Hanlon's Razor, Inverted

How Strategic Dysfunction Became America's Immigration Policy

"Well, sir, I guess there's just a meanness in this world"
— Bruce Springsteen

Hanlon's Razor teaches us to "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." But what happens when we flip that logic? What if we should never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by strategic malice?

America's immigration system offers a perfect case study. For sixty years, policymakers have produced a steady stream of reforms that somehow make everything worse. Caps set impossibly low, enforcement that traps rather than regulates, comprehensive solutions killed despite popular support. The conventional wisdom sees this as policy incompetence—a broken system in need of repair.

But judged by what the system actually produces rather than what it claims to pursue, a different picture emerges. The immigration system doesn't fail at governance—it excels at generating political spectacle, maintaining crisis conditions, and providing renewable sources of campaign content. The dysfunction isn't a bug; it's a feature.

The Purpose of a System Is What It Does

Consider what America's immigration enforcement actually accomplishes:

• Creates highly visible spectacles of state power (ICE raids, detention facilities, border walls)
• Generates permanent crisis conditions that justify emergency measures
• Produces vulnerable populations that can be easily targeted and scapegoated
• Maintains reliable wedge issues for political mobilization
• Provides ongoing justification for increased enforcement budgets

Now consider what it claims to accomplish:

• Process immigration cases fairly and efficiently
• Secure borders while maintaining legal pathways
• Balance economic needs with security concerns
• Reflect American values of fairness and opportunity

The disconnect is stunning. But once you recognize that the system is working exactly as designed—just not for the purposes it publicly claims—the pattern becomes clear.

The Historical Pattern

This isn't a recent phenomenon. The weaponization of immigration dysfunction stretches back over a century:

1920s: The Johnson-Reed Act explicitly codified racial hierarchies in immigration law, coinciding with the KKK's resurgence.

1930s: Depression-era mass deportations deliberately scapegoated Mexican migrants to deflect from economic failures.

1965: While many supported the Hart-Celler Act as a civil rights milestone ending racist quotas, its family-based provisions—added with exclusionary motives by some southern lawmakers—had unintended demographic consequences that were later exploited rather than corrected.

1986: Congress created permanent crisis through simultaneous amnesty and border militarization, ensuring both problem and "solution" would generate ongoing political capital.

2013: The Senate passed comprehensive immigration reform 68-32, with CBO scoring showing it would reduce the federal deficit by $700 billion over 20 years. House Speaker John Boehner refused to bring it to a vote, explicitly stating it didn't have Republican support—not because it wouldn't work, but because it would work too well.

2024: Donald Trump killed bipartisan border security legislation not because it was ineffective, but because it would eliminate immigration as a campaign issue. As he posted: "Only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill."

The Logic of Strategic Problem Maintenance

The pattern reveals a consistent logic: "We know it's an issue that resonates with our base, so it is not in our best interest to resolve it."

This explains why every "solution" of the past sixty years has somehow made things worse. They're not designed to solve the problem—they're designed to manage it at a level that remains politically useful while providing cover for having "done something."

Take the 1965 Hart-Celler Act's caps on Mexican immigration. Setting the limit at 20,000 annual visas when 50,000 workers were already coming annually wasn't an oversight—it was a deliberate choice to create "illegal" immigration that could then be weaponized politically.

The 1986 Immigration Reform Act's border militarization had predictable consequences: seasonal migrants who had previously moved freely between countries became trapped in the U.S., creating exactly the "permanent undocumented population" that politicians love to campaign against.

The system isn't broken—it's working exactly as intended by people who discovered that broken systems are more politically profitable than functional ones.

This strategic dysfunction persists across party lines. The Obama administration deported record numbers of immigrants while proclaiming support for comprehensive reform. The Biden administration maintained certain Trump-era enforcement mechanisms while calling for humanitarian changes. Democratic mayors in "sanctuary cities" have quietly coordinated with ICE when it served their political needs.

The persistence of strategic dysfunction isn't just electoral—it's profitable. Private detention contractors like CoreCivic and GEO Group, border surveillance tech companies like Palantir and Anduril, and entire congressional districts built around ICE operations and border enforcement funding all benefit from maintaining rather than solving the "crisis."

The Spectacle of Cruelty

This dynamic has reached its logical conclusion with facilities like the new immigration detention center in Florida, dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz" for its location surrounded by alligator-infested waters. The facility isn't designed for detention efficiency—it's designed to generate visceral, shareable imagery that dominates news cycles and social media.

The location choice reveals the true purpose. The alligators aren't an unfortunate side effect; they're the entire point. The facility exists to create an image so threatening that it functions as both a rally cry for the base and a terror message to immigrant communities.

Immigration enforcement becomes a national purification ritual, creating sacred violence that defines who belongs by punishing the outsider. The border cruelty serves as a proxy for "restoring order" in a declining empire, offering the emotional payload of imagined purity and control.

Media—left and right alike—become unwilling accomplices, transmitting the spectacle in formats that reward emotion over analysis. This is governance as entertainment, with real human suffering as the special effects.

Despite the system's design, immigrants have resisted, organized, and survived in ways that expose its cruelty and demand its dismantling. Yet even this resistance becomes content for the spectacle. Fox News broadcasts footage of "lawless sanctuary cities harboring illegals" while liberal media shows "brave activists standing up to fascism." The resistance doesn't stop the machine—it fuels it. We have become spectators in our own coliseum, cheering for different gladiators while the fundamental structure remains unchanged.

The Polling Disconnect

Recent polling shows 79% of Americans view immigration as good for the country, with only 35% approving of Trump's handling of immigration policy. Yet "Alligator Alcatraz" opens anyway. This isn't democratic responsiveness—it's the system serving its actual constituency.

That 35% represents a complex coalition: authoritarian-leaning white voters, evangelical-nationalists, anti-immigration business owners, and national security hawks. Each group benefits differently from the spectacle, but all share an investment in maintaining the crisis rather than solving it.

The 79% who support humane reform aren't the target audience. They're irrelevant to the system's actual function, which is to provide psychological satisfaction and political mobilization for this minority coalition through visible symbols of dominance and exclusion.

Beyond Immigration

The inverted razor offers a diagnostic tool for understanding other seemingly dysfunctional systems. Healthcare policy that enriches insurance companies while bankrupting patients. Educational policies that defund public schools while subsidizing private alternatives. Criminal justice reforms that somehow increase incarceration rates.

In each case, ask not "why are they failing?" but "what are they succeeding at?" The answer often reveals that the "failure" is actually competent pursuit of unstated objectives.

The Stakes

Recognizing strategic dysfunction doesn't lead to cynical acceptance—it leads to clearer analysis of what actually needs to change. You can't reform a system by fixing its "mistakes" when those mistakes are actually its core competencies.

The immigration system doesn't need better implementation of existing policies. It needs to be redesigned from the ground up with different objectives: solving problems rather than maintaining them, serving human needs rather than political ones, optimizing for outcomes rather than spectacle.

But first, we have to stop giving credit for incompetence to people who are competently pursuing malicious goals. Sometimes the cruelty isn't incidental—it's the point. Sometimes the dysfunction isn't accidental—it's strategic.

Sometimes Hanlon's Razor needs to be inverted.

The question isn't whether our leaders are too stupid to govern effectively—it's whether they're willing to trade honesty for spectacle, and justice for power. Increasingly, the answer appears to be yes.