by Doug Casey, International Man. Sign up for his newsletter here.
International Man: During his presidency, Joe Biden implemented an open border policy with thousands of migrants entering the US daily.
The number of migrants that have entered the US illegally since Biden took office is easily in the millions. The invasion has put immense pressure on frontline states.
Where do you think this trend is headed?
Doug Casey: In December 2023 alone, at least 300,000 of these people crossed the border. The numbers are going up. And I wonder, where are you going to put them? They arrive with nothing more than the shirts on their backs, but need a place to sleep and something to eat.
What is the purpose of welcoming these people in to become wards of the State? There is already no place to put them, other than schools, airports, or public buildings. But millions more are on the way. Many hotels, like the Roosevelt in New York, have been rented for them. For the next step, people may be asked, or ordered, to make their second homes or guest houses available to the migrants. Or perhaps spare bedrooms in their homes.
You might think that’s absurd. And it is. But something will be done to accommodate millions of aliens who are encouraged to enter the US. They’re immediately made into welfare recipients.
The number of migrants is certain to grow. Government-funded NGOs give most of them debit cards and cellphones. They come from the world’s poorest places. You can be certain that one of the first calls that they make is to friends back home, saying “Come to America.”
They all, understandably, want to leave their shithole countries. They walk across Mexico, and pile up at the border. They’re welcomed into the US, drawn by the certainty of food, lodging, medical care, and cash. They then become America’s problem.
Why is this happening? We can conjecture. Maybe the Dems see new voters for the coming election. Maybe it’s a desire to replace white people. Maybe altruists think it’s just the right thing to do. Maybe it’s a visceral hatred of America, and what it stands for. But the result will be utter chaos in the US over the next few years. Even if the border is closed after the elections, many millions more will still pile up in Mexico. Most migrants are young males. They (justifiably, at this point) hold Americans in complete contempt for being weak, soft, and lacking self-respect. Many will form up into criminal gangs.
The situation hasn’t even started to get out of control yet. But it will as millions and millions more of these people enter in 2024.
International Man: Border states like Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico are at the forefront and dealing with large numbers of people.
In response, Texas began sending migrants by bus and train to “sanctuary cities” like New York, Washington DC, and Chicago. The Mayor of New York, Eric Adams, has complained about the influx of migrants and the city’s inability to handle and house them.
What do you think about this?
Doug Casey: I’m not a fan of local or state government officials. They’re mostly petty hacks trying to leverage themselves into the big time, which is to say, Washington DC. Don’t count on them to solve the problem.
But it’s understandable why Texas doesn’t want the migrants hanging around. If the migrants were Americans, they might be called vagrants. That’s the traditional term for people who are homeless, penniless, and unemployed. Of course they want to ship them to “sanctuary” cities.
Among other problems, the local poor, especially blacks in northern ghettos, resent the newcomers being put up in hotels, with free debit cards, food, and cellphones. Of course, a lot of the blacks on welfare get these things anyway, but they resent incoming migrants getting them immediately. Earlier waves of Hispanics, who were mostly opportunity seekers, resent the newcomers getting a free ride. It’s a formula for discontent.
Meanwhile, although the US federal government can print any amount of money to import and support migrants, local governments have to tax the money from local residents. The wealthy will gather in gated communities, or just move out. Millions of penniless migrants from Mogadishu, Caracas, Port-au-Prince, and Lagos will degrade the quality of life wherever they land.
The situation will probably resolve itself over time. Fifty years from now things will have stabilized. But the future America will be quite different, and it’s likely to be an unpleasant trip as we find out how bad things have to get before they resolve.
Let’s say we have 20 million totally illegal recent migrants wandering around the US by the end of 2024. Can they be exported back to where they came from? That’s unlikely. Many of them (understandably and intelligently) burn their passports once they arrive. They can’t even get on a plane, barring special dispensation. If they do, when they arrive back in China, or Senegal, or wherever, the airlines are fined big bucks for letting somebody board without a legal document. And will be forced to carry them back to the US.
The question is: How do you get rid of these people once they’re in the US? Rounding them up would take a police state. I suspect they’re here to stay.
Furthermore, these migrants are quite unlike those from the early 20th century. Then the migrants were culturally similar to Americans. That’s important. But more important, those people had to fend for themselves immediately. These people don’t. They’re being actively drawn to the US by massive welfare benefits, which encourage the wrong kind of immigrant, and corrupt all concerned. What’s now a flood will turn into a tidal wave in the months to come. Many will compete with native American derelicts for space on sidewalks in places like San Francisco.
As an AnCap, I’m for the free flow of people across borders. But that’s only reasonably possible when you have a true free market and strict property rights. If you enter a country without money, where are you going to stay? If all property was privately owned, nobody would tolerate squatters. Which, incidentally, is becoming a big problem.
Migrants are starting to use real estate listings to find empty houses. They then use local laws (especially in blue states) to squat. In many locales, someone who gets into a house can’t be evicted, practically as well as legally, for months.
Why, we might ask, does the government even bother having immigration and customs formalities in places like New York or LA anymore? The people that fly in have visas, credit cards, suitcases with clothes, and homes. We trouble these people, but not the migrants, who are paid to enter, and become wards of the state.
Furthermore, consider the whole idea of work visas. A law-abiding foreigner typically has to spend thousands of dollars in legal fees to get a US work visa. Meanwhile, migrants are paid to just pile in. Even if an employer wants to hire someone who doesn’t speak English, have an address, or transportation, he can’t legally give them a job, since they don’t have Social Security numbers.
All of this is resulting in massive disrespect for laws. It’s true that many or most of the laws we have in the US are stupid and counterproductive. But when the whole idea of obeying the law is subverted, the result will be chaos.
International Man: Recently, the US border crisis escalated when the US Supreme Court approved the decision for federal agents to cut the razor wire which Texas put up to prevent the entrance of migrants.
It led to a standoff between Texas and the federal government, which is still ongoing. Could the situation between Texas and the federal government escalate?
What moves do you see each side taking, and how do you see it playing out?
Doug Casey: What’s going on between Texas and Washington DC is mostly Kabuki theater. Abbott, a second-class political hack, is using it to grandstand and make himself better-known among Republicans. Anyway, the barbed wire dispute is centered on a four-mile stretch at the Eagle Pass entrance. The migrants have thousands of miles of border they can use freely.
All they have to do is ask for asylum, and they’re home free, and on the gravy train.
Speaking of the Federal/Texas dispute, it’s important to note the antagonism that’s been building up for years between the Red people and the Blue people in the US. It’s increasingly serious. They can no longer even have a civil conversation. It’s the type of thing that presages a civil war, and it’s greatly aggravated by migrants being invited in at public expense.
I’ve said for years that a civil war was in the cards. The coming US civil war won’t, however, be along geographical lines, as was the War of Southern Secession from 1861 to 1865. The Blue people are concentrated on the coasts and big cities, the Red people are in flyover country and small towns. But they’re intermingled everywhere.
This civil war is likely to be quite localized, and personalized, if you will. No armies lined up against each other, but lots of fistfights, with a fair number of homicides and disappeared persons. You probably won’t want to voice controversial views among people you don’t know well. Shocking thoughts? America is no longer the land of Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver. It’s transformed into a multicultural domestic empire.
It’s important to remember that, dysfunctional as it is, the government in Washington DC is vastly more powerful than the state governments. It’s very much controlled by modern day Jacobins, the same kind of people who controlled the French Revolution. Little Robespierres, the types who guillotined about 30,000 of their countrymen in the early 1790’s.
When push comes to shove, most Americans will tend to do what the national government tells them to do. If the Jacobins—the Democrats—retain control of the apparatus of the State for another four years, when we’re experiencing financial, economic, political, and social chaos all at once… keep your head down.
International Man: During the Covid hysteria, some state governors acted independently from the federal government’s dictates. States like Texas, Florida, and South Dakota chose to open schools, end lockdowns, and ignore vaccine mandates. The border crisis has created another situation in which the federal and state governments are at odds.
Where do you think this trend is headed?
Doug Casey: I think it’s not so much a question of various states being at odds with the federal government. It’s a question of the people being at odds with governments everywhere.
The average American, who’s under increasing financial stress, is increasingly disinclined to pay taxes, because he sees that he’s getting little in return but aggravation. In fact, with millions of aliens being imported at his expense, he sees that his taxes are being used against his own interests.
It would be nice if they did, but I wouldn’t count on state governments to counter orders from DC. However, individual Americans are talking to each other and getting fed up. Simultaneously, people within the DC Beltway are viewing Red Americans and MAGA people as threats. More gun regulations are in the works, including a bill recently proposed to make it a violation for more than three armed people to be together.
Don’t rely on your state government. Local law enforcement always rolls over when confronted by the FBI, or any of a score of similar Federal agencies. Were Provincial governments of any help to the truckers in Canada recently, when they confronted the federal government? No.
This relates to what we’re seeing in France, Germany and Holland, where common people, starting with farmers and truckers, are rising up against their national governments. They increasingly see their rulers as alien beings.
Speaking of aliens in the countries I just mentioned, as well as Britain, the migrant problem is actually much worse than in the US. That’s because their migrants are mostly Muhammadans. They’ve formed their own communities with their own laws, making it dangerous for Brits, Swedes, Frenchmen, or Hollanders to enter their enclaves.
That could also evolve into a type of civil war in Europe. The migrants hate the locals, hate Western civilization, and want to replace it. Their numbers are growing rapidly, and many want to enforce Sharia law on everyone. At some point these alien people, most of them perpetually unemployed and living off the massive European welfare benefits, will no longer be tolerated.
Mass migration is going to change the nature of America, as it has Europe.
You can’t fight the tide of history. The West has lost faith in itself. It’s natural for demographics of any place in the world to change. But it’s a pity if you value things like free minds and free markets. The West in general and America in particular were not just unique, but hugely better than the rest of the world in many ways. But they’re being overturned. It’s not change itself that’s the problem. It’s that these changes are destructive and degrading.
Part of the change is because Wokeism has become a new religion. The migrants are accelerating the change because they’re not drawn to America out of love for the idea of America and freedom. They’re being drawn here because they love freebies, not freedom.
International Man: How does the trend of the states increasingly defying the feds play into your big-picture outlook?
What are the investment and other implications?
Doug Casey: Well, for one thing, if you are in a Blue state or a sanctuary city, I would bail out now. The pot is likely to boil over, and things could get violent. Even if violence is avoided, taxes are necessarily going up to support welfare receiving migrants.
More important, you might want to establish a second residency outside of the US. Current trends are likely to continue accelerating. If the Dems can round up the many millions of recent migrants, and get them voting in the 2024 election, it’s likely game over.
We’re just at the early stages of a major cultural change. Higher taxes, more crime, and general chaos are part of it. It’s not going to be any fun to watch anywhere, but absolutely not out of your front window in the US.