Shifting the terms of debate & a call to conservatives in the wilderness

by: marsguero

Fri Mar 20, 2009 at 00:10:58 AM EST

I want to address those who can be persuaded by reason, and are interested in more than the worn out clanging from people who would have you believe there are aliens living among us.  The choice of the word 'alien' by the immigrant haters is obviously intended to literally alienate the immigrant as the consummate other. But it also exposes the infantile underpinnings of their thinking.  Their appeal is to the visceral, those who are only interested in short cuts to thinking.  They constantly deploy alien as their pejorative of choice because so many negative and frightening connotations attach to the word, but also because they believe in an America that is so encapsulated within a white-dominant cultural experience.  They think it's not a leap to convince us that a brown man speaking something other than English is deeply threatening and somehow un-human.  

Their ideas need to be exposed as extremist and un-American because they are.  
 

Nonetheless, the terrible immigration system we have now is at war with reality, and is widely recognized as a dismal failure all across the political spectrum.  It is the product of powerful interests that benefit from the status quo, but it is also an outdated and unworkable body of laws administered by a megalithic bureaucracies that leeches off of government waste and stunt productive economic activity. Eventually, market demands and interdependence between the U.S. and Mexico will result in far more open borders - eventually.  How long we have to be shackled with the INA, ICE, DHS and all the other useless laws, the agencies that enforce them and their acronyms, God only knows.  

Just like Babel was never going to reach heaven with its tower, the United States will never exercise absolute dominion over the flow of people across its borders.  It's a lie to tell people that one day it will be so, or that it should be so.  Simply because power wills it does not make it right, or feasible.  The lesson in the story from Genesis is an appropriate allegory because it is a condemnation of misplaced pride and idolatry.  The consequence of these transgressions is disassociation from our fellow man, frustration and waste.  Nations, just like individuals, are not gods.  When we pretend otherwise, we suffer.  

There are no aliens.  The people who are here without visas and passports are here because we want them.  They are our neighbors.  They are the product of our collective desire to have a dynamic economy that provides cheap produce, an unlimited variety of affordable restaurants, and profitable businesses.  We don't simply tolerate them.  They are not parasitic.  They are the pistons of economic output and productivity gains.  We don't only depend on them - we owe them because we are them.  

We stand upon the shoulders of ancestors who defiantly flaunted the unenforceable and poorly conceived laws of ages past, and who fled other places from across the world because they were many times compelled, or simply because they could.  The idea that they came "legally" is meaningless because the regime of immigration laws that existed throughout the majority of our Country's history was more restrained in its aspiration and laissez faire in its application.

The idea that the government had the power to completely restrain immigration was not born until a series of poorly reasoned Supreme Court decisions in the 1880s.  The federal government had no real way to even deport people who entered without inspection until the 1920's.  For the masses of European immigrants who came mostly during the 19th Century, walking up a large flight of stairs after getting off the boat was enough to pass inspection at Ellis Island.  Immigration laws were designed to favor the admission of protestant white people, exclude the Chinese and Japanese (after they built our railroads), and ignore the Mexicans as long as they work hard and stay quite.  Even ambitious  immigration laws were not designed to obtain absolute control over the immigrant population, not only during but also after admission, until much more recently.  

The government has never controlled our border with Mexico.  They have constantly exploited it in many ways, but never controlled it.  Our  attempt to exclude Asians for several decades was facilitated by the fact that they were traveling across the largest body of water on earth, and it still failed.  Even if we choke off our land with fences and guard towers, there will still be illegal entries.  

Take a look at the "war on drugs" for an object lesson in the inability of laws to eradicate profitable economic activity that is driven by willing actors and a product (or services) in demand.  As long as our citizenry and our economy demand cheap labor and the benefits it brings, while at the same time our immigration system constrains the supply of willing workers, there will be economic rewards for those who break immigration laws; employers and workers alike.

Breaking laws, however, is an important part of our tradition.  (That's why our separation from Great Britain was violent.)  Even though many of our great, great grandparents enjoyed the federal government's seal of legal approval when they immigrated, they were no less lawbreakers. That "free" land that was passed out so generously to aspiring pioneers was won by breaking treaties and trumping up wars.  The government and the settlers knew that it was being obtained and doled out illegally. After all, those treaties with the indigenous nations did have the force of law, yet they were breached by our forefathers without care.  Maybe they should have listened to their better angels, and objected to gorging on the spoils of war.  If they had, we wouldn't be here today, and the United States would be an entirely different nation.  In one way or another, we are all "illegal."  It's what makes us pioneers.  

Would to God that our people could regain some of the freedom that is born from restraining the powers of government.  Not the flag pin freedom, or the "freedom fry" swill we've been force fed for too long.  When our government exercises absolute control over our borders and our rights to associate and contract freely, this Country will have crossed a damning threshold.  Prosperity will wither and aspirations will flee because the government that controls who can come in will also decide who can go out.  The government that controls who can work, can decide who will eat.  

We need to parry on those who argue that security and sovereignty and the rule of law compel us to "fix our borders."  The fact that our borders are not, have never been, and are by constitutional design not fixed is no accident.  It is an integral part of the basic freedoms that are the inherent right of the people.  Let's shift the focus to challenge them with a vision of national pride in our liberty and the peoples' freedom rather than demagoguery wrapped in a flag.  Liberty from the oppression of government means the freedom to cross borders in pursuit of economic opportunity.  Once a person is here and has adhered to our social and economic collective, then that person is one of the people.  If we allow the government to impose absolute control over them, then we are selling out the power contained in the idea of people and that is the greatest threat to all of our security.