Some people have asked, “Why does a truly free country need borders? In a free country, can’t people just move about freely, at will? And don’t free people want everyone to come into their country?”
There are two reasons a free country needs borders.
One, not all other countries are free. In fact, the vast majority of countries in the world today – including the United States – are not consistently and absolutely free. Borders are required to provide objective and discernible boundaries between free countries and less free, or totally unfree, countries.
Two, not everyone is good. So even if every country in the world were free, there would still be terrorists, criminals and others who intend to do harm to innocent victims.
The border agencies of a free country exist to ensure that only the right kind of people get into that free country. By “right kind” I mean that some discrimination is used to ensure that likely or known criminals can be kept out. For example, a dictatorship might seek to dump its derelicts on a free country. Or someone might develop an ideology sworn to destroy freedom and liberty wherever they find it, making members of that ideology seeking to enter the free country suspect, at best.
Today’s leftists don’t want borders for obvious reasons. One, they claim to believe that everyone is the same, and that it’s automatically and always “racist” or otherwise irrational to make any kind of judgments at all. Two, they know full well that with open borders the most needy and dependent will enter the nation in order to exploit that nation’s welfare and entitlement programs, including but not limited to “free” schools, health care and all the rest.
The only solution, obviously, is to repeal the welfare state altogether, demanding that no charity be coerced and all schools and medical care either be privately funded or based on voluntary charity. That’s the only consistent way for the country to be called a free country.
The next best solution would be to deny the “freebie” benefits to immigrants and let them either fend for themselves or rely on voluntary charity.
That’s the last thing proponents of “immigration reform” or open borders want, and it’s revealing because it shows their true intentions.
Their true intentions are not to allow “dreamers” to live in self-responsible liberty, but rather to ensure that as many become as dependent on the government entitlement state as possible, ensuring permanent electoral victories. This has already happened in places like California and, on our present course, even with Donald Trump in office, it’s inevitable for the country as a whole.
In the end, the only answer will be the one most don’t want to consider, because it seems too radical: Repeal most of what the federal government currently does, and go back to the original Constitution, where the federal government provides for a national defense, border control and that’s pretty much about it.
Yet even if we did that, our free country would still need borders because, as I said, most countries will not ensure freedom as America’s Constitution attempted to do.
And even if all countries became permanently and totally free, we’d still need borders, at least until the entire world came to agreement about living on a planet dedicated to liberty and individual rights.
I can hardly believe I even had to write this article. But things have gone so bonkers and so crazy in recent times, it forces us to state or restate what should have been obvious all along. In a strange way it might be good, because with everything going down the tubes, perhaps the stage will be set for a return to reason and liberty as America’s wise founders originally envisioned.
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