Since there has been much talk about Arizona’s recent passing of its controversial immigration law, I thought it a perfect time to announce that the latest edition of the Journal of Libertarian Studies features an article that Albert Esplugas and I have written on immigration. The title is “Immigrants: Intruders or Guests? A Reply to Hoppe and Kinsella.”
(Stephan Kinsella’s views appear to have changed since this piece was written a few years ago. Indeed, he is now pro-immigration and pro-open borders.)
The same edition of the JLS (Vol.22 Num.1) contains another article on the issue: “A Pure Libertarian Theory of Immigration” by Jan Krepelka; it appears to be a critique of the major arguments against free immigration.
As Michael Barnett points out, government can’t do anything efficiently, at least not without spending enormous amounts of tax dollars and violating our rights. The border wall is one example of a project the Federal government will never be able to complete to anyone’s satisfaction: for closed-border advocates, it won’t be effective in keeping out illegal immigrants; for open-border supporters, it will be a monument to government waste and tyranny. The only way it might work at a reasonable price (reasonable for government, anyway) is to put a lot of armed guards along the wall.
Arizona is now seriously considering another application of the brute-force approach, in the form of a “papers, please” shakedown of anyone who doesn’t look, well, legal:
The Arizona House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a wide-ranging bill that, if signed by Gov. Jan Brewer, would cement the state’s reputation as the leader in tough and controversial immigration-control measures.
Senate Bill 1070 would, among other things, make it a state crime to be in the country illegally and bar what its proponents call “sanctuary city” policies.
Most disturbing among the bill’s provisions is granting cops the ability to arrest an immigrant without a warrant if they have “probable cause” to believe the person has committed an offense for which they can be deported. And inviting an illegal immigrant over for dinner could land even legal residents in hot water, if they know their guest’s immigration status.
Just imagine how Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who holds illegal immigrants, criminals and civil liberties in equal disdain, might utilize these new powers. Given that his uniformed thugs already routinely round up Mexicans in sweeps and were so abusive of their authority that ICE stripped the sheriff of some of his immigration enforcement powers, the Arizona legislature has effectively granted Arpaio a license to perform “enforcement” actions akin to ethnic cleansing. The state will protect you from the brown menace! And never mind the boot on your neck.
It’s all the more outrageous for the fact that it’s so unnecessary. The same week the Arizona House was debating this evil bill, Governor Jan Brewer signed a far more laudable measure that will do more to improve her citizens’ safety than an entire file cabinet of anti-immigration statutes: allow residents to carry a concealed weapon without a license. If Arizona residents are truly worried about violence from Mexico’s U.S.-backed drug war spilling over the borders, I can’t think of any better security measure than arming themselves. And Brewer’s spokesman said that the governor did not believe that residents needed permission from the government to exercise their constitutional right to bear arms. I’ll wholeheartedly agree with that! Now if only she was as consistent on people being free to go about their daily business without being harassed by the cops for having a suspicious skin color.
There's only one way for government to effectively secure its borders.
In a perfect world (Ancapistan/Libertopia), say libertarians who want to restrict immigration, we could have open borders. For one thing, they say, all property would be privatized, so it would be up to individuals to decide who will be allowed to traverse their land, roads, and waterways. Furthermore, they explain, there would be no massive welfare state encouraging the neighboring country’s proletariat to immigrate for all the freebies. There would be no arbitrary government rules about “natural born citizenry” which encourage pregnant mothers to try to birth their babies on American (that’s the country we’re talking about here, after all) soil thus securing the right to live in America for their child, and by extension (since it’s inhumane to break up the mother-child family unit) their right to live there as well.
Now, I’ve seen libertarians argue that the Mexicans (let’s face it, that’s really whom we’re talking about) who cross the border illegally are mostly looking for the freebies, and I’ve seen libertarians argue that the Mexicans who cross the border illegally are mostly looking for work which Americans don’t want to do themselves (like picking lettuce all day in fields of pesticide). Who’s right? I haven’t a clue. I’m sure the American welfare state is very enticing to the neighboring poor. I’m sure without it, there’d be less immigration from Mexico. But none of this matters to me. I’m not even going to make the pro-liberty argument which by definition is against government controlled borders.
What I want to do is concede all of the above arguments to the anti-immigration libertarians. Let’s assume that an enormous welfare state requires heavily regulated or possibly even closed borders. I don’t believe this to be the case, but let’s stipulate that it is. Now what? What are these libertarians implicitly assuming?
That the government can efficiently and effectively manage the borders. If there is one thing every libertarian should know about government it’s that government cannot efficiently or effectively perform any “service” without resorting to totalitarian police-statism. When the government minimizes costs (don’t laugh), it performs at woefully substandard levels. Think of the levees around New Orleans which failed during Hurricane Katrina, for instance. For adequate quality of service, for instance the Hoover Dam or those stretches of elevated interstate cutting through the marshes and swamps of Louisiana (very fine work), the government has to overpay enormously. The systemic defects inherent in government bureaucracy cannot be overcome, as they are due (mostly) to the absence of a profit motive. The government simply cannot provide quality services at market prices; often, the government cannot provide quality service at any price. What the government can do, however, is provide brutality very cheaply, for a while.
So, while the government won’t be able to build proper border walls at a reasonable price, what it can do is man whatever type of walls it does build (cheap, low quality walls, or massively overpriced, high quality walls) with soldiers who have orders to shoot-on-sight and ask questions later, if at all. Tossing several thousand mines outside those walls wouldn’t cost much either — we could describe it as brutally efficient. Why not require every citizen to carry government identification cards and make the penalty for failure to comply (accidental or intentional) very severe? We have examples of countries which have managed to secure their borders effectively (for the most part). I’ll name three: The former Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba. Governments which haven’t degenerated into police states just cannot accomplish it.
So I pose this question to those libertarians who claim that as long as we have a colossal welfare state, we must have strict immigration controls: what’s your libertarian plan for accomplishing this?
You can’t trust the state, even when it appears no one else can save you. And now survivors of the terrible earthquake in Haiti are learning the same, painful lesson:
More than two months after the earthquake that devastated Haiti, at least 30 survivors who were waved onto planes by Marines in the chaotic aftermath are prisoners of the United States immigration system, locked up since their arrival in detention centers in Florida.
These are not criminals — just people overwhelmed by the quake and subsequent aftershocks, looking for food, water and shelter. When the Marines evacuated them, they were under the impression that they could join relatives already in the U. S., but instead they were immediately arrested and held for deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — despite a current suspension of deportations to Haiti. All of this, because they didn’t already have a piece of paper from the U. S. government granting them permission to come here. And yet more immigrants have all but disappeared into ICE’s detention center network, with family unable to find them. Some that were lucky enough to be freed were granted tourist visas, allowing them to stay for a short while, but not to work.
But even when their loved ones are put in cages for no reason by the government, people can’t seem to let go of their implicit trust of the state:
The government’s actions have been especially bewildering for the survivors’ relatives, like Virgile Ulysse, 69, an American citizen who keeps an Obama poster on his kitchen wall in Norwalk, Conn. Mr. Ulysse said he could not explain to his nephews, Jackson, 20, and Reagan, 25, why they were brought to the United States on a military plane only to be jailed at the Broward center when they arrived in Orlando on Jan. 19.
The cognitive dissonance of that paragraph is almost dazzling: an Obama supporter who doesn’t understand why the Obama-led government jailed his nephews. Even with the boot on their neck, people still look to the state to save them. Will they ever learn?
