Immigration is the Sincerest Form of Flattery
I know the immigration bill is dead for the next year and a half, but the issue is still important–so I’m going to give you my personal libertarian take on it. (Just to be clear, I thought the most recent immigration bill was a load of crap, but not for the reasons most Republican were opposed to it. The bill was a Soviet-style, central planning, grossly expensive, big-government boondoggle.)
We don’t need a crackdown on immigration.
Immigration, in general, is a good thing. It’s the result of natural supply and demand in the free market.
If you consider aggression, coercion, and the initiation of force (meaning not in self-defense) to be inherently wrong, then you surely consider freedom and the free market the most natural and just state of affairs.
It follows that you should be allowed to hire whomever you want at whatever wage is mutually agreeable (this, of course, is why minimum wage laws are inherently wrong).
It then follows that if someone says that someone from outside the country is not allowed to come into the country to work for you, they are engaging in coercion against both you and that person. Stopping people from moving into the U.S. and punishing business owners for hiring certain people are entirely inconsistent with freedom and the free market.
The three real problems we face are:
1) welfare handouts attracting a higher amount of immigration than the market would naturally demand: this, of course, is not an immigration problem–it’s an overall socialist scheme that increases poverty and dependence, distorts all kinds of markets (including the labor market), and should be done away with.
2) archaic and complicated rules for getting into the country legally: when it takes years and thousands of dollars to immigrate to the ‘bastion of freedom in the world,’ there’s something terribly wrong. There’s nothing inherently immoral about moving from Nuevo Laredo (in Mexico) to Laredo, Texas. Therefore, laws preventing it or making it difficult are, by definition, immoral and acts of aggression. So, if someone is deemed to be ‘illegal’ or a ‘law breaker’ due to the fact that they’ve violated an unjust law to engage in a perfectly moral activity, it seems to me the term ‘illegal’ loses its meaning. One part of the solution to ‘illegal’ immigration is the same as the solution to the problem of ‘illegal drug use’–get rid of the laws!
3) an interventionist foreign policy has created a group of lunatics intent on entering the country and doing us harm–thus creating a perceived need for ’secure borders.’ Even those who agree that there’s nothing wrong with immigration, per se, tend to fall back on the need for ’secure borders’ to justify their support for a crackdown on immigration. I submit that this is an instance of putting a bandaid on an out of control tumor. First, the amount of government force that would be required to truly prevent determined terrorists from getting in would turn us into one of the most draconian police states in human history. Second, it doesn’t address the source of the problem. Islamic nutjobs want to kill us because we’ve been meddling in their countries for decades (sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad reasons). Instead of using one form of aggression (a militarized border) to solve the problems caused by another form of aggression (non-defensive military involvement overseas), doesn’t it make a lot more sense to end the causative aggression by bringing all our troops back home where they belong? And no, most Muslims aren’t trying to kill us because of our freedom. If that was true they’d be suicide-bombing Ireland, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and all those other places that match or exceed our level of freedom. And yes, there would still be a few who really do want to kill us because of our unholy freedom, but once they lose the easy excuse of ‘fighting back against American imperialism,’ they would lose the widespread support (or at least the lack of condemnation) they currently enjoy from their fellow Muslims.
Remember, immigration is the sincerest form of flattery.
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