Rightwing proponents of America’s socialist system of immigration controls claim that foreign citizens should not be able to enter the United States without “permission.” They are referring to the need to secure “permission” from two entities — the federal government and the private sector.
In making their “permission” argument to justify America’s socialist system of immigration controls, conservatives display their lack of understanding of the principles of freedom and free markets.
When anyone needs to secure permission from the government to exercise fundamental, God-given rights, we automatically know that that is not a free society. Freedom and governmental permission are opposites. When you have to ask the government for permission to engage in a purely peaceful act, you are not free. You are a serf who is asking, “Master, may I?”
As Thomas Jefferson pointed out in the Declaration of Independence, everyone in the world (that is, not only American citizens) has been endowed with natural, God-given rights. These include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
These rights do not come from the government. They preexist government. The only reason that government is called into existence, as Jefferson pointed out, is to protect the exercise of these fundamental, preexisting rights. No one needs to ask the government for permission to exercise these rights. The minute that any government requires people to ask for such permission is the moment when people have lost their liberty and have become permission-asking serfs.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Think about those rights for a moment. Life encompasses the right to sustain one’s life through labor. Liberty encompasses the right to engage in occupations, professions, and trades to sustain and improve one’s life. The pursuit of happiness encompasses the right to do whatever you want in life, so long as your conduct is peaceful and non-fraudulent.
No one needs to get the permission of the government to exercise these natural, God-given rights. And yet, that is precisely what America’s system of immigration controls requires.
Every day, there are people who cross state borders within the United States. In doing so, they are exercising their natural, God-given rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They don’t need governmental permission to cross those state borders. The principle is no different from an international border. People have as much right to cross international borders freely as people have to cross state borders freely. Exercising the natural, God-given rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which inure to everyone, when one crosses an international border is no different from when one does the same in crossing a state border,
Thus, the irony is that while conservatives celebrate the Declaration of Independence every Fourth of July, they denigrate the concept of natural, God-given rights with which everyone is endowed the rest of the year when they support America’s socialist system of immigration controls.
And it is a socialist system. That’s also what rightwingers, who normally decry socialism, can’t bring themselves to see. America’s system of immigration controls is based on the core socialist principle of central planning, which brings what Ludwig von Moses called “planned chaos.” Not surprisingly, that’s what we’ve had on the border for the last 80 years — planned chaos, along with death, suffering, rapes, kidnappings, refugee camps, detention centers, a Berlin Wall, concertina wire, highway checkpoints, warrantless searches, and a massive immigration police state, all of which conservatives falsely describe as a “free” society. But it’s not a free society. Socialism is the opposite of a free society.
What about the second feature of the “invitation” argument that conservatives make — that foreigners should need specific invitations from American citizens in the private sector before they should be permitted to enter the United States?
Their arguments demonstrate a lack of understanding of the price system that comes with a free-market economy. The price system is the invitation system in a free society.
Consider Walmart. It does not send out an engraved invitations to the residents in a community inviting each of them to come to Walmart. Instead, it simply opens its doors and offers to sell good products to people at a low price. The low prices are the invitation for everyone, Americans and foreigners alike, to come and shop at Walmart. No engraved invitation is necessary.
Consider a farmer in Oregon who needs his crops harvested now or otherwise they will rot in the fields. He doesn’t need to secure a list containing the names and addresses of prospective workers in Mexico and then mail them an engraved personal invitation to come and harvest his crops. By the time he did that, his crops would be rotten. He simply raises the price of farm labor to, say, $50 an hour plus transportation, room, and board. Immediately, word spreads in Mexico and workers rush to the farmer’s assistance. The price system provides the invitation to them.
The Declaration of Independence’s emphasis on the fundamental rights of man and the principles of the free market point the way to open borders — an immigration system that is based on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as well as on dignity, harmony, and sound economic, moral, and religious principles. Too bad rightwingers just can’t see that.