As we documented in Part 2, the immigrant crime and welfare parasite stories are complete red herrings. Instead, the underlying motivation for the Trumpian Border Wars is a faulty zero-sum economic theory, rank political opportunism by the GOP and the rise of a nativist chauvinism that glorifies a mythical American “nation” that never really existed.
Unlike most other more homogenous nation-states on the planet, in fact, America was never rooted in a tribe, folk, people or nationality. To the contrary, it was a vast melting pot of diverse ethnicities and nationalities bound together by the ideas of personal liberty, constitutional democracy and free market opportunity and prosperity, not the kind of chauvinistic nationalism propagated by today’s fear-mongering GOP anti-immigrant wing.
Indeed, the latter impulse has become so militant and vehement that it tends to obfuscate the stupid economics and the threadbare nationalism on which the GOP’s anti-immigrant campaign has been based.
For instance, the heated rhetoric about undocumented immigrants being some kind of egregious class of law-breakers is unwarranted and irrational. Aside from the special case of the government induced illegal drug business, the only legal infraction committed by the overwhelming share of the 11 million undocumenteds is the misdemeanor of crossing the US border without a visa, green card or other legal authorization.
Yet this “crime” is essentially victimless, thoroughly un-American and capable of being eliminated by the stroke of a simple statute. Namely, a law authorizing the issuance of guest worker papers at the border to any worker and his family members who want to come to the US to take a job.