Comments Elsewhere

doj: The illegal immigrant has to live somewhere, use public roads and other services, school their kids, etc. When you provide jobs to illegal immigrants, you profit while imposing these costs on other citizens.

How are the costs “imposed” in this case different from the costs “imposed” by hiring anybody who has to use government roads and services to get to your house? How are they different from the costs “imposed” by you personally when you use these government services?

Are you operating on the (false) assumption that only citizens (or perhaps citizens and documented immigrants) pay taxes?

doj: One of the jobs of government is to prevent this sort of behavior at least in the cases where aggregate utility decreases.

The easiest way for them to prevent freeloading on taxpayers is to stop subsidizing schools and roads and other services. Trying to minimize or contain freeloading by taking it out on immigrants who aren’t, after all, responsible for the subsidies is not a solution; it’s just a diversion, and one that happens to harm a lot of innocent people.

Boogieman: The next set of rights, and the ones supposedly in dispute today are the rights granted by the Constitution. These rights are natural rights possessed by all free men [sic]. … Non-citizens, however are given no such guarantee by the Constitution.

Nonsense. I defy you to show me any passage in the Constitution which distinguishes between citizens and non-citizens in delineating the natural rights which the government is bound to respect, or indeed anything identified as a “right” at all, other than voting rights (which are, in any case, arguably better described as one of the “privileges and immunities” of citizens rather than as a right, which are, except for the franchise, invariably ascribed to “the people” or to “persons” rather than to “citizens”). There is absolutely no textual basis for the claim that the restraints on U.S. government power, as expressed in Article I, the first ten Amendments, the Thirteenth Amendment, etc., don’t apply to the government’s powers over non-citizens as well as the government’s powers over citizens.

Boogieman: If they wish to exercise their natural rights, fine. They have no legal basis to appeal to the Constitution for protection of those rights, however.

Even if this were true, it would only serve as an argument against the legitimacy of the Constitution. If the Constitution allowed the U.S. government to violate the natural rights of non-citizens with impunity, then it would be a criminal document, worthy only of the contempt of civilized people.

Boogieman: In addition, natural rights do not include the right to break the law, for either citizens or non-citizens.

“You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. … The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: There are just and there are unjust laws. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. 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 Saint Augustine that ‘An unjust law is no law at all.’”

Part of what having natural rights means is that there are things that no government has the legitimate authority to do to you. If those sorts of injustices are commanded by a law, then defiance of the unjust law is justified, since laws that are passed without legitimate authority are not binding on anybody.

Of course, you could claim that U.S. immigration law isn’t unjust, and doesn’t violate the natural rights of immigrants. But then you’d just be assuming what it’s incumbent on you to prove. So let’s hear the argument for that, rather than a bunch of pseudo-legal mumbo-jumbo about clauses that the Constitution doesn’t actually contain.

From the article:

MOSCOW (AFP) — Tens of thousands of people marched through central Moscow on Monday to celebrate May Day in peaceful demonstrations organized by pro-government trade unions and Communists nostalgic for Soviet times.

About 25,000 trade union members called for a “social state,” holding balloons and flowers, according to police spokesman, Viktor Biryukov, quoted by ITAR-TASS news agency.

Several thousand Communist Party supporters also marched from the Lenin monument on October Square to a bust of Karl Marx near Red Square, carrying red flags and portraits of Stalin, an AFP reporter at the march said.

They may not have the tanks and the commisars available for the parade anymore, but the apparatchiks in the crowd seem to be marching for a return of the tanks and the commisars.

And I think demonstrations organized by “pro-government trade unions” for more bureaucratic patronage may be a good summary of everything that May Day is supposed to be against.

Macker:

One way we can keep distinguish between those immigrants who wish to freeload off others and those who do not (my preference as you obnoxiously put it) is to establish rules that disallow the freeloading. For instance one could make it illegal for first and second generation immigrants from going on the dole and that doing so would revoke citizenship.

Fine. Let’s do it. Now will you start working for this, rather than for calling for immigrants to be shot at the border?

And hey, why stop there, anyway? Why not try to make it so that nobody can go on the dole at taxpayer expense?

One could require the immigrants to provide some form of bond or insurance that would ensure that they would not have to be cared for by the state.

This will only create exactly the same monitoring and enforcement problems as any other form of ex ante immigration control. (Who do you want to verify that they have the right level of assets? The IRS? Who do you want to take action against them if they don’t match up? La Migra and the Border Patrol?) As such it involves a violation of the rights of numerous innocent third parties, and falls to the same objections. It’s also completely unnecessary if you make it impossible for immigrants to go on the dole anyway.

Kennedy,

I didn’t suggest that descriptions like “Du Toit is using bigotry to excuse aggression against innocent third parties” should be presented without an accompanying argument against the bigoted premise, did I?

What I think I have argued is that that is an accurate description of the structure of du Toit’s argument, and that it can be part of connecting your exposition of the argument to your criticism of it (in this case, as a transition to the general reasons for rejecting political collectivism), so there’s no reason why describing an argument as resting on a “bigoted” premise entails not addressing the argument on its merits. It’s just a description of the structure of the argument, which may or may not be accurate in a particular case, and which, if accurate, can be part of addressing it on its merits, by pointing the way to the rest of the argument.

How much of that argument needs to be spelled out and how much can be taken for granted depends on the audience that you’re addressing; here I’ve only mentioned the general reasons against political collectivism rather than spelling them out, or spelling out their application to this particular case, because I’m not trying to convince du Toit (or other border creeps) of anything at all about immigration at the moment. I’m trying to convince you of something about something else, and I figure you’re already acquainted with the arguments that I’m using as examples.

So, what’s the problem with describing the structure of du Toit’s argument by saying “Du Toit is using democratic mysticism [or, bigotry] to justify violence against innocent third parties”? If there are good, established reasons for saying that they are, in fact, innocent, isn’t that an accurate description of what du Toit is in fact doing?

Kennedy,

And aren’t there good, established reasons for saying so? (E.g. that collectivism is false?)

Kennedy,

Well. Aren’t they, in fact, innocent?

I’m not a fan of Galbraith’s, but he and you are spot on about the mathematization of economics.

Penis envy towards the “hard” sciences is an important part of the explanation; I think the professional interests of planning bureaucrats (a common destination, or aspiration, for institutionalized economists) are another; a lot of economists have, after all, a professional interest in justifying their positions as number-compilers, number-crunchers, and number-fudgers to the powers that be.

Personally, I think the best critique of the tendency was actually published several years back, in the form of a parable, in a Calvin and Hobbes strip.

Kennedy,

Isn’t it true that Du Toit is using democratic mysticism (among other things) to justify aggression against innocent dissenters?