Joshua Arnold – WashingtonStand.com
Commentary
Unintended consequences often make the difference between good policies and bad ones. Of all the harmful ideas governments have enacted throughout human history, very few were ever intended to cause harm. But good intentions do not guarantee that policymakers understand human nature, the incentives, or the economic conditions that their policies create. Good policies avoid bad side effects — either unintentionally or by design — or create good ones; bad policies are those which, however well-intentioned, inflict untold human suffering that they never intended.
Few Americans, besides those with partisan obligations to a losing cause, would contest the claim that the Biden administration’s experiment in open borders was an unqualified disaster. In less than four years, America welcomed in somewhere around eight million immigrants over the normal (legal) amount, with effectively no vetting. Alongside families fleeing economic hardship and those with legitimate asylum claims, the Biden administration left the door open for criminals, gangs, and foreign operatives, without even a glance at the terrorist watch list. Needless to say, chaos and crime reigned.
Granted, President Biden acted upon what he believed to be good intentions. In general, the open borders policy put into practice his belief that there should be no nations or borders, only one global community. In particular, the open border policy advantaged underprivileged, predominantly non-white immigrants over privileged, predominantly white Americans, thereby implementing a misguided, Marxist conception of social justice based on skin color and economic status.
But those “good” intentions did not prevent the ill effects of open borders. So, in 2024, the American voters elected President Donald Trump to fix the problem (for a second time). The second Trump administration has addressed the illegal immigration crisis wrought by open borders in many ways — most of them dramatic — and has already removed millions of illegal immigrants less than halfway into his term.
Housing Costs
Of interest here is the Trump administration’s underreported attention to one particular ill effect of open borders: housing costs. Eight million people entering the country need places to live. But the Biden administration did nothing to boost the housing supply to compensate for this increase in housing demand. The obvious result was an increase in the price of housing.
This much was always obvious to anyone who took half a second to think about the problem — which no one in the Biden administration ever seemed to do.