Some people reject arguments about rights and freedom.  To these people, natural rights arguments ignore the fundamental importance of results.  Humans don’t fundamentally care about means, they care about ends.  That’s why they are called ends, Milton Friedman would say.

What are the results of immigration?  In a capitalist society, people specialize in a certain profession and then trade their labor for the goods and services of other people.  When an immigrant enters a profession, they compete with the people currently in that profession.  If they provide a service at a lower cost, then people who purchase that service will have more money left over to purchase other goods and services.  The total sum of human production will increase.  These gains from immigration are equivalent to the aggregate gains from international trade.

Some utilitarians adopt a skewed view of utility.  They value not increased productivity in general, but the increased income of the poor in particular.  If immigrants enter the labor market, they may increase the total income of all Americans together, but competitive forces may decrease the incomes of the specific (poor) Americans that are most competing with immigrants.  These concentrated losses are equivalent to the industry specific losses caused by international trade.

But immigrants moving into low wage industries in America are almost certainly moving out of even lower wage industries in other countries.  Why else would they immigrate?  A utilitarian ethic that supported immigration restrictions would value the well-being of poor Americans while ignoring the well-being of even poorer foreigners.  This would be an obviously evil utilitarian ethic.

It may be inevitable for democratic processes to discount utilitarian gains to poor foreigners.  But there is no reason for any individual utilitarian thinker to adopt the utilitarian constraints of their nation’s politics.  Neither should a natural rights thinker accept the practical constraints of his political system as a moral constraint on natural rights.  Justice is justice, whether or not it is procedurally obtainable.

Perhaps it would be nice if we could let foreigners exercise their natural liberty.  But in an era of terrorism, America needs to keep its citizens safe from violent Islamist extremists.  If we open up our borders, we risk another terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 or worse.

This is the deeply irrelevant national security argument.  It fails almost any conceivable test as a justification for the immigration legislative status quo (or most feasible restrictive alternatives to it).

The 9/11 terrorists, of course, entered the country legally, mostly on temporary visas.  If immigration restrictions do not prevent terrorist attacks, then the need to prevent terrorist attacks cannot be a legitimate reason for restricting immigration.

The main immigration restrictions have nothing to do with national security.  Instead, current law functions something like a lottery.  A fraction of applicants to various categories of residency are admitted by an arbitrary bureaucratic review, or through an actual lottery.  These quotas make life miserable for immigrants waiting to live or work in the United States, but they do nothing to prevent actual terrorists from entering the country on temporary or student visas.

In any event, American immigration is predominantly a Latin American phenomenon.  Whatever prejudices Americans have about Mexicans, they are rarely suspected of wanting to wage Jihad or establish a new caliphate on American soil.  Hysterical Islamophobia is not a reason to keep out Christian Latinos (or Indian Hindus, or Asian Buddhists).

The government would be morally justified in screening out specific people that it reasonably suspected of ties to terrorist organizations.  I believe that even this is probably a fool’s errand.  The government is not an all-seeing oracle.  It is clumsy, inefficient, and operates without any proper incentives.  This is one reason why, for example, it is unable to enforce our current immigration restrictions.  Conservatives usually understand the impotence of government when it isn’t being used to oppress a disadvantaged minority group.  How horrifically intrusive would a government need to be in order to track reliably the potential terrorist activities of the world’s more than 6 billion people?  It would have a scope similar to the nightmare state from George Orwell’s 1984.

National security might be an argument for banning any foreigner from ever visiting or immigrating to America.  It would be a fairly unhinged argument, but at least a logically coherent one.  It might be an argument for screening immigrants for terrorist suspects in a timely fashion.  But it isn’t a reason to subject low-skilled Mexicans to a 131 year wait list for an immigrant visa – effectively denying them legal entry to America.

Illegal immigrants violate American immigration laws.  America is a society based on the rule of law.  If we change American laws to accommodate criminal immigrants, we will be rewarding them.  We will be encouraging them to break the law in the future and to scoff at the authority of law in the present.  We must resist law-breaking criminals even if their crimes never end.  After all, people may never stop committing theft or murder, but that isn’t a reason to stop punishing those crimes.

Or so the argument goes.

First some specificity.  Granting amnesty (residency) to illegal immigrants does not incentivize people to immigrate, or to break laws.  Immigrants do not break immigration laws merely because they rejoice in criminality.  They break the laws because they want to immigrate, and the laws make it too hard to do so legally.  The opportunities available to immigrants in America are their own incentive.  Immigration amnesty simply decreases the disincentives to illegal immigration.  Amnesty does not make it easier to commit murder, theft, or any non-immigration crime (one might say “real crimes”).

The right question is, should we enforce our current immigration laws?  Yes, say immigration opponents, because they are the law.

This argument boils down to legal positivism – the unthinkingly amoral idea that what is right is what the law says.  Under the doctrine of legal positivism, it was wrong for the American Colonies to revolt against British rule in the 1770s, wrong for black slaves to flee the plantation in the 1850s, wrong for Americans to drink alcohol in the 1920s – and it is wrong for immigrants to ignore immigration laws today.

The solution to bad laws or unjust regimes is to end them.  Laws that conflict with our basic moral intuitions will never be made legitimate by brute enforcement.  Enforcing unjust laws will make people cynically resent, not respect, the power of law.  As I resent it today.  As, I would imagine, most illegal immigrants must resent it.  What person could love a legal system that treated him like an animal to be caged if caught?  Illegal immigrants cannot participate in our justice system.  They cannot even pay taxes.  The only way to extend the rule of law to their communities is to make them legal.

Murder and theft are obvious violations of human sanctity.  The law legitimately attempts to prevent these crimes.  But immigration is a crime without a victim.  It is a crime that is committed merely by exercising a person’s freedom to live with other consenting individuals.  Enforcing these immigration restrictions makes the rule of law enemy to its legitimacy.

These are obvious, basic freedoms.  Because they are so basic, they are extremely important.  Any more complicated freedom we could pursue would almost without fail build on them.  Life in America would be unimaginable without them.  My family’s history would have been impossible.  Without the ability to travel across the country, my mother from Chicago and father from Rochester would never have met.  My father could not have taken his current job in Kansas City to support his family.  I would have been unable to attend college in Massachusetts or work in the District of Columbia.  How obviously unjust would it have been to prohibit all of these things?

Just as unjust as current immigration law, in America and world-wide.  All of the things my parents and I can do easily within this country are, in various arbitrary degrees, restricted or prohibited across national borders.  When we forbid people from immigrating from the third world, we condemn them to a shorter lifespan beset by poverty and disease, life in tyrannous police states or corrupt kleptocracies, and the chaos of civil war.  How could we defend this?

I’ll discuss and reject the possible reasons over the next couple of posts.  I’ve moved through the moral argument quickly because it is simple.  There is no need to make a thorough review of the strangling annoyances that exist under current law.  If you do not share an instinctive appreciation for the value of human beings to live their lives freely, if you do not at least see the facialappeal of open immigration, I would suggest some introspection.  What moral principles could deny the right of people to freely seek a better life?

But on the single political issue I care most about, prevailing conservative opinion seems to me so audaciously, breathtakingly wrong that I scarcely believe that I truly have any principles in common with conservatives. Or that conservatives have any principles beyond simple xenophobia and a national collectivism.

That issue is immigration. In my hubris, I continue to hope that most conservatives simply haven’t thought the issue through. Most, though not quite all, of their rhetoric, I believe, bears this out. In the spirit of this somewhat bold assumption I wanted to take the opportunity to lay out in moderate detail why I think the arguments against open immigration are either badly wrong or wrongly bad – or both. I will be posting a new section of my argument on this blog every day for the next week and a half or so. It may take a while before I get to your favorite argument for walling foreigners off from America, but if I neglect it in this series altogether then please let me know. If the arguments I do make are weak, sound off in the comments! The sections of my argument, subject to possible revision, will be as follows:

* The Moral Obviousness of Open Immigration

* The Rule of Law

* National Security

* The Utilitarian Argument

* The Prudential Argument

* The Externalities of Immigration

* Fairness

* The Bad Analogy

* The Psychology of Nativism

* Ideological Cancer

* Systemic Forces

* Credit Where it is Due

* Conclusion: What Should We Do?

* Addendum: What About Citizenship?

…it seems to me that Ford isn’t the only thing “F’d On Race Day,” as it appears Senator Reid will have the same problem this November.  (And before anyone gives me a hard time for citing the Rasmussen Poll instead of the newer PPP Poll, I say it’s because PPP hasn’t be considered the most accurate pollster like Rasmussen has…)

-rj

Here’s the rub: I know Fox News and Andrew Breitbart participated in ruining this lady’s career, and they should be reprimanded by us, the consumer.  However, I can see outcry on both sides of the aisle after this story broke, and especially after the fecal matter met the fan blades; but I did not see the same response from the left after ABC news reported on bad information.  That is what Fox is guilty of, reporting faulty information.  They should apologize and set the record straight, but government should stay the hell out of it.  Otherwise, if the government lays down the law on Fox News, they should go after ABC for reporting false information about President Bush’s Air National Guard records, and Andrew Sullivan for his Levi and Bristol Palin infatuation (all which turned out to be false) and hell, every other news organization that reported something that ended up damaging their own credibility anyway.  That’s what will, and should, happen with Andrew Breitbart and Fox after this fiasco. 

-rj

There is one talking point I would like clarified by our friends on the left: has the stimulus been successful, or are we in a dire situation? We cannot have it both ways, and yet, President Obama and his cabinet would like you to believe that the stimulus was successful while at the same time lecturing the Republicans on the reasonableness of passing the unemployment extension because we are in a crisis (and God knows, this Administration won’t let any crisis go to waste!). You can’t have your cake and eat it too, although, we are supposed to eat ours.

So which is it? Those of us with a more Conservative (or rugged individualism) proclivity are likely to say, “a year for unemployment benefits is ample time! Suck it up and get a job!” Those of us who may be more mindful of taking care of our fellow man (or, at least forcing others to do so through government so we don’t have to do the dirty work ourselves) might argue, “there are no jobs, what are they supposed to do?”

Taking only one side of this issue leaves one without a complete understanding of our present crisis’ gestalt. There are certainly a number of situations where people have been using unemployment benefits to subsidize their sloth; while one cannot take away from the fact that some areas of a state simply have no infrastructure for job growth. You cannot deny that the job situation has gotten worse, the New York Times has an interactive map that shows the growing unemployment rates state by state and how they climbed over time. Furthermore, the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not show a particularly peachy picture of jobs to come, considering at the present moment there are five Americans competing for every one job.

I know it won’t happen, but there are two things I would like to see done if Congress and the President are to pass the Emergency Unemployment Benefits Extension:

First, I cannot imagine why we can’t find a way to pay for it. Emergency unemployment benefits are not paid by the employer during the worker’s tenure, it comes straight out of thin air thanks to the Federal government’s Nietzschean ability to posit something from nothing; in this case, create money and with it, value. The Federal government sets aside a block grant to the state, whose Department of Labor hands out the benefits accordingly. Our Federal deficit stands at a paltry $1.6 Trillion dollars this year, as projected by the administration. The Unemployment bill that is set to pass today will add yet another $36 Billion to our gluttonous budget, and all the Republicans and a few Blue-Dogs ask for is a means to pay for it… part of it? Half of it? Any of it? Somebody please go to YouCut and find one of those programs that Representative Cantor’s office has bulls-eyed and we could have this extension paid for.

Secondly, I’ve already hinted to it earlier in the piece, but the Wall Street Journal has an article about stimulating unemployment where a crazy correlation was made: “A 2006 NBER study by Raj Chetty of UC Berkeley on a related subject begins, ‘It is well known that unemployment benefits raise unemployment durations.’” Imagine that: incentivizing people to not get jobs, and then telling them “well instead of getting a job call your Congressman and ask him or her to extend unemployment benefits” would lead people to strive for nothing. That’s as stupid as setting time-tables in a war. Nevertheless, if we are going to do this last emergency extension, why the hell would we not get something out of it in return? Why not ask of people (and I say ask now, but rather, I’d be much more willing to demand it as part of the prerequisite for receiving such benefits) to help out their community? I would make it mandatory for people to volunteer at least 20 hours of their week towards their community, state or nation in exchange for their free benefits (because we must remember, that they did not pay into this unemployment pool). This would allow people to create at least some value from their benefits outside of paying for the bare necessities that had to be paid for already. Giving money away doesn’t add value; but giving money to people in exchange for something does.

When I mentioned this on my Twitter account (follow me, rcaster – we are not afraid of shameless self promotion here) I was accosted by some #P2 fellow, which means he is a “Progressive” in Twitter lexicon. He claimed my idea was unfair because “the unemployed are not criminals!” I would have re-posted the conversation for you, but BlackJedi”somethingorother” was embarrassed enough to just erase his entire end of the conversation, and my tweets went as well (I guess that means I was blocked).

Imagine that, doing something for your community is an activity that should be relegated to those people who are being punished. Perhaps this is the truth about the soul of our communities, and why liberal areas tend to lack it. Doing community service is a punishment? Well I would rather bestow benefits upon people willing to contribute to their community, than give it to those who do not. And besides, who can take away the fact that people will feel better once they get into a productive groove; perhaps they will put their rear-into-gear afterward and go look for that next job with some new skills; perhaps they won’t sit around and feel sorry for themselves, but feel a sense of accomplishment for having achieved something, and that may just be the push they need to go out the door and apply. I used to get into arguments with my high school history teacher, Mr. Lubenetski, about FDR’s New Deal and whether or not it ended the Great Depression. He would say to me, looking exactly like Teddy Roosevelt (he did, red hair, mustache, glasses and all) and explode with his booming voice, “it may not have brought people all the way up to their feet, but it kept them off their knees!” If we are going to pay people who lost work, I say we put them back to work, because you may not be able to measure the benefit of doing so, but a man’s pride can carry him further than his pouting ever will.

-rj

I want to apologize, for I fear our beloved Nick’s proximity in Georgia to the Georgia Guidestones seems to have affected his ability to differentiate between what he hears on Coast to Coast AM and what is the actual truth. I love a good conspiracy theory, but when they interfere in everyday life that could harm the safety of the United States, I get a bit apprehensive being associated with such accusations. The Birtherism is funny to a point; just like chemtrails or LaRouchian fueled Conspiracies involving Neocons, Leo Strauss and Freemasons. As long as we treat it as it is… a joke.

-rj (non-Birther)