Now that the primaries are in full swing, the major candidates are debating who among them can most thoroughly violate the Constitution. My money is on John “Opie the Commie Redneck” Edwards, but a number of others seem to be giving him a run for his money, particularly when it comes to their plans to stop illegal immigration. John McCain, Ron Paul, Hillary Clinton, and Barrack Obama voted in favor of a bill authorizing the construction of a 700-mile wall along the 1700-mile border with Mexico. Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani, and Mitt Romney have all stressed the importance of building a physical wall during their campaigns.
Although the border wall issue has been discussed in great length by both the candidates and the media pundits, one small item in all this has gone largely unreported. It turns out that the land upon which the wall will be built is owned in large part by private citizens, not all of whom are that anxious to have their property stolen from them. And the Department of Homeland Security is sick and tired of waiting on these scofflaws to get with the program. As the Associated Press reports,
The federal government is preparing to go to court to force dozens of property owners in the southwestern U.S. to give it access to their land for possible construction on it of a U.S.-Mexico border fence. The government is readying 102 cases to gain entry to lands along the border owned by private individuals, local governments and others. A deadline for many of the owners to grant entry passed Monday or should expire in a matter of days...
The Homeland Security Department…says some of the properties may not be needed, but it needs to assess which ones it may need to purchase or seize through eminent domain for the fence or other barriers…
One of the holdouts is 72-year-old Eloisa Garcia Tamez who owns three acres of property in El Calaboz, Texas, a community about 12 miles west of Brownsville, a city at the southernmost tip of Texas. “I’m waiting for whatever they’ve got coming and I’m not going to sign. I’m not,” said Tamez…
Officials are considering building the fence north of a levee that crosses the property, which she fears would make much of her land inaccessible. She was told she could get access to the land south of the fencing through a gate that would be manned and be located 3 miles from her property.
“Here we are, American citizens, and have to go through a checkpoint to go through our own property,” Tamez said. “If they come in and do all that they are going to, they’ll leave me with nothing.”
Unfortunately, people like Eloisa seem to be completely left out of the immigration debate. Although the Kelo decision fueled popular backlash against the use of eminent domain for the benefit of private developers, apparently that outrage didn’t go far enough. In my opinion, eminent domain is an idea that should never have survived the American Revolution. It derives from the notion that all the land in the country really belongs to the king, and the individuals are mere custodians of His Majesty’s realms. So whenever the king needs his property back, the subjects are obliged to return to him that which is his. This concept seems rather difficult to square with traditional American principles of individual liberty.
But then again, very little of the immigration debate seems to fit within traditional American ideas of freedom. As a Cold War kid, I grew up pitying the poor souls behind the Iron Curtain because they were hemmed in by a concrete wall and had to present their “papers” to every soldier and government official that happened to demand them. We felt blessed to live in a country that was free of that kind of tyranny, but now we seem to clamor for it.
Why the change of heart? Well, most of the anti-immigration arguments revolve around welfare, jobs, and national security. But before we seal ourselves behind a 21st century Berlin wall of our own, perhaps it would be worthwhile to review each of these arguments critically to see if they hold water.
“Illegals get welfare and public services without paying for them!” Actually, immigrants (even the illegal ones) do pay taxes. They pay property tax (in their rent), sales tax (on the goods they buy), and even withholding tax (albeit under false social security numbers). In addition, the overwhelming majority of welfare payments in the United States fall under two categories – WIC and Medicare. WIC is the supplemental nutrition program for women, infants, and children. Medicare is for the elderly. Since most illegal immigrants are healthy young men, and since the 1996 Welfare Reform Act greatly limited illegals’ ability to collect welfare in the first place, this angle seems to be greatly overhyped. Besides, the idea that illegals “don’t pay their fair share” seems to miss the point of any welfare program, which is necessarily to transfer wealth to poorer people who by definition don’t pay their fair share of the benefits they receive. There are plenty of ethical and pragmatic reasons to oppose the welfare state in general, but the nationality of the recipient is irrelevant. The real issue is simply the redistribution of wealth.
“But they come over here and take American jobs!” I suppose this argument is persuasive to all those Americans desperately trying to land jobs picking strawberries and plucking chickens, but it doesn’t really ring true beyond that narrow constituency. The idea that illegals take jobs from Americans is based on a number of economic fallacies, like the notion that there are only a certain number of jobs available, and that if it weren’t for illegal immigrants, the wages in industries like food services and housekeeping would rise to the point where Americans would find them attractive. As Dan Griswold of the Cato Institute reports, “The pool of Americans who have traditionally filled such jobs continues to shrink as native-born workers become, on average, older and better educated. Yet our immigration system offers no legal channel for peaceful, hardworking if low-skilled workers to enter the country to fill those jobs.”
“September 11th changed everything! It’s an issue of national security!” Despite the fact that none of the 9/11 hijackers came across the Mexican border, I actually do think this is the strongest argument in the anti-immigration arsenal. Or at least it would be if it were consistent. If national security is really the issue, then surely a border wall on the Canadian border would be every bit as important as one on the Mexican border. In fact, given the ease with which foreigners can enter Canada, it would seem to be even more important. Since no one is talking about walling off everything from Seattle, Washington to Houlton, Maine, I have to conclude that national security is not really the driving issue after all. And as I have argued before, real national security will never be achieved while the U.S. government maintains an interventionist foreign policy.
“What part of ILLEGAL don’t you understand?” I know, I know. It’s against the law. I get it. However, the fact that something is illegal does not necessarily mean that it is wrong. It merely indicates that there is a penalty associated with a particular action. For example, the Texas state legislature could pass a law against wearing blue ties, punishable by a $50,000 fine and up to 5 years in prison. Does that mean that the day the law is passed it becomes immoral to wear a blue tie? Of course not. You may be risking jail if you dare defy the law, but that doesn’t mean that blue ties have suddenly become a menace to the security of the republic.
At the end of the day, the arguments given by those who wish to curb illegal immigration are little more than xenophobic bumper sticker slogans. Politicians are happy to tap into this fear, of course, because it gets them votes. But before we succumb to the hysteria, it may be worthwhile to recognize that all of the plans aimed at curbing this “crisis” have one thing in common – they all restrict the freedoms of American citizens:
- Authorizing the U.S. government to take land from American citizens to build a wall.
- Requiring everyone in the U.S. (immigrants and citizens alike) to carry a national ID card, and present it upon demand.
- Penalizing American business owners with fines and imprisonment for hiring the “wrong” people.
And here’s one more nugget to consider before a concrete curtain descends across the American southwest – there are an estimated 500,000 illegal Chinese immigrants in the U.S., and there’s a lot more than just a wall separating us from China. If the Pacific Ocean can’t stop illegal immigration, how much success can we really expect from a wall built by the same people who brought us the Post Office and the TSA?
