The Fearful Millions

A group of several thousand Central Americans continues to make its way slowly toward the USA. The people who compose this unarmed group consist in large part of women and children. As their difficult journey continues, many are giving up in exhaustion or losing hope and dropping out, long before they reach the U.S. border, where they hope to apply for admission as refugees.

In the USA, however, many people are freaking out about the impending “invasion” of this migrant band and demanding that the government stop it, by force if necessary. The president speaks of it as a national emergency and has ordered troops to the border. So, a nation of 329 million people, the most powerful in the world, quakes at the prospect of a few thousand poor people entering the country. Home of the brave? Bullshit.

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Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Independent Institute and Editor at Large of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and he has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, Seattle University, the University of Economics, Prague, and George Mason University. He has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and Stanford University, and a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the National Science Foundation.