thelibertypapers.org — Much noise is made about immigration; legal and illegal, about defending or opening national borders, and about the horrors of NAFTA and NWO and blah-blah. All are real issues; this submission is perhaps a small beginning for discussion. True freedom of individual around the world is always the first consideration.
Jan 2, 2009 View in Crawl 4
damoclezJan 2, 2009
Very poor article. It skips around in a very illogical manner, without really addressing the legality of an immigrant. It tries to blur the basis of whether someone is in the country legally or not. Like all Libertarian issues, they tend to fall apart when you look at them closely. Complete laissez faire systems last only very short times, because the strongest (as measured by any number of variables) will always win and, humanity being who we are, will oppress those who they can, sometimes unintentionally, but it is truly the ultimate in selfishness. This article Really Sux.
striker101Jan 2, 2009Submitter
Okay folks, as per my description, by submitting this article I was hoping we would trigger a real discussion of how these issues relate to freedom of the individual, with an eye only toward how we can somehow return to respect for the individual as opposed to the oppression and force of government. So whether this article Sux or not is not important, but the issues are very important.
Closed AccountJan 3, 2009
Governments seldom get it right.
theh2omanJan 3, 2009
I'm actually going to have to disagree with you a bit machinepolitick. We most definitely do not have good immigration laws.Reason magazine recently explored this problem (I think it was two or three issues ago). They're coverage included an excellent pull-out poster revealing it can take over a decade to become a citizen and that during that time emigres are incredibly limited in their options here. This isn't good law.People claim to be wonder why individuals come to America illegally? It's because our system incentives it! When the costs, both in time and money are huge, and the possibility of enforcement is pretty low (and that's always going to be the case, with a border as large as ours) you'd have to be an idiot to not come illegally.
theh2omanJan 3, 2009
You obviously missed the point of the article. Issues of legal regime are completely irrelevant to a moral argument - unless you're trying to suggest that obeying and enforcing the law is a moral good in an of itself.
theh2omanJan 3, 2009
Stop conflating issues. The question of immigration and welfare are two completely separate topics.Even if we closed the borer and ejected every illegal immigrant, hell even if we ejected every person who emigrated legally as well, the current welfare system will cause a huge economic crisis within a few decades.Focusing on the use of welfare by illegal immigrants does nothing but distract from the real problems of our welfare system and wastes political capital on pointless action that doesn't solve problems and alienates minorities that might otherwise embrace a limited-government message.Stop emoting and start thinking.