Horowitz: Martha’s Vineyard affair shows how easily states could fight the border invasion

We’ve been told for decades that America is different from every other country in human history in that it has no right to jurisdictional sovereignty. Anyone can trespass the country, unilaterally assert domicile in a given locality against the will of the people and its governing authority, and force the people to pay for their medical bills, K-12 education (Plyler v. Doe), make their children citizens, and be counted in the census – and there’s not a darn thing you can do about it. That was until Martha’s Vineyard.

Conservatives often observe the appalling hypocrisy of the left-wing virtue-signalers who publicly advocate for illegal immigration but then refuse to live with the consequences. But rather than just scoring a political talking point, conservatives would be wise to secure political outcomes based on the Martha’s Vineyard affair. If the residents of the opulent island were able to marshal the National Guard to remove 50 illegal aliens within a day, why shouldn’t the red states follow suit immediately?

What we’ve learned from the virtue-signaling at Martha’s Vineyard is that indeed, illegal aliens simply landing on their island doesn’t make them entitled to endless use of the community’s services. Residents, while claiming to have compassion and posting photo ops offering them food and shelter, made it clear that they lack the resources to house them — and therefore it is the compassionate thing, from anyone’s vantage point, to move them somewhere else. Why then should other poorer parts of the country be saddled with a burden on their schools and hospitals that is incalculable?

Consider the plight of Arizona, for a moment. As many as 11% of all school children have at least one parent who is in the country illegally. According to a 2012 study by the Federation for Immigration Reform, “The total education, medical, and incarceration costs in Arizona due to illegal immigration are $2.6 billion a year.” And that is for an entire state. You can imagine that the costs are even more acute in some local cities and towns, many of which are quite poor, such as Yuma. Some estimate that the lifetime cost of just the illegal aliens who have come under Biden so far is upwards of $100 billion. And those numbers are growing every day.

Martha’s Vineyard currently has 165 children in the local public school. Applying the same ratio as Arizona, they could easily afford these families because they likely don’t yet have 18 children among the group of 50 (11% of their native enrollment). If even that is too absurd for them, why should Texas, Arizona, and every other state cater to the invasion instead?

Thus, rather than merely observing the double standard of the left, isn’t it time for red states to begin promoting their own self-survival? Federal courts have forced these states to educate the world’s children, but Martha’s Vineyard wouldn’t be caught dead enrolling them in their schools. And they most certainly wouldn’t put up with the crime.

In 2018, John Lott conducted an analysis of Arizona’s incarcerated population and found that illegal immigrants in Arizona are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of crime than other Arizonans. He also found that they are 45.4% more likely to have been gang members, and “they are 133% more likely to receive sentencing enhancements for being classified as dangerous, and they tend to be released from prison at a younger age despite more serious crimes because they initially go to jail at a younger age.”

The point being that if Martha’s Vineyard could request removal of illegal aliens with no record of their island being overrun with gangs, drugs, and the rampant fiscal cost, then most certainly, those areas suffering its effects for two generations should have the right to use their respective national guards to remove illegal aliens. Ironically, Martha’s Vineyard residents were acting upon their own heritage. In 1700, Massachusetts passed a law denying admission to those deemed a public charge or who forced shipmasters to guarantee their economic security. They forced the ships to transport the inadmissible aliens at their own cost.

Red states have the ability to end this charade tomorrow. They can declare an invasion and invoke Art. I Sec. 10 to repel the invasion by coordinating their respective national guards to remove all large groups of illegal aliens the feds send into their states and return them to Mexico. If Martha’s Vineyard can’t afford them, most others can’t either. The federal government has violated its commitment to the states and the states have the right to step in and end this invasion. The amount of illegal immigration, pursuant to law, that states should tolerate is zero. The Secure Fence Act of 2006 requires the DHS to achieve full operational control over the border, defined as “the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States, including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism, narcotics, and other contraband.”

So why haven’t the states stepped up to the plate? Sadly, most Republicans still support the cheap labor-driven open borders agenda. Sure, now, more than ever, they will use the chaos at the border as a cudgel against Biden headed into an election, but do they really want to shut off the flow of illegal aliens? Idaho Republicans Mike Crapo and Mike Simpson are strongly pushing legislation to grant amnesty and a path to citizenship for illegal aliens working in agriculture so they can further drive down wages and bring some of the problems associated with big cities to America’s rural areas.

HR 1603 has 13 Republican House co-sponsors. The bill grants amnesty to every illegal alien in this country who claims to have worked at least part-time for agriculture and creates an unlimited agriculture guest worker program for the future to bring in millions of low-skilled workers. The cultural and fiscal costs are never factored in. It permanently tethers green cards for people coming in on these H-2 visas to the condition of working in agriculture for 10 years, creating an indentured servant model that will prevent farms from ever modernizing and mechanizing their processes because of the boundless flow of cheap labor.

“This is not amnesty,” said Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson, using the age-old trick to redefine amnesty. “This is earned citizenship, earned legality in the country, to be able to provide the jobs and do the jobs that are necessary.” The comments were made at the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives in Washington where the American Business Immigration Coalition promised to spend $8 million promoting the amnesty bill.

This, despite the flood of illegals at an unimaginable level.

Just know it doesn’t have to be this way. States can take charge of their own destinies. The problem is that Ron DeSantis is the only GOP governor espousing the view that immigration should be driven by a cost-benefit analysis to the whole of the people, not just to special interests. Most Republicans, as much as they don’t like the chaos at the border, continue to espouse a belief in the corporate cartel’s monopoly on our country in their desire to bring in boundless cheap labor.

“But corporatism is not the same as free enterprise. Too many Republicans have viewed limited government to basically mean whatever is best for corporate America is how we want to do the economy. And my view is, obviously free enterprise is the best economic system,” said DeSantis at a recent National Conservatism Conference.

Focusing on policy both for illegal and legal immigration, DeSantis framed his thought process as follows: “So the issue is, how does immigration serve the people of the United States and the national interest?” he said, adding, “We’re not globalists who believe that foreigners have a right to come into our country whenever they want to.”

At least as it relates to limousine liberals, when they are mugged by reality they will come to their senses. Not so for the globalist “business community” which Republicans slavishly serve. No amount of border chaos will ever move them from their dogmatic support for endless cheap labor.