I was never a great student. However, each time I tried to get a B in class, I found I wound up with a C. Each time I tried to get an A in class, I wound up with a B. It was only when I strived to get an A+ in class that I seemed to wind up with an A.

That had me thinking about the idea of an immigration moratorium. It’s a good idea, but we all know the left-wing politicians and even many right-wing politicians will be fighting back against the idea, and they will try to outright sabotage such a bill, compromise the bill or water it down with loopholes till it’s meaningless. They would also likely be defeating it and reversing it while screaming the usual racism charges. Face it, both sides are for an open border so long as the border doesn’t come to their exclusive communities.

In order to just settle for an immigration moratorium, it may very well be necessary to talk about the idea of encouraging emigration out of the United States. Right now, that sounds far-fetched and it is far-fetched, but not completely implausible. If the American economy tanks like it did during the Great Depression, I could foresee a lot of new arrivals leaving back to their homelands.

The United States is not so much a country as an economic zone now and many elites as well as immigrants view the United States as merely all about the money. In columnist Russell Baker’s book Growing Up, about growing up during the Great Depression, he tells how his widowed mother dated a Danish immigrant briefly (ironically, the Dane was a baker by trade). The Dane couldn’t make a living in the United States, so, he returned to Denmark, writing his mother a heartbreaking letter that Russell only discovered after his mother passed away.

In my experience with the Border Patrol, a lot of immigrants both legal and otherwise return home. When I first joined the Border Patrol, I was surprised when the senior Agents told me that things would slow down in the weeks before Christmas because so many Mexicans would go home for the holidays, and then pick back up once Feliz Navidad was over. Sure enough, that rule seemed to hold true each year I was down there.

Later on, one of my colleagues got a detail to London’s Heathrow Airport (Border Patrol Agents usually don’t work airports, let alone airports overseas). My colleague ran into a Somali returning from Somalia to pick up his Social Security checks. I didn’t work for the Social Security Administration, so I’m not sure exactly how the rules work, but if you spend too much time overseas, then your Social Security checks risk being cancelled. So he was returning to the United States to pick them up and then to go back to Somalia. My colleague was surprised and asked the former refugee if it was unsafe in Somalia. The Somali said that it used to be unsafe, but that it was safe now.

I’ve encountered an entire van of Chinese who had all claimed asylum based on religious affiliation (in my professional opinion they did so fraudulently). They were afraid of returning home officially. Yet, when their green cards came through in the mail, each one had returned home to China within months of getting that card.