The iceman cometh and he’s out of control

There are a few things in life that can make even a tolerant person feel like banging a few heads together. One is the price of imported cheese in Ecuador. Another is standing in line at immigration with a folder of documents thick enough to stun a mule. And the third, it turns out, is reading about U.S. citizens being shot dead by immigration officials in their own country.

This column was triggered by recent incidents, because when a citizen can be killed during an immigration operation, you are no longer talking about paperwork, border management, or visa terminology. You are talking about the nature of the state itself, and whether it still understands the difference between law enforcement and intimidation.

Before the comment section starts howling like a pack of Cuenca dogs hearing the approach of a propane truck, let me be clear. It is perfectly possible to support lawful immigration and still feel disgust at what the United States is doing.

I believe the United States should have borders and visa rules. I believe work migrants should pass criminal and health checks, have vaccinations if necessary, pay fees that cover administration, and prove who they are, what they are doing, and why they should be admitted. None of this is controversial. It is what serious countries do, because the alternative is chaos and a repeat of the Mariel boatlift.

I know this from experience. I am a naturalized U.S. citizen. I jumped through the hoops, paid the money, and waited for years, not only for myself but for family members too. I have lived inside the immigration photocopier, and you go there only because you want to live without fear.

I have also lived and worked in four countries, travelled in about twenty more, and finally migrated to Ecuador, which means I have had more than one official stamp and more than one official scrutinize my documents while eyeing me as if I were auditioning for Al Qaeda. So yes, I know of which I speak.

When people ask why migrants do not “just come legally,” I understand the instinct, because lawful immigrants quickly learn that the system runs on documents, fees, and waits that can stretch into years.

And yet many people living illegally arrived in morally different circumstances. Some were brought as children, so America became their mental country even if it never became their legal one. They speak American English, know American schools and customs, grew up on Sesame Street, and their stomachs have learned to tolerate American food. Deporting them is not “sending them home,” but dumping them in a place they barely remember.

If my own daughter, who is a U.S. citizen with a passport, were deported tomorrow to a foreign country with no language and no support, she would be helpless, which is not virtue signalling but basic human reality. People are not chess pieces that can be slid across a board without breaking.

No country can tolerate permanent shadow populations, and borders must be enforced, but methods matter, because some methods mark a nation as unserious, savage, or both.

Immigration agents should not have authority over U.S. citizens, full stop, and they should not be carrying guns for administrative enforcement, because removing illegals is not warfare. It is paperwork with consequences, which is precisely why restraint matters.

It is also too easy to turn this into a morality play. Most ICE agents are not monsters, but ordinary people who signed up for stable work with government benefits. If officers must subdue resisting deportees, they should be given tasers and handcuffs rather than firearms, and be trained for control rather than domination. Most countries manage immigration enforcement without roaming posses of gunmen, and it is neither normal nor civilized to treat paperwork problems as lethal threats.

Snatching parents while children are at school is not border control but cruelty theatre, designed to display power while advertising moral emptiness. Nothing corrodes a country faster than deliberate humiliation.

If the United States genuinely wants to reduce illegal immigration, it should do the boring thing that works and attack illegal employment.

Britain fines employers heavily enough to put them out of business and penalizes landlords, and while people argue about fairness, the logic is simple enough to be understood by a child. If you cannot work and cannot rent, you cannot easily remain.

Canada relies on audits, fines, hiring bans, and public blacklists that make employers fear non-compliance, preferring bureaucratic dullness to theatrical intimidation.

Australia enforces borders without turning immigration into a testosterone hobby, punishing illegal employment through supply chains and treating detention as part of a system rather than a spectacle.

Serious countries build policy around incentives rather than staging science-fiction horror movie scenarios about alien invasions.

The United States does have hiring laws but enforces them very weakly, because it is so much easier to chase laborers than executives, easier to frighten families than boardrooms, and easier to terrorize the poor than confront the powerful.

Washington politicians thunder about borders while benefiting from invisible labor, and many have probably employed illegal cleaners, gardeners, and people to iron their shirts and suits without noticing. It is remarkably easy to be righteous when someone else is doing the dirty work.

Illegal labor is also organized through networks involving citizens and legal residents who recruit, house, transport, and exploit their own countrymen, leaving workers to carry the risk while employers take the profit. That is not immigration policy but a labor abuse pipeline.

If America wants to be serious, chief executives must face personal punishment, because fines are not punishment to rich people but operating expenses.

Yes, that means prison, and not the weekend version with tennis courts and sympathetic profiles, but real sentences that change behavior.

Once the first major CEO is marched out in handcuffs, compliance will spread overnight, paper trails will become immaculate, subcontracting loopholes will close, and illegal employment will stop looking clever and start looking suicidal. That is how America actually solves problems in practice, by changing incentives rather than staging theatrical hunts for easy targets.

Everyone in Florida knows this. After hurricanes, contractors arrive with patriotic quotes, and then the real work is done by undocumented Mexicans moving across roofs like specialists evolved for storm recovery. It is not an insult but a visible fact, and it is national hypocrisy standing on shingles.

If you want to reduce illegal immigration, admit it is a labor-market problem, enforce hiring laws, prosecute leadership, audit subcontractors, and terrify profiteers rather than nail-gun operators.

That is what functional countries do.

Then, because firmness without humanity is barbarism, create a realistic path for those already embedded through registration, background checks, fees, taxes, and gradual legal status, offering serious obligations without free passes or permanent shadows.

Deport violent criminals and recent entrants, regularize settled families, and protect those brought as children, because punishing people for adult decisions is not justice.

That is the bargain of a serious nation: rules, order, enforcement, and humanity.

And finally, I think of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and the solemn war between the Big-Endians and Little-Endians over which end of a boiled egg should be opened. Three centuries later, Republicans and Democrats still behave as if trivial differences justify paralysis, when one would hope they could forget their tribal rituals long enough to draft workable laws, even if they dislike one another too much to share a drink after a hard day of drafting paragraphs and clauses.

Swift understood that governments collapse not because people disagree, but because they prefer performing disagreement to doing their jobs, and until someone bangs heads together in Washington, immigration will remain less a policy than a farce, with working people and families continuing to pay the price, while those who profit most from hiring illegal workers get off scot-free.