Comments Elsewhere

Keith,

The fact that Roe has survived this long in spite of long-standing presidential opposition has little to do with any great security that the ruling (which is currently supported by at best a 5-4 margin) has, and a lot more to do with the fact that historical accidents — like Bush Sr.’s deicision to appoint the moderate Souter, or the counter-to-expectations behavior of Reagan appointees Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy — can profoundly influence the direction of a divided court for long periods of time, thanks to lifetime terms and the small number of justices involved. The Roberts court has already upheld substantial new federal restrictions on abortion in Gonzales v. Carhart, and several anti-abortion state legislatures are already chomping at the bit to pass state abortion laws in order to force a review of Roe v. Wade before the new court. You’ll forgive me if I’m not as sanguine as you are about the threat of new forced pregnancy laws.

As for your comments on immigration, I simply have no idea what you mean. Immigrants are wanted in the United States; they come here, in spite of great physical danger from both the law and the physical conditions that the legal situation forces them to endure in their crossing, precisely because there is ample work to find. The reason that every year there’s one or two dozen immigrants who die from exposure or dehydration in the southwestern deserts is precisely because the statist federal immigration controls, which Ron Paul wants to enforce even more aggressively and rigidly than they are currently enforced, force them to try to cross in remote desert areas where they can evade detection, rather than at urban border crossings in Tijuana, Juarez, Nuevo Laredo, and similar border towns. Ron Paul has directly stated that he wants to continue, and in fact escalate, the border policies that cause these deaths. He also wants internal immigration cops to enforce immigration controls even more aggressively than they have been, which means more of the “Ihre Papiere, bitte” treatment for both non-immigrants and immigrants, more paramilitary raids on workplaces, and threatening millions of undocumented immigrants with arrest, jail, and government-imposed exile from their current homes, their livelihood, and their families.

As for feminism, you wrote: “In your comment above you laid down a laundry list of statist policies that you support in the name of radical feminism”.

Could you please list a single statist policy that I stated my support for in my comment above?

As I explicitly stated in my comments, all of the items that I listed — broad sexual harassment policies, free daycare, employer-paid maternity leave, and worker ownership of the means of production — are things that can be brought about voluntarily within a free market, without government intervention.

The issue of libertarianism or statism only arises when it comes to the question of MEANS — whether these projects are to be brought about through voluntary cooperation or through government coercion. Government-imposed sexual harassment policies (whether broad or narrow) are statist; government-funded daycare is statist; government-required paid maternity leave is statist; but in a free market employers can adopt any sexual harassment policy they want, including the kinds of policies that radical feminists favor; and community groups can provide free or sliding-scale daycare if they feel like it; and employers can offer whatever sorts of parental leave policies they like, including gender-neutral employer-paid leave benefits of the kind that liberal feminists generally advocate.

You might think that these sorts of things won’t happen on a free market, because they are impractical ideas; you might think that they oughtn’t happen on a free market, because they are foolish ideas. But you had better make sure that you understand the difference between free market principles and favoritism for your preferred business model. And, as I directly stated above, and as Roderick and I also spent quite a bit of time explaining in detail in the essay that, I’ve repeatedly referred you to, there is an existing tendency within radical feminism that has favored grassroots cooperative action rather than attempts to seize or influence state power, and it is that kind of non-statist or anti-statist activism that Roderick and I support.

It is extremely frustrating to have to repeat this point once again when I already made the same point obliquely in the post you were putatively replying to, and made it directly and in some detail in the essay linked from that post, and made it directly again in the rejoinder to your comments immediately above your most recent reply.

You wrote: “… excuse me for questioning your commitment to limited government”

I have no commitment whatsoever to limited government. But your suspicions are pointed in the wrong direction. I am an anarchist, and so I oppose both limited statism and welfare statism. Less destructive governments are preferable to more destructive governments, but given the abject failure of every single attempt in the history of the planet earth to sustain a “limited government” against mission creep and the ambitions of professional politicians, I don’t think it’s worth devoting a lot of energy to such a doomed project.

If you seriously believe that Chairman Ron’s Great Libertarian Electoral Revolution is the only real shot we have to resist an ongoing slide into totalitarian hell, then I’d suggest you get out of the country as quickly as possible, because your plan has an awfully limited chance of success, and if he fails to make it past the primaries, then you have about 1-3 months before it’s all over.

Personally, I’m rather more optimistic, because I don’t think that the only way for good men and women to do something is for them to support a candidate for a government election. I prefer to spend my time on forms of activism that are more practical than the proven failure of libertarian electioneering.

You wrote: “The question is are we going to be concerned about winning a philosophical argument or are we going to be concerned about some American soldier in Iraq being blown up by a roadside bomb in 2010?”

Dude, this is a ridiculous cheap shot and you know it. I could just as easily go around telling those, such as Gordon, who attempt to give philosophical defenses of voting for Ron Paul, “The question is are we going to be concerned about winning a philosophical argument or are we going to be concerned about some woman dying in a back alley in 2010?” or “The question is are we going to be concerned about winning a philosophical argument or are we going to be concerned about some immigrant dying of dehydration in the Arizona desert in 2010?” Your argument cuts as much ice as either of these, which is to say, none at all. All the parties to this debate are arguing over issues that have real and grave human consequences in the near term.

As for radical feminist literature and action, Roderick and I discuss that at length in our essay, so it would be more productive to engage with what we said there. For what it’s worth, there’s nothing inherently unlibertarian about broad sexual harassment policies, free daycare or employer paid maternity leave (or, what radical feminists are more likely to advocate, radical transformation of the economy away from an employer-employee model and towards ownership of the means of production by working women and men). These ideas may be wise or foolish for other reasons, but libertarianism as such only comes up when we turn to the question of whether these kind of measures are to be attained through voluntary means or by means of the State. As Roderick and I explain in the essay, while there are many radical feminists who advocate State action, there are many others who distrust State action for practical reasons or even reject it entirely on principle.

You write: “I also recall prominent radical feminists arguing that sex between a man and a woman in marriage was a form of rape.”

Can you specify which radical feminist(s) you’re referring to and where she or they say this? (If you’re referring to Andrea Dworkin’s discussion of martial rape laws in Right-Wing Women, that’s not actually an accurate statement of her conclusion, but in any case you should know that even if it were, she was discussing the ramifications of a legal context has mercifully ceased to exist since the book was written.)

As for the radical feminist menace to the safety of men’s wing-wangs, the legitimacy of violence depends on whether it is aggressive or defensive. Given the radical feminist emphasis on the prevalence of violence against women, I’d suggest that even if that talk were meant literally rather than rhetorically, that wouldn’t necessarily be an objection to it.

In which I discuss Veterans Against Individual Freedom and More Veterans for Vandalism and Petty Thieving.

In which I hear from the experts.

In which I note that last Thursday was A Day of Remembrance.

Robert, there’s certainly no evidence of such a position in his platform. Here’s what he says. Boldface is mine.

• Physically secure our borders and coastlines. We must do whatever it takes to control entry into our country before we undertake complicated immigration reform proposals.
• Enforce visa rules. Immigration officials must track visa holders and deport anyone who overstays their visa or otherwise violates U.S. law. This is especially important when we recall that a number of 9/11 terrorists had expired visas.
• No amnesty. Estimates suggest that 10 to 20 million people are in our country illegally. That’s a lot of people to reward for breaking our laws.
• … Pass true immigration reform. The current system is incoherent and unfair. But current reform proposals would allow up to 60 million more immigrants into our country, according to the Heritage Foundation. This is insanity. Legal immigrants from all countries should face the same rules and waiting periods.

In other words, Ron Paul apparently advocates:

1. … having the government aggressively and rigidly enforce admittedly incoherent and unfair immigration laws; and
2. … having the government adopt a new system of immigration laws which will still enforce “rules and waiting periods” — which have to be designed in such a way that they will prevent any substantially increase the number of immigrants entering the country above current levels.

The position would still be statist even if it were what you’re describing, but it’s not. Paul has already ruled out any system of immigration liberal enough to substantially increase the number of immigrants legally entering the country as “insanity.”

Or, in other words, to make my point a bit more explicit, the requirement to get an SSN before you start a job, whatever its merits or demerits, would not impose a “more involved process” on “coming into the US to work.” It would only be imposing a requirement on immigrants to work, after they had already come into the United States.

That may seem like splitting hairs. But it’s significant that the point at which the requirement would be imposed need not be the point at which the immigrant enters the U.S. And that the penalties for failing to do so need not have anything to do with the right to remain in the U.S.

I go to New York most summers to take a temporary teaching job, and when I do I have to fill out the requisite paperwork for New York state tax withholding. But I don’t have to fill out those papers ahead of time in order to enter or to stay in New York. And if I took a job off the books in New York without filling out those forms, then the penalty, if I got caught, would be the usual fines. Not being exiled from the state of New York and sent back to my old home state.

cfrost:

Is a lifeboat mentality ethical? Probably not, but that’s inevitably what you’re going to get with a sinking ship. With a world population of 6.5 billion and growing by the second, you’ll have a hard time convincing those who live in the few islands of prosperity to let the masses in.

This argument presupposes that the most privileged people in the world have some kind of business supporting themselves in the style to which they have become accustomed by forcibly interfering with the peaceful migration of the poorest and most vulnerable, and to use force to stop them from taking jobs for willing employers, or to live on property onto which the owners have welcomed them. The comfort of American natives is not worth more than the well-being of people from other countries, and Americans do not gain the right to maintain a particular standard of living on the backs of pauperized foreigners simply in virtue of being Americans.

Nativism is the progressivism of fools. Besides the fact that it’s a disgusting sentiment, it also has no basis in anything that could possibly be recognized as liberal values.

Lindsay,

A more substantive reply to your points will have to wait a little while due to other work, and it may be worth a post of its own at my blog. For the time being, though:

Yes, coming into the US to work should be a more involved process than crossing a state line. At the very least, people who want to work in the US need to be issued Social Security Numbers or some functional alternative so that we can keep track of their payroll taxes and the legally-mandated contributions of their employers on their behalf.

I don’t think that anybody, whether native or immigrant, should be forced to contribute to Social Security in order to get a job. If they don’t intend to draw benefits that they didn’t pay in for, then it’s none of the government’s business. But if you think that it is necessary to issue new SSNs and subject immigrants to withholding taxes, then go ahead and issue those SSNs. But all that takes is one more sheet of paperwork to do at the point of employment, probably at the same time as the W-2. It has nothing in particular to do with imposing any kind of special restrictions or special ex ante screening for immigrants at the point of the border crossing, or as a condition for establishing long-term residency, and there’s no reason why enforcement should be considered a matter for immigration law, or punished by deportation, rather than merely considered a matter for tax law, as it would be considered if the person working off the books were an American citizen.

There’s no intrinsic connection between being an undocumented immigrant and working under the table. It is only because of the existing government restrictions on immigration, and the need to avoid government detection, that undocumented immigrants are disproportionately likely to work under the table.

I didn’t say that so-called “volunteer” soldiers aren’t responsible for their actions while in the military, or that the government’s coercion against them excuses immoral actions. I said that they aren’t actually willing volunteers. Willing volunteers are free to withdraw their decision to volunteer if they repent, or get scared, or have second thoughts. Soldiers aren’t.

cfrost: Rad Geek, good luck getting your plan passed into law, in the U.S. or anywhere else on planet earth.

I didn’t say that my proposal is popular. I said that it’s right. I am not foolish enough to think that being right guarantees being popular. Or amoral enough to believe the converse.

As for California farmers, they surely are foolish if they believe that they can practically maintain a quarantine zone larger than most European countries by forcing individual drivers to lose their pears or grapes at an agricultural checkpoint. I’m not too worked up about it in the grand scheme of things, though.

Dock,

Thanks for the dishonestly selective quotation. I do wonder who you think you’re fooling, though, since the source is right above your cherry-picked selection. The existing immigration system certainly does criminalize millions of immigrants — tens of millions, in fact — and forcibly pauperizes many if not most of those by dramatically restricting the kinds of jobs that they can find or their opportunities for advancement. The number who are jailed and deported is in the hundreds of thousands per year (the government only tabulates statistics on “criminal alien” deportations, which are upwards of 80,000). The hellish crossings of the desert that current immigration policy forces on new immigrants “only” kill a few dozen people a year. I feel so great knowing that my government “only” forces a few dozen desperate people per year into a slow and agonizing death from dehydration or exposure in 115 degree temperatures.

Lindsay:

RadGeek, do you think that the government should relinquish all control and supervision over the flow of people across our borders?

Yes. I think that both the Border Patrol and the ICE internal security forces should be completely abolished, as should the entire visa / resident alien documentation system, with complete amnesty for all currently undocumented immigrants. In terms of traveling freely, establishing a temporary or a permanent residence, getting a job, etc., moving from Ottawa to Michigan should be no different, and involve no more scrutiny or documentation, than moving from Michigan to Ohio.

Any legitimate functions that the Border Patrol and ICE serve (say quarantining people with dangerous communicable diseases or apprehending known criminals) can and should be served by ordinary police forces, without regard to immigrant status.

For example, do we have a right to deny entry to war criminals?

I don’t have a firm opinion on whether or not governments would have the right to deny entry to known war criminals. But if they do have such a right, the problem is how to identify war criminals from among the general pool of immigrants, and I don’t think there’s any way of creating an ex ante system for identifying and screening out war criminals that won’t violate the rights of millions of non-war criminals by subjecting them to heightened government scrutiny without probable cause. There’s no reason to think that the average Mexican worker is secretly a war criminal, and no non-xenophobic reason for treating prospective immigrants with a greater presumption of their criminality than U.S. citizens would be.

But anyway, why deny war criminals entry, even if it is within one’s rights to do so? If you’ve identified a war criminal trying to get into the U.S., why not let them in, and then arrest them within the country and pack them off to the appropriate tribunal?

For example, I supported Spitzer’s plan to issue driver’s licenses substantiated by ID other than immigration documents. If people are going to come here, they’ve got to be subject to the same level of monitoring as everyone else. I’m glad that we have means to track citizens.

I also support plans to extend driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, although perhaps for different reasons. But I don’t see how this cuts against the open borders proposal that I advocate. If driver’s licenses or government identification documents are a desirable thing to have for long-term residents, then all my proposal would require is precisely what you advocate — that these licenses or documents be available to all long-term residents, without requiring them to produce documentation of immigration status (since that sort of documentation would no longer exist).

Ex hypothesi, there’s no process, so there’s no path to citizenship for these folks, even if they spend years contributing to our society. Citizens have rights and privileges, but these people are just hanging out in indefinite legal limbo. Is that fair?

I don’t understand the inference here. It seems to me that you’re conflating immigration restrictions with a naturalization process. All I’ve proposed is that the immigration restrictions be done away with. As far as my argument goes, you can implement whatever kind of process you like for naturalizing immigrants once they are here; my only claim is that the government shouldn’t be making any efforts to stop them from getting here, or to control how they can make a living once here, or to throw them out over arbitrarily imposed time limits or restrictions on their peaceful activities.

Similarly, when I moved from Michigan to Nevada, I didn’t have to send any prior notice to the government and I didn’t have to undergo any kind of pre-screening or submit to any government restrictions on how long I could stay or what kind of work I could take. I just moved into a new house and started working. There are defined processes that I have to go through in order to do things like establishing official residency, getting a local driver’s license, registering to vote, etc. These processes just aren’t linked to any kind of ex ante screening at the border.

We’re still going to need checkpoints to inspect goods and make sure all the applicable duties and tariffs get paid.

Well, I don’t think that the government should be collecting duties and tariffs on imported goods, or limiting entry chokepoints for inspection. Those who do think that duties and tariffs are important don’t need government-controlled chokepoints to do that, either; the U.S. government’s physical control over the land borders and the sea coasts used to be far, far looser than it is today, but nevertheless they got by just fine, even when import duties were almost the only source of federal revenue.

But. If this sort of thing is both justified and desirable, then channeling cross-border traffic through government chokepoints isn’t necessarily inconsistent with what people call open borders immigration policy, which refers to the right of people to travel freely across the border without government restrictions, not necessarily the presence or absence of inspection stations. (Does California have an open border with Nevada? I’d say so, in spite of the agricultural inspection stations. Although personally I think that the inspection stations are foolish.)

So, if you please, I support what you call “physically open borders.” If what I can get is checkpointed borders with non-discriminatory inspections, but free and open crossing without any kind of government visa system, then that would be less than what I advocate, but it would also be big step forward over the system we have now, which serves to criminalize, forcibly pauperize, jail, and/or kill millions of immigrants every year.

Just letting people circulate freely without actively inducting them into our system is ghettoizing.

Not as ghettoizing as constantly forcing them to live with the threat of imprisonment and forced separation from their friends, family, livelihoods, and homes.

I haven’t said anything against having naturalization procedures. I just denied that those procedures should be tied to restrictions on crossing borders or living and working within the country.

herbert browne:

Yes, there are 2 distinct issues here. Like rootlesscosmo & Rad Geek I support the former as an “open border” process, with this caveat: It only works with with citizens of countries with whom it is RECIPROCAL, ie the country has to be willing to allow ME to go there & work legally, if I want.

I don’t understand this restriction. Let’s say that you want to move to Ruritania, but the Ruritanian government has closed its borders to American immigrants. And let’s say that a Ruritanian citizen, who had nothing in particular to do with the Ruritanian government’s stupid decision, wants to move to America. Certainly the situation sucks for you, and the Ruritanian government deserves blame for treating you badly. But why should the sins of the Ruritanian government be taken out on some innocent would-be Ruritanian ex-pat, who played no particular role in forming or implementing the policy?

Lindsay:

The reality is that it’s going to be time consuming to process all the people who want to come.

What processing? Again, if we’re talking about entry to the country, rather than naturalization, then there’s no processing necessary: you let people come in via their port of choice and you leave them alone rather than demanding that they flash their papers whenever they try to get a job, try to go to school, etc. etc. I.e., you treat somebody moving from Michoacan to take a job in California the same way that you’d treat somebody moving from Michigan to take a job in California. No processing necessary.

You might say, “Well, what if the Michoacan@ isn’t ready to work and pay taxes?” Well, what if the Michigander isn’t ready to work and pay taxes? Why should the Mexican immigrant be treated with greater scrutiny and greater prior restraint than the American native? Simply because one is Mexican and the other is American? If not, then what other reason is there, besides discrimination on the basis of nationality? If so, then what possible connection could this have to anything like liberal or progressive values?

“Open borders” isn’t an accurate description of any progressive immigration policy or amnesty deal.

Depends on what you mean by “progressive,” I guess. The old-timey Progressives certainly were for all kinds of immigration restrictions. But then, the old-timey Progressives were for sedition laws and forced sterilization, too. I would hope that people who call themselves “Progressives” today have moved on.

“Open borders” makes it sound like society is just stepping back and letting events play out. That’s not what we should be doing at all, and it’s not really what anyone is proposing.

Of course it’s what some people are proposing. I’m proposing it right now. I believe that the government has no business whatsoever in choking off border crossings or in maintaining an internal police force for surveillance and deportation of undocumented immigrants. I think that both should be abolished immediately, and people should be free to move wherever they can find a home and make a living for themselves. Neither “society” (whatever that means) nor the government should be trying to micromanage freely adopted demographic patterns, or trying to exclude or screen people on the basis of their nationality.

We still have the right to manage the flow of new arrivals. For example, even if we agree that everyone who wants to work ought to be able to do so, it doesn’t follow that we are obliged to let in everyone who qualifies at the same time.

On what possible basis would you justify imposing these kind of discriminatory prior restrictions, screens, quarantines, dossier-gathering, etc. on Mexicans, Canadians, Guatamaltecans, Cubans, Haitians, etc., but not on U.S. citizens? How do you figure it’s “progressive” for the government to privilege one group of people over everyone else, when it comes to basic workaday activities like traveling, setting up a home, getting an education, or making a living, solely on the basis of their nationality?

Reform means taking control, and using that power more wisely and humanely, not abdicating.

Sure, which is why reform is a bankrupt goal: it leaves a fundamentally racist and classist system of power in place, even if it liberalizes the exercise of that power slightly around the edges. I’m not for immigration law reform. I’m for repeal.