Ep. 52 - There Isn’t Any Nice Or Pleasant Way To Enforce Our Immigration Law
It's hard to have a discussion about immigration law with people who think there shouldn’t be any immigration laws at all. The Left is being disingenuous. They say they have a problem with separating kids, but really they have a problem with immigration enforcement of any kind. But we cannot have a country if we do not have clearly defined, and strictly enforced, borders. The process of defining and enforcing the border will not always be pleasant. But it can be just. Those two things are not the same.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Well, I've been away on vacation this week and I'm actually going on vacation again a week from now.
So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take a vacation every other week in perpetuity.
Well, that would be nice anyway.
I'd love if I could do that. Now, we decided to take our two weeks this way, two weeks of vacation, but breaking it up in this weird way for some reason.
We were at a lake in Pennsylvania this week, and then in two weeks we're going to be at a lake in New England.
So we enjoy lakes.
And as part of our fascination with lakes, I have developed a bit of a fascination with fishing.
An interest in fishing, anyway.
The problem, though, is that my interest in fishing does not include, so far, a corresponding talent for fishing.
So when I say that I've been fishing, I've been fishing all this week, but when I say I've been fishing all this week, what I really mean is I've been casting hooks into the water.
I don't mean that I've been catching fish all this week.
But that's really, this is what I've discovered when it comes to developing a hobby, is that in the early going, and this is why I think a lot of people have trouble developing hobbies, and why I do as well, is that in the early going, you have to enjoy the hobby while being terrible at it.
And it's hard to like something when you're bad at it.
But if you can push through that phase, then eventually I think the payoff comes.
So maybe, I'm about two years into it, I'm still waiting for that payoff.
Anyway, I didn't have my phone on this week.
I didn't check the news at all.
I avoided all that like the plague.
So I have therefore missed most of the discussion over the separation of families at the borders.
By the time I got back, Trump had already effectively reversed the policy, at least to the extent that he could legally.
But I do want to say just one quick thing on this, because I haven't really chimed in on the issue yet.
I know that the whole world has been waiting with bated breath To hear what I have to say about it, nobody cares.
I know. You don't have to remind me.
Here's what I think about it.
If we are going to enforce our laws and protect our border, and I think we should do both of those things, then there has to be some kind of legal penalty for those who break our law and sneak across the border.
And if we're going to prosecute them And send them back, which is the penalty, at least for the first time across.
It's a misdemeanor. So you prosecute them, send them back.
If they come back again, then it's a felony.
So if we're going to go through that whole process, then we have to detain them in the meanwhile.
We have to lock them somewhere, keep them somewhere, while that process of prosecution and then eventually shipping them back is carried out.
If we don't, then they're just gonna disappear into the ether and we'll never see them again.
So we can't say to them, oh, you're in trouble now, mister, you snuck across the border, so just go do what you want, but check back in two weeks.
There's going to be a court case, and here you go.
Here's a note, okay?
Here's your court date. Come back.
Make sure you check back. In fact, you know what?
Every three days, I want you to give us a call just to check in, all right?
Honor system, don't disappoint us by disappearing like everybody else.
No, we can't do that. If we do that, then it's just, there's no point.
We're never going to see them. So you see how there's kind of a logical progression here, where if we're starting with the proposition that it is good to enforce our laws and protect our border, then I don't see how we avoid, you know, you follow down, once we get like two or three steps into it, we are inevitably going to get to the point where we have to detain, confine, lock up these people for a period of time.
I don't see how you avoid that.
I don't see any way around it.
The only other option, as far as I can tell, is to not enforce the law, or to enforce it in a way that is so incompetent and ineffective that you may as well not enforce it.
And if an illegal alien family comes across and they claim asylum, then there's still the same issue, where that asylum claim has to be investigated and processed, and in the meanwhile, You've got to detain them somewhere.
Because claiming asylum is not just...
They say, oh, I claim asylum, and we say, okay, you're good then.
Because if that was the process, then everybody would claim asylum, and it would be anarchy.
But asylum is a very particular thing for a very particular situation.
It's not for everybody.
So that's the issue.
And if we are going to detain them...
If we have an entire family, and we've got thousands of entire families that are streaming across the border all the time, we catch an entire family with parents, kids, everything else, and we're going to confine all of them while we go through this process, then we run into some complications.
First of all, we run into all the different laws that govern the detainment of families.
We also run into the fact that there is a different process for parents or for adults than there is for kids.
So there are all these kinds of bureaucratic loopholes and complications.
And I'm all about streamlining that and taking the bureaucracy out of some of this stuff and making it simpler.
I'm all about doing that in every facet of American life, especially when it comes to immigration.
So if that's what we're going to do, I say, great.
And then there's also an issue of resources and capabilities.
We do not have infinite resources and an infinite capability to detain and care for and provide for entire families all at once.
But if it were possible, legally speaking, and in terms of resources, capabilities, logistics, laws, everything else, all the things you got to take into consideration, if it were possible to detain entire families together, I would be in favor of that.
I would think that's the best approach.
I'm not a fan of separating kids from their parents.
I don't like that idea.
I don't like the idea of separating kids.
I don't like the idea of kids being traumatized and so forth.
Especially when you consider that because this is a bureaucracy, we're talking about bureaucracies are very clumsy, bureaucracies are very inefficient, ineffective.
So there's also the difficulty of reuniting the families after the kids have been separated.
So I don't like any of that.
And I'll fully admit, I'm a sucker when it comes to things involving kids.
I don't like the idea of kids being upset, traumatized, separated from their parents.
I mean, I hate that. Because I think about my own kids.
I think about my five-year-old kids being separated from us.
So I'm like most people when it comes to that.
I look at that and I say, no, if we can figure out another way, let's do it.
But the other way cannot be Just not enforcing the law.
The other way cannot be, oh, you have a kid with you?
Well, then just do what you want.
Throw open the doors to anyone who happens to wander across the border with kids.
Because then you have the situation that we're facing right now, which is kids are used as get across the border free cards.
They're used that way.
And I think that that is much more dehumanizing than detaining them.
So that situation is bad for our country.
It's also bad for the kids.
So it's also in the kids' best interest for us to enforce our laws and to have this disincentive.
To make it clear to people, it's a bad idea to bring your kids across the border illegally.
We want to disincentivize that.
We want there to be a deterrent.
So that's where we're at.
You got to detain them. We got to enforce the laws.
You got to detain them. We don't want to separate them.
Yeah. But we have to enforce the law.
So the only other option, if it's possible, is the keys to detain the families altogether.
But even that is not a clean or easy solution.
Keeping an entire family detained is still upsetting to a lot of people, just as we've seen, because even after Trump reversed himself on this, said they're going to change the policy, he's still being criticized by the media and by the left, because they're saying, well, it's not good enough, because even if you detain the families, you confine the families together, you're still confining kids and confining families, and that's bad.
We can't do that. So what they're really trying to get to is let's not enforce our laws.
They don't have a problem necessarily specifically with separating kids.
They have a problem with us enforcing the law.
So that's what this discussion is really about.
And here's the reality that you run right into when we're talking about this.
That there is not always a nice or polite way to maintain and protect a civilization.
If we are going to have a civilization, if we're going to have a country, then we have to enforce our laws.
And that, as I've established, is going to involve catching the people when they're coming across, confining them in some sort of locked environment, okay, and then prosecuting them and shipping them back.
That has to be the process.
That's the only way we can have a country and a civilization.
And it's not polite.
It's not nice.
It's somewhat unpleasant.
But there are not always nice, polite, and pleasant ways to maintain a civilization.
We have this really childish, ridiculous idea, this utopian idea that we can just erase the borders and get rid of all the laws and just say, everybody live where you want, do what you want.
It's fine. Everything is fine.
You know, you have all these people that grew up listening to that stupid, horrible John Lennon song, Imagine a World Without Borders, Without Countries and so forth.
Which is just people with the mentality of five-year-olds who think that sounds like a good idea.
You know, in fact, I had...
And also, the other problem is you have a lot of people that have never read a history book and really know nothing about the world whatsoever.
For instance, yesterday on Twitter, someone said to me, and I know I've heard this a million times, I'm sure you have as well.
Somebody told me on Twitter the other day, they said yesterday, they said, well, America was founded on open borders.
America was founded on open borders.
That's literally impossible.
You cannot found a country with open borders.
Because founding a country with open borders means you're not founding any country at all.
The process of establishing and founding a country means drawing a border.
And probably fighting over it.
That is an essential component of founding a country, is the border.
That's what defines it. It's like building a house.
It's like saying, you know, I built my house without walls.
Well, then you didn't build a house.
That's not a house. You're just living on a mattress in the grass, okay?
That's not a house. Building a house means building the walls.
There's no such thing as a house without walls.
In fact, when you look at the history, the early history of the United States, when you look at the 18th and 19th century of history of the United States, what you find is an endless series of wars, battles, and other armed conflicts that were fought in order to define, establish, maintain, found, and expand our borders.
That's what you find.
You find men who are willing to fight and bleed to defend, establish, define, expand the borders.
That's what you find here, and that's what you find everywhere in the world, in every civilization.
There has never been a civilization that established itself and established its borders by talking politely and nicely to the civilizations around it.
And things say, do you mind if we draw our borders here?
Oh yeah, sure, you could draw.
You know what, in fact, have some of our land.
You could draw it further back here and have some of ours.
And, oh yeah, be our guest.
Oh yeah, absolutely. And then they all shake hands and they have tea and crumpets together.
No, that's never happened.
It is a bloody rough thing.
And that is unavoidable.
Now, that doesn't mean, this is not an ends justify the means situation.
That doesn't mean that everything a country does in order to protect, define its borders is justified.
We should still strive to be humane and just while we set out to do that.
And that should be one of the things that separates America from other countries, is that we care about being humane and just.
But You can do something that's humane and just, and yet at the same time is kind of upsetting and unpleasant.
That's what I think a lot of people miss.
Just because it's upsetting, and just because it makes you feel icky inside, and just because it's unpleasant, doesn't mean that it's inhumane, and it doesn't mean that it's unjust.
I mean the idea of enforcing any law is kind of unpleasant.
The idea of locking anyone in prison for breaking a law, that's an unpleasant idea.
I mean it doesn't make me feel good when I think about people in prison.
Even when I think about a murder in prison, it's not like it fills me with just happy butterflies in my stomach.
I'm just so happy thinking about people locked in prison.
It's not a happy, pleasant thing, but it's a necessary and just and humane thing.
And it's also fair.
Here's the other thing. Enforcing our law, it's nothing personal against these people who are coming across the border illegally.
And yeah, you know what? If I lived in some dirt-poor, drug-infested Central American country, and I had kids especially, and I couldn't really speak English, and I didn't understand the American system, and I didn't even know how to go about obtaining legal American citizenship, and I had heard all these stories about how difficult it is and everything else.
And then I'd also heard stories about how easy it is to just sneak across the border, and I've already got family somewhere in Texas or wherever.
Then if I were in that situation, I may well decide to sneak across the border myself.
I don't know. I may make that decision.
Because I would be far, far more concerned with protecting my children than with obeying the law.
So I get it. I understand.
On a personal level, I understand and I sympathize.
You can sympathize with someone and yet still believe that they should face the penalties for breaking the law.
Look, I sympathize with people who grow up in the gutter, you know, in the inner city, and they have no parental guidance to speak of.
They're just surrounded by gangs and violence and drugs all the time.
There's no moral formation, no guidance, nothing.
And they start selling drugs when they're 12 years old.
And by the time they're 18, they're, you know, knocking over liquor stores.
I sympathize with those people.
And I look at the situation that they're in and the trajectory that they've been on, and I think I could very easily have ended up doing the same thing if I was in their situation.
But we still have to enforce the law.
So we still have to lock them in jail.
Because the law matters.
The law must still be enforced.
It's nothing personal.
It doesn't mean that we hate you.
It doesn't mean that you're dirt.
It doesn't mean that we're dehumanizing somebody.
It just means that the law must be enforced.
So these families are doing what they think they need to do, and we as a country have to do what we must do.
And that's a lot of life, you know?
That's what life consists of a lot of times.
You have two people with competing interests who are both doing, or two groups, doing what they think they need to do.
And then there's kind of a clash there.
We can't have a country if we don't have a border.
That's what this really comes down to.
And enforcing the border can be an unpleasant process.
You have to be able to remove emotions from law.
Now, that doesn't mean you remove morality from law.
It doesn't mean you remove justice from law.
It doesn't mean you remove humanity from law.
It doesn't mean you remove fairness from law.
But you do have to remove emotion.
Laws should be just, humane, fair, but they can't always be comfortable, they can't always be nice, and they can't always be pleasant.
And in order to have justice, in order to have order, in order to have a civilization, you have to have just, fair, clear, understandable laws that are enforced.
And it's going to be, as I said, unpleasant.
No matter how you do it.
And I'm, okay, if we can keep the families together, I say, let's do that.
But we still have to detain them and they still have to face the penalty.
And even that, Even if we get rid of all the situations where kids are being separated, keep the families together, but still, we still are running into the fact that we have to catch these people, confine them, go through this legal process, and then send them back across the border to a country that is not a very nice place to live.
They're trying to escape it. And in the meanwhile, there's going to be tears, and there's going to be, you know, there's going to be some level of trauma, and people's dreams are going to be crushed.
I mean, they were dreaming of living in America and escaping all of this, and that's now being taken from them.
I mean, that's an unpleasant, tough thing to think about.
It really is. It doesn't make me happy to think about.
But it is necessary, and it is just.
Because it is the law, and it is a necessary, just, fair law, the kind of law that every country has and must have, or it cannot be a country.
The real problem is that many of the people who are shouting about the child separation issue, when it really comes down to it, they don't want to enforce the law at all.
They want open borders. So they are not looking for a more just, a more fair, a more humane way to enforce the law.
That would be a worthy discussion.
Okay, if that's what we were talking about, if we were just talking about, well, what is the best way to enforce this law, this necessary law that, you know, protects our border?
If we were having that discussion, I would say that's a great, that's a great discussion to have.
Very productive, very fruitful, very important.
But that's not the discussion.
Instead, we're having a discussion about immigration law with people who don't think there should be any immigration laws.
So it would be the same thing if we were talking about, you know, what are the most humane ways to deal with prisoners in the prison system, but it turns out that half of the people involved in the discussion think that there should be no prisons at all.
Well, then you can't get anywhere in the conversation because, number one, they're really being disingenuous.
I mean, they're beginning the conversation by criticizing this particular policy, but then it turns out that they don't think there should be any policies.
So that's disingenuous, and it's also incoherent.
The open borders position is incoherent because it means the dissolution of our country.
And in the process, it means dissolving the very thing that makes our country appealing to those people in Mexico and Central America and South America.
If there's a way to keep these families together while you enforce the law and protect the border, then let's do that.
I don't want to see kids separated from their families.
I don't like seeing them. But what we cannot do is go back to a policy where anyone who crosses the border with a child, even if the child doesn't even necessarily belong to them, gets to come in scot-free.
You know, we cannot go back to that.
We cannot do that. That's not good for the kids.
It's not good for the country.
It's not good for anybody.
Except maybe smugglers who profit off of this whole situation.
So if you want to talk about enforcing the law humanely, great.
But enforcing the law is the first part of that.
And we have to do it.
Even if it makes our tummies hurt, we still have to do it.
