Since the 2016 election Americans have been focused on the debate over whether to build a wall on the southern border to staunch the flow of illegal immigrants into the country. (For those new here, this is a proposal I wholeheartedly support.) The debate, however, usually fails to note the significance of what is leaving the country at the same time:
Asylum is in large part a colossal scam designed to provide Latin American countries with both a safety valve and a cash cow of foreign exchange. In 2017, remittances sent back to Honduras totaled $4.33 billion and make up a significant part of the Honduran economy… Remittances comprised 17 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2011, according to World Bank estimates, the second largest share of any country in Latin America or the Caribbean…
Overall,
Immigrants in the United States in 2016 sent home ((worldwide)) more than $138 billion – a sum that exceeds the entire gross domestic product of Kuwait – according to a new report from the Pew Research Center[.]
This is essentially involuntary foreign aid from the United States — on a scale three times larger than the official foreign aid budget! — to a host of nations that are less inclined to reform their basket-case economies because of this parasitical safety valve.
Since both flows — inward and outward — need to be addressed, today’s linked article makes a solid case for taxing these remittances to build the wall, noting one Congressman has already proposed to do just that:
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) sponsored a bill in March that would slap a 2 percent tax on all money transfers from the United States to Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America.
If Rogers expanded the idea to include all transfers to countries outside of the United States, it would generate $2.76 billion, based on the 2016 remittance totals.
“Over 10 years, there it is… There’s your wall.”
The means to achieve better national security and control of our own sovereignty exist. The question is whether we will exercise the will to use them. I don’t support building the wall because I hate foreigners (far from it). I support it because I love my country, and can see what lawless immigration and economic colonization are doing to it. I can also see how other nations in the world are less motivated to solve their own problems when they can simply shift their most restless populations to the U.S., all while taking a cut of their economic good fortune. All of this needs to come to a stop, for everyone’s long-term sake.
A True Progressive 