When you make a thing illegal you lose control of it.
Let me explain by example. Prohibition in the US was made Law by a constitutional amendment that made alcohol beverages illegal from 1920 through 1933. During this time more alcoholics came into being than the nation had ever known before. This period also saw the launch organized crime into a “billion dollar business”(2). To a real extent this is more than anything else what powered the “roaring 20’s.”(3).
That period in time also saw a lot of hard drug usage. I’m going to put forward a postulate not all will agree with [what’s new in that?]: the fact that alcohol was illegal but could still be had made it for practical purposes a gate-way drug, opening the door into other things that were also illegal. The very fact of it’s being illegal made it enticing and also put it on the same list as cocaine and heroin, laudanum, and other such substances. (Do you know where Coca-Cola got it’s name? Think about it.)
On the flip side, the repeal of the 18th amendment (1933) also created a lot of fortunes. For example, those who had the foresight and funds to warehouse a lot of “stuff” now had “stuff” that they could claim was “aged” and sell for extra bucks-up.(4)
On the flip-flip side, it has been suggested that the 18th Amendment / prohibition was nothing more than a maneuver by some folks to make sure gasoline from petroleum rather than alcohol / oil from corn was what powered automobiles. Grain alcohol could not be produced during those years, even for fuel, so that clinched the petroleum industry into its position of power.(5)
My point is about making a thing illegal and losing control over it. Or, if you want to control a thing you first have to make it legal. Only then can you do things like price control, quality control, safety, long term health effects or benefits, etc.
You want to “stem the tide of illegal immigration?” Building a wall is not going to do it. Change the laws / agencies to respond to the realities of the situation. If going through the front-door for immigration has become so bad that they’ll take their chances doing it the other way, then may be the front door needs to be reexamined. If there is a problem in those nations to the south of American that causes so very many people to want to come to America, maybe this is an opportunity for America to lend a hand, the way it always boasted of doing in the past.
“Seems you have a problem; can we be of some assistance here?”
Or, or, or… there a hundred solutions to this problem that are not building a 1,954 mile long wall.
Building such a wall is only going to create a lucrative black market in smuggling Over, Under or Around that wall. You just turned it in to an industry, for Pete’s sake!
Law vs People is always like this. The harder you squeeze, the more the People will slip out from under.
Remember the Boston Tea Party? A few taxes (quite a few) without actually examining the real consequences, followed by squeeze, control, squeeze, make-an-example of, and squeeze and England lost the richest colony any Western Empire had ever had control of.
If you go “father knows best” and “your opinion has no merit” and “I don’t care what you want; this is for your own good” then you are either in charge of several 3 – 5 year-olds and doing it badly, or you are being a totalitarian state. Sometimes, in limited circumstances, this is appropriate. Most of the time, nearly always, it is not.
This does not cover everything. I certainly do NOT mean that murder, malicious violence, fraud(6) and other theft for no reason than personal gain should be made legal so they can be controlled. They should not be legal. Ever.(7) This rule applies, in my mind as I write this, mostly to broad public behaviors or social phenomenon.
Drinking. Marijuana. Illegal Immigration. Prostitution. Gambling. These are not things you wipe out by “enforcing” them.(8) Fact is, you won’t wipe these things out. Ever. You can enter into a balanced relationship with them, though; protect the participants and limit the damage to non-participants that might otherwise get sucked in or affected by repercussions. For example: the drug dealer who, being in an illegal trade anyway, pushes his “stuff” on the young or otherwise vulnerable and “hooks” them. It’s illegal anyway; what’s he risking? Only more profits, really. In his own mind, at least.
Is it not the job of a government to obey the will of the people? All the people? (Yes, there’s a very long and very loud debate that follows this question, especially in this context. So… debate it!)
Once a thing is made illegal, you open the door for people to walk into the Room, the Illegal Room, the Fun Room (so they think), the Room that wasn’t even there until you created the Black Market for it by making it illegal.
Wrong solution. These things can be solved (most definitely!), but not that way.
(1) Surely an inappropriate use of the Constitution? Specifically writing a “can’t” into the document? Not what it was created for; though, of course, the Founding Fathers (to use an inappropriate but handy phrase) knew that the Future would test the document in unforeseen ways. As it has.
(2) “Billion” dollar business is to put it in today’s terms. Frankly, back then, a million dollars was more like what we generally mean by a billion dollars now.
(3) Well… not really. It was also the lash-back from the War to End All Wars that had just ended, and that was an experience no one was prepared for. It was the first mechanized war and it was brutal, and “shell shock” (as PTSD / combat fatigue / battle fatigue was called then) doesn’t do justice at all to the after effects. So the “roaring 20’s” were a reaction to a prolonged could-die-any-moment experience. There’s a lot more to say on all that, and none of this is more than surface. My apologies for any misleading statements; there isn’t room here to make these points really clear.
(4) Yes, whiskey / scotch isn’t “aged” that way. But isn’t it amazing the lies that told to the consuming public?
(5) Of course, that’s hardly complete either, as a movement to make drinking illegal had been underway for decades before cars were even a concept. Still, awfully good timing for the petroleum industry and bad timing for the future. The real disaster here is that while corn alcohol still burns into CO2, it’s from carbon that the plant took from the air in the first place. So, it’s carbon from the air back to the air. Petroleum, on the other hand, is carbon that was locked up safely in the ground, now it’s put into the air as additional carbon. When legislators bicker back and forth about the merits of carbon footprint, they’re missing the real culprit which is new carbon that wasn’t in the air before. Am I blaming prohibition for global warming? Yes (not entirely, but burning petroleum has been the biggest single factor). Was it a deliberate maneuver to secure petroleum as fuel, and secure billions (trillions?) of dollars? We’ll probably never know at this point.
(6) Including voter fraud and election rigging, which are most definitely forms of theft (and violence), some thing way beyond Grand Larceny. There’s no legal definition large enough to cover what voter fraud amounts to.
(7) Of course, Governments do such illegal things all the time and it’s all some how legal for them… that’s another conversation, though. I will say, though, since we’re having footnote moment anyway, that sometimes that’s proper — more often it’s not, though. It falls into “don’t do as I do; do as I say” which is a losing argument all the way around.
(8) Isn’t it interesting that it’s called “immigration enforcement” and “drug enforcement,” etc, rather than “control?” Doesn’t “drug enforcement” sound more like “you will take your drugs right now!” They are properly named, as it turns out, for what they really do, sadly. Not what they were intended to do, not what [most] of those who work in those agencies believe themselves to be doing or truly want to do, but the long term effect of such things is inevitable. Like the results of DARE’s first year; according to the official study analyzing DARE’s first year, drug use in the “target group” went up 400%. In one year! Their conclusion was that DARE needed a serious funding increase. How sad, truly.