No Coercion

This story turns my stomach:

Immigration crackdown hits fence builder

Long article, quick summary:

A guy (Mel Kay) owned a very successful fence company (Golden State Fence) in California. About a third of his employees were illegal immigrants, some of whom he actually rehired after they had been arrested on immigration charges. He says he preferred Mexican immigrants (often friends and family referred by current employees) to the typical American citizen blue collar workers in the area, the Mexicans being more trustworthy and likely to stay long term. He paid his employees incredibly well and provided benefits. So, here we have a man and some other men entering into peaceful, voluntary, mutually beneficial agreements in order to engage in a business providing goods and services to others in peaceful, voluntary, mutually beneficial agreements.

Enter the federal government.

The Feds find out that -gasp- this guy was employing people that the government said were ‘illegal.’ Nevermind that every individual has the natural right to enter into voluntary agreements with any other individual–the government (and a great many voters) has decided that particular right can be violated if one party happens to have been born on the wrong side of an imaginary line drawn by politicians and hasn’t gone through the unjust, coercive, expensive and time-consuming ‘official’ channels to become ‘legal.’

Here’s a telling quote regarding the massive operation the government launched to take down this horrible man and his ‘illegal’ fence company:

Shortly after Kay arrived at work at 5 a.m. on Nov. 30, 2005, federal agents stormed his 14-acre headquarters in an industrial part of Riverside, 60 miles east of Los Angeles. In 14 hours, they would fill a 16-foot truck with boxes of documents and computer hard drives.

Simultaneously, a helicopter with a loudspeaker circled over nearly 200 agents who raided the largest of Kay’s 10 branches, in Oceanside, north of San Diego. In all, agents arrested 17 employees at their homes or as they came to load their trucks at 6 a.m.

So basically, this old guy and his son-in-law would have gone to prison if the judge at the sentencing hearing hadn’t looked at the overall picture and had a momentary lapse into the mindset of an almost free human being. Still, the guy ended up with 6 months home confinement and a $5M fine–for daring to enter into peaceful, voluntary transactions with other human beings.

This is your government, people. The government of the so-called freest country on Earth. Yes, that has disturbing implications for the future of human civilization, but what’s most disturbing to me is how many of our fellow Americans (perhaps even some of my readers) not only approve of this kind of coercion and violation of natural rights, but actually protest loudly in favor of such policies and the politicians who support them. For a great many Americans from both of the state-sponsored parties (Democrats and Republicans), support for these kinds of anti-human, wealth-destroying, totalitarian policies is actually the key factor in their decision to support a given candidate.

And to hear it coming from those who consider themselves supporters of limited government is especially confusing and disheartening. To the anti-immigration conservatives and libertarians out there, why is it wrong for the government to ban certain light bulbs and shower heads, but it’s okay for it to launch commando-style assaults on peaceful businesses for the crime of employing hard-working men in voluntary arrangements providing great value to their fellow man–all because they were born on the wrong side of an imaginary line? Somebody please attempt to justify that. I dare you.

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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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