Tucker Carlson on Open Borders
Note: Today, Wednesday, October 23, at 11 a.m. Eastern time, I will be on Ernie Hancock’s podcast “Declare Your Independence” to discuss the wrongful conviction of libertarian bitcoin advocate Ian Freeman. Click here to listen in LIVE. We will post a link to the podcast later.
Reminder: Our online Zoom conference on open borders continues on Monday, October 28, with Benjamin Powell, director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University and professor of economics at Texas Tech University’s Rawls College of Business. 7 p.m.-8 p.m. Eastern Time. Register here.
Reminder: I’ll be speaking at the JFK Lancer conference and also at the CAPA conference, which are being held on November 22-24 in Dallas. Both of them are fantastic JFK-assassination-related conferences. I highly recommend registering for both and then picking and choosing which sessions you would like to attend at both conferences. I will have some of my JFK books there to autograph and sell at a discounted price. I hope to see you there!
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During the four years of the Biden administration, conservatives have steadfastly maintained that President Biden has adopted a policy of “open borders.” A recent example of this phenomenon involves Tucker Carlson, one of the most renowned and intelligent conservatives in the country.
Carlson recently sent out a promotional email for a documentary entitled Line in the Sand, which addresses what he calls “America’s illegal immigrant crisis.” The documentary details “undercover journalist James O’Keefe’s stunning journey to the United States through Central America with the cartels.” Carlson exhorts people to watch the video (which requires a paid membership in Tucker’s organization) to “discover the secrets of our open border that Washington’s establishment doesn’t want you to learn.” (Emphasis added.)
As I read Tucker’s promotional email, I asked myself: How can such a smart guy really believe that the “illegal immigrant crisis” is the result of an “open border”? After all, Tucker attended boarding school and then got a B.A. in history at Trinity College in Connecticut. He has had an illustrious career in journalism, including stints at New York magazine, Reader’s Digest, CNN, PBS, MSNBC, Daily Caller, Fox News, and others. He now hosts the highly successful Tucker Carlson Network.
Bottom line: Carlson is one smart guy.
So, how can he genuinely believe that the reason there is an “illegal immigrant crisis” is because President Biden has adopted a system of “open borders”?
First of all, let’s establish the genuine meaning of “open borders.” Open borders is the system we have inside the domestic United States. The borders between the states are completely open. People are free to cross state borders back and forth without control, monitoring, inspection, or vetting.
In other words, there are no governmental control stations at the state borders. No federal or state agents stop people who are crossing the border to ask for identification. No searches of persons or vehicles at state borders. No state border patrols. No government walls along state borders. No concertina wire. No separating children from their parents. No state highway checkpoints to determine whether a person has crossed into a state without official permission. No criminalization of hiring, transporting, harboring, or caring for illegal entrants into a state. No warrantless searches of ranches or farms on or near state borders.
That is a system of open borders — genuine open borders.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, that is not the system we have on the U.S.-Mexico border. Instead, we have an immigration police state, one that is designed and intended to deter and prevent people from entering the United States without the official permission of the federal government. This immigration police state is characterized by various police-state measures, such as fixed highway checkpoints, roving Border Patrol checkpoints, thousands of Border Patrol and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents, warrantless searches of farms and ranches within 100 miles of the border, boarding of Greyhound buses to check people’s official travel documents, a Berlin Wall along the border, concertina wire, the criminalization of
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