Just to be clear, my “Friday Anti-meme” post wasn’t a condemnation of weblog games as such. What I object to is calling them “memes,” because the term is ugly and I have philosophical objections (which the post explains) to the jargon of “memetics” (and surrounding ideas like “viral” information, etc.).

Kuznicki:

4. Make everyone take civics lessons. No exceptions. Preserving our freedom first of all means knowing what freedom really is.

You’re going to teach people what freedom really is by having the government force everyone to take a civics class against their will?

Why not teach by example, and abolish coercive schooling?

Bithead: “Why of course, slaves were not a part of the original contract… initialy…”

So was it morally legitimate to enforce the terms of the U.S. Constitution on slaves at any time prior to 1866?

tas: “But Roxanne, that would mean blaming a corporation for something negative.”

I object to the idea that hiring undocumented workers is “something negative.” One of the most common reasons that people immigrate is in order to find more lucrative work, and it’s a good thing, not a bad thing, if they are able to find it. (This is why talking about “demand side” policies makes me queasy: what “reducing demand” means is making it so that people who need jobs are less able to find them.)

Of course, some companies that hire undocumented workers are abusive and exploitative: the threat of La Migra makes both legal and social recourses largely unavailable to undocumented workers; and that makes it easy for predatory employers to pay them starvation wages, cheat them, put them in unsafe situations, etc. That’s wrong, and employers who do it should be blamed and punished. But it’s wrong because abuse and exploitation of anybody is wrong; the only connection between this and immigration status is the artificial connection forged by government intimidation and punishment of undocumented immigrants. Given that that’s the only connection, the logical response is not to force employers to discriminate against undocumented immigrants in hiring; the logical response is to call off the immigration cops and stop treating undocumented workers as outlaws.

Rox: “The purpose of this post was to point out that legislation in this area is almost always focused on the supply side.”

Well, sure, and I’m all for wide-ranging debate that’s not constrained by the operational assumptions of sadistic nativist blowhards. What I’m questioning mostly has to do with the terms on which the suggested broader debate is being conducted. A lot of discourse about immigration tends to assume that immigration or immigrants pose some kind of special problem that demands a special solution. A lot of it also tends to assume that undocumented immigrant workers are a problem that needs to be analyzed and solved (whether the problem is blamed on the workers themselves or on their employers). I think that both of these assumptions should be challenged.

Bithead: Which has nothing to do with the topic at hand.

Yes, it does.

If you’re trying to use the fact that people didn’t leave after the Constitution was ratified as evidence that they consented to the Constitution, then basic intellectual honesty requires you to at least abandon this argument when you’re discussing the couple of million people in the United States who did not have the option to leave, and were forced to stay where they were whether they approved of the new Constitution or not.

I think the argument is terrible even for those non-voting Americans who could leave without the threat of being hunted down and violently forced to return, for the reasons I’ve discussed above. But if you honestly want to try to defend an argument based on tacit consent, then you have a baseline obligation to concede that you haven’t proposed any meaningful criteria at all by which enslaved Blacks (just to take one prominent example) could be said to have consented to the authority of the federal Constitution.

Rox: Did I suggest new legal measures to punish anyone?

I don’t know; I’m asking some questions because I’m not sure what you’re referring to when you suggest that “immigration reform” focus on the “demand side.”

Do you think that the government should (by whatever means) be actively trying to stop, or at least discourage, employers from hiring undocumented workers? If so, why should they be doing that, rather than simply removing the legal intimidation that prevents undocumented workers from taking and leaving jobs on an equal footing with citizens and documented immigrants? If not, then what kind of “demand side” policies did you have in mind?

Chris, thanks for posting this.

Mez: The owners and operators of the Triangle Shirtwaist manufactory, btw, were not successfully brought to book, although some regulations were changed and the example was used during the decades before WWII to promote the need for unions and for reining in galloping “free enterprise”.

Just to be clear, The problem wasn’t free enterprise; free enterprise didn’t exist in the garment industry in the early 20th century. Under free enterprise workers can form whatever voluntary associations they want, can walk out on jobs that they don’t want to do, can air grievances against unscrupulous employers, etc. without the threat of violent repression. But under the corporatist regime in the early 20th century, the bosses’ hired goons and uniformed goons from the government repeatedly attacked ILGWU picketers and used legal intervention and physical violence to suppress union organizing as far as they could get away with it.

That’s not free enterprise; it’s just state intervention on behalf of predatory bosses.

upyernoz: they’re related because employer who hire illegals regularly break wage and hour rules. another employee would get a lawyer and go straight to the DOL, but an illegal is usually too afraid of being deported to do anything like that.

Roxanne: Because documented workers have the law on their side (when it comes to the minimum wage, anyway) and undocumented workers do not. Hence, the special connection.

So why not just remove the threat of deportation, instead of devising new legal meaures to punish people just for giving undocumented immigrants a job?

Roxanne, but there are already laws against paying under minimum wage. If you think those should be enforced more rigorously, fine, but how does that have any special connection with “immigration reform”?

Further, why is immigration a “problem” that we need to find the “root causes” for? The only fundamental problem I see here is that peaceful people want to move to the United States (because they have thought about it and decided that their lives would be better if they did so), and a bunch of nativist bullies are for using physical violence to stop them.

Jay Tea: The fundamental question behind all this is stunning in its simplicity: does the United States have the right to maintain and secure its own borders, to regulate and control who comes into the United States, when, how, and why?

That’s not the fundamental question behind all this.

The fundamental question behind all this is whether the United States government has the right to impose restrictions on whom United States citizens can invite into their own homes, sell land to, rent to, provide services to, or employ. Because you realize that’s what your little policy proposals involve, right? Bigger government and more restrictions on the freedom of those American citizens who do not agree with exclusionist immigration policy?

To illustrate, consider this little plan for less immigration:

Linoge: I would not go so far as to say they should be arrested on sight (though I am close), but their presence illegally in another nation should be heavily discouraged. That means, no health care, no driver’s licenses, no jobs, no nothing. At all. Ever.

Let’s set aside for the moment the question of how you could discern somebody’s immigration status “on sight” for the purposes of the arrest, and ask a different question. In the United States, health care and jobs are not (usually) provided by bureaus of the government. They are (mostly) provided by private doctors (nurses, midwives, etc.) and by private employers. If I happen to be a doctor, and I want to treat a paying customer without checking her or his immigration status, this policy proposal would require that the government use physical violence in order to stop me from providing health care whichever paying customers I want to. If I happen to have a job I need to get done and willingly hire a good worker to get it done, this policy proposal would require that the government use physical violence against me in order to stop me from hiring whomever I think is best qualified. Where in the world do you think that big government bureaucrats in Washington get the knowledge, the virtue, or the right to go around giving me orders about how I can run my own business, or provide healthcare to whoever needs it?