Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Back in 1981 I did the crummiest thing I've done in my entire life. My wife was in labor so I had to leave my 3 year old daughter and 12 year old sister in law at home alone. It was dark, sleeting, and around freezing There was an illegal alien kid sleeping under a tarp on my porch. I chased him off claiming it was time for the Border Patrol to patrol the area so that he would move on.

At the time we were living in Sunset Heights in El Paso, so it was common for Illegal aliens to pass through. Frequently they were kids, juvenile delinquents come to beg and burglarize houses if no one was home. They would escape to Mexico with their loot. The point is I could not let him stay, but it was a crummy thing to do to chase him off into the storm.

Sometimes in life you have to make hard choices, so I get why Trump has done what he has done about families crossing illegally. I do have it in for Sessions over the obvious and excessive delight he took in the process. Still, I am willing to concede the necessity of Trump's actions as a consequence of existing immigration law.

If you don't like the consequences of the law, change the law. That is the logic applied by both Presidents Bush and Obama. Congress failed to come up with a new law. President Trump has hit people with the cancellation of DACA and his Zero Tolerance policy that could be swept away by the passage of new immigration laws, which hasn't happened.

The current immigration law has led to separation of families, people sneaking in with the help of coyotes who regularly rape, rob, and murder them, kidnap people then contact the relatives they were hoping to join stateside and extort ransoms, leads to human trafficking, identity theft, illegal voters, and every other problem created by the current law. Yet Congress fails to come up with a new law, in spite of Republican and Democratic Presidents calling for it and one acting out the abuses it leads to.

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch is an easy maxim to apply to other people. The corollary of "If it ain't broke don't fix it," is "If no one is fixing it's working." So for whose lunch are we paying?

The current immigration law creates a subclass of people in the USA who work at physically demanding jobs for lower wages than Americans do. These people enjoy less protection of their rights as their bosses threaten to turn them in if they get uppity. I am convinced that whether or not this is the original intent of our current immigration law that is the result. Apparently those who like it that way have enough influence to keep the law from being changed.

So in exchange for underpaid agricultural sweatshop, construction, and hospitality workers we are expected to put up with rape, murder, kidnapping, welfare cheating, identity theft, illegal votes, and more. There ain't no free lunch, but you can get someone else to pay. If it's working for you why change it?

I'm related by marriage and friends with people who help immigrants get sorted out to stay and in the Border Patrol. If the law was working they wouldn't be working so hard.