Immigration - Again

Sometimes I am accused of hammering this issue into the ground. That’s fine with me. It comes up a lot among the different factions of the libertarian movement and, to my mind, has become a good measure of where people stand on individual rights versus collective rights. There are a bunch of different views on why there might be a case for collective rights, and just as many excuses.

Socialism

To me, there is no difference between collective rights and socialism and I think I should state that from the beginning. Socialism is a socio-economic belief that property and the control of wealth are subject to the control of the community as a whole, working towards some “greater good”. As I have stated previously, there is no greater good than personal freedom, so for this reason I am totally opposed to the concept of socialism. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think people have the right, need or desire to work together for a common goal and they should always be free to voluntarily associate to do that. And there is the rub.

If you are not given the choice to participate in something voluntarily, what is the difference between that and being a “subject” of who ever? In this country that “who ever” is the majority sometimes, the government other times, working on behalf of the perceived wants of the people. In this case, the perceived want is to keep “illegal” aliens out of the country. There are a couple of understandable (although incorrect) beliefs behind this for the socialist minded. First is a protection of the environment. I know that may sound strange on its face, but the belief is that more people equal more of a negative impact on the environment. Next is protection of public goods, such as welfare programs, “public” roads, “public” education, etc. As I pointed out in an article entitled, “Quit Saying Public Please”, “public” is actually a euphemism for government owned. Just because they take our money to pay for those things doesn’t make us co-owners of them. And these “public” goods are usually administered on the state, not federal level. Every immigrant, whether they are legal or “illegal”, pay as much into the system for these local goods as anyone else, especially when we break down the amount paid based on what economic class the people are paying into it from. The money that is pumped into these programs from the federal government all comes from federal taxation that comes from the people of the states anyway. The third and probably most vocal opposition to immigrants is their entry into the labor pool. Socialists have a need and desire to protect “their” labor pool from outside competing labor. For a socialist system to operate (for however temporarily they are able to keep it a float) they must have control over the flow of people into and OUT OF the system.

Socialists are not the only ones opposed to immigration, even though the other groups, if they were capable of being honest about it, should be able to trace their reasons back to this socialist standpoint.

Nationalism

Nationalists are also opposed to immigration on the grounds that it “dilutes” the culture of the country they are entering. This is the group that will be most vocal about their opposition not being “racist”, even though their argument is nothing but racist. Their arguments all sound something like this…

“These people bring their culture with them and don’t integrate into the culture of the US. They keep their language. They bring their politics with them. They tend to keep to themselves and not become a part of the larger community. They are not educated and they take all the entry level jobs. They don’t care about their communities, they leave trash everywhere. They are more involved in crime than normal citizens (and if you ask for proof of that, they use the old line, “They are here illegally, that means they are criminals).”

To me, those are all racist reasons and we should call the people that make them racist. The exact same arguments against the blacks, Irish, Germans, Italians, and every other group, were used to keep these groups from being accepted into the mainstream society of the US.

But we have another one to add to the list since 9-11. “They might be terrorists or sympathetic to terrorist groups.” Of course, this one falls apart pretty quick when the opponent is honest. Someone can be any race and be sympathetic to terrorists. They can be from any country. They can come to this country from anywhere or already be in this country. So, why aren’t we building the wall along the Canadian border? That’s were the hijackers came into the country from. And out of the 19 hijackers, only 3 were here illegally. But the wall isn’t going along the Canadian border. This same argument isn’t being used against white people. The focus of the attack is on the Hispanic immigrants, not even on the immigrants from the Middle East, were the supposed breeding ground for “Death To America” comes from. Mexicans on the other hand love America. They have loved it so much in the past that a third of the country belonged to them.

When these arguments fail, they retreat to the socialist economic positions that I mentioned earlier.

Outright Racists

Another group that I am going to mention here is the people who are outright racist. Their arguments usually fall into the above two categories, but they add their old favorite stand bys. Since they don’t really even have their own ideas maybe I could gloss over them like so many others do. But they are out there so no use denying it. Anyone that has seen or been to any immigration rallies (either pro or con) has seen them there, making themselves known and heard on the issue. This group doesn’t get the media coverage that the others do. They aren’t embraced by the public face of the anti-immigration movement, but they are there. And for that reason, they are here too.

Believe it or not, as reprehensible as I find their views most of the time, this is the group that I think is at least honest about their beliefs. They hate (insert some group here) and don’t want to have anything to do with them. Like I said, at least they are honest about it, something to be said for that.

The Stupid Sheep

The last group is the outright stupid. I probably shouldn’t include them in the list either, since every side of every argument or position has their fair share of these people. They are ill-informed of the positions they take, they have nothing but regurgitated propaganda to repeat, they spend their time hammering one point whether it is true or not and they don’t seem to care that they are ignorant. The reason I thought I should include them in this list is because it seems the anti-immigration crowd has more than its fair share of these people. Lots of times it seems like an argument a lot of them hold onto is that Mexico is a third world country were disease (at least in their minds) is running rampant and the immigrants need to be screened for these diseases before they can come to this country.

People come to this country everyday from all over the world without getting screened for disease. That is just the way it is. But even if we did screen everyone that came here legally, how is an invisible line in the desert going to stop diseases from spreading here. It isn’t like you come upon the US-Mexican border and there is force field that keeps diseases from traveling across the border.

Human Rights, Property Rights and Constitutional Rights

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

These are extremely powerful words and that is probably the reason they open the Declaration of Independence. They put forward that idea that strikes at the heart of the idea behind natural rights. The Declaration of Independence made clear the idea that regardless of the government that a person found themselves under, they are entitled to be treated a certain way based, not on the laws of the nation that claims to be their master, but on something deeper, something rooted in the act of just being alive. There is nothing in that statement that limits human rights to the rule of any type of law and the document they came from was in fact a rejection of the rule of law for a higher authority.

Some people familiar with natural rights might point out that when Locke was talking about natural rights, he included “property”, instead of the “Pursuit of Happiness”. This is true and deserves to be mentioned. The incorrect assumption that is often made based on this call to “property” is that it isn’t a call to any type of collective ownership of property and surely not a call to a governmental monopoly on land that falls inside of its borders. This call to the idea of collective property goes back to the socialist “collective goods” idea that rejects individual ownership of property and says that there is a greater good that trumps individual rights and freedoms.

Often I get to hear that the rights we enjoy in the US are a result of the laws we have here and that anyone that rejects any of those laws is a criminal that doesn’t deserve to enjoy those rights. Since these people think rights are derived from obeying the laws of the land, they have never been given a speeding ticket, fined for anything, pulled over or anything like that. Maybe, trespassing?

Isn’t that basically what we are talking about here? The law that these evil immigrants have broken can be boiled down to what it really is, trespassing. Do we deny people their human rights in this country for trespassing? I hope not. And what about my “constitutional” rights of freedom of association? Does their fear and loathing of immigrants allow me to be denied of my “constitutional” rights of free association?

Most of the collectivists seem to think it does.

The No Name Group Project