The Moral Hazard Of An Open Border
https://issuesinsights.com/2024/02/06/the-moral-hazard-of-an-open-border/
The political left argues that the immigrants illegally crossing our borders are in search of better lives, and that those who want to stop the flood are hateful, heartless bigots and racists. Morality is a certainly central to the dilemma, but it’s not the morality that much of the Democratic Party wants everyone to believe it is.
An average of more than 200,000 immigrants a month have illegally jumped America’s southern border during Joe Biden’s three years in the White House, almost four times the monthly rate of crossings under Donald Trump. By any fair description, our southern border is open, and this has created a humanitarian crisis of emigres being processed in cities where there are not enough services to meet the surging demand.
The Democrats and their marketing department, known as the media, insist that we have a principled obligation to absorb the immigrants. Some seem to think the poem found on the Statue of Liberty that asks “ancient lands” to “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” is actually U.S. law. Or at least a tenet that we all have the duty to live by.
To drive this point home, a number of Democrat-run municipalities declared themselves to be “sanctuary cities,” where the local government refuses to comply with federal immigration law and to cooperate with immigration officials. Chicago’s welcoming ordinance, for instance, “means that the city will not ask about your immigration status, disclose that information to authorities, or, most importantly, deny you city services based on your immigration status.”
Of course now that the humanitarian crisis has arrived in these cities, officials are moaning that they can’t handle the swelling flood.
“All of our cities have reached a point where we are either close to capacity, or nearly out of room,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson recently said, while blaming Texas, where conditions in its border towns have become desperate, for busing immigrants to sanctuary cities. In Denver, where hundreds had been camping in a tent city, Mayor Mike Johnston says his city “is very close to its breaking point.” In April of last year, Mayor Eric Adams complained that New York City “is being destroyed by the migrant crisis.”
So much for these sanctuary cities lifting their “lamp beside the golden door” to welcome “the wretched refuse” from a foreign “teeming shore.”
It might seem that the most ethical and decent path we can take is to fully open our country to economic refugees who simply want to live better lives and are willing to work for them. But following that course creates a moral hazard, because as long as entry into the U.S. is a pressure release valve for countries where millions are mired in perpetual, handed-down poverty, those nations have no incentive to liberalize their economies and root out the government corruption that limits prosperity to only a select few. They can continue to send their “tempest-tost” homeless and poor to America and not concern themselves with the hard labor needed to fix their problems, or worry about staying in power.
Their benign neglect, and in some cases outright depravity, condemns countless future generations to lives of squalor and desperation.
Comments are closed.
