Brian Miller wrote:
BM) economic UNLESS YOU WANT TO FREELY TRADE YOUR LABOR ACROSS NATIONAL
BORDERS (BM
You seem to be confusing permanent migration with having a daily commute
that crosses national borders. I bet you can't quote Paul speaking against
the taking of day jobs in America by residents of Canada and Mexico. Ron
Paul indeed opposes unlimited immigration and wants to eliminate illegal
immigration, but also says:
*
"Americans are happy to welcome those who wish to come here and
build a better life for themselves, but we rightfully expect immigrants to
show loyalty and attempt to assimilate themselves culturally."
*
"The vast majority of Americans welcome immigrants who want to come
here, work hard, and build a better life. But we rightfully expect
immigrants to show a sincere desire to become American citizens, speak
English, and assimilate themselves culturally."
*
"Legal immigrants from all countries should face the same rules and
waiting periods."
While most anarchopuritarians' policy prescriptions are unrealistically
utopian merely about America, their stance on open borders is
unrealistically utopian about the whole world. That's utopianism squared.
Open borders between America and the rest of the world will only be feasible
when the differences between America and the world are as small as, say, the
differences between America and Canada, or between Alabama and Florida.
Libertarians like Ron Paul indeed aren't thinking clearly when they
condition open borders on replacing the welfare state with private charity.
If hordes of poor immigrants would cause an intolerable expense for public
charity, then they would cause a similar expense for private charity. To the
extent that private charity doesn't replace public, it will result in
massive downward pressure on unskilled wages and levels of mass squalor
unseen outside the Third World.
Another way to state the argument is in a set of propositions which cannot
all be believed consistently:
1. Technology will continue to drive the costs (in money as well as
social disconnection) of emigration dramatically lower.
2. Polities with significantly more economic liberty will continue to
grow dramatically more prosperous than other polities, increasing their
attractiveness as immigration destinations.
3. People living in such prosperous polities are reasonable to expect
something better than the subsistence labor markets and ubiquitous squalor
typical of economically unfree nations.
4. America should not guarantee to immigrants that they will enjoy
(through either public or private charity) America's current effective
minimum living standards (which are extravagant by global standards).
5. Immigration of peaceful honest people should be unrestricted.
Even if one doesn't believe that current or prospective technological and
demographic conditions don't combine with global disparities in economic
freedom to make opening America's borders infeasible, it surely is not
tenable to claim as a matter of political philosophy that a liberty-loving
human polity should under all conceivable circumstances always allow
unrestricted economic immigration. The concept of a "border" in these
discussions is a demarcation between regions with different policies. It's
just not intellectually credible to maintain that conditions and policies on
opposite sides of a border could never vary so widely as to make
unrestricted immigration undesirable in terms of impact on political
freedom, economic freedom, population density, natural resource load,
standards of public goods infrastructure, labor markets, productivity
levels, education levels, cultural revanchism, propensity to vote away
liberties, etc.
BM) and personal EXCEPT IF YOU ARE A NONVIOLENT VIOLATOR OF STATE LAWS
AGAINST HOMOSEXUALITY, PROSTITUTION OR DRUG USE. (BM
If you disagree with Paul and say that all our personal liberties are best
protected at the federal level instead of the state level, does that mean we
can infer that you support current federal violations of our liberties in
the areas of substance use and campaign speech and warrantless monitoring
and gun rights and "hate crimes" and reproductive technology and digital
copying technology, even though you say you oppose curtailment of such
liberties?
