They Didn’t Close the Border—They Started Charging the Poor to Leave
By Tom Hicks — The Unredacted Bastard | Independent Journalist • Democracy’s Fire Alarm • Professional Shit-Stirrer
Representative image. Millions of low-income workers send money home to support families—now facing new financial and legal pressures.
Bastard’s Law
When a system can’t solve a problem, it figures out how to profit from it.
Every time a housekeeper in Miami sends $200 home to her family in Jamaica, the United States government now takes a cut. Not a bank. Not a transfer service. The government itself, reaching into survival money like a goddamn tip jar it didn’t earn. And if that same woman gets swept up in an immigration raid, the system doesn’t just separate her from her paycheck—it kicks her out of the country and dumps her back into an economy that was already struggling to breathe before she ever left. That’s not policy. That’s a machine. And once you see the gears turning, it becomes painfully obvious this whole thing is built to extract, not fix.
Let’s cut through the bullshit right now, because this story does not deserve polite language. This isn’t immigration policy. It’s not border security. It’s not about law and order or whatever sanitized phrase they’re feeding people this week. It’s about monetizing poverty and calling it governance. The administration rolled out a 1% tax on cash-based remittances, and on paper, that sounds harmless enough to slip past most people. One percent doesn’t sound like much until you remember who’s paying it. It’s not investors wiring profits offshore. It’s workers sending $100, $200, maybe $300 so their families can eat, keep the lights on, or buy medication. Skimming off that isn’t taxation in any meaningful sense. It’s a fucking poverty toll.
At the same time, deportations of Caribbean nationals have ramped up hard, with thousands of Jamaicans alone being shoved back into a country that has no real infrastructure to absorb them. No coordinated reintegration. No job pipeline. No safety net waiting on the other side. Just “good luck” and a one-way ticket back into instability. And Jamaica isn’t exactly sitting on a pile of extra resources right now—it’s still dealing with the economic wreckage from major storm damage and ongoing structural strain. So what you’ve got is a system that weakens the financial lifeline keeping these communities afloat, then sends more people back into that weakened system, and acts surprised when it buckles. That’s not enforcement. That’s deliberate pressure.
Here’s where it gets even more fucked up. Remittances aren’t a side note for these economies—they are the backbone in a lot of cases. Billions of dollars flow from the U.S. into the Caribbean every year, keeping entire communities functional. When you start shaving money off the top of that, you are tightening the screws on households that are already stretched thin. Then you increase deportations, which adds more people back into those same strained systems, and suddenly you’ve created a perfect storm of less money and more need. And when that inevitably leads to more instability and migration pressure, the same assholes who helped create the problem will point at the result and say, “See? This is why we need to crack down harder.” It’s a closed loop of manufactured crisis, and it runs exactly how it was designed to run.
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Now let’s talk about who benefits, because that question usually exposes the whole damn scam. The U.S. government gets a steady drip of revenue from taxing people who can least afford it. Politicians get to pound their chests about being “tough” while never actually solving anything. And the broader system keeps humming along, still dependent on vulnerable labor that’s easy to exploit because it’s constantly under threat. Nobody with power has any real incentive to fix this, because the current setup extracts value at every stage. It’s cold, it’s efficient, and it’s completely fucked.
Then comes the gaslighting, because of course it does. You’ll hear phrases like “fair taxation” and “border integrity,” delivered with a straight face as if this is some kind of neutral policy. But a system that disproportionately targets people sending a couple of hundred dollars at a time is not neutral. It’s targeted as hell, and it’s designed that way. Nobody has to stand at a podium and admit what’s happening. Nobody has to say the quiet part out loud. People just lose a little more each time they try to support their families, and others get sent back into situations that were already fragile before we made them worse. It’s clean, it’s quiet, and it’s incredibly effective.
What should really piss you off is how scalable this model is. Once you normalize extracting from vulnerable populations in ways that are technically legal but morally bankrupt, you’ve created a blueprint. Today, it’s remittances and deportations. Tomorrow it could be fees, restrictions, or penalties that hit closer to home, dressed up in the same language of necessity. Systems like this don’t stay contained—they expand, because they work. And by “work,” I mean they make money and avoid accountability at the same time.
So let’s stop dressing this up like it’s something it isn’t. This is not about controlling borders. It’s about controlling people and monetizing every part of their existence—their labor, their movement, and even their attempts to take care of the people they love. The cruelty here isn’t loud or theatrical, and that’s exactly why it’s so dangerous. It doesn’t need to be. It’s baked into the structure, hidden behind policy language that most people will never read closely enough to understand.
Because once you figure out how to make poverty profitable, you don’t have to solve it. You just have to keep the machine running—and make damn sure nobody looks too closely at how it works.
💣 TRUTH BOMB
If you can make poverty profitable, you’ll never run out of customers.
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