“We are bound to treat foreign citizens as well as we would be expect our citizens to be treated when they are abroad.”

How does forcing would-be immigrants to fill out government paperwork affect whether or not they’re being treated as well as we would expect our citizens to be treated when they are abroad?

Wouldn’t it be easier to just treat all immigrants decently, and forget about the paperwork?

“It is also incumbent upon a host government to provided foreign citizens with adequate access to the diplomatic services of their home country.”

How does using force against immigrants who haven’t filled out government paperwork improve anyone’s access to the diplomatic services of their home country?

“Most importantly, the US needs to ensure that a foreign individual’s home country will allow them to leave before we allow them to enter …”

Why?

Well, the issue isn’t whether or not Ron Paul would have to stop sitting in the House of Representatives. I agree that he isn’t necessarily under a moral obligation to do so. But he would have to stop trying to pass off himself and his colleaguesas legislators invested with the right to make laws wholly of their own device. As it stands he’s a professional usurper because whatever votes he makes in practice, he professionally claims an authority that he has not got.

Also, I doubt that he would have any right to accept a Congressional salary and benefits for his “services,” even if he were holding the position in a strictly defensive way (which of course he’s not).

Dr. Paul: “We must reject amnesty for illegal immigrants in any form. We cannot continue to reward lawbreakers and expect things to get better.”

Dr. King: “An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. … Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. … One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’”

Dr. King wins.

“Wasn’t the Declaration of Independence itself an act of lawbreaking?”

Well, if you take the Declaration at its own word (as I think you should), it wasn’t so much an act of breaking the law as an act of recognizing that the so-called “law” was no law at all, because it was without legitimate authority. Rather than breaking the law, it refused, and therefore dissolved, any obligation to respect the claims of legal authority over the American states at all; but folks with no legal authority can’t make law, so there was no law to break.

But, since the United States government hasn’t got any more legitimate authority over peaceful immigrants on private property than the King of England had over Americans minding their own business, the status of illegal immigrants is really much the same as that of those who signed the declaration, anyway.

Of course, for Ron Paul to recognize that, he would have to give up his job as a professional usurper, and start looking for an honest line of work. So I’m not holding my breath.

Jason,

Three things.

First, while you probably do have a right to use force to defend yourself against certain kinds of known criminals, even by forcing your way onto my property against my will in order to take her into custody, it’s quite another thing to claim that you have a right to force your way onto my property in order to do ex ante screening of everyone who passes through it, in order to find out whether they are criminals or not. But of course that’ latter is precisely what the border patrol and internal immigration cops need to do in order to enforce an immigration policy. Do you think that your right to self-defense extends to commandeering my property for ex-ante screening? If not, where will your immigration cops even find a place to stand?

Second, to confine criminals in prisons the burden is on the government to demonstrate guilt. As you note, domestic cops have no power to make you stop at checkpoints and do ex ante screening without probable cause. (Actually, they do get away with this on the roads, but that’s low-intensity occasional screening rather than systematic.)

But if your argument in favor of ex ante screening is that you have a right to keep criminals away from you, why doesn’t that give you an even stronger right to have the government do the same thing at state lines, or just randomly search other people’s houses whenever they feel like it? They have no less probable cause for people crossing state borders, than they do for people crossing international borders. And whatever microscopic contribution to your safety you think it makes to stop a criminal from moving from one city a thousand miles away from you to another city a thousand miles away from you, you surely make yourself more safe by stopping a criminal from moving into your state, city, or neighborhood.

It’s true that limiting checkpoints to the border crossings would be less inconvenient (since it means fewer checkpoints) than an extensive internal checkpoint system. But precisely because it’s less disruptive the actual meaningful contribution that it makes to anyone’s safety is correspondingly microscopic. As you remove the defeating condition, the supposedly justifying condition also evaporates.

Third, if the moral justification for confining and exiling immigrant criminals is the same as the moral justification for arresting and confining domestic criminals, why treat them differently at all? Why not throw both in prison, or exile both, rather than adopting different responses depending on the nationality of the person who’s allegedly posing a threat to your safety?

Thanks for your patience, by the way. I realize this is a pretty long pile-on and a lot of questions being fired your way over a disagreement that, from the standpoint of policy results, no doubt seems quite small when fully considered. (I’m just of the opinion that similarities or differences in moral principle are much more worth spending time on than similarities or differences in concrete policy outcomes.)

Eponym: “IMO, it isn’t a human life that should be provided the protection of law until it has a functioning cognitive brain.”

Whether it’s “a human life” or not, since when did people at any stage of development get the right to live their human lives by commandeering the use of your internal organs against your will?

The problem with Roe v. Wade is that it’s not pro-choice enough.

Jason: “I may also protect my legitimate interests through other means — as in prohibiting criminals from entering the country. It’s impossible, after all, to protect your land day and night while still making a living, and the task of the government is likewise made easier if criminals are screened out at the border. … The only groups I have advocated deporting are criminals and terrorists. These people have no right to be here, because criminals have fewer rights than the rest of us.”

1. Do you think that the government would be within its moral prerogatives to use similar “screening” procedures to keep criminals, terrorists, etc. from moving from, say, Ohio to Michigan? From Detroit to Ann Arbor? After all, insofar as it succeeded, that would materially improve my safety a lot more than stopping criminals from moving from Tijuana to San Diego.

2. There are two different aspects to immigration policy: border patrol and internal policing. Suppose that someone who is not, in fact, a criminal, a terrorist, the bearer of a dangerous disease, or anything of the sort, doesn’t want to deal with immigration paperwork and somehow skirts your border patrol. Suppose that she stays at my place while she works for a willing employer who doesn’t care about her immigration status. Should she be arrested and deported if she is found out? Should I be forced to do “screening” for her immigration status before I give her a place to stay? Should her employer be forced to do the same?

3. What kind of crimes do you have in mind when you say that “criminals” should be stopped at the border and/or exiled from the country? Do you think that U.S. citizens who commit similar crimes should also be exiled, or prevented from re-entering the country if they leave it? If not, what makes the difference between the two cases?

Kennedy: Nobody’s buying it, and this is precisely why you should deal with arguments first.

Look, just to be clear, I think that there are plenty of racist creeps involved in immigration debates, but that Jason is not one of them. When I am arguing with them (contrary to Jason’s suggestion, I do argue with some of them) I don’t flinch at calling their position racist. That’s not a failure to “deal with arguments first;” it’s a characterization of the type of argument being mounted. Maybe a racist argument is cogent and maybe it’s not; but whatever it is somebody mounting one does have a responsibility to own up to the fact that that’s what she or he is doing.

However, I don’t think that that’s what Jason is doing, and whether anybody is “buying it” or not, I was not suggesting that it was. If you think saying “That’s mighty white of you” is necessarily intended as an insinuation of racism, you’re mistaken. (See, for example, here, here, or myself here, in contexts that clearly have nothing in particular to do with accusations of racism.)

If I wanted to say that his argument was racist, I would have said, “Your argument is racist,” or something to that effect.

DevP: “Immigration needs reform, and illegal immigration is indeed a crime.”

A crime against whom, exactly?

Thanks for this post. One correction, though:

“The Libertarian platform, which speaks to harming no other’s life or property, is silent (at this time) on the issue of abortion.”

Here’s the Platform as of the 2004 Convention, section 20 http://www.lp.org/issues/platform_all.shtml#womerigh:

“Recognizing that abortion is a very sensitive issue and that people, including libertarians, can hold good-faith views on both sides, we believe the government should be kept out of the question. We condemn state-funded and state-mandated abortions. It is particularly harsh to force someone who believes that abortion is murder to pay for another’s abortion.”

This plank has come under concerted attack from those who believe that the government has a right to commandeer women’s wombs for the benefit of fetuses they don’t want (most of them have aimed at getting the platform silent on this point, in the name of “not being controversial” or somesuch). But as far as I know, it’s still there for now.