Immigration. Despite other headline-grabbing news, this issue persists.
How could it not? Trump’s masked goon squad, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), abducts peaceful people off the streets, from their workplaces, and from Home Depot parking lots, then shuttles them without due process to detention centers, including the ominously named Allegator Alcatraz, and prepares to deport them to third countries deficient, shall we say, in their devotion to individual rights. Many detainees have been unable to contact family and attorneys. Even American citizens have been swept up, subjecting them to the trauma of confinement until they demonstrate that they “belong here.” Trump’s quota of 3,000 detainees per day creates the most perverse of incentives for ICE agents. He reportedly has berated ICE because the arrest numbers are too low.
Need I say that this should not be happening in America, and Americans should not forget that it is happening? Fortunately, some glimmers of hope penetrate the dark clouds. The latest to come to my attention is the reported bad morale among ICE agents. Apparently, they don’t enjoy “arresting gardeners.” Why don’t they quit?
Moreover, recent polls indicate that a growing number of Americans dislike how Trump is handling immigration. Naively, they seem surprised that Trump did not confine his hunt to real criminals (that is, murderers, muggers, rapists, thieves, etc.) but is going after people who hold jobs, live normal lives, behave neighborly, and bother no one. (And, alas, pay taxes.) We’re also seeing federal district judges smack down ICE raids and Trump’s autocratic bid to rewrite the Constitution on birthright citizenship. (See the 14th Amendment.) …
“Indeed,” Caplan responds, “they [border restrictions] probably have a bigger effect than all other regulations combined.”
It’s simple. Billions of people around the world live on a few dollars a day or less. Under open borders, tens of millions of them would migrate to the U.S. every year. Remember: Even if you’re an illiterate peasant from Bangladesh, credit markets and/or employers would be happy to front the money for airfare. This immigration flow wouldn’t stabilize until real estate prices massively increased and low-skilled wages drastically declined. The U.S. population could easily increase by 50% in a decade. New cities would blanket the country. The level of output would skyrocket—and its composition would rapidly change, too. Whether you love this vision or hate it, you can’t deny that free association would radically and rapidly reshape the face of America.
The upshot: “restrictions on the right to associate are massive, and there is enormous pent-up demand to migrate. Hundreds of millions of people want to move here, landlords want to rent to them, employers want to hire them—but the law won’t allow it…. While restrictions on exclusion are occasionally irksome, they rarely ruin lives. Immigration laws, in contrast, usually condemn their victims to life—and often early death—in the Third World.”
Like free trade, free immigration is overwhelmingly win-win.
Well, this is an article that looks at another side of immigration and immigrants. Freedom to associate as well as freedom to not associate are both considered with this author saying. “Open the borders!” He makes the point, through a contrary viewpoint, that the whole world’s population can live with a 1/4 acre plot of land in Texas, sans roads or anything else. It can be done, can’t it? Perhaps open borders are a great idea as long as freedom of association and not associating includes the freedom not to give anybody any handouts or freebies, especially from taxation. Just to ask one question, though: When are all the other countries going to open their borders? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right?