
Francisco Oropesa, the subject of a continuing manhunt as I write this, allegedly murdered several of his neighbors after they complained about his noisy behavior (shooting in his back yard while intoxicated).
What does Oropesa’s immigration status have to do with anything? I’m tempted to say “nothing,” but on further thought this strikes me as a teachable moment.
The usual suspects, of course, want us to take this incident as confirmation that “illegal” immigration is an inherently terrible thing, and that the US government needs to dramatically increase its funding ($25 billion is the number in president Joe Biden’s 2023 budget request) and manpower (more than 40,000 government employees between the US Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement) dedicated to “immigration enforcement.”
The REAL lesson is that throwing tens of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of people at “immigration enforcement,” turning a 100-mile strip around the edges of the United States into a “constitution-free” zone where native and immigrants alike are subjected to warrantless searches and other predatory government behavior, and abducting and deporting people multiple times:
HAS. NOT. WORKED.
Nor is it about to suddenly, magically START working.
The borders of the United States have always been open (by constitutional mandate until the late 1800s, when the Supreme Court decided to start ignoring the Constitution and just let Congress do whatever it felt like).
The borders of the United States are open now. People who want to get in, get in. Some of them are abducted and deported. And those who still want to be here get BACK in.
The borders of the United States will always be open. With 95,500 miles of border and coastline, “securing the border” wouldn’t be an option even if the government put every member of the US armed forces, plus every state and local cop, on nothing but the business of “securing the border.”
Our choices are:
- Open borders; or
- Open borders AND a $25-billion, 40,000-guard, 100-mile-wide police state dedicated to the preposterous claim that we can have something other than open borders.
Pick one.
Either way, Oropoesa’s victims remain exactly as dead as they would be if he was from Peoria.
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
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