Comments Elsewhere

doj: It’s obviously silly to focus on the single use of government roads in getting to your house, and that’s not what I’m doing. Instead, I am trying to look at the big picture and comparing the case where an illegal immigrant is living in the US with the case they aren’t, since the largest marginal effect of the $40 job is a probabilistic increase in the number of illegal immigrants living in the country.

Well, no, the “largest marginal effect of the $40 job” is that your grand piano is moved, and the worker has $40 more than before.

It’s true, of course, that it also has the effect of increasing the demand for labor not restricted by immigration status; and so it may contribute, on the margin, to the probability that more undocumented immigrants will live in the country. But so what? The only reasons you’ve offered for thinking that there’s anything wrong with having more undocumented immigrants living in the country is the allegation that it involves unspecified “costs” being imposed on innocent third parties—an allegation which has been objected to, since you’ve offered no evidence that this involves more “costs” for those third parties than hiring anybody else in a welfare state does, let alone that either the immigrant or the person hiring him or her is morally to blame for those “costs.” So let’s get down to brass tacks. You claim that increasing the probability of more undocumented immigrants in the country is something that you oughtn’t do. Why? What’s wrong with having more undocumented immigrants in the country, let alone with merely increasing the probability that this may happen?

doj: In principle, I may agree. However, just because one policy is optimal in utopia does not mean that policy makes sense in concert with the messy set of other policies that are currently in place. The welfare state in the US is not going away soon, and wishful thinking to the contrary when setting immigration policy is potentially disasterous. We need to be realists.

How is this any of the immigrant’s fault? There are lots of ways you could reduce the total welfare burden in this country. For example, you could shoot people standing in the queue at the welfare office. Or you could blow up government schools. Or you could implement a forced sterilization / abortion program for the poor. Do you think that these are acceptable methods? If not, why do you think that restraining, arresting, confining, an immigrant, beating or shooting them if necessary, destroying their livelihood, and exiling them from the country, is any more acceptable? Why are they fair game for your policy “realism” but not the domestic poor?

doj: And the reality is, among other things, that most of California’s public school system is shot to hell and can be expected to remain so as long as too many illegal immigrants stress the system.

Who cares? Why are you trying to fix the government school system?

doj: The majority of voters are quite willing to pay more for labor if they can reverse this sort of thing;

Then they are welcome to pay for it. What I object to is when they propose to force me pay more for labor in order to fulfill their demographic goals, which I couldn’t possibly care less about.

doj: … when we refuse to enforce the immigration laws they vote for, that is a subversion of our political process.

You say that like it’s a bad thing.