> Tom, I can't belive that is the way Gregory or you would have worded
> it. Both of you have more sense. At least I hope you do. and with the
> exeption of one or two of you pieces both of you act like you have good
> sense.
OK, from the top:
1) Anthony (I believe) wrote a straight libertarian immigration piece.
2) My job was twofold: a) to "re-voice" the piece so that it "sounded
like Badnarik," and b) to bring Badnarik's positions and the LP's
platform into accomodation with each other. As a writer for the
Badnarik campaign, my job was not to express my own views, but to
express Badnarik's. The writing of the paper was informed by his input
and ultimately issued under his name, with his approval. It represents
his statement on immigration, not mine.
The same is true of each of his position papers, most of which I
wrote, re-wrote or edited. The single exception to that was the
abortion paper, which I declined to have anything to do with. I can
write a pro-choice paper, but my very strident opinion was and is that
a presidential candidate should not change his position on an issue
twice in the course of his campaign, which is the point we were at
when the task of writing that paper came across my desk. Badnarik was
pro-life prior to receiving the nomination, having second thoughts
about "electrical brain activity as the point of personhood" by the
time of the convention (as revealed in an interview in The Free
Liberal, distributed in its print edition AT the convention), and
ultimately agreed, under pressure from within the campaign, to issue a
position paper that simply parroted the LP's pro-choice platform
plank. Someone else wrote that paper, someone else edited and proofed it.
3) Since 2004, the paper has undergone major alterations in both
language and content. I don't consider it the same paper at all even
though it is composed of re-arranged chunks of the old paper, with new
sections inserted.
The text from the 2004 paper, as best I could recover it, is below my
signature (there's one curious ungrammatical break in it -- I'm
assuming that happened due to file corruption or something some time
after the campaign -- since the position papers received numerous
critical readings during that campaign, it would have been caught and
corrected at that time. You'll see that a lot of fairly unequivocal
libertarian positions in that paper are equivocated on in the 2006
version.
Regards,
Tom Knapp
-----
Immigration is among the most contentious issues facing America today,
and the specters of terrorism and war have only added fuel to an
already fiery debate. Let's take an objective look at immigration,
borders and legitimate national security concerns.
By any reasonable measure, immigration is not just beneficial to the
American economy but indispensable to the goal of a nation of freedom
and opportunity. This nation was built on immigration. Allowing
peaceful people to enter our country is not just an option. It's a
benchmark by which we measure whether or not we're living up to the
American ideal.
This does not mean, however, that the national defense must be
sacrificed to some naive conception of "open borders." The right to
enter the United States is not the same as the right to enter the
United States in contravention of its legitimate interest in securing
itself against those who would do it harm.
Immigration and borders are two separate issues. When they are mixed,
the result is both deadly to peaceful immigrants and subversive of the
security of the United States.
Peaceful immigrants should be allowed to enter the US at conveniently
located Customs and Immigration stations, subject only to brief
vetting to ensure that they are not terrorists or criminals. They
should not be forced by restrictions or quotas to place their lives at
risk by crossing the border at remote locations, often under the
guidance of ruthless "coyotes" who are as likely to leave them to die
as to get them safely across, and to then lead lives of fear of
detection, detention and deportation. I do not regard the existence of
the social "safety net" as a good excuse for excluding immigrants. The
welfare state needs to be eliminated. It would need to be eliminated
whether immigration was an issue or not.
Not only are immigration restrictions bad policy in and of themselves,
they make national defense a more difficult task. Immigrants crossing
into the US illegally, because they were denied legal entry for no
good reason, provide cover, by sheer dint of numbers, for terrorists
and criminals. The black market in smuggling humans constitutes a
vector for bringing the nation's enemies into our homeland.
Coupled with open, easy immigration for the peaceful, I advocate a
vigorous national defense against our enemies. Terrorists and
criminals who attempt to enter the US via a Customs and Immigration
station should be denied entry and, where applicable, arrested or
extradited. Terrorists and criminals who attempt to enter the US via
other points along its 95,000 miles of border and coastline should be
treated as what they are: invaders against whom our armed forces must
respond. There are obvious exceptions Cuban and Haitian "boat
refugees" who don't have much control over where they make landfall,
for example but they are exceptions, not the rule.
As a Libertarian, I reject a conception of national defense that keeps
American troops overseas, meddling in the affairs of other nations.
Instead, I advocate a national defense which, sans any attack which
might require retaliation elsewhere, focuses on the logical area: the
nation's borders. As president, I would work to eliminate the Border
Patrol and treat border issues as what they are: defense issues coming
under the mission and scope of the armed forces. In an age where the
equivalent of a large invasion force can be packed into a
suitcase-sized box containing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons,
no lesser response will do.
-----
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