Government Incompetence and the Migrant Crisis

Ask a group of people to solve a pressing problem, and although they may experience disagreements and a few false starts in their attempts to solve it, eventually, they will come up with a workable solution. Ask government to solve a problem, and watch as it wastes decades and countless fortunes on responses that not only fail to fix the central problem adequately, but which exacerbate the issue by creating new problems that didn’t exist before. 

Drug policy is a good example. In an effort to prevent illegal drugs from harming citizens, the illegal drug trade spawned violent gangs and cartels. As the gangs and cartels became more violent, the police increased their firepower and adopted military tactics. The gangs and cartels escalated their firepower to match. Citizens are gunned down on the streets, and in countries where the drugs are sourced and trafficked, police, judges, and politicians are routinely assassinated. This secondary problem of extreme violence did not exist before drug use was criminalized.

Why does this happen? Why does government come up with solutions that are worse than the original problem. There are three reasons. First, unlike the team of people who solved the hypothetical problem in the first paragraph, government is expected to please everyone all the time. If some vocal minority complains loudly every time someone suggests decriminalizing drugs, for instance, decriminalization will be seen as a politically toxic policy. Mothers and widows will offer tearful testimony about the children and spouses that they lost to drugs, and politicians that run on a platform of decriminalizing drugs for the purpose of reducing violent crime will be branded as heartless supporters of criminals. And the drug war will rage on unabated for another decade.

The second reason is that government is beholden to special interest groups. The private prison industry does not long for lower crime. Nor does the firearm industry. Since drug incarceration impacts poorer communities disproportionately, and since in many jurisdictions, convicted felons cannot vote, those who champion voting restrictions would prefer to continue imprisoning people for selling small amounts of narcotics.

The third problem is that it takes a lot of effort to get governments to work together for the common good. Nationalism, regional interests, and long-standing grudges present roadblocks to work toward the common good. How likely is it, for instance, for the United States and Mexico to work on a comprehensive drug violence reduction campaign when the President of the United States routinely berates our neighbor to the south?

I fear that the migrant/immigration problem is being handled with typical governmental incompetence. The ideal solution would be for the world to work together to address the issues that encourage migrants to leave their own countries - violence in Central America, war in Syria, unrest in Libya, religious extremism in East Africa, for example. Instead of establishing quotas and turning away boatloads of desperate refugees, restore the conditions by which they can prosper in their homelands.

But that won’t happen, of course. Nationalists will continue to promote anti-immigrant sentiment. Countries will bicker with each other about quotas. Immigrant populations will be marginalized and face discrimination. All because the right course of action is rarely politically popular. 

Copyright © 2018 Daniel R. South 

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