Immigration

Immigration advocacy groups are challenging the Justice Department's decision to allow police departments to pursue illegal immigrants as part of the war on terror.

Of course immigration advocacy groups will fight anything that might possibly be effective!

But while I have to play by the rules, another class of people does not. They don't have to prove they're American citizensıthey arenıt. They don't have to prove they lived in the U.S. for 5 years ı they may not have. They don't have to pay for paperwork to be processed. This class of people is granted a number of privileges that I, an American citizen, am not entitled to. To what privileged class of people do I refer? I refer to the illegal aliens in the U.S.A. Under the insane anchor baby policy, an illegal alien can cross the border, have a baby five minutes later, and that baby is automatically declared a citizen of the U.S.A.

The families of 14 illegal Mexican immigrants who died of dehydration while crossing the hot Arizona desert have filed a $42 million lawsuit against the U.S. Department of the Interior, claiming it failed to help them survive. The lawsuit, filed April 30 in U.S. District Court in Tucson, claims federal border policy forced the immigrants to enter the country through the treacherous area southwest of Tucson known to have little water. Border Patrol agents found the immigrants on May 23, 2001 in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge.

Color me boggled, folks. What kind of attitude and worldview does it take to file a lawsuit like this? I can understand, vaguely, the people who feel illegal immigration is their best option. I can get angry at the smugglers who victimize their "customers". But suing the government because your family members tried something stupid and illegal?

Do these people even understand that what they are doing is illegal?

We all feel tremendous sympathy for the men who lost their lives last week locked in a truck-trailer outside of Victoria, Texas, in the congressional district I represent. Regardless of the circumstances of their entry into the United States, it is a terrible tragedy for their families, and a horrific example of what can happen when human life is considered cheap.

Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Col., is calling for a White House probe into high-ranking federal Homeland Security authorities in Texas who publicly reassured illegal aliens and their backers they have no plans to enforce federal immigration laws anytime soon.

Tancredo, head of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, responded to statements by Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent in Charge Joseph Webber, and Rep. Gene Green, D-Texas, who called a special meeting, attended by about 400 people.

At the meeting, they announced they had no plans to arrest, deport, or hassle the scores of aliens illegally living and working in the Houston area, according to the Houston Chronicle.

As a Libertarian, I'm not all that fond of immigration laws. That is, I think we have the right to choose who comes into the country and who doesn't, but in general I favor a fairly open border policy. That is complicated by the existance of a present welfare state and the current war on terror; in times of war no nation is obligated to maintain an open border regardless of peacetime principles.

And yet the current government is completely blind to this. That's not my only beef here, though. Why is the government openly stating that it will not enforce immigration laws?

Well, duh. Politics. Bush wants the votes of those in the country legally but who come from a culture with a large number of illegal immigrants. Immigration policy is one of the few levers into that voting population . Unfortunately, refusing to enforce the law is a very poor choice of lever.

We have so many laws these days that we can pick and choose among those to enforce. Indeed, we have to pick and choose. We don't have enough police or enough prosecutors to do anything else. Perversely, that lack of resources leads to even more power in the hands of the government; since the government cannot control an innocent man, where there are not enough criminals to satisfy the lust for power, government will act to make more criminals. And with an abundance of rarely-enforced laws to choose from, governments are free to select cases not by the severity of the crime but by the opportunity to set an example.

Or, in other words, the squeaky wheel gets locked up. All the other wheels stop squeaking when that happens, because they are all breaking some of the laws, somehow, and avoiding the attention of the State is suddenly a necessity of survival -- and survival easily outweighs principle in the minds of most squeaky wheels... and even squeaky men. The power to prosecute one man in 10 who breaks a law is the power to threaten all 10 with being chosen.

Right now, regardless of what our government has to say about enforcement, there are millions of illegal immigrants -- honest and hard-working, for low wages, and without the protections of America's labor laws -- who live in fear of being deported... because whereever they came from is worse. These are the victims of our immigration policies. They are victims because they are neither accepted nor rejected.

If we are to welcome to our shores the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free"

For years, the first thing new immigrants saw of our country was a great statue, with this inscription:

... Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the goden door!

If we are to live up to that charge, then we must welcome these new citizens into our land with open arms, offering them all the rights, responsibilities, and privileges of citizenship. If we cannot do that, and instead pass laws to turn them away, then we must enforce those laws. Otherwise we are no better than slavemasters, threatening with the whip of the INS and tantalize with the bribe of a scanty meal to a starving man.

... but he's not ranting about it in a Libertarian fashion. Actually, he's complaining that he doesn't subscribe to the open-borders position. And he's got a point; the official libertarian position on immigrants and border control only makes sense if the rest of the libertarian platform gets enacts, or something fairly close to it. So, with that in mind, let me explain how it is supposed to work:

First, under a libertarian government, the government would not be responsible for providing things like welfare or health care to those who can't afford them. Under the current system an illegal immigrant has access to all sorts of government benefits without any obligation to pay the taxes that supposedly fund those benefits; if you remove those benefits you remove one of the things that makes illegal immigrants an economic drain on the country.

Second, under a libertarian government, taxes on personal income would be much lower, or even eliminated completely. This effectively removes the economic conditions that make employing an illegal immigrant so much cheaper than employing an American citizen. Restore parity in the cost of labor, and you're back to a free market again.

Third, under a libertarian government, many of the enforcement difficulties for immigration law are reduced. It's easy to get into the country, so smuggling people in becomes much less of a problem; the only people being smuggled in are people who would be denied legal entry, and those people would only be the ones we really want to stop -- that is, terrorists. So anyone getting smuggled across a border becomes fair game for severe enforcement efforts.

Fourth, under a libertarian government, the people are generally responsible for their own defense. (This is also true under the present government, of course, but in a libertarian government they would be told this and expected to arm themselves accordingly). This reduces the crime problem posed by illegal immigrants, since they are among an armed people expecting to defend themselves. Since many illegal immigrants are also legalized, there's much less of an incentive to commit crimes. The combination should be very effective.

Finally, in times of war, no one seriously expects even a libertarian government to maintain a completely open border policy.

Overall, he's right -- a libertarian immigration policy doesn't make sense with our current government and legal system. But it makes perfect sense once you replace our current policies with libertarian policies.

Kevin at The Smallest Minority points us to this story about determined minority high-school students competing against the best-and-the-brightest from MIT in a robotics competition -- and winning.  It's an excellent reminder that the results you get from our school system are hugely dependent on what you bring to the table in terms of brains, and more importantly, enthusiasm.

Schools do not fail because their students are undermedicated or genetically incapable of learning.  They fail because the students don't want to learn, or can't be bothered to work hard at learning.  All other obstacles can be overcome by determined students regardless of supposed cultural, financial, or genetic barriers.  (Hiring incompetent teachers doesn't help, and is in fact one of the few things we can probably fix, but it's not the core problem).

So with that said... most, if not all, of the students described in that article were illegal immigrants, or the children of illegal immigrants.  One, in particular, wanted to join the military as a career option -- but could not, because his family was in the US illegally.  It seems cruel to deny these students the same education benefits granted to ordinary citizens when they are clearly capable, deserving individuals who would probably make good use of the opportunity America not only offers, but represents, to the poor and oppressed across the world. 

They do not say, "I want to work hard and have a fair chance to succeed."  Even though that is what they mean, they say it differently in the rest of the world.  They say it like this: "I want to go to America."

And yet America is becoming increasingly insular.   Our society is often divided along racial and ethnic lines, in large parts due to efforts by the Democratic party.  We are facing tough economic choices regarding education, social security, health care, and other entitlement programs.  And we are facing a terrorist threat that cannot be ignored. 

Our citizens do not want to work at the low-skill, low-pay jobs taken by illegal immigrants.  Nor do they want to pay more for goods and services.  Those low-pay, low-skill jobs are given to illegal immigrants because no one else wants them, and they are kept off the tax books because it keeps costs -- and thus consumer prices -- down.   Many of those jobs would become economically insupportable if they were taxed and regulated the way that on-the-books jobs are treated. 

We deny many benefits of American society to illegal immigrants.  It's not quite second-class citizenship status; call it second-class residency.  Yet this flies in the face of our history, because America has thrived by providing a haven for those who want to work hard, take risks, and seek in return not government benefits... but merely opportunity. 

America is not the land of the free college education.  America is the land of opportunity.

And we have some hard choices to make if we want to keep that title.  We cannot allow the flow of illegal immigrants to continue.  What was an acceptable security risk before 9/11 is now unsupportable.  We need to know who is entering our country, and we need to stop terrorists and criminals at the borders.  Once inside our country they can disappear into the population, and locating them after that requires intrusive measures that threaten our cherished tradition of liberty.  Better to stop them at the border.

And yet we cannot simply stop them all.  It's hard to measure the effect it would have on our economy, but it's easy to understand the effect it would have on our principles.  If America is to remain the land of opportunity, we need to continue to offer opportunity to the world.  More practically, it's politically impossible to muster the required resources to close our southern border.  People will sneak through no matter what we do.

If we can't stop them, we need to know who they are.  That's what Bush is driving at with his various not-quite-an-amnesty immigration programs.  It's not something his Republican base is terribly happy with.  I have a certain amount of sympathy for those views.  The problem of illegal immigration affects people in the southern border states personally and viscerally.  The same routes that smuggle people also smuggle drugs, and the people running those routes are criminals willing to threaten violence to protect their interests.  How long before those same routes begin to smuggle terrorists? 

But those problems are associated with illegal immigration.  Make the immigration legal, and the honest folks who just want a piece of the American dream will participate.  The illegal smuggling routes will become the domain of criminals only -- and there will be no political cost to cracking down on those.

Once you've done that, though, there's still a problem.  Do you provide all the benefits of citizenship to these now-legal immigrants?  Or do you maintain a second-class status?  If you prefer to offer them the same benefits, how do you fund those benefits?  Remember, if you tax those jobs at the same rate as other jobs, many of those jobs will go away entirely -- and you are left with legal immigrants on welfare rather than illegal immigrants struggling to make the American dream come true.

The solution is to recognize reality.  Our politicians have created a government wherein the costs of compliance (in the form of taxation, regulation, and so on) are high enough to exclude the vast majority of unskilled laborer jobs.  Quite simply, we can't afford to provide welfare, social security, health benefits, and free education to low-income workers, because the cost of providing those services is greater than the revenue that can be derived from taxing the workers.

Hard choices indeed.

The people who created those programs have a ready answer.  "Raise taxes on the rich!" they cry.  "Redistribute the wealth!" 

Well, the graveyard of history is filled with the corpses of communist and socialist nations that tried exactly that and found out that it doesn't work.  More importantly, in America the market has spoken, and the market has decreed that it is better to import undocumented workers in violation of the government's tax laws than to pay the taxes. 

Do you doubt me?

Some people made a stink last year because the Libertarian candidate for President was a tax protester.  But Badnarik is just one man.  The real tax protestors are companies like Wal-Mart who refuse to pay taxes on their employees in favor of employing illegal immigrants.  We're not talking wild-eyed libertarian lunatics picketing the Internal Revenue Service here.  We're talking rational corporate actors making decisions to break the law.

The current tax regime is unsupportable, and the trends all suggest that it will continue to get worse.  We can't afford the pseudo-socialist state that 60 years of Democratic dominance has given us.  They mortgaged our future to pay for it, stealing the money we contributed from a mythical trust fund, and now the bill is starting to come due.  We see it in jobs that go to illegals because they can be kept off the books, and we see it in the looming social security crisis.

The solution is to tighten our belts, abandon failed programs funded by fraudulent pyramid schemes, and return to a government of limited size and limited means.  Once we remove the excessive taxation, regulation, and red tape from the economy, the jobs presently held by illegal immigrants can become legal jobs held by legal immigrants.  Those jobs will still face a tax burden, but a dramatically reduced one.  The people working on those jobs will not have to live outside the law.  They won't get a free ride to college, but they don't anyway; they will get the opportunity to work their way through college, which they are presently denied, even if they want to.  Most important of all, they won't be terrorists.

True, ordinary Americans will have to give up some of the benefits they receive.  But that is both fair and inevitable, as the behavior of companies like Wal-Mart demonstrates.  And it will put pressure on the educational system to return to a sane pricing structure, rather than demanding that our students mortgage their own future to support professorial frauds like Ward Chuchill.  Rather than taxing only the rich to support programs for the poor in an unsupportable cycle, taxes will be low, fair, and applied to everyone equally; prices for education will be low, student choice will force schools to compete for students (resulting in better quality education for everyone), and the American Dream will remain an opportunity available to anyone willing to work hard for a fair wage.

UPDATE: This posting was included in the Carnival of the Capitalists.

... and furthermore, it won't work.  All it takes is one sympathetic person willing to make "straw purchases" of cars.  When the blamosphere suggested regulating cars like guns, we weren't serious, so knock it off, ok?