We Must Secure The Border
Part 9: We Must Secure the Border.
Immigration reform does not exist in a vacuum, and every change has a consequence — every action has a reaction. The scales must be balanced, and the solution approached holistically. Let’s say we’ve been successful in achieving moral immigration policy reform this far.
We have maximized legal immigration in its most productive form. We’ve modernized and increased our immigration quotas, streamlined the process, and created a legal apparatus for low-skilled permanent labor to access our economy.
We’ve disincentived and limited illegal immigration to the best of our ability. We’ve closed asylum loopholes, disincentivized the use of children as pawns to move across the border, and built the necessary legal and humanitarian infrastructure to process the remaining requests in a reasonable timeframe.
In doing so, we have satisfied our many competing moral obligations — to those in need on both sides of our border. We are maximizing the use of our finite resources to achieve the best outcome for the greatest number of people; fulfilling our ethical responsibilities to our citizenry and our duty to those in need of our help. We have extinguished the perverse incentives of our asylum laws, lifted a great burden on our representative democracy, and have begun protecting the people whose labor our economy relies on.
Now we must secure the border.
As we are now executing our ‘Kantian imperfect duty’ perfectly, any further illegal immigration, or any policy incentivizing it, is inherently harmful — for all of the reasons detailed above. We have struck a moral balance, and must do everything we can to avoid again tipping the scales.
But we have an ethical obligation to stem the flow of drugs across the border as well.
“The main suppliers of heroin to the U.S. have been Mexican transnational criminal organizations. From 2005–2009, Mexican heroin production increased by over 600%, from an estimated 8 metric tons in 2005 to 50 metric tons in 2009. Between 2010 and 2014, the amount seized at the border more than doubled. According to the DEA, smugglers and distributors “profit primarily by putting drugs on the street and have become crucial to the Mexican cartels (Opioid Epidemic in the United States, n.d.).”[1]
“Illicit fentanyl is commonly made in Mexico and trafficked by cartels. North America’s dominant trafficking group is Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, which has been linked to 80 percent of the fentanyl seized in New York (Opioid Epidemic in the United States, n.d.).”[2]
Fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin — fatal overdoses have increased by over 500 percent since 2015.[3]
“In 2016, around 64,000 Americans died from overdoses, 21 percent more than the approximately 53,000 in 2015. By comparison, the figure was 16,000 in 2010, and 4,000 in 1999.” There were “72,000 drug overdose deaths overall in the US in 2017.” “[P]ublic health experts estimated that nationwide over 500,000 people could die from the epidemic over the next 10 years.” “The epidemic cost the United States an estimated $504 billion in 2015.” (Opioid Epidemic in the United States, n.d.)[4]
Most of the drugs come through legal ports of entry, and we must continue to bolster our ability to detect them. Of a sample of 120 border drug seizures in 2018, only 24 came outside of ports of entry.[5] But when 72,000 Americans are dying, and hundreds of thousands more suffering from addiction, 24 is too many. The opioid epidemic is complex in nature. But having less drugs would help.
We will leave it to the experts at the border, those on the front lines of the crisis every day, to best decide how to combat it. We must entrust them with the resources they tell us are needed to secure our southern border, even if in some places, it requires a wall.
Piling stones has been the best way to protect one’s property and interests since we first discovered how to pile stones; I think you would be hard pressed to argue for the inherent immorality of a wall. The only relevant question is, does the wall serve a moral purpose?
In this case it does, where necessary. We have spent this entire paper establishing that a holistic approach to moral and comprehensive immigration reform requires us to secure our borders — especially if we are going to offer a pathway to citizenship for some of those already here.
We must help the people that our broken laws have left behind. If our asylum laws have incentivized the use of children as pawns to cross out borders, do we not have an obligation to protect them?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_United_States
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_United_States
[3] Katz J (September 2, 2017). “The First Count of Fentanyl Deaths in 2016: Up 540% in Three Years”. The New York Times.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_United_States
[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/02/01/want-know-where-most-drugs-cross-border-look-border-patrols-press-releases/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4978e7d1a8af
