This House Supports Free Immigration

Many thanks Con for clarifying your stance, I must admit this is now going to be a difficult debate on my part. I shall have to martial my facts and evidence accordingly. Here goes. In Defense of free Immigration: Immigration is one of the most difficult and divisive issues for freedom lovers. Many believe in government restrictions on immigration, either for their own sake or as an interim measure so long as the United States has welfare programs that are presumed to attract immigrants, who then become net recipients of government revenue at the cost of taxpayers. Most arguments against immigration, coming from partisans of freedom, boil down one way or another to the notion that free immigration fosters socialism and moves American society away from the libertarian ideal. It is argued that immigrants use welfare programs and encourage their expansion; or that immigrants modify American culture generally for the worse, bringing from their native countries alien and socialistic ideas; or that free immigration itself constitutes a de facto trespass against the private-property rights of Americans; or some combination of the above arguments is advanced. C1. It harms the country they move from: There is no evidence to support this. If Cons argument on overpopulation in America is anything to go by then it would be hypocritical for him to state that the migrant"s home country would be benefited if said countries population would be larger. C2. Immigration harms the country they move to: Some pro-immigration libertarians have attempted to show that illegal immigrants actually receive less in welfare than they pay in taxes or even less than what native-born Americans receive, on average. This argument, as useful as it may be, circumvents the fundamental issues of immigration policy. (I, for one, think that if open immigration overloads the welfare system, causing it to collapse, so much the better.) In exploring immigration as a social service welfare issue, let us consider that it is not only opponents of social welfare who oppose open borders because of a perceived relationship between immigration and the welfare issue. European countries with socialist economies oftentimes have extremely strict immigration policies, and citizens of those countries oftentimes see that open immigration threatens their welfare state, which they strive to maintain. American advocates of social welfare policies also see the incompatibility between their pet programs and a free flow of immigrants. In a recent interview with Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader implied such an incompatibility, as well as a conception that the government should centrally plan the economy, when he said, "I don"t believe in giving visas to software people from the Third World when we have got all kinds of unemployed software people here." He went on to say, This is the reason the Wall Street Journal is for an open-borders policy: they want a cheap-wage policy. . .. [Illegal immigrants] should be given all the fair-labor standards and all the rights and benefits of American workers, and if this country doesn"t like that, maybe they will do something about the immigration laws. Nader is willing to bet that an expansion of labor regulations and economic socialism would lead to tighter immigration controls, which he appears to advocate. Conservatives have at times attempted to restrict the ability of immigrants to receive welfare benefits, such as with the notable 1994 Californian voter initiative, Proposition 187. This is surely a better method to reduce any problems immigration might have regarding the welfare state, when compared to giving the government more power and money to keep out immigrants who only seek work and freedom. It is more politically viable and more realistic, and reduces the activity of the state, rather than increasing dependence on it. (Ideally, of course, immigrants would be exempt not only from welfare but from taxes as well. Even more ideally, these exemptions would also apply to citizens.) All in all, any alleged relationship between free immigration and a growing welfare state is irrelevant to the underlying issue and lacks tangible evidence in regards to be destructive e.g the UK and Russia, as pointed out by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and is pro free immigration. As Hoppe explains, [The effect of immigration on social service welfare] is not an argument against immigration but against the welfare state. To be sure, the welfare state should be destroyed, root and branch. However, in any case the problems of immigration and welfare are analytically distinct problems, and they must be treated accordingly. In consideration of the United Kingdom, I am currently here and have just started school at Harrow. I can certainly advocate that the education here has not been affected by immigration, in fact if one considers the new 2012 international university survey they will find that the United Kingdom has 4 schools within the top 6, and from a country nearly the size of Florida that is a remarkable feat. http://www.guardian.co.uk... Therefore, I cannot accept that the education has been affected in the UK, I will go as far as to say that Harrow is far superior to the education I received back home in the US. Additionally, My father is English, therefore I have English family. My English Aunt who recently discovered she had cancer underwent emergency treatment and medication in 2010, she has since made a full recovery and has no bills to pay. Here it can be deduced that immigration has not affected the medical system as Con suggests. No welfare problem or attack on social services (as Con has pointed out) is ultimately the result of immigration. Therefore, I urges us to separate these issues conceptually. C3. It harms cultural relations: Some, including this writer, often argue that immigration is a blessing to the culture of America, which has always been a nation with a large immigrant population. The expanded variety in foods, music, art, and traditions is one of the things that makes America the great country it is. Con argues that immigrants bring with them foreign customs, practices, and ideas, which, on balance, compromise the tradition of American liberty embraced by native-born Americans, whose Anglo-European heritage provides them with an affinity for the rule of law and constitutional liberty or who simply have assimilated and come to embrace freedom over socialism. There are weaknesses with this argument, seeing that many immigrants come especially because they seek freedom, not the socialism or despotism characteristic of the countries from which they come. To the extent that they come for the socialism that already exists in America, it testifies as much against the socialist tendencies of Americans, who enact such policies, as it does against the foreigners who seek them. However, like the welfare/social issue, the cultural impact of immigration is really secondary to what kind of immigration policy is fit for a free country. Many libertarian policies will tolerate culturally and even morally questionable trends, but we who cherish freedom believe that such vices will pale in importance when compared with the moral virtues and practical benefits of maximized freedom such as America so bravely and stridently fights for, as well as the moral and cultural greatness that such freedom, on balance, nurtures. Open versus restricted immigration and employment: So the real question is whether open immigration or restricted immigration as Con may prefer, is the more appropriate policy for a free country. One argument against open immigration, given by some, is that in an ideal world almost all land would be private, but in the meantime illegal immigrants who use public space are essentially trespassing on what should be the privately owned land of native-born Americans. It is indeed true that we should maximize how much land is owned privately. If nearly all land were private, landlords, employers, merchants, and others would determine who could enter their property. Every property owner would have his own "immigration" policy. The fact is as Con skimmed, landlords, employers, and merchants currently allow immigrants on their land all the time, and in many cases would be more open to immigrants if they did not fear legal repercussions. The only question that remains is what to do about public property, including much of the land along the national borders. Whereas in a free society property owners along the border would be free to allow foreigners to enter their property, opponents of open immigration believe that the government must, in the interim, forbid people from allowing immigrants onto their own land. The philosophical case for prohibiting immigrants on public land " and by corollary, effectively keeping them out of the country and off the private land of willingly accommodating owners " as an extension of private property rights is highly problematic. Why would such a rationale not be fitting to limit, by law, the number of children a family can have? If a middle-class family has 10 children, certainly it takes up an amount of space disproportional to its income and what it pays in taxes. Every day we see the willingness of Americans to accommodate immigrants. The market supports them. They work, purchase goods and services, and pay for housing. Their use of public resources and land, if anything, is a problem with the status of so much property as public " just as their potential abuse of welfare is a problem with welfare itself. Continuing to shut out immigrants, or becoming even more restrictive with the borders, further reinforces the notion that so much public land should be protected by government, and takes us a step away from our ultimate goal of eventually privatizing it. Once most land is privatized, most immigrants would be able to find work and housing in the marketplace, and in the meantime the government cannot mimic the proper supply and demand for labor in lieu of market mechanisms. Furthermore, the use of the federal government to control borders contributes directly to socialism far more than the immigrants themselves. Just like all other federal government programs, immigration controls are a form of socialism. They involve bloated budgets, bureaucracy, central planning, taxation, abusive police powers, intrusions in the marketplace, and widespread corruption. Immigration controls are expensive, and they clearly don"t work that well. More than a million foreigners enter America illegally every year. A serious attempt to keep them out would require even higher taxes, a more militarized border patrol, and vast invasions of the privacy of employers and other Americans. It would potentially require a national ID card, as well as an army of border police and federal agents to round up and repatriate illegals. It would depend on central planning, which, as all free-market economists should know, simply doesn"t work. The border guards have already been implicated in a number of scandals, and the idea that the government can maintain efficiency and honesty in its border police, when the federal government does a poor job of preventing corruption and degradation among city police, prison guards, and even in the highly regimented military, requires quite a stretch of the imagination. As borders are tightened, a black market in immigration will expand, leading to increased violence and government corruption. The war on drugs has utterly failed to keep drugs out of the country, and yet has succeeded in draining away enormous resources and eroding precious civil liberties; a war on immigrants would yield similar results. Immigration, the Declaration, and the United States Constitution: Moreover, just like all the other socialist federal programs in America, free immigration is totally constitutional. Article I, Section 8 provides no authority whatever to the federal government to close the borders. It is a step in the wrong direction to violate the Constitution further, simply to allow one favored government program to slip through. Such leniency with the Constitution, after all, is how we wound up with so much socialism and freedom in the first place. This brings us to the question of the history of immigration control. Many Americans point to the 1965 amendments to the Immigration Act, which loosened restrictions on immigration somewhat, and associate them with Lyndon Johnson"s socialist Great Society programs of the same era, believing they are another indication that free immigration and socialism go hand in hand. This does not necessarily follow any more than Andrew Jackson"s opposition to central banking and his atrocious Trail of Tears, when taken together, demonstrate that free-market banking goes hand in hand with the brutal displacement of American Indians. Still, it is often useful to see the political movements associated with certain political trends and opinions. In the case of immigration, we can go all the way back to the Declaration of Independence, in which Thomas Jefferson cited King George III"s obstruction to immigration to the colonies as a grievance: "He has endeavored to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands." For most of U.S. history, there were virtually no immigration controls. Some northern states had Black Codes that kept free blacks from entering. Eventually, the federal government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Therefore, in light of the evidence, I refer back to my original statement that it is anti American to go against free immigration; it is immoral, unjust, and hypocritical in light of American legislation, the Constitution, our history, and an insult to our military personnel who are currently at war in the name of freedom and said principles.