Albert Einstein often receives credit for observing, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
And Conservatives might want to reflect on that aphorism, especially when discovering this new wrinkle in the increasingly ugly face of federal “control” over immigration.
Joseph Simonson reports for the Washington Free Beacon:
“A senior official familiar with the plan told the Washington Free Beacon that the Department of Homeland Security wants to dispatch Customs and Border Protection agents to areas of Mexico that have seen large influxes of migrants. There, documents obtained by the Free Beacon show, law enforcement would begin the screening process for migrants and expedite their final journey across the southern border.
Such a program is virtually unprecedented, and represents an escalation of what critics call the Biden administration’s facilitation of illegal immigration.”
Indeed. In just the last few months, Americans already have seen the Center for Immigration Studies exposing a Biden Admin program offering to potential “migrants” an app they can use to get air travel tickets that will bring them virtually anywhere in the US, allowing them to land and avoid federal border “checks” altogether. Americans already have seen Capitol Hill arguments and accusations about Biden’s border patrol withholding data related to the numbers of migrant encounters relative to the number of US government “returns” of the migrants.
And, even this past week, we saw Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) remind Americans that Massachusetts Democrat Governor Maura Healy’s verbiage about a migrant “emergency” in her state kinda runs counter to her previous statements in favor of virtually unlimited immigration and counter to her continued support for more migrants coming to Mass.
Senator Ernst told viewers of Fox News not to forget that Healy had used tax money to subsidize the housing of migrants in hotels near the stadium where the big Army-Navy football game took place Saturday, December 9.
Senator Ernst correctly made reference to the fact that Healy’s recent rhetoric about an “emergency” seems offered merely to turn on the 1980s state statute that -- upon a Governor’s declaration of an “emergency for shelter” -- mandates the state to give shelter to anyone asking for it, and facilitates legal and medical welfare for said recipients of the shelter.
It also facilitates Healy calling on “Homeland Security Czar” Alejandro Mayorkas to send her more nationally-collected tax cash, regardless of there being nothing in the US Constitution allowing it.
Now, we get this lovely insult to the “rule book of the US” and to US taxpayers, as well. Simonson reports:
"’What the Department of Homeland Security wants to do is send customs officers to Mexico so we can pre-clear surges of migrants ostensibly in hopes they stop crossing illegally,’ the DHS official told the Free Beacon. ‘They would be doing background vetting so migrants can be waved through.’
But the plan could put further strain on Border Patrol, which already faces a staffing shortage ahead of an expected winter surge. Staff who spoke with the Free Beacon said miles of the southern border have gone unguarded because agents have been relegated to processing migrants.”
The standard conservative observation of the Biden narrative has been to question how many of the migrants who cross the border are apprehended and returned. Then, added to that, there’s the question of the feds and various state governments (like that of Massachusetts) literally subsidizing people’s moves.
When was the last time your move to a new locale was subsidized by someone else’s sweat and toil and tax money?
Adds Simonson:
“President Joe Biden has overseen the largest immigration crisis in U.S. history, with law enforcement recording more than five million illegal crossings on the southern border since he took office. Blue state governors say the record number of migrants coming to their cities is straining their welfare systems, and cities including New York and Chicago are considering budget cuts to offset the cost of housing and feeding migrants.
The Department of Homeland Security declined to comment.”
Of course the DHS did. In a constitutional America, there would be no DHS to respond to these questions because the DHS is massively, toweringly unconstitutional. In a constitutional America the border would be handled according to the wording of the Constitution, meaning that state governments would handle the matter.
Doesn’t it strike conservatives as odd that a Senator from Iowa should be talking about hotel rooms and political problems in Massachusetts? Or should one recall Einstein’s admonition?
Conservatives generally talk the good talk when it comes to opposing central planning and central government. They oft promote the Founders’ ideal of decentralization and federalism. Yet, nowadays, few conservatives acknowledge a key fact about their US Constitution. As I have noted for MRCTV over the past few years, discussed with students, and written in my 2007 book, “Live Free or Die,” the words “immigration” and “immigrant” do not appear in the US Constitution.
Related: TX Gov. Abbott Invokes 'Invasion Doctrine' To Challenge Border-Crossers | MRCTV
Many Americans conflate the power in Article One, Section Eight, granting the Congress ability to create a rule of naturalization, with the power to create a rule over immigration. Naturalization is, of course, how visitors become American citizens, not whether visitors can be on the soil of any US state.
The only passage of the Constitution from which one might infer a link to immigration is in Article One, Section Nine, which reads, in part:
“The Migration of Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one-thousand-eight-hundred-and-eight…”
This provision tells readers that, prior to 1808, Congress could not write laws regarding the migration into any of the original 13 states from outside the U.S., or from other states in the union. The Founders understood that immigration was not a federal purview. Thomas Jefferson said so himself in his 1798 Kentucky Resolution Number Four, which was a slap at the Alien Act pushed by then-President, John Adams:
“IV. Resolved, that alien friends are under the jurisdiction and protection of the laws of the state wherein they are; that no power over them has been delegated to the United States, nor prohibited to the individual states distinct from their power over citizens; and it being true as a general principle, and one of the amendments to the Constitution having also declared, that ‘the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the states are reserved to the states respectively or to the people,’ the act of the Congress of the United States passed on the 22d day of June, 1798, entitled ‘An act concerning aliens,’ which assumes power over alien friends not delegated by the Constitution, is not law, but is altogether void and of no force.”
In fact, Texas’s state constitution, approved in 1869, included an article establishing a “Bureau of Immigration” in it.
If the people of Texas believed Congress had the power to control immigration, why would they bother creating their own Bureau of Immigration?
The answer is that Congress did not have such an enumerated power, and the only reason contemporary Americans fight over what the feds “should do” at the border is because of an 1875 Supreme Court ruling in the case of “Chy Lung v. Freeman” which was a challenge to a California statute imposing a charge on boat-owners who were facilitating ingress to Chinese women (seen as likely prostitutes by the politicians). With the ruling, the Justices simply made up federal immigration control, saying, in part, this errant nonsense, which easily can be refuted by actually reading the Constitution:
“The passage of laws which concern the admission of citizens and subjects of foreign nations to our shores belongs to Congress, and not to the States.”
This led to federal passage of the Page Law that same year, a statute that restricted lower-price Chinese immigrant labor, and established from that point on that the states would suffer the loss of their constitutionally granted power over immigration. The only way the feds can grab that power is if they claim the US is being invaded, and they declare war against an invading nation-state. But since the migrants aren’t members of any official national military, that would be a hard-sell.
Which leads us to the final “constitutional option”: seeing the feds getting involved in state immigration by the method spelled out in Article Four, Section Four. If a state legislature or governor should call on the federal government to lead militia from other states to it in order to “protect” that state’s “republican form of government” from violence or insurrection, the feds are constitutionally bound to respond.
Ironically, Greg Abbot has done that. And Biden has not responded in a constitutional fashion.
In fact, we now witness the possibility that Biden’s border “patrol” will head to Mexico to make it easier for migrants to come to the states.
Perhaps conservatives can see that the problem is not just Biden, but the reliance on central command and control and the discarding of the original Constitution?
What else is needed to awaken that spirit and see conservatives resist the temptation to centralize immigration, when the issue has been mismanaged for years?
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