You Can’t Have A Secure Border Without Deportations
Abandoning deportations would be a capitulation to Democrat demands when doing so has the potential to do massive damage to the rule of law across the country.Abandoning deportations would be a capitulation to Democrat demands when doing so has the potential to do massive damage to the rule of law across the country.Conservatives can’t barbecue their way through national collapse
Conservatives want to be left alone. They have families, jobs, churches, hobbies. They love their country, but they stay busy and comfortable. Politics feels like something for other people — activists, ideologues, the perpetually aggrieved. The left may dream of tearing the system down in a fiery Marxist revolution, but one solid vote every couple of years or so should keep the crazies in check. Then it’s back to work, back to Little League, back to the barbecue.
That belief sustained many on the right for decades. It has become a liability.
A vote followed by retreat no longer suffices. Saving the country requires engagement, sacrifice, and the willingness to place political reality over personal comfort.
The sunshine conservative lives under the assumption that the American system more or less runs itself, that excesses can be corrected with minimal effort, and that power remains constrained by shared norms. Those assumptions no longer hold. The times that try men’s souls have returned, and the sunshine conservative is about to discover that comfort carries a cost.
For years, a bipartisan consensus reshaped the country through mass immigration. Call it conspiracy if you like, but incentives explain it better.
Democrats saw a reliable path to permanent power. Immigrants arrive without wealth, social capital, or political leverage. They gravitate toward the party that promises redistribution and protection. Every program — health care, housing, loans, benefits — tilts toward newcomers. Open borders grow government, entrench dependency, and expand the progressive patronage machine.
Republican incentives looked different but proved just as corrosive. Conservative voters opposed mass immigration, legal and illegal alike, but party leadership feared one thing above all else: being called racist.
Progressive programming successfully framed the idea of America as a homeland — run for the benefit of its people — as morally suspect. Any attempt to articulate national interest became “nativism.” Chamber of Commerce Republicans exploited that fear, importing millions of workers willing to accept suppressed wages while silencing critics through ritual denunciation.
While the country changed, conservatives largely stood aside. The transformation unsettled them, but lawn care got cheaper and food delivery faster. The sunshine conservative preferred comfort to confrontation. Political activism felt vulgar. Winners, after all, make money and buy boats.
Now the bill has come due.
Human trafficking. Drug flows. Violent crime. Overcrowded hospitals. Stagnant wages. Exploding housing costs. The social fabric frays under the weight of policies designed to benefit elites while disciplining everyone else.
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The Trump administration’s effort to remove the worst offenders collides with a system addicted to inflow. Obvious solutions exist — employer enforcement, E-Verify, ending the H-1B visa scam, taxing remittances heavily — but those measures threaten donor interests. Instead, enforcement proceeds piecemeal, state by state, criminal by criminal.
Each attempt to exercise authority triggers panic among mainstream conservatives. They fret about optics. They warn about norms. They clutch abstractions while the left shoots at or runs over federal agents, storms churches, and treats public order as optional. Establishment voices agonize over power even as their opponents wield it without hesitation.
A friend of mine returned from the Global War on Terror with what doctors labeled post-traumatic stress disorder. The diagnosis missed the point. His trauma didn’t come from violence alone. It came from clarity. He had lived in a world where stakes mattered, where power operated openly, where failure carried consequences. Returning to a culture submerged in therapeutic language, pronouns, and safe spaces proved disorienting. Everyone else lived inside a fantasy and demanded that he play along.
Eventually, he learned to stay quiet. He still regards much of what surrounds him as childish and unmoored from reality.
That reaction mirrors what many feel toward sunshine conservatives. They cling to a story about politics that bears no resemblance to how power functions. When confronted with evidence, they demand that reality conform to their narrative. It never does. That narrative existed to pacify them, to make them manageable. They defend it with the same fervor with which the left defends its own delusions.
Each crisis cracks the façade. An assassination. A church invasion. A city surrendered to disorder. Every time, a few more conservatives wake up — only to be swarmed by those demanding a return to small talk about tax rates and process. The problem never lay with those who saw the danger. It lay with those insisting everyone else look away.
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The question no longer concerns policy tweaks. It concerns survival. One side believes the country deserves preservation and repair. The other treats it as illegitimate and disposable. That divide cannot be bridged by nostalgia or proceduralism.
The sunshine conservative era has ended. Saving the country requires engagement, sacrifice, and the willingness to place political reality over personal comfort. It requires choosing the future of one’s children over quarterly returns. It requires the disciplined use of power to defend the nation’s institutions, borders, and communities — even when that makes polite society uncomfortable.
A vote followed by retreat no longer suffices. The fantasy that it does belongs with other comforting lies. The right can either shed it or be ruled by those who never believed it in the first place.
Why the laws of government physics remain undefeated
In an age when government grows with the regularity of the sunrise and the humility of a bonfire, Dan Mitchell’s “20 Theorems of Government” land not as abstractions but as reminders of truths America’s founders understood almost instinctively. The theorems, devised by the co-founder of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, capture the recurring failures of centralized authority and the virtues of free people operating in free markets.
These theorems are not predictions. They are explanations of what government always does when left unchecked and how society always suffers when the state’s reach exceeds the citizen’s grasp.
The problem is not the quality of the people in government. The problem is the nature of government itself.
Mitchell’s First Theorem, which describes how Washington actually functions, could be carved above every federal agency door. Politics rewards the spending of other people’s money for other people’s benefit. The entire system is designed to avoid accountability and to maximize political reward. Once you accept that incentives drive outcomes, the rest of the theorems follow naturally.
The Second and Third Theorems make this point bluntly. Any new program will grow, metastasize, and waste money. Centralization magnifies inefficiency because bureaucracies face no competition, no profit-and-loss constraint, and no personal consequences for failure. When the private sector gets something wrong, it pays for its mistake. When government gets something wrong, it demands a larger budget.
Theorems Four through Seven widen the gap between political rhetoric and economic reality. Good policy can be good politics, but incentives push politicians toward superficial fixes and short-term gratification. Even strong ideas rot inside bureaucratic execution. And the larger the government becomes, the more incompetent and unresponsive it grows. Bureaucrats answer to political pressure, not consumer choice, and the results are inevitable: waste, rigidity, and indifference.
The Eighth through 10th Theorems confront the moral dimension of government overreach. Politicians who obsess over inequality rarely seek to lift up the poor; they seek justification for more control. Crises — real or imaginary — become tools for expanding that control. And politics almost always overwhelms principle. This is not cynicism. It is observation backed by centuries of evidence.
Theorems 11 through 15 dismantle common misconceptions. Big business is not the same thing as free enterprise. In many cases, it is free enterprise’s most persistent enemy. Corporations often work hand in hand with government to protect themselves from competition. Meanwhile, anyone who opposes entitlement reform is endorsing massive, broad-based tax hikes, because arithmetic leaves no other option. You cannot fund European-style welfare states without European-style taxation. And history shows voters resist paying for the bloated government they claim to want.
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This leads naturally to the 16th and 17th Theorems. Economic progress becomes a race between private innovation and public consumption. When government grows faster than the private sector can produce, stagnation follows. Worse, when dependency becomes a norm, the cultural foundations of liberty erode. A nation that forgets how to rely on itself cannot long remain free.
The final three theorems complete the picture. Climate policy becomes hypocrisy when elites demand sacrifice from others while refusing it themselves. Politicians operate under incentives that reward short-term benefit at long-term cost. And the fiscal results — from rising deficits to ever-multiplying promises — are exactly what those incentives predict.
Taken together, Mitchell’s 20 Theorems point to a conclusion Milton Friedman drew decades ago: The problem is not the quality of the people in government; the problem is the nature of government itself. A government that grows without limit will, eventually and inevitably, burden the citizens it claims to serve.
If Americans wish to preserve both prosperity and freedom, they will have to internalize these theorems as practical truths, not relics of libertarian theory. The path forward is not mysterious. Limit government. Unleash markets. These principles are old — and their urgency has never been greater.
To entice 12- to 17-year-olds to get vaccinated, Minnesota offers $200 Visa gift cards, chance to win $100,000 college scholarship
The state of Minnesota is offering financial incentives for children ages 12 to 17 to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
Young people who get both doses of a two-dose COVID-19 vaccine between Monday and Nov. 30 will be eligible to snag a $200 Visa gift card. A parent or guardian can register their child after that child has received the two shots. Registration opens the morning of Nov. 9.
Minnesotans ages 12 to 17 who have received two COVID-19 vaccine doses at any point in 2021 are eligible to be entered to win a $100,000 college scholarship to go to any public or private nonprofit educational institution in Minnesota. There will be five $100,000 scholarship drawings, and after a child has been entered by their parent or guardian into a drawing, they will also be included in each subsequent drawing.
"Our administration is dedicated to doing everything we can to keep our kids safe during this pandemic – and that includes working to get as many Minnesotans vaccinated as possible," Democratic Gov. Tim Walz said in a statement, according to reports.
"We're launching this program to help reward teens for doing their part by getting fully vaccinated and keeping our schools, community, and state safe. If you haven't started your vaccine series yet, do it now and get $200 in your pocket. And to every Minnesota teen across the state: Get fully vaccinated and get your shot at a $100,000 college scholarship," he said.
Just 50% of 12- to 15-year-old Minnesotans have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, while less than 60% of youth ages 16 to 17 have been fully vaccinated in the state, according to a news release, FOX21Online.com reported.
Walz, a Democrat who entered office in early 2019, authorized utilizing $12.2 million of federal American Rescue Plan money for the vaccine incentive program.
📣 📣 Minnesota teens: Not only are you eligible to get vaccinated, but starting today, you can also get $200 AND a s… https://t.co/y6wSSKFoup
— Governor Tim Walz (@GovTimWalz) 1634577328.0
The immorality of the open-borders Left
We have two choices when it comes to border security and interior enforcement. We can continue telegraphing the message that when you come here with children you are home free. This will continue fueling the drug crisis, growing MS-13, enriching the drug cartels, inducing sex trafficking and terrible crimes at the border, encouraging illegals to kidnap children to gain admission, and causing death and mayhem on both sides of the border. Or we could finally deter this behavior by announcing an end to any immigration requests not processed in a controlled environment through our embassy. If you are concerned about “separating children” and don’t support the latter path, then you need to seriously examine your values and priorities.
The entirety of the epidemic-level increase in both drugs and MS-13 began around 2014-2015 with the rise of UACs and the collapse of interior enforcement against criminal alien drug trafficking networks operating in our major cities. That was all precipitated by the rise of the “dreamer” political movement incentivizing people to come here as children or to bring children here to gain admission through catch-and-release.
Here are the facts:
DACA created the surge of Central American teens
From the time DACA was announced, in 2012, through 2014, the number of unaccompanied minors apprehended from El Salvador, Guatamala, and Honduras increased 490 percent, 444 percent, and 610 percent respectively. The El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) drafted a memo in 2014 asserting that 95 percent of the border-crossers interviewed cited the promise of amnesty as the primary factor behind their migration, not violence back home.
The Miami Herald reported at the height of the surge that “children are also being sent by families who believe they could qualify for immigration reform—if Congress ever acts on it—or for President Barack Obama’s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program known as DACA.”
On June 13, 2014, the Washington Post, which now recognizes the problems with UACs but still obsessively supports DACA, admitted that the surge of tens of thousands of Central Americans was “driven in large part by the perception they will be allowed to stay under Obama administration’s immigration policies.”
On June 4, 2014, the New York Times reported that the “shift in the way the United State treats [illegal alien] minors” aka amnesty and catch-and-release, “prompted” and “inspired” parents to either “hire so-called coyotes … to bring them north” or to “make the trip with toddlers in tow, something rarely seen before in this region.”
Thus, it is incontrovertibly clear that amnesty and refugee policies for those coming with children are what incentivized the chain reaction of smuggling that empowers drug cartels and leads to all the social ills for the migrants, not just Americans who have to deal with the consequences.
The surge of central American teens fueled the drug and gang crises
Once we had a surge in Central American teenagers, they served as drug mules and diversions and also paid the drug smugglers record funds to get in. This is why, according to the DEA, the poppy fields of the Mexican drug cartels tripled from 2013 to 2016. They are also the recruiting grounds of MS-13. The Washington Post recently wrote a story on how MS-13 is tearing apart schools in Maryland and hurting some of these very children people claim to care about.
But where did the problem come from?
According to the Post, “The gang’s growth has been fueled by a wave of 200,000 teens who traveled to the United States alone to escape poverty and gang violence in Central America … Nearly 5,000 of those unaccompanied minors have arrived in Prince George’s since 2012.” This parallels comments made Geraldine Hart, police commissioner of Suffolk County, New York, that the entirety of the MS-13 crisis is because of the UACs and that Long Island had it bad because it was “the largest recipient of UACs in the nation.”
Acting Assistant Attorney General John Cronan said that there are 2,000 MS-13 members in Long Island and they are “continually being refilled with new emissaries from El Salvador.”
Even Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said that the MS-13 activity he’s seen in Maryland and the D.C. area “was fueled by illegal immigration and particularly by the challenge of unaccompanied minor children.”
We also know that up to 30 percent of unaccompanied minors (or purported minors) detained by immigration authorities had ties to gangs.
And again, where do the UACs come from and why did it start around 2014? They came from this very “compassionate” agenda of releasing “the children” that is still to this day promoted by the same organizations.
Sadly, not only does this hurt Americans, but it hurts the very innocent illegal alien children those pushing the policy claim to care about. Those are the ones getting raped in schools but are too scared to speak out against MS-13, according to the Washington Post. We do the children of the third world no favors but letting them in through an environment that ensures they will wind up in enclaves in America that are just as violent as Honduras.
The collapse of interior enforcement and rise of sanctuaries allowed drug distributors to flourish
And remember, where you have MS-13, you have a spike in drugs. All those tens of thousands of primarily young Americans dying from heroin, meth, and fentanyl? It’s all being distributed by the drug cartels and gangs of criminal aliens we let in and refuse to deport.
The same people shaming our border agents for defending our sovereignty against what should be an act of war are also shaming ICE for apprehending illegal aliens from state and local jails. But guess what? Even under Trump’s ramped-up enforcement, apprehensions of criminal aliens by ICE are less than half of what they were under Obama before he suspended enforcement after his first term.
Notice when the dip in apprehensions began and how they have still not recovered from Obama’s suspension of the rule of law. This coincided directly with the rise of the drug epidemic.
Likewise, the number of detainers issued by ICE even under Trump is still half the rate it was under Obama in 2011 before the collapse.
On the flip side, there was a surge in releases by immigration judges beginning around the same time as DACA and the suspension of the 287(g) program. The percentage of immigration cases that resulted in release by immigration judges surged from 30 percent to over 50 percent during this period. In some of the big trafficking hubs like New York and Boston, those numbers surged past 80 percent.
Compassion rooted in ignorance is cruelty that leads to the deaths of thousands of people. Guess what most of the aliens apprehended by ICE are typically picked up for? Almost every year, the top charge is for dangerous drugs. All of the primary trafficking is done, in large part, by criminal alien networks that now flourish thanks to these “American values” and “compassion.”
If you truly feel bad about separating families of both illegal aliens and Americans and all the chain reaction of woe it brings, you’d support automatic and immediate denial of entry and deportation for families – together.
President Trump needs to use his inherent Article II powers to stop entry as well as his delegated authority from Congress under 212(f) of the INA. He needs to announce that because of the drug crisis, nobody will be allowed to enter our country under asylum through the border because it does nothing but empower the drug cartels. All applications must be filed in a U.S. embassy in a safe and controlled environment. Also, section 235(b)(2)(C) of the Immigration and Nationality Act specifically allows the Department of Homeland Security to return to Mexico an alien seeking admission or asylum at a port of entry — pending any final outcome in immigration court.
The most compassionate thing to do for the people of Mexico and Central American tracks very closely with the most compassionate course of action for the American people — you know, the people the politicians are actually supposed to represent. And that means closing the border to all migration once and for all. No good can ever come from encouraging migration across a border controlled by some of the most evil people in the world, and that is a point on which we should all agree.
Editor's note: This article has been updated to include a link to a 2014 New York Times article and to correct a misspelling in a quote from the NYT piece.
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