Comments Elsewhere

Blowhard: “Good lord but a lot of you seem determined to not take into account one important factor, which is the preferences of the people already living in said country, namely the USA. … But their preference should certainly be taken strongly into account, don’t you think?”

Their preferences concerning what?

Their preferences concerning the use of their own property certainly should be taken into account. In fact, they already are; trespass is against the law and you have every right to throw people off of your property if you do not want them there.

But if you’re trying to give an argument for immigration prohibition, then you aren’t just asking whether people’s anti-immigrant sentiments should hold sway over how they use their own property. You’re also asking whether they have the right to force other people to use their own property only in the way that the 60% see fit. You and your neighbors only have a right to enforce your preferences on your own stuff. While disregarding what many of your neighbors think may or may not be crass (this depends, inter alia, on whether their judgments on the matter are rational or irrational), I can’t see any justice in making it criminal.

aleph0: “I am saying that it should in the very least not artificially inflate the supply of low-skilled labor by neglecting its duty to enforce immigration law.”

Again, open borders are a free market in human movement. Immigration law, when enforced (as it is, even if not so harshly as you’d like) is a government intervention to constrict the labor market. If there is a growth in labor supply as a result of free choices to immigrate, then that’s not an “artificial inflation”. It’s the market at work.

You aren’t happy with how you think the market would work, so you propose government intervention to support low-income citizens on the basis that the State has a special obligation to safeguard their earning potential. That’s state socialism. Specifically, it’s national socialism as opposed to international socialism. Draw your own conclusions about whether this is a position you want to hold.

aleph0: “If I, as owner of property A, have absolute control over what is to be done with my property, then certainly I have every right to disallow use of my property from whomever I chose? I am within my rights to disallow immigration to kingdom A for whatever reason I choose.”

If “kingdom A” happens to be your own property, then yes, of course you do. That’s just a matter of trespassing law; it has nothing in particular to do with immigration. But that has nothing to do with this:

“If we assume that an accurate top-down approach to the net benefit question is intractable, that the results largely hinge on biases and subjective considerations of benefit vs. cost, then I think that this should become a question settled by vote.”

Y