(4) seems clearly wrong. At the most it is a parochial about the conventions for modern works (and I’m not sure it’s universally true even there). We know, for example, that “Iliad” is the title of the Iliad, but we have no way of knowing whether that title was assigned by the author or was merely conventional, and assigned after the fact. We know for a fact that “Metaphysics” (or “Meta ta phusika”) was assigned by later editors and not by Aristotle, and yet it is in fact the title of the Metaphysics.

Actually, every single one of the points, except possibly (1) (and I’m not sure about that) seems based on pretty parochial intuitions. I’m inclined to doubt that any general theory of titles is possible at all.

Well, “P because Q” doesn’t actually entail that “If it weren’t the case that Q, it wouldn’t be the case that P.” There are cases where one cause trumps another cause that would have been sufficient had the trumping cause not been present: where if Q hadn’t caused P, something else would have.

Example: A is going on a three-day expedition deep into the desert. B wants to kill A, so B secretly poisons the water in A’s canteen. C also wants to kill A, but doesn’t know that B poisoned the canteen, so C drains all the water out of the canteen. A dies in the desert of dehydration; A was killed because C drained the canteen. But it’s still true that even if C hadn’t drained the canteen, A would still have been killed: she just would have been killed by the poisoned water instead of by dehyrdation.

This could also be the case in terms of war justifications. (You might think that there’s a secondary reason that would be sufficient, even if the primary reason turned out not to be sufficient after all.) But of course you’re right that most people argue in the way you have in mind are just making excuses for a predetermined policy, so just about anything at all would do. In that case you’re right that the “because” hasn’t been earned.

John,

B can’t recover it from A because once recovered by A, it belongs to her.

This is no different from any other situation in which assets on hand aren’t sufficient to cover all the debts that are out.

If I take out $100,000 in loans each from A and B and then default, but I can only pay back $20,000, then there’s no way for me to pay back everything I owe. But if I pay back $20,000 to A and nothing to B, B has no right to take the $20,000 from A on the grounds that it’s really her money.

Similarly, if I steal $1,000 from you and another $1,000 from Lopez, then blow $1,500 in Vegas before you catch me, you’re still entitled to recover $500 from me. You’re not obliged to turn over all of it, or part of it, to Lopez, and he’s not entitled to take it from you.

Because it was taken from them.

If you’re bankrupt, there’s no just way to pay off all of your creditors, since at least some debts are going to get defaulted on. That doesn’t mean that you’re not obliged to do what you can towards paying off at least some of them.

Kennedy: He can morally take as much of the stolen loot as he wants. What else should be done with it? The original rights to the loot are unsalvageable.

How so? Money’s fungible. It seems as though it would be pretty trivial for him to find net tax payers that he could return it to.

Do you think that he has a right to accept money or benefits above the total amount he paid out in taxes before he became a government employee? Or are the reasons that it would be legitimate other than whatever compensation the government owes him for taxes extorted?

“Your questions challenge the some of the most basic elements of international customary law”

That’s deliberate, and it’s a matter of conviction rather than ignorance. I don’t accept the legitimacy of “international law.” My interest is not in how well governments get along with each other, but rather in the kind of powers that governments do or do not have over peaceful individuals who are harming no-one.

“We make immigrants and non-immigrant visitors identify themselves and their intentions (filling out paperwork) to demonstrate to foreign countries that we are taking steps to ensure the safety of their citizens (read: we can easily find and identify them upon request). You would be surprised to know how many criminals and terrorists can be turned away by a little paperwork and an interview.”

You seem to have switched from one justification to another in mid-sentence. In the first case you seem to claim that the government is justified in using force against immigrants without documentation in order to assure the governments over their former home that the U.S. government is adequately attending to their safety. In the second you seem to claim that the government is justified in using force against undocumented immigrants to block or remove “criminals and terrorists,” presumably for our safety. Those are two separate claims; and frankly I don’t find either very persuasive. The latter because the government has no right whatever to force people through ex ante screening (that is, treating them as presumptive criminals) without probable cause. The former because the rights of peaceful immigrants not to be molested are more important than how comfortable the governments they formerly lived under are made. Neither you nor the government have any right to arrest, beat, restrain, confine, or exile an immigrant who has chosen to come here without a permission slip from the federal government, just in order to make their former government feel better, of all things, about the physical security (!) of their emigre subjects.

“I am not advocating that we criminal illegal border crossing, but we should be able to take such individuals back to the border to fill their paperwork out properly before re-entry.”

You act as if La Migra were just walking them home after school. In fact what you’re proposing is that La Migra use force against undocumented immigrants, arrest them, restrain them, confine them, beat or shoot them if it’s necessary to ensure compliance, and ship them in chains down to the border to get them to fill out the right forms in triplicate. Whether you call this “criminalizing” or not, that’s treating innocent people as criminals when they have violated nobody’s rights. And for what?

“Finally, allowing foreign citizens to enter the US in contravention of their domestic laws causes unnecessary political headaches.”

So what?

“Changing citizenship is a big deal and customary law dictates that both states involved in the immigration process have a voice in the process.”

Well, I didn’t say anything about changing citizenship. What I’m talking about is whether people who are in this country without a permission slip from BICE and who don’t have citizenship status should be arrested and forced into exile for it. I don’t think they should. If undocumented immigrants were free to live on property where they were welcome, and free to work for willing employers, with or without citizenship status—if they weren’t treated as outlaws and put at the mercy of La Migra, then I really wouldn’t care much at all how byzantine the rules for changing citizenship were. The issue here isn’t so much changing citizenship as whether or not non-citizens have rights that the State is bound to respect, and if so how far those rights extend. I think that they extend, at the very least, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

“The core values of an immigration system should be responsibility, expediency, and fair treatment.”

The core values of an immigration system should be packing up their guns and going home. Moving is not a crime, and it’s not a problem to be solved.

Stephen, I agree that many actually existing corporations reap benefits from the criminalization of immigrants, in part because they can use the threat of La Migra (tacitly or explicitly) to control and exploit immigrant workers. And I’m on record as emphatically agreeing that corporatism or state capitalism needs to be sharply distinguished from the free market, and (therefore) defenders of free enterprise shouldn’t always, or even often, be defending actually existing big business. (See, for example, http://radgeek.com/gt/2005/03/31/anarquistas_por .)

And of course I agree that undocumented immigrants shouldn’t be blamed. (For what? They’re doing nothing wrong.) I just can’t find this argument anywhere in MacIntyre’s piece. All I can find is a single paragraph where he says that certain sorts of Chicano activists who are currently boogey-men of the nativist Right are indeed a problem locally in California, but aren’t as big an influence on federal policy as some seem to claim.

He does say that the corporate class has more effect on immigration policy federally than those Chicano activists do. But I can find anywhere at all that MacIntyre suggests that undocumented immigrants aren’t to blame, or that they shouldn’t be punished. He does have some complaints about the “disaster” of Spanish being spoken in Los Angeles schools, apparently blames Latin American immigrants for Los Angeles’s murder rate, and generally talks about Mexican immigrants in a way virtually indistinguishable from the AFL’s anti-Chinese rhetoric of the 1880s.

He nowhere advocates decriminalizing undocumented immigration, which is the only non-immigrant-blaming policy to take. He nowhere even suggests that the criminalization of immigrants, rather than the immigration itself, is the problem. Instead he repeatedly calls for escalation of the war on immigrants, e.g. by prosecuting banks that dare to write loans to immigrants, or government-subsidized landlords who dare to rent to them.

If you want to make the argument that corporatism is at least partly to blame for the situation, and that the best solution is to stop punishing undocumented immigrants immediately and entirely, then you can and of course you should. My beef is with the claim that MacIntyre’s piece, which is a string of immigrant-blaming, protectionist fallacies, and calls for escalation of government attacks on immigrants, has anything to do with the argument that you seem to want to make.

On domestic issues such as shooting immigrants, as a form of protectionism for U.S. workers’ wages? If that’s the tent, I’ll stand in the rain, thank you.

Corporatism and a free market are indeed different things. But the only way to achieve a free market in labor is the complete decriminalization of immigration, not arresting, confining, exiling, and/or shooting immigrants who haven’t gotten a permission slip from the government, or (as McIntyre wants) arresting banks for loaning money to those immigrants, or employers for giving them jobs.

Incidentally, since when did “responsible immigration” mean producing your papers to the federal government on demand? I don’t notify the government of my whereabouts every time I move. What business is it of theirs?

Andy: “Much of the land in this country is held by government or by government connected corporations. The American people are the rightful owners of this land. Most of the American people (80% or more) do not want this country to be flooded with illegal aliens.”

Just what has this got to do with the debate over actually existing immigration policy? The government doesn’t just claim the authority to exclude or remove undocumented immigrants from government roads or schools. They claim the authority to exclude or remove them from anywhere in the United States, including private property, with or without the consent of the owner, and even to conscript employers to serve as immigration cops with their new hires. Whatever you think about the rightful ownership of government-controlled thoroughfares (and, frankly, I think that key aspects of the theory you suggest are frightfully silly), the government is currently reaching far over the boundaries that even your theory would allow for.