“Incentives” can be very worthwhile, but the costs must be weighed in every case. Mice are incentivized to seek out peanut butter and/or cheese. The result of that incentive is usually death.
The gold rush through the Yukon and Skagway, Alaska, in 1896, drew over 100,000 self-incentivized miners. Thousands lost their lives in terrible conditions, injuries, starvation, and violent encounters. Thousands of horses and mules were lost as well. Abject poverty followed about 97% of those who climbed the Yukon trail, yet they were incentivized.
Now we are experiencing hundreds of thousands of men, women and children incentivized to make the long trek through a very open border because of conditions in their homeland, and false incentives. Among those hundreds of thousands of immigrants, we find an unacceptable percentage of sex trafficking, gang infiltration and a high rate of rapes among the women making the journey.
Our open acceptance and tolerance of these known factors calls for a screening process of some sort as well as a substantial border. Any of these factors are unacceptable. It is not the president’s fault that this is happening, any more than the president in 1896 is responsible for the gold miners’ deaths along the Yukon Trail.
When we set a mouse trap, we become the incentivizer. Nobody wants that label, so let’s set up a system that regards some order and a legal process for everybody’s benefit. I still think a modern, high-tech wall, along with Congress sitting down to improve our immigration laws, is the answer. Our division over this is not helping anyone. Let’s change some lives for all the right reasons. Everything has become political.
