Yesterday
Jake
asked about how murderers and rapists would be kept out under my utopian
open-border proposals. I may be mistaken, but I'm hearing two things in the
question. First, "the government" is keeping murderers and rapists
out right now, and second, if we abolish government border police, we will
have no way to deal with criminals who come from south of the border.
It's always good to remember that if I were elected, I would be the only
Libertarian in Congress. That's 434-1. Republican Ron Paul votes
libertarian, so ideologically the vote is 432-2. A libertarian society will
not come about overnight. (Even
Ron
Paul is not as open-borders as I am.) For the next few years the
government will still be in the business of granting visas and naturalizing
new citizens, and murderers will kept out.
Or at least
most murderers will be kept out; murderers with friends
in high places or with buckets of drug money will still get through.
Then again, one wonders if
any murderers are now being kept out by
the government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara_Salvatrucha
So perhaps the government is not keeping murderers and rapists out after
all.
One writer
has moved from worrying about those who call themselves
"Mexican-American" to those who call themselves
"gang-American."
Perhaps we would be better off not depending on "the government"
to deal with murderers. We must move in the direction of consistency. We
should be true to our best assumptions. We have two alternatives: move
toward (1) Christian libertarianism or move toward (2)
statism.
Statism says build a Berlin Wall around America. Turn America into a police
state. The Christian answer was seen in the
voluntary
associations of the past, who met immigrants at the docks and converted
them from criminals to Americans. This is the true "culture war,"
an offensive missionary-minded war, not a defensive statist war.
As Rushdoony pointed out in that essay, Europe literally emptied out their
prisons and shipped their crimimal class across the Atlantic to the new
world. But America did not become a criminal distopia. Voluntary
associations preserved the godly character of the nation by evangelizing and
converting the immigrants into Christians and Americans. In the 20th
century, government stepped in to replace private charities, and America's
Christian culture went into freefall.
The government is not keeping the murderers and rapists out. So the question
is, do we want to strengthen the government so that it does, or should we
create new solutions in a libertarian context?
I frankly don't want a government powerful enough and a Berlin Wall high
enough to keep every murderer and rapist in the world out of America.
America's
Founding Fathers clearly opposed such a strong-arm state.
The Biblical promise is that all nations will be attracted to the prosperity
and healthy culture of a Christian nation. Even if the immigrants aren't
truly converted,
they
will act like it in order to assimilate and benefit from participation
in a Christian capitalist economy.
We are dealing with a cultural problem, not a border problem. We can't build
a Berlin Wall all around the U.S. Gang turf is usually "public"
areas within the U.S. By "public" I mean not privately-owned, or
not governed by private property owners who see themselves as soldiers in a
culture war, but regulated by government, rent checks paid by the
government, or lacking the influence of voluntary associations. "The
City" tends to be anonymous and impersonal. "The Ghetto" is
the creation of a government that tells private voluntary associations that
"poverty is OUR job, not yours," and zones immigrants away from
growing and healthy economic and cultural influences. In a Christian
libertarian utopia there would be fewer zones of anonymous isolation, where
gangs are now multiplying like a petri dish.
Where should we invest our energy and talents? In creating that libertarian
utopia, or in strengthening the state to protect the status quo?
We should move in the direction of that "libertarian utopia"
because the economic advantages of millions of hard-working immigrants
vastly outweighs the harms of a handful of murderers. That may sound greedy
and callous, but if you think about it, it's true. We can turn America into
a police state to keep one murderer out, and then the standard of living of
millions is dramatically reduced. If we open the borders and the murderer
gets in, the statistical probability of YOU being murdered is very small,
but you and millions of other people gain better lives through new jobs,
specialization, and the effects of competition and the division of labor.
We should also move toward that "libertarian utopia" because
it's
the right thing to do, and we have no right to pray "God bless
America" if we're not doing the right thing. A bureaucrat in Washington
D.C. has no ethical or moral right to tell Jones in L.A. that he cannot hire
Gonzales, or cannot rent to Garcia. These are basic God-given rights which
Washington D.C. has no right to alienate, either from Jones or Garcia.
There are no immigration laws between Missouri and Oklahoma. How do we here
in in Missouri keep murderers from Oklahoma out? Are fences and border cops
economically justified? Are Mexican immigrants statistically more likely to
be criminals than
Oklahoma
fascists? Is there evidence that people who want to come to America from
Mexico are more criminal than people who were born in the American
welfare-state? If America were more libertarian, how would all this change?
What kind of immigrants would a Christian libertarian America attract? What
kind of Americans could immigrants become if they were met at the border and
welcomed by Christian libertarians? I say let the murderers in, and conquer
them with the weapons of faith.
2 Comments:
Kevin,
You have caused me to change my position on immigration some what.
I have a question though. How would you plan to keep the murders and rapists out? I didn't completely understand that.
I may be mistaken, but I'm hearing two things in your question. First, "the government" is keeping murderers and rapists out right now, and second, if we abolish government border police, we will have no way to deal with criminals who come from south of the border.
I'm learning that I can't post long links in comments (or at least it appears that way in the "preview,") so I'll comment on this comment in my next post.