Re: the thread on the limits of open immigration
It’s time for Ayn Rand’s Power Question: What facts of reality give rise to the need for such a concept as X?
Here, X is “citizenship.” Why do we need this concept? Mainly, to determine who can vote. You can probably think of a few perquisites that attend to attaining the status of “citizen.” But that status has nothing to do with the rights of man.
The territory within the boundaries of a given country is the area in which its law has jurisdiction, the area in which a specific government, by its apparatus of compulsion, maintains a de jure and de facto monopoly on the use of physical force.
We used to discuss whether the police, in a voluntarily financed laissez-faire nation, would protect the rights of non-contributors against criminals. The answer was: yes, mainly because the thug who would assault anyone is a threat to everyone, including the contributors. The “yes” answer follows from practical, moral, and symbolic considerations. Defending the rights and freedom of everyone currently in the country is symbolic of a government devoted to justice.
The same considerations that require the government protect the rights of non-contributors apply to protecting the rights of non-citizens.
What, then, is at issue in this member’s statement?
A government’s priority is protecting the rights of its citizens. Protecting the rights of foreigners is a good thing as well, so long as it does not risk the rights of its own citizens. A foreigner does not become a citizen by walking over the border.
What does it mean to give priority to protecting the rights of one kind of person over protecting the rights of another kind? What does it mean in concrete reality?
Does it mean that if a cop sees the beating or robbery of someone he thinks is a non-citizen, he should decide whether his limited resources and time would be better spent fighting crime against citizens?
I don’t think that’s what the issue is currently. I think the idea is that if the government would “loosen up” due process of law for non-citizens—maybe feel free to search their homes without a warrant or demand identity papers without any reason—it would make the average citizen safer.
But due process and all the safeguards are there to rein in and make safer everybody who faces the possibility of government interference. The safeguards are there to eliminate arbitrary power.
Government is potentially a far bigger threat than criminals.
To introduce a preserve within which government agents can exercise unsupervised power is a threat that dwarfs that of any gang of hoodlums (citizens or non-citizens).
And this is what we are seeing with Trump’s every action—the quest for arbitrary power, unconstrained by checks and balances or anything other than the will of Donald Trump.
If Trump doesn’t have to follow due process in regard to non-citizens, does he have to follow it in regard to determining whether or not the person is a citizen? That’s not theoretical. That’s today’s headlines.
It can’t be repeated too often: the solution to crime is not “screening” or “roundups” of anyone; it’s repeal of the drug laws.
It can’t be repeated too often: the solution to lawless behavior by immigrants is not lawless behavior by the police.
You can avoid a criminal gang; you can even move to a different locale. You can’t avoid a SWAT team, the FBI, or any part of the state’s apparatus of compulsion and incarceration.
Incidentally, I’m dubious about the very policy of deportation. Why not treat all criminals the same—citizen, non-citizen, illegal, vacationer: arrest them when there’s probable cause, arraign them, indict them, try them and jail them if found guilty?
The pathetically inadequate answers come down to money: “We can’t hire more cops, more judges, build more jails, and feed the inmates.” Yes, we most certainly can. Especially when half or more of the cases go away when drugs are made legal.
And when you think of all the trillions being spent on nonsense and worse than nonsense, you get a sense of proportion: weigh the prospect of, say, ending the student-loan program against that of losing the restraints on the state’s power over you.
Threats to the rights of citizens? How safe would you, as a citizen, feel as you watch government agents in riot gear with machine guns herd foreign-looking groups into huge trucks to “disappear” them?
That’s what Trump promised and what he’s delivering.
As to the cultural-ideological makeup of immigrants, if Trump or any political faction can screen immigrants on the basis of their having an undesirable, “non-democratic” ideology—even if not expressed in any illegal action—then where do we Objectivists go to hide?
(I sympathize with any European’s worry about being overrun by Muslims who are seeking, or sanctioning those who seek, the imposition of Sharia Law, but ideological litmus tests are not the way to deal with that problem.)
