A Latter Day Modest Proposal

This One to Solve Our Stubborn Immigration Problem for Good

By Anonymous (After Jonathan Swift)¹

Precis: Our nation’s immigration problem can be permanently solved. But we can’t do this by building a big beautiful wall or by trying (in vain) to improve conditions in immigration source countries. Instead, we need to degrade our own institutions, deepen domestic dysfunction, and foment internal corruption to such a degree that people will never even dream of coming here anymore. While this will be a long, tough slog, the writer believes we will be off to a strong start.

Immigration, A Resurgent Problem

Immigration has once again surged to the top of the heap of our national problems. Hordes of unruly immigrants streaming shoe-less over our land borders (and better clad ones streaking through the skies and airports with valid visas) represent a scourge that poisons our nation’s bloodstream, upends our construction, farming, and high tech industries, and dooms our special providence forever.

Of course, this is not the first time a similar dilemma has veered into crisis, only the latest (and most serious) instance of many in our history (because we are the ones being impacted now). This is why I, a proud member of the latter day Know Nothing party, am proposing a more permanent fix. Because, let’s face it, despite our being the greatest laughingstock nation in the world, millions of people from scores of other countries—strangely—still come here, and still want to come. This state of affairs is simply unacceptable. Even recent immigrants agree, it must stop.

A Mathematical Proposition

Most of us understand that people pull up stakes and leave the places they live for good reason. Typically, it’s some combination of fearing for their lives, inability to make ends meet, and despair about a better future for themselves or their children. By contrast, the place they go (in this case, our country) is blessed by relative safety, economic opportunity, and greater promise all around. We’ve got to plug this gap.

It’s hard not to see immigration as a mathematical proposition: There are more pluses than minuses in the places people immigrate to than in the places they emigrate from, and fewer overall minuses too. It’s a better all around bet. Ergo, they go; and they come.

The solution, too, is mathematical. The odds of the bet, the pluses and minuses, must be inverted. People must reach the opposite conclusion. For good reasons, they must decide to stay instead of go.

There are two overarching approaches to closing this gap, two basic foci for potential action—one in immigration source countries, the other in our own. First, though, the one in-between.

A Big Beautiful Wall is Necessary but Insufficient

I won’t dwell on the need for a big beautiful wall or to vacuum seal our border. While a fabulous idea for chest-thumping purposes (which, needless to say, I lustily support), the wall is at best a partial solution. No matter how high we build it, no matter how far into the desert it is made to extend, a mere physical wall will never do the trick. It won’t keep people out forever—especially not the hungry, hard-scrabble, do-or-die resourceful kind of people we’re talking about. By all means we should continue its construction, but always while keeping our eyes on the ball. We want them not to want to come in the first place.

Foolishly Targeting The Source

Most nations fail for familiar reasons: Corrupt government, political mismanagement, dysfunctional or non-existent institutions. In short, because they’re shoddily run. (I encourage those who have suffered under the burdens of pretty good government to try dipping their toes in places where there’s government by thugs, no government at all, or some toxic combination thereof. We may get that chance before long.) Once it’s sufficiently entrenched and pervasive, institutional dysfunction produces the very conditions that persuade people to cast their lot somewhere else. Try building your life on the quicksand foundations of false promises, cynicism, and despair.

Up to now, most of our efforts have focused on addressing “root causes” in source countries—to nip problems in the bud before they reached us. To this end, we’ve spent countless dollars trying to strengthen security forces, shore up courts, make parliaments better represent the people etc. In the bureaucratic language of the deep state, we hoped to build institutional capacity for the delivery of public services and goods. The plan was to try to make other places work better, to build trust, to persuade people they had good reason to stay and not to go.

Alas. It turns out trying to stabilize quick sand is a fool’s errand. It turns out the world is a pretty big place. It turns out trust is a rare and rarefied commodity, even more (or rather, less) now than before.

Because, judging by their impact on immigration flows, our earnest efforts in source countries have fallen short. Far short.

A Modest Proposal: We Need to “Fix” Us

All this being the case, in lieu of throwing good money after bad and pursuing the same old failed efforts to fix the world, I propose an America First alternative. I propose “fixing” ourselves instead. If we can’t help make other countries run better, we can sure as heck make our own country run worse. If we can’t help strengthen institutions in foreign countries, we can systematically weaken and degrade them at home. If we can’t effectively combat corruption abroad, why not work hard to foment it right here instead? Remember. We reject the role of being a magnet. The point of the effort is to invert pluses and minuses, to reverse the calculus for those who might otherwise come, to convince them to stay where they are–or at least to go somewhere else instead.

Tearing a page from the kinds of places that specialize in exporting their people to us, I propose the following list of illustrative priorities, which I pull out at random from thin air:

• Stooges and incompetents should be selected for key government positions.

• Personal loyalty should be the primary criteria for government employment, particularly at senior levels, and the Constitutional oath a pro forma gesture.

• “Independent” and autonomous government entities should be brought under executive control, as should all media—new and old.

• Major economic decisions should be made on political grounds. If they benefit the president, his family, friends, and close advisers, they’re perfectly fine; if they don’t, they’re “the worst deal ever”.

• Oligarchs should be invited to rewrite national regulations, to ensure these benefit private interests, and not the public.

• The justice system should be used as a political weapon, to favor friends and cronies and to curtail rivals and critics. Of critical importance, powerful people must be placed entirely above the law.

• A firehouse of nonsense must flood the zone. For the purposes of undermining trust, it is essential that people not be able to tell the difference between fact and fiction, between truth and lies, between what matters and what doesn’t.

The list goes on. But in a general sense, the entire official apparatus must be used as a personal fiefdom to favor those in official favor. Meanwhile, outsiders, those without the privilege of special “connections,” and the great unwashed (including of course the immigrant hordes), can take a hike or go to hell.

Should we achieve these lofty goals, we will send the world an unmistakable message: It may not be so great where you live now, but we promise you won’t find the situation here any better. So don’t bother. Or go somewhere else. Some of us may even join you.

Parting Thoughts

Before anyone gets too excited or starts counting chickens before they hatch, remember: we have a long, long way to go, a far, far way to fall. We need to be in this for the long haul. The road to the irreversible degradation of our institutions will be grueling and tough, but I’m confident we’ll soon be well on our way.

1. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm