Comments Elsewhere

Kinsella:

Surely you can see the analogy to immigration policy.

I sure can’t. Here’s why: immigration policy, as we know it today, is practiced against people whether they are using government “property” or not. (Would you propose using force to stop me if I operate a helicopter service to transport Mexican immigrants from Mexico to a house that they have rented, and from their house to their place of work, without using any government roads? La Migra would.)

Of course, if you want to claim that your attacks on “open borders” don’t have anything to do with immigration policy as currently practiced—or, for that matter, with borders (since you’re proposing enforcement at the entry to roads etc., not necessarily at the border)—you can do that. But then it’s incumbent on you to explain how your proposals for pre-anarchic immigration policy are relevantly different from those of the assorted Know-Nothing blowhards who are calling on La Migra and the Border Patrol to escalate their war on immigrants rather than fundamentally change their approach.

Once you’ve done that, it’s still incumbent to you to explain how imposing the restriction on coercively monopolized resources (e.g. roads) is morally any different from stationing gunmen to enforce the restriction on private resources against the owners’ will. If there is a salient difference, what is it? If not, then how are you not advocating a violation of rights?

Lopez:

That said, it then follows that someone can be against open borders because they haven’t given the matter too much thought and they don’t have the tools to think about it even if they did. There’s plenty of “law-n-order” asshole conservatives that are against illegal immigrants simply because they’re breaking the law.

Sure, but I don’t think that means that their reasons aren’t bigoted. It just means that the dominant form of bigotry at work is either (a) bigotry against non-citizens as such, rather than against a particular racial or ethnic or socioeconomic group (believing that the government has more-or-less unlimited authority to impose coercive restrictions on non-citizens that they wouldn’t accept if placed on citizens), or (b) bigotry against civilians as such (believing that, among other things, the government has the unlimited authority to attack anyone it sees fit if the right background conditions—e.g., an allegedly worthy goal, or alleged majority support—obtain). I think most conservative “law-n-order” immigration creeps are creeps of type (a); although there are probably some straight-up type (b) totalitarians, too. Either way, the reasons they have for supporting assaults on immigrants comes down to collectivist group-warfare; I take that to be, as such, a violent form of bigotry.