Supreme Court to Hear Immigration Law Case This Week

Supreme Court to Hear Immigration Law Case This Week
"[M]any people across the country . . . will be watching closely when the Supreme Court hears arguments on Wednesday on the bitterly disputed immigration enforcement law that was passed two years ago in Arizona, inspiring the Georgia statute and similar ones in Alabama, Indiana, South Carolina and Utah." ( New York Times)

Which level of government should hunt down "illegal aliens" is the wrong question.

The Goal Is Freedom
Natural, Not National, Rights
Sheldon Richman
Posted September 26, 2011

Somewhere in my reading about immigration, someone made the deceptively simple point that it's not immigrationwe should be talking about but migration. That's another way of saying the focus has been on us, when it should be on the people coming to the United States. The discussion has proceeded as if they have no rights in the matter but we do. We will let them come here if and only if we have a use for them. And we doesn't refer to a group of free individuals, but rather to a collective Borg-like entity with rights superior to any held by its constituents. The collectivist, and therefore statist, nature of the discussion indicates how far we've drifted from our individualist and voluntarist moorings.

You can see what I mean in most of the commentary about what is prejudicially called the immigration problem. By that I don't mean such real dangers as migrant-exploitation and migrant-smuggling, which are products not of thelack of border control but precisely the opposite. No one would choose to cross the border at a cost of thousands of dollars and squeezed into a gas tank if he could walk or take a bus.

No, the problem that we presumably must solve is that too many of the wrong kind of people are coming here. Neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer writes, for instance, Do liberals [he means Democrats] believe that the number, social class, education level, background and country of origin of immigrants -- the kinds of decisions every democratic country makes for itself -- should be taken out of the hands of the American citizenry and left to the immigrants themselves and, in particular, to those most willing to break the very immigration regulations the American people have decided upon democratically?

I'm sure Krauthammer doesn't think of himself as a collectivist, but could his question be more saturated with collectivism? What does he mean when he says a democratic country should decide what kind of people may move to the United States? An abstraction, such as a country, doesn't make decisions. It requires prodigious evasion to take the self-serving, log-rolling, rent-seeking, voter-pandering, incumbent-protecting activities of a gaggle of legislators, who don't even read the bills they vote on, for the decision-making of The Country. Considering the long and winding road from an election of a congressman to the passage of an immigration bill, it's laughable to claim that the decision over who may enter the country lies in the hands of the American citizenry. Textbook political cliches can't change the facts.

Krauthammer goes on: There are tens of millions of people who want to leave their homes and come to America. We essentially have an NFL draft in which the United States has the first, oh, million or so draft picks. Rather than exercising those picks, i.e., choosing by whatever criteria we want ­ such as education, enterprise, technical skills and creativity ­ we admit the tiniest fraction of the best and brightest and permit millions of the unskilled to pour in instead.

Imagine that. We're giving up a golden opportunity to engineer the composition of our society. It's this sort of thinking that attracted many respectable people to eugenics in the early twentieth century. Krauthammer presumably would oppose central planning in other respects. But he's all for centrally planning the migrant component of the U.S. population. It's hard to see how centralized decision-making is bad in most matters but good in this one.


Bad Rights Drive Out Good

The synthetic right of The Country or Citizenry to decide who comes here nullifies the real, natural rights of flesh-and-blood individuals ­ those very rights that we believe set us apart from the rest of the world. Judging by the discussion, migrants have no rights to speak of; the Bush administration even demands that the Mexican government block its people from leaving Mexico. Forbidden entry requires forbidden exit. An American whose land borders Mexico apparently isn't entitled to think of that boundary as his border and to invite people from the other side to live or work on his property. Instead, it's our border, with our including people thousands of miles away. Then there's the popular view that if migrants couldn't find jobs here, they wouldn't come. Thus the Lou Dobbses of the country want to imprison employers who have the gall to hire migrants not in possession of tamper-proof government papers. So much for freedom of association and contract. So much for free and private enterprise.

Americans, we apparently are in need of reminding, are not the only people with rights, which are universal and natural, not national. As Robert Higgs says, [T]he Bill of Rights makes no mention of anyone's citizenship status. (FEE has been saying this from the beginning. See The Freedom to Move, 1951, by Oscar W. Cooley and Paul L. Poirot.)

And a country is not a country club. What separates a true liberal from everyone else is his or her belief that freedom is not a luxury for some, to be enjoyed only when they approve of the outcome, but a necessity for individual human flourishing.

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/tgif/natural-not-national-rights/