The US Justice Department on Monday sued the State of Texas over floating barriers installed by the state government in the Rio Grande river. The state government had installed the barrier to block migrants crossing from Mexico. The measure also accompanies other efforts by the state to control border access, such as laying razor wire along many areas of the border. Reuters reports:
Texas authorities began installing the string of buoys in the middle of the river near Eagle Pass, Texas, last week, part of Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott’s initiative dubbed Operation Lone Star to deter migrants.
“We allege that Texas has flouted federal law by installing a barrier in the Rio Grande without obtaining the required federal authorization,” Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a statement. “This floating barrier poses threats to navigation and public safety and presents humanitarian concerns.”
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in the Western District of Texas, seeks “to remove all structures and obstructions, including a floating barrier and all infrastructure related to the floating barrier, in the Rio Grande,” according to the court filing.
This latest suit highlights the ongoing intervention of federal technocrats who seek to override the policies of border states that actually have to deal with the realities of border crossings and large migrant populations.
In Washington, where most elected officials spend nearly all the year living in the Washington metropolitan area, the US-Mexico border is a distant place. Moreover, the ordinary people who actually live near the border are not something that is of much concern for millionaire members of Congress and the federal lifers working in the bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the central government in Washington continues to assert that it gets the final say on immigration matters, although the federal government has no true legal authorization to do so. This creates a typical example of how policymakers work when they have no skin in the game. When the federal government is in charge, those who do have actual skin in the game in regions near the border don’t get to make the rules. Instead, the people who make the rules are the Washington elites, thousands of miles away.
It wasn’t always this way, of course. As we’ve shown here at mises.org, the idea that immigration control is a federal matter dates only from the 1880s, and became commonplace only in the twentieth century. Prior to that time, it was recognized that the US Constitution means what it said: the federal government handles naturalization while immigration control is not among the enumerated federal powers. Thus, constitutionally, immigration is a matter for state and local governments.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that state and local governments can know the “correct” number of immigrants. The government in Austin can’t know this any better than the government in Washington. Decentralized policy, however, is more likely to reflect the diversity of conditions that exist in different economies across the country while providing more options to the taxpaying public overall. After all, to centralize policy in Washington generally results in imposing a single bad (and costly) policy uniformly across the entire nation.
(It is worth noting, by the way, that more localized control does not necessarily mean less immigration. Historically, different regions of the country have been quite varied in their responses to migrants. Political realities being what they are, parts of the country with labor shortages have historically been more in favor of immigration than other areas.)
Read More:
- Immigration, Wages, and the Global Marketplace by Murray Rothbard
- “Only the Private Sector Can Determine the “Correct” Number of Immigrants“ by Ryan McMaken
- Why the Quota System Is One of the Worst Ways of Regulating Immigration by Ryan McMaken
