$600 Silver Would Instantly Solve Illegal Immigration in the United States
In his latest RoadtoRoota update, Bix Weir argues that the United States is wasting enormous sums of money and political capital on the complicated process of locating and deporting people who crossed the border from Mexico. A far simpler solution already exists in the silver market.
Weir points out that Mexico has been one of the world’s largest silver producers for more than a century and still accounts for roughly one third of global mine supply. If the artificial suppression of the silver price were allowed to end and the metal traded freely at $600 an ounce, the economic incentives would reverse overnight.
“At a price of $600, you will see every illegal immigrant from Mexico return to their homeland,” Weir said. “Because Mexico would be much richer than the United States. We don’t need to go door to door to deport people. Just let silver trade at $600, $700, or $800 an ounce, and people will immediately return to Mexico. Because Mexico will be the richest country in the world.”
Friends and family still living in Mexico would have every reason to call their relatives in the United States and ask why they remain in a country that is trying to deport them when the people back home are suddenly becoming wealthy from the country’s natural silver endowment.
The current paper price of silver, Weir maintains, is the product of decades of futures market intervention that has kept the metal far below its true value relative to industrial demand and monetary history. Allowing that price to reach $600 would not require new legislation, new enforcement budgets, or new border infrastructure. It would simply require the end of the price controls that currently prevent silver from reflecting its scarcity and utility.
Weir notes that even $600 an ounce silver, while extreme by today’s suppressed levels, would transform Mexico into one of the wealthiest nations on the planet on the strength of its mineral production alone.
Under those conditions the economic magnet that has drawn people north for generations would disappear. The same market forces that have long pulled labor toward higher wages in the United States would pull it back toward a suddenly prosperous Mexico.
The rest of the interview covers the familiar ground of COMEX delivery patterns, bank leasing arrangements, and the continued understatement of silver use in solar manufacturing. Those details reinforce Weir’s larger point that the current price is not a free market price. Once that price is allowed to clear at levels that properly compensate primary producers, the secondary effects on labor migration become straightforward. High silver prices would enrich the country that mines the metal and simultaneously remove the primary economic reason for its citizens to remain in the United States illegally.
In short, the costly and politically divisive apparatus of mass deportation is unnecessary. Free the silver price to $600 an ounce and the illegal immigration problem from Mexico solves itself.
We suspect that $600 silver wouldn’t have much effect on the Islamic invasion however…
