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Unintended Consequences of Open Borders
Personally, I have been in favor of legalizing pot, even though I don’t use it. But now I am having second thoughts. Apparently, in California, there has been a lot of unintended consequences. The state is literally running out of water and not because of “climate change”; it is because they are using too much of it. What is interesting is that in order to “save water,” the California Ruling Class has sacrificed their agricultural sector that has been nurtured for over 100 years. But population growth and illegal pot farming is filling in the void. How nice.
This is just one of the harmful consequences of our open borders policies. What is sad is that I consider myself an environmentalist. So can someone tell me: where are the lovers of our land hiding, while all of our wild places are being destroyed? Is it because it does not follow their Hollywood scripts? Here are some interesting paragraphs from a Frontpagemag.com article:
Every few months brings another massive bust. A 40-acre illegal pot farm in an obscure part of Death Valley, the “most elaborate illegal marijuana” setup in Mendota with 50,000 pot plants that was so big that police could smell it from 1,100 feet in the air, “vast groves” worth $169 million in the eastern Sierras, and $285 million in the old Shasta region of the gold rush.
Mexican cartels now control much of the wilderness that California’s militant environmentalists had insisted on protecting from development. But while developers might fear the Sierra Club and its government allies, the cartels and the immigrant growers under their control don’t.
While California’s LEGAL agriculture industries are dying, its illegal pot industries are prospering. If you want to grow avocados, good luck getting the water. Instead, Californians are buying Mexican avocados, from which the cartels take their cut, while the water goes to illegal operations that aren’t worried about permits or environmentalist pressure groups in Sacramento.
California’s rice production will fall by 20% and its avocado production fell by nearly half in 2019 from 338 million pounds to 175 million pounds, while its illegal pot production vastly increased.”
I think it is so sad what is happening in the rural parts of California. I have heard Victor David Hanson discuss this topic. Can anyone from California comment? What have you seen?
Published in Environment
My solution: give all the Birkenstock-wearing Sierra Clubbers some AR-15s and send them out into the woods.
I haven’t taken a close look at this in a few years, but it was the case then that CA was diverting millions of gallons of water a day away from the Central Valley farms and into the Pacific Ocean due to pressure from environmental groups — something about saving the California Smelt, or something.
I was under the impression that CA’s population has been shrinking. I’d appreciate some clarification on this from those that have been following more closely than I have.
You might want to show them how they work first; but maybe not.
I’ve lived most of my life in California.
Avocados and other water intensive crops have been in “environmentalist” crosshairs for years. But those dying avocado and almond orchards won’t go to waste. Sure, they’re on some of the best farmland on the planet, but. . . the bullet train commission plans to build lots of housing on farms along the train’s route. Probably just another coincidence that members of families whose business is large scale housing development have seats on the commission.
I put “from which the cartels take their cut” in boldface:
The cartels get money from every illegal who crosses the border. Some of the illegals are indentured labor for the cartel cannabis grow operations. Daniel Greenfield does an excellent job explaining things as far as he goes, and as he noted, “Legal drugs means money for unions and community groups, which really means money for Democrats.”
The consultants who wrote California’s cannabis laws structured the regulations to give those Democrats their rakeoff. I’m pretty sure Willie Brown was involved in crafting those laws; if he wasn’t, he’s been doing that sort of work for years, and there are others, perhaps not as powerful, with years of experience in California government.
Those laws and regulations also arranged matters so that legal cannabis more expensive than the cartel product, even as the risk of getting arrested for using cannabis and, to a large extent, selling it on a small to medium scale, has vanished.
I emphasize that I have no evidence at all to support this speculation, but. . . would it surprise you if cartels are spending some of their money on those consultants to craft laws and regulations that benefit the cartels not just at the state but also the local level? Not just cannabis laws, either.
Would it surprise you if cartels are spending some of their money on politicians to vote those skillfully crafted bills into law?
That’s the legislative branch taken care of. In their native lands and, increasingly inside the US, the cartels also own a big piece of the executive branch, including bureaucrats and law enforcement officers.
Gavin, Davy Crockett said it best: Y’all can go to hell. I’m going to Texas. Or maybe Florida.
California’s middle class is shrinking. The population is going down a bit, but not much. There have been decades of stupid water policy that have led to the current situation, and decades of encouragement of illegal immigration.
Drought is to be expected in California. The state used to plan to store capture the snowmelt that is the state’s primary source of water. The reservoirs that are left are going dry, as the environmentalist save the fish and kill the farms.
The electrical grid can’t take the it when people charge the e-vehicles and hybrids the legislature promotes and subsidizes.
Meaningless rituals to “decrease peoples’ carbon footprints” are encouraged while decades of bad forest management results in fires that release massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.
But the Democrats had good intentions, at least according to the Left’s definition of “good.”
Not to mention the 4000% increase in fentanyl crossing the border. Border patrol has seized 41 lbs this year. Thats enough fentanyl to kill about 9 million George Floyds.
I’m not from California, but I posted about Mexican drug cartels (particularly the Sinaloa Cartel) establishing major marijuana growing operations in L.A. County and elsewhere as part of their continued efforts at expanding their operations within the United States. Here are some excerpts and links from that post:
Finally, this FOX News report with Sarah Carter provides some aerial footage showing the scale of the cartel’s operation at one of these sites and has interviews with local residents:
When California thought that legalizing pot was going to be a tax windfall, by not only over the counter purchases, to include permits to grow pot it didn’t happen that way. Both homegrown farming on public lands, and cartels didn’t apply for permits. Why pay for land when you can steal water, and electricity that has been going on for decades. Cartels not only farm on public lands they rent homes to grow in urban areas as well.
Cartels can grow in states like California, or any other state that has legalized pot, and then ship their product across the US without having to deal with border ports of entry. Another side effect is that farming pot in Mexico has changed to opium poppy farming in rural Mexico.
The progressive project is and always has been to transfer wealth, status, and power from those who work at objectively measurable pursuits to those who do not.
Unintended consequences? Not so sure about that. The hard left has been pretty clear about its intentions to use open borders to cause trouble–which can be illustrated by the left’s opposition to deporting even violent criminals.
If the left’s goal is a federal police force that replaces all state and local law enforcement, wouldn’t that federal police then be tasked with dealing with illegal immigrants/criminals? Except there’s already a federal agency that’s supposed to do that, INS/DHS/etc. Do they want to have a federal police force that then still wouldn’t deal with illegal immigrants/criminals? Seems like that would get people very upset.
Would it make sense to legalise marijuana plantations, so the free market could allocate what water there is to the most profitable crops? (Avocados or pot or ??). In fact the free market would direct thirsty crops to places where water was plentiful and therefore cheap – so maybe not California.
That’s brilliant. They can just go to where the rain is! The African rainforest, the Alaskan archipelago, there’s no end to places to grow avocados!
The problem is that productivity is what keeps a society of people alive. Marijuana may be preferred to food, for a while, but avocados and other produce actually sustain life.
Or pot, but yes.
There is no example of a society that chose to produce marijuana to the exclusion of food without being able to use the profit to buy food + other stuff. It’s a cash crop, but with comparative advantage kicking in so are avocados.
It’s a purely local cash crop. Where does the cash come from?
I’m guessing you’re going to say not from selling avocados. Why not? Where does any cash come from? Where do I get cash to pay for movie tickets?
Edited to add: why purely local?
Pot competes with avocados. You are justifying spending water to grow an ephemeral drug, as if there is an unlimited supply of money and food.
Do you trust the free market or not?
What free market would that be?
Clearly not. There is such a thing as broadly applied stupidity. Pot effectively competes with avocados using up an already scarce resource. But so long as it’s taxed, legislators know it must be great.
Added: And the water that is used may or may not be paid for by the pot growers, but it is one of the most regulated essential resources in America. There are water rights agreements and covenants with water that flows into California, and associated disputes over usage and water rights, that go back a hundred and fifty years.
So it’s not really free-market anything.
At the end of the day let the market choose between pot and avocados. Fwiw I don’t think demand for either is that elastic.
I don’t believe it. Please see the Added comment to #22.
it should be paid for by pot growers is my point.
Do these constrain the use to which this water can be put?
Yes.
Can’t wait for the left to complain about “Big Weed”
? I wasn’t even thinking about federal police forces. I was thinking about chaos and crime leading to greater political polarization.
But take another example: In the sixties leftists worked to get as many people as possible on welfare (many saw welfare as shameful and did all they could to avoid it) with the intention of breaking the system. There can be thousands of ways to destroy a society, one bit at a time.
Only for about 20 minutes.
Then it’s chips and avocado dip.