The other day I mentioned an exchange that I had with regular R.-J. columnist and occasional libertarian Vin Suprynowicz, over an ill-tempered blog post he wrote on so-called illegal immigration
. Since my most recent comment on the post was deep-sixed into a moderation queue and shows no signs of reappearing, I offer this post as a way of recording the conversation so far in full.
Vin’s original article, Speaking in code words to disguise what they really mean,, is an extended complaint about a recent immigration freedom rally in Vegas — not the 1 May marcha that I participated in, but a more recent rally by Reform Immigration for America, focused on family reunification. Suprynowicz reacted with a polemic against the alleged euphemisms
being used by those radicals
(his word; he says it like it’s supposed to be a bad thing somehow) who would dare propose even the smallest rollbacks of government constraints on voluntary migration. One of these euphemisms, he says, is calling people who move to Nevada without a permission slip from the United States federal government undocumented immigrants,
or even immigrants
at all; instead, we are told, they should be called trespassing illegal aliens.
We are also told that fewer government restrictions on immigration would lead to the swarming and bankrupting of our current [state] socialist policies
like government-run schools and hospitals. And he tells us that anyone who does not support the most rigorous and aggressive enforcement of the Fugitive Alien Acts by federal police agencies is promoting amnesty,
which is, apparently, supposed to be a condemnation beyond any hope of appeal:
These radicals [sic] can use all the euphemisms they please to avoid the word, but anyone who believes illegal trespassers should not be deported — or imprisoned and THEN deported — is promoting amnesty, and needs to answer the question: How does giving amnesty to a couple million knowing law-breakers not encourage the next set of knowing law-breakers, inviting them in no uncertain terms to Come on in and enjoy all the free stuff; after a few years you can get amnestied
, too!
?
— Vin Suprynowicz (2009-06-14): Speaking in code words to disguise what they really mean
Well, I wouldn’t know; but one of the advantages of being an unterrified radical is that you don’t have to live in fear of boogey-words, or waste time defining down your goals to suit the status quo. (On which, see GT 2007-11-12 Sin Fronteras.) I don’t know all the details of what Reform Immigration for America stands for, but, in any case, I’ll be your huckleberry: sure, I’m for amnesty — immediate, complete, and unconditional amnesty, without any penalties and for every single criminalized immigrant in this grand old country. I’m promoting amnesty, and I’m promoting open borders, too, so I don’t care how many people show up in hopes of the next
amnesty. If I really had my way, there’d be no next
amnesty — because there’d be no government border laws left for anyone to violate.
So here was my first reply. (In which I chose, for rhetorical reasons, to use Vin’s own terms, using socialist
to mean state socialist,
and also illegal immigrant,
for undocumented immigrants, a phrase that I would never choose for myself in conversation, because I think it’s dehumanizing and brutal. But in this context, I chose to use the phrase rather than criticize it, because part of the basic problem here is the underlying notion that there’s something morally wrong with breaking government laws.) Anyway:
The people to whom Ms. Arguello-Kline refers as immigrants
aren't immigrants,
by that sensible definition, at all. They're trespassing illegal aliens,
A trespasser
is someone who intrudes on another person's property against the will of the property-owner.
Let's pretend I'm an illegal immigrant renting an apartment, working for a meat-packing plant, shopping at the local grocery store, et cetera. Presumably my landlord is willing for me to live on his or her property: if the owner didn't want me to live there, he or she wouldn't have signed the lease. Presumably, also, my boss is willing for me to be inside his or her plant; otherwise he or she wouldn't be paying me to do it. Presumably, also, the stores I shop at are willing for me to be inside their stores: otherwise, they wouldn't welcome my business.
So just whose property, exactly, am I trespassing
on?
How does giving amnesty to a couple million knowing law-breakers not encourage the next set of knowing law-breakers, inviting them in no uncertain terms to Come on in and enjoy all the free stuff; after a few years you can get amnestied
, too!
?
You say knowing law-breakers
like it's supposed to be a bad thing to knowingly break the law. Coming from someone who so vocally praises the American Revolution, this seems odd.
If the radicals who gathered downtown on June the first want to demonstrate in favor of a mass amnesty — for open borders, over which hundreds of millions of the world's poor and oppressed would be invited to come here and swarm our free public schools and free hospital emergency rooms until our current socialist policies drive us finally, completely, bankrupt — let them at least say what they mean.
That sounds like a problem with the socialist policies, not a problem with free immigration.
Why exactly do you want to save socialist policies like government control over schools and hospitals?
— Rad Geek, June 15th, 2009 at 12:48pm
(For more on conservative welfare statist arguments against immigration freedom, see GT 2007-12-13: On the dole.)
Vin’s reply:
So, presumably, if I wrote warning people not to let their children swim in the river because there are crocodiles, Rad Geek,
hiding behind a cloak of anonymity, would ask:
Why exactly do you want to save the practice of crocodiles eating little children just because they go swimming in inappropriate places?
Signing my name, standing tall and risking the consequences, I have fought a radical, no-compromise battle for the complete shutdown — not some kind of half-assed reform,
but the literal dynamiting (once the children have been removed to a safe distance) — of the government schools, and every government income redistibution bureaucracy, for more than 15 years.
Warning of — heck, simply observing — the consequences of allowing unlimited millions of people to violate American immigration laws, arriving here to flood the government welfare schools and enormously expensive tax-subsidized hospital emergency rooms every time they come down with the sniffles, means I want to save
these evil redistributionist schemes?
How does acknowledging a reality of which we disapprove indicate we want to save
it? By this logic, if you believe the Constitution forbids government agents from restricting your right to carry a loaded firerarm into a federal courthouse (as it most certainly does), you MAY NOT leave your firearm in the car; you MUST carry it into the courthouse in defiance of the orders of the armed guards there, lest you stand accused by Rad Geek
of wanting to save all their unconstitutional gun laws.
You must, in short, PRETEND that all current conditions of which you disapprove DO NOT EXIST.
In the real world, this is a good way to quickly get yourself killed. But Rad Geek
will accuse us of wanting to save
any current condition that we merely acknowledge as currently existing.
Do the illegal aliens stand up and declare We reject your laws, here we stand with our guns, we're willing to risk death to proclaim that your laws have no dominance over us,
like the patriots at Lexington and Concord?Are they fighting to free us, as well as themselves, from unconstitutional tyranny? I haven't noticed them doing that. What I notice them doing is walking away from car crashes and hospital bills and orders to appear in court to answer for their crimes, refusing to take any responsibility for the damage they cause.
Yes, if there were no tax-funded commons,
and none of us were numbered or taxed, the arrival of a million strangers seeking work would do me little harm, provided they maintained reasonable sanitary safeguards. When Rad Geek,
hiding in the shadows of anonymity, has managed to accomplish goals to which courageous Libertarians have been unable to win over even 5 percent of our casually socialist neighbors in 40 years of effort, I hope he'll let us know.
Meantime, since he wants to speak in hypotheticals, let's pretend Rad Geek
is a landlord or an employer, telling all applicants who speak poor English, I'm not going to rent to you or offer you a job, because I think you may be an illegal immigrant and I don't want to become an accessory to your crime.
Do you think our brave federal bureaucrats will congratulate him and back him to the hilt, demanding the applicant prove he or she is here legally?
Those employers and landlords soon find themselves in an Alice-and-Wonderland world, threatened with fines by the EEOC and other alphabet bureaucracies, you simpering innocent. Presumably my boss and landlord are willing?
Go talk to a few of them, before you go presuming too much, you ivory-tower twit.
Why do you suppose Barack Obama declines to put E-Verify
into widespread use?
Yes, I would prefer no Social Slave number
or internal passport
were necessary to go about my business. But if we WERE allowed to take one state of 50, and make it a Libertarian state, hasn't it occurred to you that we'd have to require new immigrants to forswear socialism, under oath, and upon penalty of immediate exile, before granting them the right to vote? Otherwise, we'd be swarmed by socialists fleeing their own dysfunctional enclaves, who would immediately vote to tax their wealthier neighbors for their own sustenance, at which point we would have accomplished nothing at all.
— Vin Suprynowicz, June 16th, 2009 at 11:47am
My reply, from behind that cloak of anonymity:
"Rad Geek" is a pseudonym, but it's hardly a "cloak of anonymity." If you spent a minute searching for it on Google, you'd find my website, which (among other things) talks at length about what my views are, who I am, where I live, what my real name is, and what I've published under my name. I don't usually post comments on the Internet under my given name because it's a common name, which happens to be shared by at least one prominent blogger with radically different views from mine, so that "Rad Geek" actually provides you with a more reliable way of finding out who I am and what I stand for than Charles Johnson
would.
Not that your sniping about pseudonyms as against big manly signatures, or your thuggish anti-intellectual sniping at "ivory-tower twits" has anything to do with the argument; these are simply textbook examples of argumentum ad hominem (abusive form).
Warning of — heck, simply observing — the consequences of allowing unlimited millions of people to violate American immigration laws, arriving here to flood the government welfare schools and enormously expensive tax-subsidized hospital emergency rooms every time they come down with the sniffles, means I want to save
these evil redistributionist schemes?
The question is simple. If you don't want to save government welfare schools and tax-subsidized hospitals, then why in the world do you care whether or not they are flooded? Are you normally in the business of advising government bureaucrats about how to keep their unsustainable socialist schemes running?
By this logic, if you believe the Constitution forbids government agents from restricting your right to carry a loaded firerarm into a federal courthouse (as it most certainly does), you MAY NOT leave your firearm in the car; you MUST carry it into the courthouse in defiance of the orders of the armed guards there, lest you stand accused by Rad Geek
of wanting to save all their unconstitutional gun laws.
Well, no. All that I think you MUST
do is refrain from cheering on government agents when they go to arrest, exile or kill those who DO choose to exercise their rights.
If you stand by government police when they do try to enforce tyrannical gun laws on innocent people exercising their rights, then yes, you are trying to save tyrannical gun laws. Otherwise, no, you aren't.
Of course, the problem here is that you ARE explicitly calling for bigger and more aggressive government when it comes to monitoring, policing and punishing illegal immigrants. Even though you haven't anywhere stated who they are trespassing
against by living in the U.S. without a permission slip from the federal government. And one of the reasons you give for this is the alleged effects of free immigration on cockamaimey socialist schemes that you yourself consider wasteful and foolish.
Yes, if there were no tax-funded commons,
and none of us were numbered or taxed, the arrival of a million strangers seeking work would do me little harm, provided they maintained reasonable sanitary safeguards.
It's true that when you combine something basically moral (free immigration) with something completely immoral (government subsidies for education and medicine) you may get bad results from the combination. But why spend your time attacking the moral part of the combination, instead of the immoral part?
Are they fighting to free us, as well as themselves, from unconstitutional tyranny? I haven't noticed them doing that. What I notice them doing is walking away from car crashes and hospital bills and orders to appear in court to answer for their crimes, refusing to take any responsibility for the damage they cause.
I don't care whether or not illegal immigrants fight to free me from tyranny. A little help is always appreciated, but I don't think that fighting for everybody else's freedom is necessary for people to be justified in breaking unjust laws. Do you think the American Revolutionaries should have been expected to fight not only for their own freedom but also to free the Irish, the Scots, the Welsh, the English commoners, or any number of other victims of tyrannical English government? Do you expect Ford to make cars for GM?
As for those fighting their own freedom, maybe it's a matter of who you know. I know plenty of undocumented immigrants who are actively engaged in pro-freedom politics and against the bordercrats' Papers please
police state.
And as for irresponsibility, I'm sure there are some individual illegal immigrants who are irresponsible. So what? I hear some native-born Americans are irresponsible, too. In a free society, institutions work to hold individual people responsible for what they do. They don't launch massive collectivist campaigns to hunt down and exile whole populations regardless of whether or not they have ever actually done any of the things you mention.
But if we WERE allowed to take one state of 50, and make it a Libertarian state, hasn't it occurred to you that we'd have to require new immigrants to forswear socialism, under oath, and upon penalty of immediate exile, before granting them the right to vote?
No. I don't believe in using government to police political thought.
I also don't know how you intend to enforce these immigration restrictions you plan on implementing without exactly the sort of Officially Permitted Citizen, Papers-please
documentation requirements that you claim you would prefer to abolish.
Those employers and landlords soon find themselves in an Alice-and-Wonderland world, threatened with fines by the EEOC and other alphabet bureaucracies, you simpering innocent.
Oh, please. If you think that Tyson wouldn't be hiring any illegal immigrants but for the nefarious manipulations of the EEOC, I think you probably need to think about this harder.
Of course, in specific cases where a landlord would like to exclude illegal — or for that matter legal — immigrants from renting apartments, or a boss would like not to hire them, I think that he or she ought to have the right to do so, and that if the EEOC tries to interfere, the EEOC is violating the rights of that boss or landlord. But of course this doesn't answer the question of who illegal immigrants are trespassing
against. If the landlord doesn't give a damn where the tenant comes from as long as she pays her rent — and many landlords don't — and if the boss doesn't give a damn where the worker comes from as long as she does her job — and many bosses don't — then just who the hell is left for this trespasser
to trespass against?
— Rad Geek, June 16th, 2009 at 5:09pm
(For more on how border laws necessarily entail police state measures, inflicted on immigrants and natives alike, see GT 2009-04-17: Death by Homeland Security #3: The Disappeared and GT 2008-01-27: Someone must have slandered Thomas W…..)
Vin’s reply:
Rad Geek
asserts:
The question is simple. If you don't want to save government welfare schools and tax-subsidized hospitals, then why in the world do you care whether or not they are flooded?
Vin replies:
Because I am taxed to pay for them. I am given no choice in the matter. If I refuse to pay the (ever-increasing) taxes to fund these things, the government will (it has, since I have fought these battles for real, not merely as a let's pretend
intellectual exercise) ) seize(d) my paychecks. It will eventually seize and expel me from my house.
Illegal immigrants, who are trespassing because they come where they have no legal right to be, violating the laws of the place to which they travel , tend to vote socialist, because they are looters. Ask those charged with collecting hospital bills how many illegal aliens make good faith efforts to pay their bills. Those who would amnesty
them will guarantee the continued spread of socialism, bankrupting us all.
There IS a theory that this is a good thing: Let socialism be overburdened and collapse. Then we will build a better, more Libertarian society on the ruins.
Interesting theory. It can be argued, for instance, that a society more respectful of the Rights of Man [sic] was built on the ruins of Rome, once Rome fell.
It was. The only problem is ... it took about a thousand years.
If there is no right to exclude looters from our midst; if we must allow free entry of anyone who wants to come to our community — and the smallest community is my house — and then allow them to decide how my stuff shall be redistributed by majority vote,
then freedom of a family of three can last only until four guest workers
break down their front door and vote
on how to divvy up the food in the refrigerator.
This is the current reality. Rad Geek
supports it, apparently under the delusion this is some kind of admirable conscientious objection.,
whereas organizing a campaign to track down and punish lawbreakers is inherently collectivist.
I rarely find myself supporting the existence or activities of the FBI, but I fail to see how it's despicably collectivist
for them to try to catch and punish runaway rapists, murderers, and stickup men.
Or those who violate our perfectly constitutional immigration laws.
I would wish him a happy life in the Looters' Carnival he prescribes for all of us ... if only I were not forced at gunpoint to share it with him.
— Vin Suprynowicz, June 16th, 2009 at 6:18pm
I have no idea how an open demand for the abolition of all existing border laws constitutes supporting the current reality,
but whatevs. In any case, my reply was posted to, and appeared publicly in, Suprynowicz’s comment section, on the next morning, but within a day it was deep-sixed into the WordPress moderation queue. Of course, Vin’s blog is his place, and he can choose what to print or not to print; but if the unabridged version of the conversation won’t appear there, I’ll publish it here, as a matter of record, and to keep things open for further discussion and comment:
Vin Suprynowicz:
Because I am taxed to pay for them.
This is pretty rich, coming from someone who vocally insists on the right of tax-mooching immigration bureaucrats and a jackbooted federal police agency to reach their hands into the tax slush fund to enforce immigration policies that I never asked for and don’t want, and then tax me to pay for it against my will.
In any case, in a welfare statist system, it is true that government forces to pay for everyone–and that it forces everyone to pay for you. But this is true regardless of immigration status. Every time some pair of Officially Approved Citizens send their Officially Approved children to government schools, the government spends money which is ultimately extracted from your pockets and mine. I have no idea why you would blame this on people who could not possibly have shaved one cent off of your taxes by refusing to accept government hand-outs — do you suppose that if government doesn’t spend tax funds on schools, it’ll give the money back to taxpayers? ho, ho, ho — rather than blaming it on the people who are actually taxing you.
But in any case, if you are going to blame the people who reclaim government-seized money, rather than the government that seizes the money in the first place, then you do realize, don’t you, that illegal immigrants aren’t special in any particular way on this count? That you could use this argument just as easily to justify government force against just about anyone — government-enforced population control (since children receive big tax subsidies for education, healthcare, etc.), internal passports (since immigrants from poorer states tend to move to richer states and take advantage of the more plentiful welfare benefits), summarily jailing and exiling everyone over the age of 65 (seeing how they mooch of Social Security and Medicare, usually far in excess of what they paid in when they were working), or any other collectivist horror you might dream up.
Perhaps, rather than creating a police state in order to hunt down, round up, and punish those who take receive welfare payments funded by taxation, the thing you should be doing is focusing on the real problem — the welfare state and confiscatory taxation?
Illegal immigrants … tend to vote socialist, because they are looters.
Dude, what you are talking about? Illegal immigrants don’t tend to vote at all in the U.S., because illegal immigrants can’t legally vote.
Maybe you’re worried about what would happen if currently undocumented immigrants were able to become citizens, and then to vote. The fact is that right now, in the real world, immigrants from California pose a much bigger threat to freedom in Nevada than immigrants from Mexico do. And the real threat is not immigrants from anywhere, but rather from unlimited majoritarian democracy, which is always going to have these problems regardless of who can or cannot immigrate. Maybe you would be better served by focusing on the real problem, rather than on trying to get government to police political beliefs (!) or on getting government to inflict punishment on all members of a population for the bad thoughts or bad behavior of some of them?
Ask those charged with collecting hospital bills how many illegal aliens make good faith efforts to pay their bills.
You know, as it turns out, there are already perfectly just laws against refusing to pay your bills, without getting the federal bordercrats involved.
Surprisingly, it turns out that the appropriate punishment for this is not exile from the country.
Also, surprisingly, they don’t take a federal police state or “Papers, please” checkpoints to enforce.
Also, as it turns out, the laws against running out on your bills generally only allow for you to go after the individual person who actually defaults on the bill, or occasionally close family members — in any case, not against complete strangers and entire populations on the collectivist premise that everybody in that population can be held to account for the bad behavior of a bunch of perfect strangers who just happened to come from the same country as they did.
I have no idea what the hell you think this kind of collective guilt-by-association smear, let alone your proposal for addressing it by means of collective punishment of both the innocent and the guilty, has to do with the politics of individual liberty.
If there is no right to exclude looters from our midst;
You have a perfect right to exclude anyone you want from your private property, for any reason, or for no reason at all. What neither you, nor the United States federal government, has any legitimate right to do, is to go around excluding people from my private property, let alone inflicting a massive system of “Papers, please” documentation requirements and checkpoints on me in order to do so, without my permission and indeed against my will.
So, please, exclude whoever you want from your midst. But who’s “we”, kemosabe? Keep your preferences on your own property.
if we must allow free entry of anyone who wants to come to our community
You have a perfect right to evict trespassers from your own property.
The problem is, you see, that “the community” as a whole is not your private property. Or the United States federal government’s. Sorry.
… and then allow them to decide how my stuff shall be redistributed "by majority vote," then freedom of a family of three can last only until four "guest workers" break down their front door and "vote" on how to divvy up the food in the refrigerator.
This is of course a ridiculous strawman of my position. I explicitly argued above that private property owners should have a right to exclude anyone they want from their own private property.
It’s also pretty rich, hearing this stirring defense of the sanctity of the family home and private property, come from someone who is so angrily insisting that the federal government has a right to send federal police agencies around and stage stormtrooper raids on my private home or workplace, if some elected government passes a “perfectly constitutional” law that says that I can’t invite who I damn well please onto my own damn property.
Or those who violate our perfectly constitutional immigration laws.
Your immigration laws, maybe. Not mine. I wasn’t asked, I didn’t pass them, I don’t enforce them, and I don’t support them; they are inflicted on me and on people I care about without my permission, against my will, and over my explicit protests. Keep that “our” to yourself.
organizing a campaign to track down and punish lawbreakers is inherently "collectivist."
It is when the laws you’re trying to enforce are collectivist.
Illegal immigrants, who are trespassing because they come where they have no legal right to be, violating the laws of the place to which they travel ,
Again. Trespassers against whom? You can only trespass against the will of an aggrieved property owner; that’s part of the meaning of the word “trespass.” But the laws you’re talking don’t come from the owners of the property on that illegal immigrants live on, or work on. They are passed by government.
Staying somewhere in the U.S. that the United States federal government doesn’t want you to stay is “trespassing” only if you think that the United States federal government is in fact the rightful owner of all the land in the United States. Do you?
I don’t. My view is that the government is not the rightful owner of my home or my business. I am. If I want to invite anyone to peacefully move in on my land (for love or money), or to work for me in my shop, that is exactly none of the government’s business, and the fact that people have not gotten a permission slip from the federal government doesn’t make them “trespassers” on my land — when they have permission from me.
As for whether or not It’s The Law, who gives a damn? Seriously? So’s tax evasion; so’s nonviolent drug use; so’s owning an unlicensed fully-automatic AK-47; lots of things are Against The Law that government actually has no legitimate right to prosecute or punish people for doing. When that happens, the problem is with the government law, not with the law-breakers.
–Rad Geek, June 17th, 2009 at 10:46am
On which, see also GT 2006-04-09: Freedom Movement Celebrity Deathmatch.
Elsewhere, Tom Knapp stages a tough love
intervention against border-creep libertarians. And while I’ll thank him for the support, I can’t agree with Justin M. Stoddard (2009-06-18) that I completely owned Vin Suprynowicz.
Inalienability, you know.
See also: