Illegal Immigration Headache II

(This is adapted from my July 31, 2010 blog post)

Some of the more controversial parts of the new Arizona immigration law signed by Gov. Jan Brewer have been blocked by a federal judge, and, according to Roto-Reuters, a hearing for Arizona’s appeal will be in early November, in time for the next rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic.

Now, I’m not an “open borders” guy, nor am I a “closed borders” guy. But I am for “closed borders” when it comes to private property. I’m an extremist on that. Private property owners have a right to protect and defend their property from intruders. There’s no discussion.

However, I am a defender of the very rights of humankind declared in the Declaration of Independence, which states “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.” (Jefferson actually wrote the word “inalienable” in his original draft, but John Adams had it changed to “unalienable,” because Adams was a jerk.)

Jacob Hornberger recently wrote about his experiences growing up in mostly-Hispanic or Mexican/Mexican-American Laredo, Texas. It was a very “open borders” area there. While I don’t think he mentioned this, I would bet the crime rate was much lower then, because there was no War on Drugs during those years. It’s this counter-productive Drug Prohibition which is the primary cause of the violence, the drug pushing, drug trafficking, the cartels and all the violence associated with all that. Those poor people in Texas and Arizona have to suffer because we have ignoramuses and idiots in Washington. Oh well.

Jacob Hornberger also wrote about the immigration issue a few weeks ago, in which he noted that immigration controls by the State are of socialist central planning, and that is why such a scheme is dysfunctional and can’t actually work the way the socialist planners intend.

As Mises, Hayek, and the Austrians showed long ago, central planning can never succeed because the planner can never possess the requisite knowledge to centrally plan a complex market, especially one as complex as an international labor market. All the planner inevitably does is produce chaos, distortions, and perversions into the market process.

In my opinion, as the Declaration states, each individual has a right to one’s life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. When Jefferson et al. refer to “all men,” first, they are referring to all people, not just “men,” and also they mean all of humankind, not just Americans. Some people have this misguided notion that such a statement is referring to “only Americans.” Nope. Everyone.

And everyone has a right of free association and a right to participate in voluntary exchange with anyone else one wants, as long as it is mutually agreeable and voluntary, and no one has a right to interfere with that. No one. Especially not the State. The private contract that two people establish between one another (or three, four people, etc.) is their own business, and no one else’s business.

Therefore, if a businessman in Laredo, Texas or Phoenix is hiring people at his business, he has a right to hire whomever he wants, and no one has any moral authority or right to judge or interfere with that.

And if a Mexican sees a job advertised and wants to seek employment there, no one has any moral right or authority to interfere with that, either. Any community or government interference with those private, voluntary, peaceful relationships is immoral, because it violates the rights of people to voluntary contract and trade, and their inherent right to life, liberty and their pursuit of happiness.

The socialist, central planning interference with those private matters is of collectivism. Collectivism is the main force behind all that threatens individual liberty, private property and voluntary exchange. Collectivism has been at the root of civilization’s decline, especially since the mid-19th Century. While their Declaration of Independence recognized those aforementioned rights to liberty, as soon as the Founders wrote and ratified that Constitution, which was the basis of the centralized State in Washington, that spelled the end of individual liberty and private property in America.

And it was the collectivist immigration restrictionists who prevented Jews from entering the U.S. in the first half of the 20th Century, who were trying to escape the pogroms of Russia and Poland, and trying to escape the Nazis and Stalin.

I just don’t understand how anyone who claims to believe in the original intent of the Founders could support giving the armed police the power to stop and search people and ask them for their papers, unless you want the USA to be a totalitarian society. (That’s what they do in totalitarian societies — demand to see your papers.) There used to be something called freedom of movement, and something called presumption of innocence and the right to be left alone. But I guess while the socialist central planners and police staters are well intended, perhaps they don’t know their history, I don’t know.

One thing that gets me is these conservatives and others who talk about “borders,” “national sovereignty,” and “preventing invaders,” are the same ones who do not believe that other countries have a right to their national sovereignty, and do not believe that people in other countries have a right to protect their territory and defend their sovereignty and their borders, as those conservatives and others have supported U.S. government foreign interventionism and all the U.S. government’s intrusions into other societies abroad for the last century.

I guess when people are socialist central planners and love the centralized bureaucratic Leviathan federal government as many apparently do, they really aren’t supporters of national sovereignty, and are really internationalists and globalists, and collectivists. Oh well.

Earlier, I mentioned the War on Drugs. This is mostly — and very naively and misguidedly — supported by conservatives, who apparently don’t believe in individual responsibility. People who support Drug Prohibition really want the Nanny State to have the power to permit or forbid individuals as far as what they may or may not ingest in their own bodies, so that those who do ingest behavior-altering substances don’t have to be responsible for the consequences of their actions. Conservatives support this. “There’s nothing like the Nanny State (or Nanny-Police State) to decide for me what’s good for me and what’s bad for me, as long as I don’t have to be responsible for the consequences of my actions,” say the supporters of Nanny State Drug Prohibition. Unfortunately, some people are just statists and collectivists and don’t learn from history — in this case, the history of Prohibition, which was 80 years ago!

I can’t see anything more un-American than the intrusive policies of government foreign interventionism that does nothing but create the blowback of anti-Americanism abroad, and policies of Prohibition that does nothing but cause the blowback of more drug abuse and higher rates of violent crime, and restrictive police-state immigration policies that do nothing but violate private property rights and violate civil liberties. All of those policies are against America and the moral values of individual liberty and peace upon which America was founded.