06/20/14 – Jacob Hornberger – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, the Scott Horton show.
And our next guest is Jacob Hornberger.
He's founder and president of the Future Freedom Foundation, the same one that Sheldon is the vice president of.
Fff.org is the website.
And I'm sitting here scrambling, Jacob.
I can't, I don't know what the hell happened.
I can't find the article that I invited you on to talk about.
It doesn't seem to be under your blog heading at fff.org slash blog.
But I know I was just looking at it the other day, all about the kids being held by the ICE, by the feds down there for having the temerity to be on the wrong side of a line without the proper paperwork or something terrible like that.
Can you please enlighten us and yeah, I think it was an article.
It may have been an article we linked to in our FFF Daily rather than an original article that we wrote.
Now, I did write an article on May 14th under my blog called Immigration Controls Breathe Death and Misery.
But in the last couple of days, we've linked to a news article on the whole thing and it really involves this phenomenon of where there's essentially a flood of children, of minors coming from Latin America, Central America and Mexico into the United States, illegal aliens and the Obama administration's plans to deport them all, assuming that they can find them, that they find them, they're going to deport them.
And this, of course, is part of the U.S. government's concept of immigration controls, it's war on immigrants, the horrible abuse that is being inflicted on people that are just trying to sustain and improve their lives.
It's absolutely one of the most horrible moral episodes in U.S. history.
It's really bad.
And you know, it's in a kind of just funny way, almost.
It goes to show the ridiculousness of socialism and government central planning, where they just don't know what to do.
So they just pile them up in a gym, you know, basically just lock them all in a prison.
They got no room for them, no ability to care for them or distribute the proper amount of, you know, supervision and health care and whatever they need.
It's like, you know, a normal American could make the parallel to some third world country like where these kids are from is what it looks like, where they're being held.
Yeah, your use of the term central planning socialism is very apt that, you know, you do have aspects of social central planning in American society.
You've got like the Federal Reserve Board, you got public schooling, and Americans like to think of these as free enterprise institutions, but they're the exact opposite.
They're the socialist concept of central planning.
And immigration controls are the classic example of this.
You've got this board of commissars in Washington deciding how many immigrants should enter the United States, which countries they should come from, what their qualifications are.
And not surprisingly, as with all socialist structures, you have this total chaos, I mean, Ludwig von Miethe has called this phenomenon planned chaos.
And you have, you know, people crossing borders, smugglers, coyotes, as they call them.
You have people dying in railroad cars in the back of 18-wheelers.
You have them starving, they're dying of thirst on the deserts.
It's just a catastrophic system, and it goes on and on and on.
I've seen it since I was a kid.
I grew up on the Texas-Mexican border, and I worked with the illegal aliens and so forth.
And I've seen this for decades.
It's just an ongoing crisis.
And every so often, like every five years, like the five-year-old Soviet socialist planning, they come up with a new crisis, and it requires new immigration, quote, reform.
And it never stops.
And of course, the state gets bigger and more powerful, and you've got essentially a total militarization of the border.
I mean, I grew up down there, and all you see is federal agents everywhere.
And the most important thing is, how do you reconcile this with a free society?
I mean, to me, it's more reconcilable with an East German type of society than, or a Cuban type of society, than it is with a free society.
All right, now, and I'm sorry, I meant to say, too, I'm sorry about the mistake.
I could have swore that the article I clicked on was just waiting for me to catch up and read it, but I couldn't find the dang thing in my mess of tabs here.
But anyway, I'm glad that you're on top of this.
I know that this issue is very important to you, and I'm looking at, I guess, at least one of the articles that you linked to here at FFF.org, and then the morning email was to The Guardian about these children being held.
And literally, piles of them, just, they're piled in a prison.
And by the way, and I don't know all the stats, I know Anthony Gregory can rattle them off, but Barack Obama is far worse on this than any president ever, by far, in terms of the raw numbers of people being deported, and for the meagerness of the excuses.
People who've lived here their entire lives, since they were little children, but oh, they got a speeding ticket, or, you know, just nonsense.
Any kind of excuse.
And that's no hyperbole.
I think that's at least one of the cases, but I'm sure there are many.
I don't know the numbers, but it's hundreds and hundreds of thousands, millions of people being deported by the Obama administration right now.
And so, I guess you can comment on that, but I also wanted to ask you about, who the hell is sending all these kids by themselves over the border?
What is this?
Yeah, that's an interesting, that's an interesting question that, for one thing, yes, he is the deporter-in-chief.
I mean, he's breaking all records for deporting people.
And the interesting aspect of this is, you know, remember, I grew up on the border when everybody was a Democrat when I was growing up.
And so, you know, I've heard this all my life about how liberals or progressives love the poor, the needy, and the disadvantaged.
And whenever they hear that we libertarians want to dismantle welfare state programs, they say, oh, you hate the poor, you hate the poor.
And of course, the immigration issue is their big Achilles' heel, because they're part of this problem, too.
I mean, remember, President Obama is a Democrat, he's a progressive, he's a liberal.
He professes to love the poor, needy, and disadvantaged, and he'd be the first one to say libertarians are bad people for wanting to abolish welfare state programs.
And yet, he's the deporter-in-chief, and it's been democratically controlled congresses throughout the years.
I mean, they've been all part of this problem of waging war against people who have committed what they consider is the dasherly crime of coming to America, trying to find a job, sustain their lives, improve their lives, send money back to their families, and it really goes to show you the total hypocrisy of these people.
So yeah, the numbers, I'm not sure what they are, but yes, they're extremely large.
But the real ultimate moral question is, you know, why does this go on?
Why is it necessary to go on?
And the way I look at it is that you don't have to have this kind of system.
I mean, our founding fathers had open immigration.
I mean, you could come into this country from anywhere, and you had a cursory health inspection, tuberculosis at Ellis Island, but other than that, you were free to come in, no questions asked.
In the Southwest, after the U.S. took over the northern half of Mexico, that new border stayed open for, I don't know, 50 years or so until the Franklin Roosevelt administration, all the way from 1848 to the 30s.
Now, your question is, okay, so how does this happen?
Why are these kids doing it?
Well, part of it is that their parents are up here, and they're trying to sustain their lives.
I mean, things are so desperate in Latin America that people will do anything to sustain their lives and, of course, the lives of their children.
But when they're coming across into the United States, it's too difficult to be carrying toddlers.
I mean, they're being smuggled in.
They can't cross like ordinary human beings, like, you know, walking across a bridge or taking the bus north or whatever with their families.
So they have to leave their kids behind.
And then once they get settled in, they tell the kids, okay, time for you to come up.
And so a lot of these kids are like 9, 10 years old, and they risk their lives to come up here.
And, of course, U.S. officials would say, oh, well, they're just bad people for telling their kids this.
They're illegal.
Exactly.
The law puts them in this position.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, but the music's playing, and we've got to take this break.
Okay.
When we get back, we're going to be talking more about this crisis with Jacob Hornberger.
It's a little bit off topic for the show, the usual subject matter, but a real important one, something I ought to cover more, too, because it is absolutely a nightmare on the scale that you described there, Jacob.
One sec, y'all.
We'll be right back.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Jacob Hornberger.
He's the founder and the president of the Future of Freedom Foundation, and we're talking about the national government's war on little children who dare to cross the border without a permission slip from the empire.
When is a little kid a detainee when he's an immigrant, according to the Associated Press?
Yeah, no, that's what they are.
They're prisoners.
I guess they're not charged or convicted of anything.
So they're not prisoners.
That's a legal term, not just a dictionary definition.
So they are detainees, these toddlers and under-12-year-old children here.
It says in at least one of these captions that they reproduce here, 47,000 unaccompanied children have been abducted by the U.S. government trying to come into the country since last October.
So now, I guess, well, I don't know what to say, but I don't have a devil's advocate argument for these kids' situation at all, but I'll go ahead and pretend to be a liberal conservative for just a minute here at you, Jacob, and say that no, because they're taking our jobs.
Because you libertarians, you're just the shills for big business, and they want to drive down the labor market.
They want to as loose a labor market as possible, and damn us if we're all unemployed.
They don't care about that.
They want to keep their costs of hiring people down in all ways, and the more cheap labor, the better.
And also, to paraphrase the conservatives, Mexicans, we hate Mexicans.
So what's your answer to that?
Well, the stealing of the jobs thing is standard fare.
I mean, I've heard that since I was a kid.
And actually, it works the exact opposite, that immigrants are a tremendous economic boon to a society.
I mean, Americans ought to be thanking their lucky stars for this gift, that when you look historically at two societies, for example, that have had open immigration, the United States in the 19th century and the Argentinian society between the 19th and 20th centuries before Peron came into power, they essentially copied the original American system, open immigrations, no income taxes and so forth, no welfare state, and tremendous economic prosperity.
And the idea is that immigrants bring a passion for work, a work ethic.
They want to work.
They're striving to work.
There's a dynamism that they bring into a society.
And generally speaking, they take the lower echelon jobs.
And so in the short term, it looks like, oh, well, they're displacing American workers.
But with the prosperity that the immigrant brings, because remember, he's involved in economic activity, he needs a used car, he needs clothing for his family, he needs food for his family, he needs to find an apartment, that that generates new economic activity that then provides jobs for the Americans who are being displaced at the bottom scale.
So now Americans are getting better-paying jobs, jobs that are more suited to them.
They're able to speak English better, which is more important than a higher-echelon job.
And so you have this perfect system where everybody's benefiting.
It may not look like it's a benefit for the guy that's losing a job picking cotton on the fields or something, but when all of a sudden he's hired by the tractor company that's providing tractors for that farm, he's realizing, hey, I'm making more money, there's a better job for me.
And this is what happens with the division of labor.
Immigrants infuse that dynamism.
But Jacob, there are 7 billion people in the world.
And I know this is true, because I've heard conservatives say it lots of times, that all of them would want to come here.
If our government wasn't here to keep them out with fire, they would all move here and take all of our jobs.
We'd be washed away and have to go live back where they're from.
Well, that's another popular canard.
It's kind of arrogant, because it assumes that everybody really just can't wait to come to the United States.
And I remember traveling to Mexico once, and I was actually living with a family.
I was studying Spanish in San Miguel de Allende, and I was asking this guy, he had come to the United States to work and then had returned home.
And I said, well, let me ask you, if the borders were open, you would move?
And he said, oh, of course not.
He says, I love Mexico.
I love my country.
I love living down here.
And he says, that's the way most people feel.
Moving away from your country is a very difficult process.
It's the rare person that's willing to risk everything, leave his family, his friends, go to a place where he's going to get insulted and abused and have to work at wages that may be subpar within that particular society.
So the fact is, not everyone wants to come to the United States.
It's a tough life, you know, when you're on your own and so forth.
But it's not something you fear, because economically speaking, it can happen anyway, that as people start to go into an area, prices start to rise.
It's supply and demand.
Housing starts going up.
Food starts increasing.
Everything starts going up.
And that in itself is a deterrent to more people moving in.
I mean, we see this domestically.
You know, how many people fear that everybody's going to exit New York and move to Dallas?
Well, you know, yes, there are New Yorkers moving to Dallas, but nobody sits here pacing the floors of, oh my gosh, what if everybody from New York suddenly moved to Dallas?
Well, we all know what would happen.
As more people move in, prices start to rise, less people start to move in because they realize, hey, I don't want to go into a high-cost area.
So it's an old canard that really has no validity whatsoever.
All right.
Well, I just noticed, and boy, they're pissed off that I just noticed, but somebody's mad in the chat room saying that, well, hit me with some stats then, because this is just not right.
We've got all this immigration and high unemployment, and you want to pay for all their health and education and welfare too, or who's supposed to?
I guess he must understand that you're not for the welfare state, but we live in one.
So what about all of that?
Can you really prove what you're saying, Jacob?
Because conservative, maybe, I think, I'm guessing in the chat room says, hell no.
Well, Milton Friedman brought this up.
He said, oh, well, as long as you have a welfare state, you can't have open immigration.
Well, that's just nonsense.
Of course you can't.
And for one thing, all you have to do is say, look, anybody who's not a citizen doesn't get welfare, doesn't get public schools.
I mean, you actually would be doing them a favor, because we all know that public government schools are a detriment to children, destroys their mind, puts them on a riddle, and makes them good little citizens of the state, conformists and so forth.
So the greatest gift you could give to an immigrant is you don't have to go into the government school system, but you could also do the same thing with welfare.
In fact, right now, they have strict rules on immigrants getting welfare and so forth.
I mean, I would exempt them from the taxes, too.
It seems only fair that if you're not going to give them these welfare benefits, and I put benefits in quotation marks, they ought to be exempted from the taxes.
But let me say this, though.
Even if the government doesn't do that, my feeling is, as libertarians, what do we want to save the welfare state from these stresses and strains for?
I mean, this may be the way to finally get the welfare state repealed, when Americans say, well, I don't want my tax monies going to fund foreigners.
I don't mind it to fund domestic Americans, but by golly, I don't want it to fund foreigners.
Well, of course, they don't object to foreign aid, which is exactly that.
But hey, I say if there's a way to get people to repeal the welfare state, open immigration may well be the way to do it.
And finally, there's a lot of immigrants that don't go on welfare.
You know, where's the morality of punishing innocent people?
All right.
FFF.org, y'all.
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Scott Horton here.
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