Barr vs. Boortz on Borders
David Weigel | April 9, 2008, 11:39am
The popularity of Neal Boortz and his brand of bare-knuckled, national greatness libertarianism is one reason Libertarian candidates do unusually well in Georgia. Georgia libertarian radio host, national audience: Seems like an unalloyed good for Bob Barr. But Jim Galloway listened in to a Barr-Boortz interview and heard the two scrapping about illegal immigration.
Said Barr:“You set a mechanism internally to determine who is here. And if you catch folks that are here unlawfully, and do not submit themselves to a background check that those coming into this country are going to be required to do, then you send them back to their country.”
Said Boortz:
“It sounds to me that you’re saying, if you find an illegal immigrant in this country, and they’re willing to submit to a background check, that that could open the door to them staying here.”
Said Barr:
“I think as a practical matter, that makes a lot of sense. I’m not sure how you would go about rounding up millions of people and trying to deport them. The key here is security….”
What's Barr's immigration record? The rundown from the restrictionists at Numbers USA is here, and it reveals that Barr voted against most liberal immigration policies, with a few exceptions. Those exceptions were usually for employers.
Rep. Barr voted AGAINST the Gallegly Amendment to H.R.2202. That amendment would have made pilot workplace verification programs (see above) mandatory in five of the top seven immigration states
Rep. Barr voted IN FAVOR of the Pombo Amendment to H.R.2202. He was voting for a massive new program that would have allowed agri-business to import up to 250,000 foreign farm workers each year for a period of service of less than a year.
Before the House passed the H-1B doubling bill (H.R.3736), Rep. Barr had an opportunity to vote for a Watt Substitute bill that would have forbidden U.S. firms from using temporary foreign workers to replace Americans. Rep. Barr opposed that protection. The substitute also would have required U.S. firms to check a box on a form attesting that they had first sought an American worker for the job. Rep. Barr voted against that.
This is the kind of stuff that starts restrictionists' teeth gnashing. How much Republicans and pro-McCain bloggers make of this will depend on whether Barr becomes a threat, and how much he pounds on the issue.
Fluffy | April 9, 2008, 1:22pm | #
Lonewacko, here is why you are wrong:
I suppose you will claim that the statement about "rounding up" is misleading because you don't intend to arrest every illegal immigrant. You only intend to make spectacular arrests and harass business owners until illegal immigrants "leave on their own".
I would submit to you that if you put a law on the books and a punishment on the books, you pretty be prepared to actually enforce that law and apply that punishment. If your law and your punishment would be exposed as horrific and unjust if it was instantly uniformly applied to all lawbreakers, it's a manifestly horrific and unjust law.
Laws that are not designed to be enforced are evil. It's that simple. They're either evil because they're selectively applied, or they're evil because they lie in their very existence, or they're evil because they will tend to be excessively harsh because they need to be in order to have the proper "symbolic" value.
Your law and your punishment can't be defended with the claim that they won't actually have to be applied, because "people will get the message". It's actually WORSE if the law isn't universally applied, because [as with the drug laws] that means you are using some persons as sacrificial animals, with no intention of actually applying the law uniformly or fairly.
Let's do the checklist:
If all murderers walking the streets were instantly arrested and had to pay for their crimes, that would be awesome. [Check - just law.]
If all burglars walking the streets were instantly arrested and had to pay for their crimes, that would be awesome. [Check - just law.]
If everyone who has ever smoked pot was instantly arrested and had to suffer the penalties on the books for the number of times they possessed or smoked pot, the result would be an almost unimaginable disaster. [Check - unjust law.]
If every illegal immigrant was instantly arrested and had to be kept in camps while their deportation cases were adjudicated, I think most people would find the resulting spectacle to be an absolute atrocity. [Check - unjust law.]
See how easy it is?
MikeT | April 9, 2008, 2:43pm | #
Just because America is more free than other countries in this regard does not mean that we should not strive to make it more free by itelf.
I agree, but Fluffy refuses to face the fact that he/she can "deny" something till the heat death of the universe, but that that has no relevance to what the federal government will do in retaliation for that denial. This is why arguments from the position of an ideal libertarian model are pure bullshit. No libertarian society has ever existed, and no libertarian society ever will exist because most people are motivated by more factors than just freedom, such as ensuring that their children are fed and taken care of.
This is why I scoff at the idealist positions that most of the readers here take. Human nature is almost never taken into account by libertarians. One of the fundamental lies of libertarian economics is that man is a rational animal. Man is a
rationalizing animal, not a rational one, and people will often sacrifice freedom if freedom comes at the price of an unacceptable loss of their more fundamental needs.
If you want to balance this out on an immigration policy, you have to balance two needs of Americans, because after all, they are the ones who the federal government supposedly derives its reason for existence from:
1) The need to support themselves and their family.
2) The need to not have the productive forced to support the unproductive.
Immigration is a solution to #2, but a threat to #1, if it comes in too large of numbers and from the wrong type of people. Should foreign students in American universities get visas? Absolutely. Should every Indian or Chinese with an engineering degree get one? No. You bring in the best and brightest, and cut off after that, otherwise you end up with a flooded labor market.
Look at what caused the rise of the Soviet Union: a government that put the interests of the economic elite above the common Russian subject. That was an extreme case, but it is illustrative of how a government cannot ignore the well-being of its common citizens or subjects in the name of advancing the interests of business and established interests. Eventually, the people will have enough, and give their nod to a leader who will swing the pendulum harshly the other way out of anger for what they have been through. If libertarianism is to have any hope of succeeding, it is going to have to take into account human nature and work to create a government that balances the direct interests of as many of its citizens as possible, something that our immigration program does not do.
Fluffy | April 9, 2008, 3:09pm | #
I agree, but Fluffy refuses to face the fact that he/she can "deny" something till the heat death of the universe, but that that has no relevance to what the federal government will do in retaliation for that denial.
Tough luck, Mike. How's that illegal immigration enforcement working out so far?
I don't employ any illegal immigrants, but it turns out I don't have to, because there are LEGIONS of people willing to subvert the immigration laws. All I have to do is laugh at you about it, and I can do that without exerting myself much.
We're having a normative discussion here, Mike. That means when I deny a premise, I'm arguing with its soundness or justness. If you think that replying, "Nyah nyah nyah nah nah, you have to obey, tough luck," is an answer, then I guess I'll answer you by laughing in your face and pointing to both the current state of enforcement and the likelihood that if H1B visas don't allow engineers to come to the US to work, it's likely that the work will just be outsourced to wherever those engineers actually are, anyway.
Immigration is a solution to #2, but a threat to #1, if it comes in too large of numbers and from the wrong type of people.
There's little evidence of this. I'm sure many economists would take issue with your argument here, and assert that immigration is a net benefit to the economy and therefore to the overall wage level.
But it's not necessary to argue the point. I actually have some sympathy for the anti-immigration position, although my reasons are different than yours. But we aren't actually arguing about immigration right now. We're arguing about whether an employer should be required to document an employee's citizenship before employing that employee. And that has nothing to do with immigration policy, really. It's a question of whether the purchase of labor is a unique economic transaction that requires a higher burden from the purchaser than any other economic transaction, and it simply is not. It should be no more incumbent on an employer to document the citizenship status of his employees than it is incumbent upon you to produce documentation of the tax status or import status of every product you buy. When you are required to produce documentation of the source country of every orange that made up the orange juice you bought this morning, I will acknowledge the justness of your demand that I document the citizenship status of my employees.
If you don't cooperate when you are shown good evidence to support the claim that it is stolen, you are morally responsible, as the banker, for any of that money that is spent.
Hey, I said I might cooperate in that case. The conditions of my cooperation would be: the money is demonstrated to be stolen by due process of law, and a valid court order presented for the funds.
What I would NOT cooperate with is the legal regime that says that all cash is automatically evidence of suspicious activity, and that if anyone brings cash to my bank [or uses cash to buy goods or services from me] that I have to inform on them. You will get no information from me that ordinarily would require a warrant by doing an end run around the 4th Amendment by forcing me to surrender the information as a condition of a banking or business license. You might consider this "morally bankrupt", but I consider the attempt of a state to circumvent the rights of its citizens by creating legal and economic privileges that one must surrender one's rights to obtain to be about 100,000 times as immoral as a banker engaging in wilful blindness regarding the source of large cash deposits.
