no third solution

Blogging about liberty, anarchy, economics and politics

Category Archives: immigration

Immigration Laws Kill

May 5th, 2008

If you advocate immigration laws, you have to accept collateral damage towards a “greater good.”

You believe that the price to be paid by the immigrants of the world is justified by some perceived benefit accruing to someone else — someone else who probably hasn’t had to pay any price whatsoever. You must believe that some immigrants simply aren’t worth as much as some barely noticeable increase in your standard of living. You justify these deaths, for the greater good, by convincing yourself that they are less-than-human; criminals in-fact. Satisfied that these people are criminals who do not deserve to be treated like human beings with inalienable rights, there is virtually no limit to the injustices you will permit to be carried out agaisnt them, in your name.

Mr. Bah’s relatives never saw the internal records labeled “proprietary information — not for distribution” by the Corrections Corporation of America, which runs the New Jersey detention center for the federal government. The documents detail how he was treated by guards and government employees: shackled and pinned to the floor of the medical unit as he moaned and vomited, then left in a disciplinary cell for more than 13 hours, despite repeated notations that he was unresponsive and intermittently foaming at the mouth.

Your laws and your bureaucracies kill innocent people. Do you feel safer, yet? Do you want to hold the gun?

Illegal Immigration

May 2nd, 2008

For the better part of American history, there were quite simply, no immigration laws. And the land survived wave after wave of immigrants, from the dastardly Germans, to the drunken Irish, to the opiated Chinese. As I previously analyzed immigration,

From 1800 through 2000, the population of the United States increased 51-fold! During that period…population growth was generally declining. The population is only 3.6 times bigger than it was 100 years ago, at which point it was over 14 times larger than it was a century earlier.

Each new wave of immigrants revived a xenophobic fear of foreigners, that in recent times has become increasingly nationalist in nature. But ultimately, the new population survived, and the nation thrived.

Apparently, nobody was paying attention:

Greg Palmore, spokesman for ICE in Michigan and Ohio, said deportations are increasing every year. They jumped to 4,144 last year from 2,974 in 2006 in Michigan and Ohio and to 280,523 from 205,430 over the same period nationwide.

“Yes, immigration enforcement is very active,” Palmore said. “One of our key priorities is to restore integrity to the nation’s immigration laws.”

“You’ve got to remember that the duty of the immigration agents and officers is to enforce the nation’s immigration laws. Enforcing the law is not optional for us, it’s our duty.”

There is no integrity to restore, unless Mr. Palmore is willing to advocate the dismantling of his department and the repeal of immigration laws. There can be no integrity in any law which brands people as criminals merely on the basis of where they happened to be born. A law preventing free migration of people is a crime.

Mr. Palmore’s statement is the typical Statist argument which has never been valid. “I was just following orders” doesn’t count. He would be wise to remember that it was the duty of German soldiers to summarily execute millions of innocents during the second World War. They tried the very same logic at Nuremburg.

Even to-day, there is no one forcing him to uphold those particular laws. At some point, Mr. Palmore and his co-conspirators were faced with a moral decision: to take that job and enforce those laws of their own volition, or to take a different job.

It seems Mr. Palmore finds nothing wrong with pointing a gun at someone who has done nothing wrong—he chose the former.

Racial Profiling for Thee, Not for Me

September 14th, 2007

This was almost included in the Questions earlier, but I feel deserves a stand-alone entry.

Keeping in mind that the state is nearly bankrupt, the following is analogous to buying another pack of cigarettes with the last welfare check:

Although profiling is a useful pseudo-science in law-enforcement and apprehension, most people dislike “racial profiling” in most other circumstances (e.g., driving while black). Of course the proper scope of profiling is limited to describing the likely tendencies, habits, and character traits of an unknown subject with regards to a known crime, or series of crimes.

Profiling is used properly to discover criminals when a crime is known to have been committed, not crimes. There is a subtle, but necessary distinction. Otherwise, we’d have to detain every single, white male in his thirties, these being statistically most likely to be serial killers.

So what about a State law that would deny revenue-sharing dollars to communities who have laws against racial profiling on their books? Would it make a difference if we’re talking about Guatemálans and Mexicans instead of Blacks?

Aside from the aforementioned “low-hanging fruit” problem, there is clearly insufficient cause to assume that everyone who “looks like a Mexican,” (whatever that means) actually is a Mexican (and not instead a Filipino or a Portuguese, a naturalized citizen, or a born-and-bred citizen of Mexican ancestry), let alone to assume that said person who “looks like a Mexican” is also violating an immigration law. It is facially absurd, and ultimately boils down to payment for profiling, by the State, to a municipality. Or if you’d rather, from those municipalities who abhor the idea of profiling, to those municipalities who embrace it.

How charming. But, what did you expect?

no third solution

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