Comments Elsewhere

Let’s take things a little bit out of order, because one of mac’s first points is more closely connected to gc’s point than to the rest of his argument.

RG: Who cares if we are “integrated”?

mac: “My hand is up. Racially and ethnically balkanized societies tend not to work very well.”

The horror! We might end up like Switzerland, or Belgium!

“Especially when the various population groups differ in their level of economic productivity.”

If you don’t think immigrant farm labor is economically productive, then try picking your own damn tomatoes and see how much you like it. In any case, however, open immigration also means that immigrants will have access to many sectors of the economy (including those that you might think of as “productive”) that they do not now.

In any case, again, at the worst it’s still not worth shooting innocent people over.

RG: Immigrant labor is an economic boon…

mac: “It’s a boon all right… for the immigrants themselves, their relatives back home, and their American employers. For everyone else it is a net bust.”

False. Why do putative Rightists start imbibing economic theory from the AFL-CIO when workers’ skin turns brown?

Using force to prevent people from going to work for an employer at a market wage is not economically productive. It is a wealth transfer, enforced by the government, primarily from those prevented from working to those who hold the jobs. That helps out, e.g., American janitors or computer scientists who can reap artificially inflated wages; but it’s a drain not only on employers and the immigrants forcibly excluded from the jobs, but also on everyone who (for example) buys products from the company that employs the janitors, or software from the company that makes it at an artificially high labor cost.

Government force is destructive, not constructive. Markets work.

And even if they didn’t, it wouldn’t be worth shooting innocent people over.

mac in japan: “Good news, Rad Geek. The authorities do not in fact shoot innocent people for crossing borders. So with your overriding moral concern allayed, you are free to think about this topic consequentially”

Government immigration restrictions are enforced by agents of the law, and enforced without regard to whether or not the targets of the restrictions have trespassed, stolen, assaulted, or otherwise violated anyone’s rights to life, liberty, or property. If you do not believe that innocent people will get shot, beaten, shocked with electricity, or otherwise attacked, up to and including the use of lethal force, then feel free to disregard the orders of an INS or Border Patrol agent and see what happens to you.

(N.B.: I think it’s wrong to beat the shit out of innocent people, too. The specific choice of armaments is not the issue.)

Perhaps your issue isn’t the tactics used, but rather that you don’t think of immigrant workers as