Freedom is nearly always blamed for the bad consequences of unfreedom, that is, of government intervention. Take immigration.

We hear these days that migrant gangs are killing, terrorizing, and stealing from Americans. Some immigrants without government papers have definitely committed heinous crimes. Opponents of immigration say that migrants join violent migrant gangs to pay off debts incurred in the process of traveling to the United States. If that’s true, we can see that it’s not freedom that leads to crime, but rather the black market. Black markets by definition are products of unfreedom, that is, of government prohibition of peaceful behavior. Freedom is not the culprit.

Because legal migration is next to impossible, desperately poor and oppressed people pay thousands of dollars to coyotes to get them from Latin America to the United States. If migrants can’t repay the money, they might be forced to work off their debts by joining a migrant gang. Their creditors are likely nasty people because that’s what prohibition does. It doesn’t make an activity disappear; it simply turns the activity over to organized crime. Think of U.S. alcohol prohibition in the 1920s.

Just as repealing drug prohibition would break the backs of the drug cartels, repealing immigration prohibition would break the backs of the coyote and migrant gangs. Under legal immigration, people would apply at U.S. consulates, gain approval if they weren’t violent criminals, buy their plane tickets for a few hundred dollars, and come to America. End of.

Pretending that free immigration causes crime is like thinking that Al Capone was a free-market entrepreneur.