Comments Elsewhere

“In doing so, they only bolster the stereotype that porn is automatically sexist and homophobic.”

Well. Isn’t complaining that the content in Hustler makes porn look violently sexist and homophobic sort of like complaining that “Jump Jim Crow” or “Rufus Rastus Johnson” makes American musical look viciously racist? It always has: that’s the market niche that it’s carved out for itself.

Blowhard likes short responses. So let’s try it again:

“Another try: 60-80% of Americans think immigration rates are already too high. Now imagine how many of them would object to any open-borders proposal. Now: are you really going to say that you think it’s fine to overrule their preference in this matter?”

On my own property? Yes, of course I do.

Now tell me why I don’t have the right to do so.

Razib: ‘If you give them the word “god” most people would have an “idea” somewhere around the middle of the sphere, that is, an MRI would show the same general image, they would react in the same way to prayer or ritual, etc.’

But the conclusion that the ordinary people are having the same idea cross-culturally only follows from the evidence given if having the same electrochemical reactions in the brain and the same individual behavior constitute (or at least entail) having the same idea.

But they don’t, at least, not all the time.

If you could look at all the individual behavior and the brain processes and so on of a medieval peasant and her counterpart on Twin Earth (which is identical to Earth except that the seas, lakes, rivers, etc. are all filled with a substance XYZ, which is chemically very different from H2O but looks, tastes, feels, functions, etc. the same under ordinary circumstances) having to do with the word “water,” you would no doubt see exactly the same thing in both cases. But that doesn’t mean that they mean the same thing when they say the word “water”: the Earthling peasant means the stuff that turns out to be H2O, and the Twin Earthling means the stuff that turns out to be XYZ.

The parallels you might draw between this, and the deference over, e.g., the nature of rituals, matters of theological doctrine, etc. that the laity offer to theological elites (whether formal or informal), should be obvious.

Cut the pie any way you like, meanings just ain’t in the head.

“If we assume that an accurate top-down approach to the net benefit question is intractable, that the results largely hinge on biases and subjective considerations of benefit vs. cost, then I think that this should become a question settled by vote.”

You’re no longer talking about people deciding what to do with their own property. You are talking about a gang made up of the majority of people telling individual people in the minority what they can and cannot do with their own property. The land that I’m living on is my land, not yours and not the government’s.

aleph0: “It seems pretty clear to me that the simplest way to deal with illegal immigration is to crack down on employers.”

Awesome! So we can all go through even more government-inflicted red tape in the process of getting a job! This is sure to improve our economic well-being.

barlow: “That unskilled immigrants pay taxes is largely immaterial, because they pay so little. How much in taxes do you think someone making $7 an hour is paying?”

Quite a bit, actually. If you don’t think that low-income workers pay a hell of a lot of money in taxes it can only be because you are ignoring the (regressive) FICA tax and the (regressive) state and local taxes that nearly all of us pay.

But in any case, what has this got to do with immigration? The problems that you are citing, even where they are genuine, are problems common to all low-income workers, as a result of the tax structure that the government inflicts on us. If that’s a reason to forcibly exclude low-income immigrants, why isn’t it a reason to forcibly expel all low-income workers? If it isn’t a reason to expel all low-income workers, then why aren’t you working on reforming tax law rather than making immigration law even more draconian?

Blowhard: “Good lord but a lot of you seem determined to not take into account one important factor, which is the preferences of the people already living in said country, namely the USA. … But their preference should certainly be taken strongly into account, don’t you think?”

Their preferences concerning what?

Their preferences concerning the use of their own property certainly should be taken into account. In fact, they already are; trespass is against the law and you have every right to throw people off of your property if you do not want them there.

But if you’re trying to give an argument for immigration prohibition, then you aren’t just asking whether people’s anti-immigrant sentiments should hold sway over how they use their own property. You’re also asking whether they have the right to force other people to use their own property only in the way that the 60% see fit. You and your neighbors only have a right to enforce your preferences on your own stuff. While disregarding what many of your neighbors think may or may not be crass (this depends, inter alia, on whether their judgments on the matter are rational or irrational), I can’t see any justice in making it criminal.

aleph0: “I am saying that it should in the very least not artificially inflate the supply of low-skilled labor by neglecting its duty to enforce immigration law.”

Again, open borders are a free market in human movement. Immigration law, when enforced (as it is, even if not so harshly as you’d like) is a government intervention to constrict the labor market. If there is a growth in labor supply as a result of free choices to immigrate, then that’s not an “artificial inflation”. It’s the market at work.

You aren’t happy with how you think the market would work, so you propose government intervention to support low-income citizens on the basis that the State has a special obligation to safeguard their earning potential. That’s state socialism. Specifically, it’s national socialism as opposed to international socialism. Draw your own conclusions about whether this is a position you want to hold.

aleph0: “If I, as owner of property A, have absolute control over what is to be done with my property, then certainly I have every right to disallow use of my property from whomever I chose? I am within my rights to disallow immigration to kingdom A for whatever reason I choose.”

If “kingdom A” happens to be your own property, then yes, of course you do. That’s just a matter of trespassing law; it has nothing in particular to do with immigration. But that has nothing to do with this:

“If we assume that an accurate top-down approach to the net benefit question is intractable, that the results largely hinge on biases and subjective considerations of benefit vs. cost, then I think that this should become a question settled by vote.”

Y

Well, I just prefer the term “feminist” myself, but the idea is to pitch as big a tent as is reasonable, so I didn’t want to alienate people who, for whatever reason, identify strongly with branches of the women’s liberation movement but don’t like calling themselves “feminists” specifically. I think this sort of stuff is less likely to come up now than it was in the 1970s, but you never know.

(And if you think that string of modifiers is long, just check out what they had to do to cover most of their bases over at Anarchoblogs…!)

birch: “How do you propose to solve the problem of poor immigrants not being able to support the infrastructure they use?”

Me: “Try not to indulge in anti-immigrant fabulism. Poor immigrants pay federal and state gasoline taxes just like everyone else.”

birch: “mass unskilled immigration is OK because they pay…gas taxes? Please.”

Try to stay on topic. You made a specific claim about infrastructure, and how immigrants do not support the infrastructure they use. This claim is false. In the case of roads, for example, immigrants pay for their use of the road the same way that everyone else does: by gasoline taxes.

“Let’s say someone works 250 days a year and uses 2 gallons of gas each workday. That’s 500 gallons of gas. Even if gas taxes were 50 cents a gallon, that’s only a mere $250.”

What the hell do you think is the marginal cost of one additional commuter on the road? On what basis do you figure it’s more than $250 / year?

“And btw, highways are generally paid for out of the state general funds and federal income taxes, not just gas taxes.”

In FY 2000, 13.3% of highway funding by all units of government came out of General Fund spending. The remaining 86.7% came from so-called “user fee” taxes such as gas tax, tire tax, additional charges for heavy vehicles and trucks, etc. If you’re that damn worried about the remaining 13.3%, however, it seems like you ought to focus on inefficiencies in road building and maintenance, or on slightly raising “user fee” revenue, or (better yet) on beginning to privatize roads so that they can calculate on their own how to support themselves. None of which has anything in particular to do with immigration.

However, here’s another secret for you–don’t tell anyone! Immigrants also contribute to the General Fund at the state, local, and federal level! Documented immigrants pay all the taxes that you do, including income tax and FICA, and are barred from receiving many of the services that you can receive. Undocumented immigrants still pay sales tax, property tax (either on their own or through the rent they pay to whoever owns the property they live on), and the myriad other taxes that the government inflicts on our daily life.

birch barlow: “Utter nonsense. Large-scale immigration of poor people makes the problems associated with welfare programs and other government-financed programs far worse. Poor, unskilled immigrants put a disproportinate strain on the welfare system and the justice system for that matter. They are also far less able to pay for the services they use.”

This isn’t an argument for immigration restriction. It’s an argument for lobbying to deny welfare services to immigrants. Actually a substantial amount of public aid is already off-limits to both documented and undocumented immigrants; it’s not like you couldn’t rally support for a move like this. The Left would complain, but they’ll complain about your “shoot ‘em on sight and build a fence” ideas too.

birch: “How do you propose to solve the problem of poor immigrants not being able to support the infrastructure they use?”

Try not to indulge in anti-immigrant fabulism. Poor immigrants pay federal and state gasoline taxes just like everyone else.

birch: “The fact that current voters vote for leftist policies at an alarming rate is not an excuse to bring in more people who will, on average, vote even more in favor of socialist policies and have children who will vote for such policies.”

aleph0: “Razib’s non-economic argument is, IMHO, particularly significant when it comes to the responsibility the nation has to it’s native-born low-skilled workforce. This is relevant because massive low-skilled labor immigration directly reduces the ability of native born low-skilled workers to find productive employment. Regardless of the morality of welfare, reducing the ability of already low-skilled workers to find productive work increases the demand for welfare. A country has a duty to the citizens of its polity, low-skilled included, that it does not for non-citizens.”

I await birch’s principled denunciation of such shamelessly socialist attitudes from the anti-immigration corner.

Me: “So where does the government get the right to demand that I pay them protection money to keep their goons off of my family’s doorstep?”

Frank: “The same place the government (ostensibly) gets all of its powers, from the governed.”

Do you, as an individual citizen, have the rightful authority to take a shotgun and point it at non-citizens and demand that they pay you protection money in order to keep you from kidnapping them and leaving them back in Mexico?

No?

Then how did you manage to delegate that authority to the government?

Frank: “My point was that there are more parties concerned than just immigrant and employer.”

Indeed. The immigrant needs a place to stay. But that’s provided by his family, in the hypothetical. (Or the immigrant might make a deal with a willing hotel owner, or landlord, or buy a plot, or…). The immigrant needs roads to drive on. But in the present system those roads are paid for primarily by gasoline taxes which the immigrant pays as much as you do. And so on. So what? Where does your right to demand protection money to keep the government from invading the property of the immigrant’s family and kidnapping him and sending him back home against his will come in?

“The concept of sovereignty seems to have escaped you”

As a libertarian, the only form of sovereignty I recognize is individual sovereignty, which can be delegated but can never be alienated or destroyed. You do know that that (classical liberal, Lockean, Jeffersonian) notion of individual rights and legal authority is where phrases like “consent of the governed” comes from, don’t you?

Frank argues: “The point is that the overwhelming majority wants (restrictionist) immigration reform, but their representatives still won’t enact it.”

Who cares what the overwhelming majority wants? The question was whether or not “open borders” constitutes a form of social engineering. The answer is that it doesn’t. Even if the overwhelming majority of people wants force to be used against immigrants regardless of whether or not those immigrants have violated anyone’s rights, failing to do so is not using government force against anyone.

(Incidentally, those who are familiar with Hans Hermann-Hoppe’s work may find it amusing to watch as both paleolibertarian arguments and arguments from majoritarian democracy are thrown out in order to attack the position.)

And: “The ranchers who have finally reached their limits and started trying to police their own properties against illegal aliens certainly know a bit about the government force brought to bear in favor of open borders.”

The issue here isn’t open borders, it’s proportionality and the right to self-defense. If you think ranchers are acting appropriately to curtail trespassing and being punished by the government for it, that hasn’t got anything in particular to do with immigration.

Frank goes on: “The fact that you can even frame a question like that with a (presumably) straight face argues against any reasonable person wasting his time formulating an answer.”

My comment was in response to a blogger who has repeatedly identified himself as a libertarian, on a blog read by many people who express libertarian sentiments. Libertarians typically consider private property rights important and government expropriation of wealth problematic at best. They also typically aren’t swayed by majoritarian arguments for using violence to achieve some set of cultural goals. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to pose the question, given what Razib and others have stated in the past in this space. If you think no reasonable person could possibly consider libertarian objections to immigration controls, then what do you think about people who claim to take libertarian claims seriously in general?