The Bottle and The Border: What Can America's Failed Experiment With Alcohol Prohibition in The 1920s Teach us About The Likely Effects of Anti-Immigration Legislation Today?

Abstract

Alcohol prohibition is now distant memory, although it’s direct descendant—the War on Drugs, first declared by Richard Nixon in the early 1970s—appears to have inherited many of the ugly features of its predecessor. Economists, policymakers, and others (filmmakers, journalists, etc.) have taken note of the obvious parallels and called for reform. Yet there exists another clear historical parallel that seems to have been overlooked in the public imagination: Our political system remains fixated on what amounts to a de facto prohibition on economically realistic levels of immigration.