House Democrat jokes "communism works" as argument for ... open borders

It’s tempting to go snarky on this, but Rep. Joe Garcia’s point isn’t actually about communism — to the extent he had a point in his Google Plus hangout. Garcia wants to push for comprehensive immigration reform, complaining that the boost-the-border approach hasn’t worked except to make crime go away, which … is apparently not the point of enforcing immigration law, I suppose. Garcia claims that El Paso is the safest city in America because the federal government hired everyone, which then eliminated crime, which proves “communism works,” or something. He’s using that to argue that we should scale back enforcement, I guess, in favor of allowing an open border across from Juarez, which is the most-unsafe city in the Americas, according to Garcia.

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Well, that certainly sounds like a great idea … until you clear the figurative ear wax from your figurative head:

“The safest city in America is El Paso, Texas. It happens to be across the border from the most dangerous city in the America’s, which is Juarez. Right?” Garcia asked a Google Hangout participant.

“Two of the safest cities in America are on the border with Mexico. Of course, the reason is we’ve proved that communism works. If you give everybody a good government job, there is no crime,” Garcia said.

It should be noted that Rep. Garcia has had a rough two weeks. Last week, he was exposed for eating his own ear wax.

On the other snarkier hand, you never go full communist, Congressman. If we took that argument seriously, it resembles the argument for ObamaCare. In order to address an issue among a small percentage of the population, Democrats insisted that the federal government needed to disrupt the entire market to create a command economy and forced participation. With that model working so well, why not just extend it to the entire American economy?

Back to the issue itself, Garcia is about as confused on employment as he is about communism and immigration. The unemployment rate in El Paso for April is 7.3%, higher than the national average.  It dropped from 7.6% in March, as it did nationally, but it’s still higher than the US average. The crime rate for El Paso is more difficult to determine, but the real-estate site Neighborhood Scout says 73% of American cities are safer than El Paso. It’s not clear where Garcia gets his data about communism, crime rates, and employment, but I’d assume it comes from another body part other than his ear.

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