Liberty For All

by Starchild

Since September 11, 2001, the United States has become a colder, less hospitable place. Anxious to ease their fears about security, Americans have grown increasingly willing to let people from other countries pay the price. I’m not talking about the tragic killing of civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan, but of something even deadlier: Fearful inhabitants of the “home of the brave” who want to see the borders tightened and fewer people allowed to enter the United States.

Before I explain, it is worth emphasizing the fact that controlling national borders will *not* stop terrorism. All it does is allow government to create the illusion that it is protecting us. In fact, restricting civil liberties like the freedom to migrate hands terrorists a victory, since their goal of creating a climate of fear is greatly aided by the presence of draconian security measures. And, of course, trying to keep people from coming to America costs billions of dollars a year in money stolen from American taxpayers.

Meanwhile, the deadly combination of poverty and population pressure in developing countries continues to take a terrible and growing toll on the natural environment. Rain forests and coral reefs, the most fragile and biologically diverse habitats on earth, are being destroyed at an alarming rate (see). Much of this destruction is at the hands of poor, desperate people trying to eke out a living in places where environmental protections, secure land titles, and property rights are virtually nonexistent. If better economic alternatives, such as migrating to the United States, were available to these individuals, many would surely take them.

You may be aware of these arguments for open borders. Here’s another reason to get rid of U.S. border controls which you may not have heard: They are killing millions of people.

In John Stossel’s terrific new book “Give Me A Break,” the ABC commentator describes an FDA press conference at which the agency announced the approval of a new drug. A spokesperson said that the action would save 14,000 lives a year. Doesn’t that mean, Stossel asks, that the FDA *killed* 14,000 people by *not* approving the drug a year sooner? Unfortunately this question wasn’t asked by reporters, he says, because they don’t think that way. Fourteen thousand lives lost from the delay of one drug. If we added up the lives lost because of lack of access to *all* the drugs which the FDA’s controls keep out of the hands of people who need them, we’d probably find that they are shortening the lives of tens of thousands of people every year.

But the FDA’s death toll pales compared to that of another government agency not typically thought of as being in the life-and-death business — the Border and Transportation Security Directorate (successor to the old Immigration and Naturalization Service under the newly created Department of Homeland Security behemoth). Few people question how many people die because the FDA failing to approve new drugs in a timely fashion. Even fewer question how many people die because they were not allowed to come to the United States. Of course there are the senseless migrant deaths regularly footnoted in the news: People packed into the cargo holds of ships, or the back of sealed trucks driven by human smugglers dying of asphyxiation, people getting lost and dying of starvation in the desert, people shot and killed by border agents, etc. I’m not even talking about these deaths, but about a far higher number that go unreported because they are not identified as a consequence of government policy.

Life expectancy in the United States is about 77.5 years. In Mexico and China, it’s about 72 years; people in India live about 63 years; in Cambodia about 57; in Haiti a meager 49.5 years (figures available here). When the U.S. government refuses to allow people from these countries to emigrate to the United States, it is statistically shortening their lives as surely as it shortens peoples’ lives when it delays approving life-saving drugs. Thus every newborn child denied entry has her life shortened by up to 28 years. It is the same for all the future children who won’t be born in the U.S. because border controls prevented their parents from coming here.

How many people are being killed in this manner? It’s impossible to say, but let’s estimate that completely opening America’s borders would result in an extra 5 million people a year emigrating to this country (right now the rate is about 1.5 million a year). Given that those with the most to gain from emigrating are people from very poor countries and that better-off individuals wishing to come to America can usually find a way to do so, let’s assume that the average potential migrant’s life expectancy is an average of 10 years less than it would be here. Assuming a life is 77.5 years available to the average person in the United States, that 10 years per life taken off the lives of 5 million people would represent approximately 645,161 lifespans. That’s 645,161 deaths *every year. * [Of course if we calculated the number of lives using the length of an average lifespan in the developing world, the death toll would be even higher. Canadian, American and Australian studies have also shown that immigrants, particularly non-European immigrants, generally have a longer life expectancy than the native-born population. (See here.) 

Let’s further assume that every two migrants produce an average of one child after arriving in the United States (probably a bit on the low side for birth rates among newcomer families). If being born in the U.S. would mean an extra 10 years tacked onto their lives, then denying them this opportunity amounts to another 2.5 million lives shortened every year, or the equivalent of 35,714 full lives lost annually. I won’t even attempt to get into grandchildren and so on.

Admittedly these are extremely rough estimates. However they may just as easily be on the low side as on the high side — the numbers hardly need to be inflated to make the point that what’s going on is absolutely horrific. If the figures I’ve guessed at are anywhere near correct, we’re talking around 650,000 to 700,000 lives lost every year. That’s roughly the equivalent of another genocide in Rwanda. Within the span of a decade, the death toll could be higher than that inflicted by the Nazis at places like Dachau and Auschwitz.

Now compare this to the 3,000 or so Americans whose lives were shortened by the terrorist attacks in September 2001, a loss of perhaps only half that many full lives using the methods described above. It gives one pause to realize that Al Qaeda could inflict a dozen World Trade Center attacks every year and the loss of life would still be a tiny fraction of the slow, hidden genocide that is being silently inflicted in the name of “security” by keeping people out of the United States.

Of course the United States isn’t the only country whose border controls are killing people. Other wealthy countries are sentencing untold numbers of people to early deaths in a similar manner. They also deserve our condemnation. But it is particularly egregious for the fourth largest and most prosperous nation in the world - a nation built on the labor of immigrants, that reveres the Statue of Liberty lifting her lamp to new arrivals as one of its most cherished symbols, sitting astride a huge patch of the most desirable temperate land on earth, much of it uninhabited — to be denying entry to world’s poor and downtrodden.

Each of us living in this land of the protected and the home of the fearful should ask ourselves this question: If I do not speak out against rules which seek to ease my fear by condemning hundreds of thousands of people a year to an early death, what kind of person am I?