no third solution

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Category Archives: immigration

An Open Letter to “Libertarians” Against Immigration Amnesty

May 6th, 2010

If you are one of these ‘libertarians’, who oppose amnesty for migrant workers, who oppose open borders and freedom of travel, employ and commerce, this letter is addressed to you.

Dear “Libertarians”,

I notice a lot of you like to say that brown people in third world countries accept low-wage, hard-labor jobs because that’s better than the alternative (namely: subsistence farming). You argue that this is how the invisible hand of the “free market” works.

No, it’s fucking not.

The only reason they are condemned to these choices is because they had the misfortune of being born in some banana republic, some petty dictatorship, or some ass-backward third-world country. Viz., some place you ‘libertarians’ would never — ever — want to find yourselves; you would kick, punch, claw, gouge and shoot your way out. You would climb mountains, cross deserts, or navigate shark-infested oceans in order to find something better.

But when I bring up immigration, I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about them. You’re worried that if people emigrate, you might not pull down $18/hour plus benefits to be a high school custodian — as if being compelled by the forces of supply and demand to accept a $13/hour gig instead is a degradation even remotely similar to being locked in some craphole third-world country making $100 shoes for 8 cents a day.

You’re saying, “I’m all for the free market as long as I get to play by a different set of rules [than immigrants and residents of LDCs]”. But that’s not how a “free market” works.

You do not get to exempt yourself from the workings of the free market and still call it a “free market”. The same forces which might compel a migrant worker to pick cherries in Traverse City, or to work ‘illegally’ doing midnight shifts at the gas station, may also compel you to sacrifice that vacation home, or the third flat-screen TV, or the brand-new car for your daughter’s sweet sixteen, or your microbrews, or your Marlboros or your expensive tennis shoes and video games — so that those oppressed and disenfrachised can feed their fucking families.

Take a good, long, hard look in the mirror. You are not an advocate of the ‘invisible hand’.
You are an apologist for the ‘invisible fist’, punching all of humanity in the throat, forever.

Sincerely,

David Zemens

Fake Anarchists Oppose Immigration

October 29th, 2009

I find it ironic, and just a bit confusing, to see an “anarchist” waxing poetic about national identity; as though anything could be less meaningful in the anarchist lexicon than those f*cking arbitrary delineations of conquest and subjugation drawn on maps by all manner of kings, tyrants, and usurpers.

I’m not going to bother wasting five minutes of my life watching the video linked via the National Anarchist Revolution! blog, primarily because NumbersUSA peddles a lot of borderline-bogus, alarmist, jingoistic “statistics” in support of their arguments.  I’ve taken them to task on this junk-science in the past, and that will suffice for me, thank you very much.

There will always be scarcity, but if it were possible to create a localized superabundance, any decent man, genuinely concerned with the plight of the poorest among us, would wait a little bit longer to get there, so that others could feast at that table, too.

—Immigration: The Good Stuff. 31 May, 2007.

I do not mean to imply that freedom of immigration would solve all of the world’s problems, although I do believe it would go a long way towards achieving that goal.

En français, dessous du pli

Do You Feel Safer Now?

May 14th, 2009

From my brother, via e-mail, “I cant decide if this (login required @ NYT)is somewhat disturbing or incredibly disturbing. Oh, wait — it’s incredibly disturbing.”

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The NYT’s Jennifer Steinhauer reports on an Explorer Scout program, indoctrinating training American youths — some as young as 13 and a half — to preserve the Empire, which of course means learning how to shoot brown people from poor countries trying to make a better life for their families and learning how to destroy lives by perpetuating the war on drugs.

Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout. “Put him on his face and put a knee in his back,” a Border Patrol agent explained. “I guarantee that he’ll shut up.”

“Cathy Noriego, also 16, said she was attracted by the guns. The group uses compressed-air guns — known as airsoft guns, which fire tiny plastic pellets — in the training exercises, and sometimes they shoot real guns on a closed range. “I like shooting them,” Cathy said. “I like the sound they make. It gets me excited.””

Children, malleable minds, lured by the sound of gunfire. Hell in a motherf*cking handbag.

There’s some sick irony when teenagers with surnames like Noriego are learning how keep people, who were unfortunately born on the “wrong” side of some arbitrary and purely imaginary line, out of their country.  And I can’t help but think that many of these children wouldn’t be here today if there had been a draconian border policy a cenutry or two hence in order to preserve America’s “Manifest Destiny”.

no third solution

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