The Border is a Ponzi Scheme

 There is something happening at the border, and it's fucked up. These are the only two things that the loudest of the yammering heads on either side of America's partisan divide seem to agree on when it comes to immigration and they're probably the only two things about this issue that either side actually gets right. There are millions of people flowing back and forth over that invisible line in the desert as part of a tumultuous tide of violence and exploitation that seems to be beyond anyone's comprehension, let alone control. This much is hard for anyone with functioning eyes and/or ears to deny. The rest of the popular narrative however is generally comprised of one of two fictions. There is the liberal fiction that these folks are just clambering for the milk of American exceptionalism and old Joe Biden is just doin his damnedest to let em on in. And then there is the slightly meaner but no less delusional conservative fiction that Biden is in league with the ghost of Joseph Stalin to open the borders so he can replace white cultural conservatives with slightly darker cultural conservatives.

Please allow me to do what I do best and rip the fucking Band-Aid off of this infected wound right now. First off, these people aren't rushing the ramparts of the world's biggest police state because they're just jonesing for our superior brand name of freedom. They are fleeing for their fucking lives from the flaming shitholes that our superior brand name of freedom has reduced their homelands into after we failed to outsource it by the barrel of an M-60. The top four nationalities currently seeking refuge at the southern border are Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians. The first three in that bunch were actually doing relatively fine by post-colonial standards until we chained their countries up in strangling economic sanctions and kicked them into the bottomless well of human misery that tends to come with that sort of economic terrorism and Haiti has been fucked over so many times by Uncle Sam that we all lost count about a century ago. These people are refugees of American violence flocking to the land where all their wealth is being horded by a bunch of lazy fucking gringos with sharing issues.

As for the big bad open border, it's being policed by a larger and more heavily armed squadron of crypto-fascist boot boys than ever before. Even before the Democrats all hopped aboard the border hysteria express, Biden had approved of a $97.3 billion budget for the Department of Homeland Security's fiscal year of 2023, the largest budget in that Orwellian apparatus' putrid history. This includes a combined $26 billion dollars for border protection and immigration alone, which is once again the highest sum in human history, burying Donald Trump's mighty wall in the fucking sand. The jagged little reality that neither species of partisan Washington sewer mutant can seem to swallow is that the border is not open, it has simply collapsed beneath the weight of an insatiably massive police state that both parties have consistently conspired with their shared corporate overlords to construct.  

Like all of America's forever wars, the border war is an ongoing multi-administrative affair passed down from generation to generation, from Democrat to Republican to Dempublican to Republicrat. This carefully manufactured crisis began under Clinton in an attempt to make sure that the supposedly free trade of NAFTA only went one way. From that point on, the differences in how each successive administration fought this jihad were largely cosmetic in nature but they generally followed a downward trend of becoming more and more totalitarian with each changing of the guard. Bush transformed this war into a matter of national security in the wake of attacks that could have been easily avoided if our intelligence monstrosity wasn't too busy hassling Latin American freedom fighters to guard base camp from a few well-known Saudi whack-jobs with green cards and box cutters, but it was actually our sweet-talking humanitarian wunderkind Barack Obama who really kicked the shit into high gear with gulags and mass deportations on a downright Soviet scale.

Donald Trump simply took what Obama had quietly erected and swung it around over his head like a coked-out berserker slathered in virgin calf's blood. He definitely ramped up the cruelty and turned what had been a largely covert war into a blatant act of terrorism by advertising it like a goddamn monster truck rally. But every single weapon at that raving orange supremacist's disposal was provided to him gift-wrapped by the same bleeding-heart liberals who wagged their fingers at the bad man and consoled his victims before the cameras with warm blankets, hot cocoa and Sarah McGlocklin jams. 

And all of these deadly weapons have remained in use long after the bad man went away, however, I will concede that Biden should be given credit for stepping up a program to phase out the horsewhips and cattle prods with more high-tech solutions to improve American border savagery. Joe didn't tear down Donald's silly Great Wall of Atzlan, he simply increased funding on efforts to bring it into the age of Philip K. Dick with a virtual wall of autonomous surveillance towers, armored robot dogs and low-flying Predator drones. Oh, that wet-brained motherfucker didn't come up with this Brave New World, but he and his Department of Homeland Security maestro Alejandro Mayorkas were the first psychopaths sick enough to sell it to the public as a more safe, sane and humane alternative to flaming moats and machine gun turrets. They also stepped-up long-standing efforts to both privatize the border and affectively outsource it farther south to darker quisling rump states like Mexico.

This brings us to the Biden Administration's latest pseudo-humanitarian hustle, labeled the Safe Third Country Policy because apparently Alzheimer's isn't a post-irony condition. While both Joe's grumbling critics and groveling supporters focus on that old bastard's plan to allow 30,000 asylum seekers in the country each month from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti, they also both conveniently avoid the devil in the details. The only asylum seekers allowed in the country will be those with the substantial financial resources and first world computer literacy to be able to do so from their embattled third world countries currently under siege by American imperial designs. This affectively counts out everyone but the wealthiest classes most likely to be collaborators in America's failed regime change schemes as well as the kind of doctors and engineers those countries desperately need to function. Add to this the fact that Biden is also using this decidedly conditional benevolent gift to lay cover fire for his plans to purge as many impoverished refugees as he excepts, enshrining Trump's most dystopian border policies into law in the process, and you get a vastly different picture than the political cartoon being painted by both sides of the partisan Peso. 

However, all of these details still don't change the inconvenient fact that all of this effort, the decades of military machinery, the jackbooted shock troops and Skynet-grade technology, haven't done a goddamn thing to slow the relentless tide of desperate people crossing these trillion-dollar trenches. That's probably because none of this shit was actually designed to keep poor people out of this country. It was designed to control poor people inside of it and make powerful people very rich. The unavoidable solution to this confounding equation is that much like other forms of prohibition, the prohibition of human movement on a massive scale is a very profitable failure and the border as we know it is affectively a massive Ponzi scheme.

Whereas in your typical Ponzi scheme, a fraudster pays existing investors with the funds of new investors while promising high returns and pocketing the money instead, the border Ponzi scheme promises last year's immigrants protection from next year's immigrants but actually just invests this money in a fascistic police state that only benefits the fraudsters pulling its strings. All of this is part of the fastest growing international cartel on the planet, a sinister cabal known as the Border Industrial Complex which is set to reach a value higher than the combined GDP of the entire third world by the time we reach the apocalypse. In an age of collapse, these blood-sucking weasels have cornered the market on an industry committed to defending the besieged Westphalian nation state from the human blowback of its own putrid existence during the final stages of the Kali Yuga.

It is indeed a hideously spectacular scam, and everyone seems to have fallen for it. But like all scams, it is damned to failure by the insatiable hubris of the sociopaths running it. Any boundary defined by a construct larger than the community it supposedly serves is simply too artificial to be sustained indefinitely. Every tribe has some right to define their own boundaries, but this includes the right for me and my tribe to defend ourselves from the real fucking predators of a fanged deep state that none of us actually voted for. It should also include the right for me to invite whoever the hell I want over to dinner, regardless of which fanged deep state claims the soil on their boots. 

As for the desert wilderness that stretches beyond the reach of Ozymandias, no-man's-land is anybody's land and I wish anybody who passes it peacefully nothing but luck in protecting their own tribe. After all, we were all nomads once before we found a space to call our own. There but before the grace of Kali go I.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

*  I'm Set Free by the Velvet Underground

*  Circle the Drain by Soccer Mommy

* Tugboat by Galaxie 500

* So Far Gone by Weird Nightmare

* All the Rage Back Home by Interpol

* Rocket by Smashing Pumpkins

* I'm Beginning to See the Light by the Velvet Underground

* Emma's House by the Field Mice

* Heaven by the Walkmen 

* Oh, Sweet Nuthin by the Velvet Underground