By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, March 16, 2021
Why is it we do not control our southern border?
Some people say it is the lack of a wall. There are
places along our border where barriers are appropriate and useful and places
where they aren’t. But we could put up a wall of a different kind — the human
kind — tomorrow. The federal government employees 20,000 Border Patrol agents,
and our border with Mexico is less than 2,000 miles. That means that we could
station a Border Patrol agent every 500 feet or so on the border, or every
1,500 feet if we split them into three eight-hour shifts for 24-hour surveillance.
And 1,500 feet is not very far: They could see each other. There are people who
can run that far in less than a minute.
Yes, I know we have other borders.
Since we need some of those agents to do other things, we
could pretty easily supplement them with volunteers. Harris County (that’s
Houston), Texas, and Los Angeles County both have very large volunteer
auxiliaries for their sheriffs’ departments (L.A. County has more volunteer
sheriff’s reserves than Salt Lake City has police officers), and one gets the
distinct feeling that volunteer border watchers would not be hard to come by.
Give them radios. They don’t have to intercept anybody — they just have to call
it in.
We do not use our resources effectively because there is
no incentive to do so. Patrolling the border — actually doing the job — would
be hard and tedious work, and thankless for the most part. You see the same
pattern across U.S. law enforcement: We do squat to run down straw-buyers and
low-level firearms offenders, but we have a gigantic, expensive bureaucratic
apparatus to police the trade in firearms at federally licensed retailers,
where the owners and the customers are, pretty much by definition, law-abiding
people. You probably think the Border Patrol is a law-enforcement agency, but a
lot of people think of it as a jobs program, the same way they think of the
schools and prisons (which increasingly resemble one another in their
architecture and management). I have heard the same story from any number of
embittered young police officers: They thought they were signing up to be
protectors and guardians, and then found out two years in that they were mostly
tax collectors. But they stay in the job.
Getting control of the southern border is not the same
thing as getting control over illegal immigration. Many of our illegal
immigrants (in some years, the majority of them) do not come into the country
by walking over the border illegally. They come legally by land, air, and sea,
and then they don’t leave when they are supposed to. Those illegal immigrants,
like the ones who cross the border on foot, come and stay for different
reasons: many of them, but by no means all, for work; others to be reunited
with family living here; others because of the simple raw desperation of living
in one of the unhappier corners of this world, where there is no hope of
improvement. People respond to incentives.
That we should be sympathetic to their situation and that
we should enforce our laws are not mutually exclusive propositions. It is
certainly the case that our lax attitude toward illegal immigration makes their
lives worse in some ways — it is an attractive nuisance that leaves them in
thrall to human traffickers, organized-crime bosses on both sides of the
border, unscrupulous employers, etc. For them to be in the United States is a
near-guarantee of poverty and puts them at very high risk for various awful
kinds of exploitation. The Biden administration is not doing anybody any favors
by signaling its intention to loosen up Trump-era practices. People — I repeat
— respond to incentives.
Illegal immigrants who come to the United States for work
should be the easiest ones to police — but we don’t do it. A mandatory system
for verifying employment eligibility (E-Verify or similar) would get most of
that job done. Frog-march a few meatpacking executives off to the pokey for a
few years and start enforcing the law and word will get out. All the complaints
that this or that business cannot make it without illegal-immigrant labor are
poppycock: We are still going to have farms, hotels, and drywall, even if we
start enforcing our immigration laws. If your business cannot make it without
violating federal law and holding your workers in semi-serfdom, then your
business doesn’t make it. I get the feeling somebody is still going to figure
out a way to make a dime selling me an avocado.
Should the United States have a tighter or looser
immigration policy? Yes.
We should make it as easy as possible for highly skilled,
highly educated, high-income people to come here. They will do highly
productive work and start businesses. Immigrants like Elon Musk don’t come here
to take Americans’ jobs — they create new ones. But we should also get control
of illegal immigration and be forthright about creating a legal-immigration
system that is oriented toward the interests of American citizens, just as we
would ordinarily expect any other policy to be.
If it were only a matter of labor economics, then I’d be
happy to let the markets decide. But people aren’t just units of labor. And
though it may not always be as obvious as those disquieting photos of children
locked up in detention facilities, our decision — and it is a national
political decision — to tacitly encourage illegal immigration is much more
profoundly inhumane than it would be to enforce our laws and reform our system
along intelligent and decent lines.
We could do that, if we wanted to. But we don’t want to.
In Other News . . .
There is at the moment a very dumb and largely one-sided
turf war on the right. It is mostly an intra-media thing, and it produces some
strange results: My colleague Mark Krikorian was scandalized that my colleague
Jack Butler had the audacity to take his own side in a fight. It is
very tedious, and I bring it up only because it illustrates something that
conservatives need to be thinking about — which is: What is all this for?
There are really two audiences for conservative
commentary and conservative journalism. One of those audiences is conservatives,
and the other audience is everybody else. Which audience you are
after determines a lot about your business model and your politics — and, in
some cases, there’s no difference between those.
Fox News, talk radio, a lot of dopey websites and
would-be social-media influencers whose main mission in life is trying to get
noticed by picking a fight with Jack Butler or David French, the television
startups that hope to out-Fox Fox — all of these are in the business of
packaging conservatism for conservatives. There is a lot of money to be made,
and easeful careers to be had, preaching to the choir. I take the Don Corleone
view of this question: I don’t judge a man for how he makes his living, but
it’s a dirty business, and I believe that it will destroy us in the years to
come. I have a few friends who have traded in their bow ties for red caps. Some
of them are true believers, and some of them have been corrupted. Some of them
feel a strange compulsion to explain themselves to me: “Yeah, it was a deal
with the devil — but I got a really good deal!”
To quote the noted economist Katt Williams: “By all
means, make your paper, boo-boo.”
A variation on this is the Tracy Flick school of activism
— starting a club for the purpose of giving yourself something to be in charge
of. Catholic integralism? That’s pure Tracy Flick. These are the “strategists”
and “consultants” who have never had a real paying client, the “institutions”
and “organizations” that are mostly social-media accounts, etc.
Conservatism-for-conservatives, telling conservatives
what they want to hear, can be really good business — Sean Hannity is seriously rich
— and it is based on a conception of conservatism as tribe, conservatism as
self-conscious counterculture. For these people, being conservative is an identity,
like being transgender or being a religious convert. (Indeed, religious
converts, political converts, and transgender people all tell a variation of
the same story: “I was blind, but now I see.”) That means that conservatism
isn’t a disposition or a sensibility, but something that one is loyal to.
Like all tribalism, it is primitive and, therefore, effectively ineradicable.
You can’t argue with it.
Politically, it is a losing proposition, as attested to
by President Biden, Senators Ossoff and Warnock, Senators Sinema and Kelly,
etc.
The other model of conservative journalism or activism is
the everyone else approach, one that is directed not at
rallying one’s own partisans but at persuading people who are not already
self-conscious conservatives, engaging with people as they are and with
mainstream institutions. This irritates and enrages tribal conservatives, especially
if you’re any good at it. I quote the New York Times fairly
often, because it is one of the newspapers to which I subscribe, and I write
from time to time for mainstream publications such as the Washington
Post. And I hear from my fellow conservatives: “Why would you want
to read the New York Times? Why would you want to write in the Washington
Post?” Often, this is accompanied by some kind of feral howl about “Georgetown
cocktail parties.” (I live in Texas. If memory serves, the last Georgetown cocktail
party I went to was Jonah Goldberg’s birthday party a couple of years ago. Bill
Kristol was there — it was practically a talk-radio conspiracy theory come to
life.) The answer to the silly question, of course, is that I read the New
York Times because I live in the United States of America, not in the
People’s Republic of Konservistan, and if you want to effect change in the
United States and in the world, it matters what other people who read the New
York Times and the Washington Post think. It even
matters, a little bit, what the people who write for them
think.
The value of this used to be obvious: William F. Buckley
(who lived and worked “a long time ago,” I am informed) criticized what he
called “the Playboy philosophy,” but he also wrote for Playboy.
Rush Limbaugh wrote for the New York Times. (His byline was “Rush
H. Limbaugh 3d.”) Ronald Reagan didn’t change the country because conservatives
supported him — he changed the country because he ran a sensible conservative
administration on big-tent principles and won 49 states in his reelection
campaign.
(Recount Minnesota!)
Conversely, Trump lost in 2020 and took Georgia down with
him because, even though he wasn’t and never has been a conservative,
he is a practitioner of conservative tribalism, a
counterculturalist down to the medical quackery and conspiracy kookery.
There are three kinds of voters in the United States:
committed Republicans, committed Democrats, and everybody else. Two out of
three, you win — one out of three, you lose. But if you have a powerful appeal
to a tiny share of the population — even if it is only 2 percent — you can make
a lot of money and have a pretty big social-media footprint, which will be a
big deal until people figure out that it doesn’t mean anything. You can’t do
politics with 2 percent, and you can’t do much cultural reform with 2 percent,
but you can do other things. And conservatives should maybe think a little
about what those other things are the next time somebody tries to sell you some
doggie vitamins or a five-year supply of freeze-dried apocalypse lasagna.
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