One benefit to illegal immigration.

I am someone who believes, based on evidence and experience, that the vast majority of people are assets where ever they live. The degree to which they are an asset to those around them may vary. And whether a person is born in a country, or moves there, makes very little difference in the equation. Actually those who move may have the edge as it takes no effort to be born, at least not on your part, but plenty of effort to immigrate, whether legally or illegally.

The video below is an interview with Alexander Rybak, a musician/singer in Norway who has become quite popular in Scandinavia, as well as Europe in general. (More below.)

Rybak won the Eurovision Song Contest as the Norwegian entry, with the highest combined score in the history of the contest. His original song Fairytale was visually spectacular, told a great story, and was musically compelling. His combination of classical violin, Folk dancing, and his own lyrics are highly entertaining. And it doesn't hurt that Rybak is a natural charmer.

I was aware that Rybak was born in the old Soviet Union in Minsk and that he and his parents emigrated to Norway. But this interview brings out some things which I didn't know, until now.

Alexander's father, Igor Alexandrovich Rybak is a classical musician. When Alexander was still a young child, Igor went to Norway and stayed there illegally. According to Alexander his father hide in Norway, with the help of a rich family there. For two to three years he worked illegally saving up the money to bring his wife, Natalie, and young Alexander to join him.

Alexander says that he didn't even know he was immigrating to Norway, only that he was going to visit his father. But immigrate he did. It is not clear from the interview whether he and his mother were also illegal immigrants but it is clear his father was. And Alexander says the old Soviet Union was unhappy and that the KGB was looking for his father.

Alexander speaks of his memories as a child under Soviet domination. He remembers the family living in a tiny apartment that they had to share with another family. He says he never knew this wasn't the way most people lived. As he put it, if one's parents run around the garden dressed up as kangaroos a small child just thinks that is how everyone does it. He didn't know better so he assumed that life was normal.

But Alexander and his parents acclimated to the new culture, the new way of life, and the new language. So far I've heard Alexander interviewed in Russian, Norwegian, Swedish and English, which is rather impressive given how many people can't give an interview in one language.

His music has created a lot of wealth for the producers and much enjoyment for his legions of fans. He has enriched the world around him. Yet he is the product of illegal immigration. If the redneck vision of immigration were wholly accurate, he ought to be a rapist, a murderer or a drug dealer, occupations the rednecks wish to reserve for themselves I suspect.

It is absolutely true that Alexander is exceptional. The son of the typical illegal immigrant will not become a world famous entertainer. But neither will the same child typically become a criminal. Most live their lives in ways barely any different than those of the wider culture. Most work for a living, most create families that they love and care for, most contribute to their neighborhood, and to their new found home. Along the way most produce surplus wealth, leaving this world richer than they found it.

But there are the great exceptions, those immigrants who enriched their new home in much greater ways: Irving Berlin, Albert Einstein, Andrew Carniege, Houdini, Levi Strauss, Father Flanagan, Elizabeth Taylor, Angela Lansbury, Bob Hope, Ayn Rand, Colonel Tom Parker, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Isaac Asimov, Joseph Pulitzer, Eddie Van Halen,, Andre Previn, Knute Rockne, Mario Andretti, Wayne Gretzky, Admiral Rickover, Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi, Max Factor, John Audubon, and Ludwig von Mises as a very few examples. When you look at this list you wonder what area of American culture was not enriched by immigrants.

I would dare say that many of the immigrant-bashing xenophobes are quite appreciative of many of these immigrants, but don't realize they are immigrants. Most people just assume you can't be more American than Bob Hope for instance. The great American pants are Levi's, named after Levi Strauss who produced them in San Francisco. Knute Rockne was the epitome of an American sport's hero.

My life is richer because of immigrants. And I suspect you has been as well, even if you don't know it.

And now an excuse for a second Rybak video, this time the visually stunning rendition of his song Europe's Skies. This is also available in HD format, if you have it.

Atlas surrenders: No Will for Freedom

As this blogger sees it the Atlas Society, that band of Ayn Rand aficionados, has joined the hysterics about immigration. Atlas, the mythical man that is, was strong, holding the world on his shoulders. Atlas, the society, seems to have become something else.

One of their writers, Will Thomas, has penned an essay that betrays Rand's ideas.

Background on the Arizona law.

Mr. Thomas basically says that when a law is passed which throws freedom under the bus, then Objectivists like himself must support the law. In particular he means the legislation that Arizona passed requiring anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant to provide ID to police upon demand. I had wished to gather the evidence to do a full expose of the origins of this law, but in a nutshell, it was written by a group from outside Arizona that has close ties to racist organizations. The law was actually written by a group called the Federation for American Immigration Reform—don't let the name fool you, they don't want to reform immigration they want to end it, especially for non-white immigrants.

FAIR has received $1.2 million in funding from a little-known racist outfit known as the Pioneer Fund, founded by, and this is not hyperbole, Nazi sympathizers and advocates of racial eugenics. This may explain why the local legislator who introduced the law was caught sending out anti-Jewish articles from a neo-Nazi group. The founder of FAIR, John Tanton gave his personal papers to a library, and those papers include his correspondence with numerous racists, anti-Semites, and ne0-Nazis. Tanton introduced FAIR to the Pioneer Fund, founded to promote "race betterment." And he told one of FAIR's major funders to read the work of an anti-Semite in order to "give you a new understanding of the Jewish outlook on life." Tanton told this woman that the book "explains a large part of the Jewish opposition to immigration reform," by reform he means restrictions.

Tanton also said for "European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that." Tanton promoted a book that claims that Jews actively try to undermine cultural majorities in any country where they live in order to enhance their own power. Among the alleged tactics of "the Jews" was promotion of non-white immigration.

Tanton started a publishing house that focuses on two bugaboos: the threat of immigrants and the threat of so-called overpopulation. One book he published is America Extinguished, written by a notorious racist and anti-Semite, Samuel Frances. Another book they print is the racist rant, The Camp of the Saints, a book filled with bad economics, open racism and hysterical projections about the threat of non-white immigration. Tanton's own website says this novel "envisions the overrunning of European civilization by burgeoning Third World populations."

Ayn Rand: Illegal Immigrant?

As further background you should know that Ayn Rand was both Jewish and an immigrant herself. And we should be clear that Ayn, in order to escape communist Russia, lied to get into the United States. She basically entered the country illegally. As has been well documented, the young Ayn pretended to be coming to the U.S. in order to study the film industry so that she could return to Russia to work in the film industry there. Her first actually published writings were two booklets the Soviets published by Rand about the American film industry.

Rand, however, knew she had no intention of ever returning to Russia. Rand's biographer and friend, Barbara Branden, also an immigrant and Jewish, described Ayn's dilemma. Even though Ayn had secured Soviet permission to visit the U.S. for six months, she still had to secure a U.S. visa. Anti-immigrant hysteria in the U.S. had lead to the passing of numerous laws meant to keep out immigrants of a certain kind: and among them were Eastern Europeans, mainly Jews who were fleeing a history of pogroms against them.

Branden says Ayn could only secure a visa "if she could convince the consul that she did not plan to remain in the United States," this in spite of her having every intention of staying in the U.S. Rand had already decided that if the visa were turned down by the consulate in Latvia, where she had to travel to receive it, "she would vanish into the anonymity of Latvia, and find a way to flee to Europe." When Ayn meet with the U.S. consulate official, who would approve or deny her visa, "she thought she must tell him every reason she could invent to convince him that she wished to return to Russia."

As the official was looking over her application she read the dossier he had in front of him. She noticed it said she was engaged to marry an American. Ayn pounced, insisting that the information was wrong. And then she embellished the truth by saying that she was engaged, but to a Russian whom she would marry upon her return. She was not actually engaged to anyone. The official took a closer look and realized that her papers had been confused with another woman's and told her he was about to deny her the visa but would now approve it—after all, she was to be married in Russia, after her temporary visit to the U.S.

As far as I can see, Ayn Rand was forced to lie to U.S. officials in order to secure a visa to come to America. I am no expert on 1920 immigration law but I suspect that lying to secure a visa is itself a crime, perhaps one that would be considered severe enough to cause the cancellation of said visa. Ayn Rand secured her visa under false pretenses, but I don't fault her, legal (truthful) immigration had been closed to her. So, in order to get the papers she needed, she invented a lie. She most likely broke the law to do so and I suggest that her immigration to the United States was illegal as a result. After her arrival in the country, she did go to Hollywood and the rest is history. She met and married Frank O'Connor, and because of that marriage she became a citizen. It was also well known to O'Connor that the marriage was necessary for Ayn to remain in the United States.

A law is a law. But what about rights?

Now I want to turn to precisely what Mr. Thomas said and why I find it so objectionable from a libertarian, even an Objectivist, viewpoint. The Thomas piece starts with the premises: "illegal immigration is illegal, isn't it?" Yes, so is marijuana, so was sodomy up until a couple of years ago, and so are numerous things defended by Objectivists. Objectivists, would even argue that people have the right to engage in activities that are illegal. Rights trump the law, which was a major point of Rand's theory. She argued that individual rights limit the power of the state, not that the power of the state limits individual rights.

Thomas tries to take a middle ground by acknowledging:

People who cross the border without permission are violating no one’s rights. Ignoring the INS does violence to no one. They’re just ignoring a restriction on freedom. When their lives and well-being are at stake, they are morally justified in taking that chance.

So he recognizes a right to immigrate and that the immigrant is not violating the rights of another person. He even says that our current immigration policy is not compatible with a free society. But then he goes off into statism: "Yet the idea of a free society is even less compatible with the failure to enforce the law. The rule of law is the basis of all dependable liberty and open government."

The rule of law was never intended to mean that all laws must be obeyed. That is just a recipe for totalitarianism. Rule of law bound, not just citizens, but governments as well. The premise is that rights, as Jefferson said, exist prior to the establishment of any government. And all legitimate government is founded for the purpose of protecting the pre-existing rights of the individual. As such, the law when properly understood binds the state. In the course of protecting rights government has the obligation to do so in a clear, consistent manner with rules that are obvious, objective and consistent with the rights of the individual. Immigration law is anything but that. It is often arbitrary, and it is clearly inconsistent with individual rights. The sad reality is that illegal immigration is widespread because, for most of these people, legal immigration is not possible.

This isn't a matter of these people "getting in line" like everyone else. They aren't allowed in the line. The line is closed to them. American immigration law denies the possibility of legal immigration and that forces people to resort to illegal means.

Thomas seems to be saying that obeying all laws, regardless of how bad the law, is important for freedom. He puts the worship of law above the primacy of individual rights and liberty. Obedience to the law comes first. He writes:

So if the Arizona government will actually enforce the existing Federal laws, bully for them! Certainly, the Federal government should do more to enforce its own laws. Whatever the law is, please, let’s enforce it objectively and with due process. When the law is unjust or unwise (and so many are!), we must fight at the polls to correct them. But if we undermine the rule of law just to win the odd smidgeon of liberty, we are cutting our own throats.

Read that carefully please. "Certainly, the Federal government should do more to enforce its own laws." What the fuck! Is this what Objectivism has come to? Consider what this means. We have drug laws so, according to Thomas the Federal government should send armed DEA agents into more homes, shoot more family pets, violate more property rights, kill more innocent people. After all, the law must be enforced even more than it already is.

According to the logic of Mr. Thomas, the IRS should do more to audit tax scoffers, more to enforce onerous confiscatory tax policies, and arrest more tax evaders and imprison them. After all "the Federal government should do more to enforce its own laws." As Mr. Thomas has written his statement, the Feds should enforce all the laws on the books and enforce them good and hard—in the name of freedom. Dare I mention that if the Feds actually enforced all the laws on the books, with 100% efficiency, there would be no freedom left in this country.

But according to Thomas "the rule of law" means that government legislation trumps individual rights, something he refers to as an "odd smidgeon of liberty." Consider that in Arizona no one is allowed to work for another person without their name being on a state database giving them permission to work. Under e-verify it is a crime to enter into a private labor agreement with another person without "verifying" with state authorities that they have the "right" to work. This interferes with the rights of every single employer to enter into private contracts. But it’s just an "odd smidgeon of liberty" and so government can control every single labor contract, in the name of liberty and the rule of law.

Another thing Thomas pooh-poohs as meaningless is that government has stripped people of the right to move about without government documents on their person. He writes:

I don’t understand what the griping is about: if you have a passport with a valid visa, or a green card, or a U.S. passport, just carry them. I carry my passport every day living in a foreign country as I now do.

So, in the name of liberty every citizen can be forced to carry government identification. Eduardo Caraballo, who I mentioned yesterday, is a natural-born American citizen who looks Mexican. He was held for three days by Immigration even though he had ID on him and had his birth certificate shown to them. Mr. Thomas may think he is lily-white enough to pass inspection, so that the law never harasses him, but Mr. Caraballo knows the reality. He had ID, he was born in U.S. territory and he was still imprisoned for three days while the Immigration bureaucrats tried to verify this.

In other words, any U.S. citizen can be incarcerated on the assumption that are illegal until the bureaucrats, moving at their usual snail's pace, verify that the person is not illegal. Even carrying government ID, as Caraballo was doing, is not sufficient. Ask Mr. Caraballo if he thought three days imprisonment was merely a violation of an "odd smidgeon of liberty." What is an odd smidgeon of liberty to Mr. Thomas was three days unjust incarceration to Mr. Craballo.

Certainly Mr. Thomas does think he is white enough to be safe. He notes that the “illegals” everyone worries about "are Mexicans and Central Americans. ...So it's perfectly reasonable to check whether apparently foreign-born Latinos are in the country legally. Just as it is perfectly reasonable to check whether anyone with a non-native- accent is in the country legally." Mr. Thomas just doesn't want to get to the point where we have "check-points or conduct random checks: that would hassle everyone, and it would be pretty ineffective at finding illegals, too." See, we shouldn't be "griping" about a law that hassles only people who "look" Mexican, after all the alternative is hassling everyone, i.e. white folk like Mr. Thomas, who currently think they are, or should be, immune from harassment.

There is an interesting aspect to the wonderful Cory Doctorow novel, Little Brother, where the Homeland Security thugs take over San Francisco after a terrorist attack. They begin monitoring everyone's travel habits using RFIDs in the travel cards that people are required to carry. The "Little Brothers" who are out to tear down Big Brother use their knowledge of technology to confuse the RFIDs so that individuals appear to be making suspicious trips, which triggers an investigation by Homeland Security. As more and more people got caught up in the gvoernment's net support for the bad law falls leading to the end of the practice. Mr. Thomas thinks this is a bad law, he just wants to make sure that people who don't look Mexican, like himself, aren't hassled by it.

Try Telling that to Ayn

I also note he thinks it reasonable for government agents to demand ID from anyone they encounter who has a "non-native speaker accent." Imagine this policy being enforced while Miss Rand was alive—she with her deep, guttural Russian accent as thick as the soups from her homeland. I would not want to be the bureaucrat who demanded "papers please" from her. She would have neutered the man on the spot and been livid about the experience for months. You would be able to hear her vitriolic denunciations of this sort of intrusion by the state, merely because she had a "non-native speaker accent," from miles away. She would denounce such a policy as being entirely inconsistent with the premises on which America was founded. And she would be right.

And, if some apologist for the system dared approach her and said: "I don't understand what you are griping about: if you have a passport with a valid visa, or a green card, or a U.S. passport, just carry them. Why are you worried about the odd smidgeon of liberty when failure to obey the state is undermining the rule of law. Why, if you don't put up with this, because you have a Russian accent, we are cutting our own throats."

How do you think Miss Rand would reply to that? If she didn't reach down the weasel's throat and literally pull out his intestines, she would certainly do it metaphorically. But, if said weasel did it in the name of Rand's own philosophy, I wouldn't want to watch the carnage. On second thought, yes I would. I would love to be able to see Mr. Thomas attempt to make this argument to Rand herself. Once he uttered "odd smidgeon of liberty" he would have been out on the pavement. I think I know enough about Ayn to know she would never have tolerated this sort of bullshit from anyone, let alone from someone spreading it in the name of her own philosophy—a philosophy that wouldn't exist today if Ayn Rand had not intentionally lied to secure a visa to come to America—something which I still insist made that immigration an illegal one.

Buck the Constitution, full speed ahead.

Generally local prosecutors are petty politicians with ambitions. That makes them dangerous to the cause of liberty as well as to general human well being. The ambition means they tend to engage in actions that they feel will garner them publicity. The actions of one such politician, Ken Buck, of Weld County, Colorado interest me because his actions undermine the claims made by the Know-Nothing anti-immigration crowd.

Prosecutors thrive on scapegoats. Unfortunately, with all the rampant political correctness, it is has become more and more difficult to find a really good scapegoat. It used to be that you could just round up a “bunch of queers” and get the applause of the mob. In the South you had the option of lynching some “uppity nigger” and winning re-election handily as a result. Well, that’s another one of those time-honored traditions that bit the dust. Pinning the problems of the world on Jews, well that went out of style with the funny little mustache on Hitler. Thank God for “sex offenders” (just don’t define the term) and illegal immigrants. When somebody needs a good bashing for some premier political publicity you at least have them to go after.

And old Ken Buck decided to prosecute illegals. His problem was how to determine who was and wasn’t “illegal.” So Ken decided to cast a very wide net, and one that breaches the Constitution and the rights of his constituents in many ways. You can say that he really “bucked up” royally.

Buck knows something that the bigots he is appealing to don’t know—in my experience it is best not to spend too much time on what the anti-immigrant crowd doesn’t know, there is just far too much territory to cover in one lifetime. Buck knew that “illegals” do pay taxes. A good number of them file income tax forms every year, a habit I don’t like to encourage.

But tax records are confidential, even to law enforcement. The Feds are so greedy that they don’t want to do anything to discourage people from paying their bloody money to the vampires in Washington. So Buck decided to try to skirt around the law—odd how those who make and enforce the laws are so eager to find ways to make sure those laws don’t apply to themselves. So the old Bucker went and conducted a raid on a local tax preparation office and confiscated all their copies of tax returns that were filed.

This, of course, means they went in and took tax records for everyone, including the native born and legal immigrants. It is was a search for evidence on par with having police go through every home in a neighborhood because they suspect that someone in the area committed a crime. They confiscated all the records. They didn’t go in even looking for specific records that are explicitly named. Apparently the Constitutional protection about search and seizure was something that the old Bucker was willing to piss down the drain—hell, he had “illegals” to bust and why let some damn Constitution get in the way of that.

Local judges have ruled that Buck violated the Bill of Rights. He doesn’t care. What’s a Bill of Rights between friends anyway? Surely we can’t let Constitutional limitations on power get in the way of the police? Of course, I happen to think it critical that we put the Constitution in the way of all armed government agents. That was the purpose of the thing after all. Jefferson said that the Constitution was intended to “bind” down politicians and public officials, to prevent them from expanding their powers beyond those enumerated in the Constitution.

As a libertarian I’m not Constitutional Patriot, I support liberty. But to the degree the Constitution restricts state power I’m for it. Not old Ken, his view is “Buck the Constitution, full speed ahead.” Buck says he will appeal hoping that judges higher up will give him permission to ignore the Bill of Rights. By the way, Buck got his start working for Dick Cheney, so you know what sort of respect he has for limited government. He also likes to whine about “the assault on traditional moral values” so you know what sort of statist you are dealing with here.

It should also be noted, that while Buck is trying to get around the Bill of Rights and Constitutional limitations on his powers that he also presents himself as “small government” conservative. This hypocrite spoke at the Tea Party rally in Colorado where he screamed, “we hear the warning about extreme government, we hear the warning about extreme taxes, we hear the warning about losing our liberty. And we’re going to do something about that.” So what is this Bucker doing? He’s trying to get around the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

And why is this old fraudulent loudmouth doing this? He’s planning to run for the U.S. Senate so he wants to bash immigrants, bash the Bill of Rights, bash the Constitution and, in the tradition of George Bush, present those views as the small government philosophy. The problem with the Tea Parties was they were infected with fringe, anti-freedom conservatives who are about as committed to individual liberty as Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, George Bush and Benito Mussolini. I should note that when I started writing this, and said that Buck is clearly ambitious for higher office and more power, that I did not then know he was running for Senate. It just proves my case.

So conservatives, what do you do? We watched you guys roll over and present your ass (that’s arse for the Brits who read this) to George Bush for a good screwing for the last eight years. Will you at least defend limited government when the guy Bucking the hell out of your rights is some petty Know-Nothing official? Or, are you so used to being pimped out to every big government cause that comes along, that you’ll pull out the lubricant and smile?

Those who aren’t reaching for the KY jelly might want to email the old Bucker himself at WELDDA@co.weld.co.us.

How illegal immigrants create jobs.

Take the following true story as an example, and remember, tighter border control could have prevented this from happening.

The place, the American southwest, temperatures are soring. It’s hot out, really hot. The residents of the house aren’t old, but old enough that they aren’t in line for heavy garden work. The trees need trimming, the leaves racking and the weeds pulling. All the best intentions in the world didn’t get any of it done.

A landscaping company is called in and asked what they would want for a general clean up of the yard. The owner surveys the yard carefully and insists he will need $250. He’s thanked but the offer is turned down. In realistic terms the budget wasn’t going to allow $250 for that. So the work was put on the list of things to do, some day, in other words, it was unlikely to be done.

As one of the residents pulled out of the driveway he noticed that a neighbor had a team of workers cleaning his yard. Unlike the company that gave a quote earlier, these people didn’t have a logo on their truck. It appeared likely that they were illegal immigrants who had come to America just to earn a living. They were willing to do work that most Americans are not willing to do. This was proven very quickly.

When they were asked for a quote on the clean-up work they said $100. The next day the resident returned to see the men working next door again and told them that the quote was fine and asked when they would like to do it. The response wasn’t your typical American reply; “We’ll get back to you about a time next week.” The man who led the crew said: “How about now?” They finished the one house and began to work at the second property. Four of them were working and working hard.

How do I know that they were more willing to do the work that was being done? Simple, they charged $100 while the other company wanted $250. The cost of hiring the local company, with a native-born owner, meant a premium of $150 for the same work. The immigrant team was $150 more willing to work, or the native-born team was $150 less willing to work. Either way you look at it, the one team was more willing to take the work.

If native-born Americans were equally as willing to do this work then the rate difference between them and the “illegals” would be close to zero. If anything, the native-born might have a slight premium merely due to some people expressing a preference for them as workers. Of course, that would lower the wages of the illegals and only make them that much more competitive.

Also, we should ask: Did these “illegals” steal a job from the locals? No. First, you don’t own jobs, they are not property. A job isn’t like a car, something that you can take away from someone who owns it. Jobs are contracts between willing buyers and sellers. Neither should be forced into the contract unwillingly. But let us be clear about this situation. No job existed. A need existed. And it was unfilled. The residents sought out American workers and discovered that the fee they wanted exceeded the value of the work for the residents. No job was created simply because the cost of labor exceeded the value of the work.

The job was only created when the illegal workers were willing to do the work at a rate that the residents could afford. Certainly in this case, and many similar cases, these workers are not stealing jobs, but creating completely new jobs. They are creating jobs by being willing to do work that others are unwilling to do at prices that attract buyers. Unemployment is always a creature of wage rates. Even today full employment would be possible—at a low enough wage—but most people won't take the positions. That some people are willing to work for those lower wages creates jobs that otherwise wouldn't exist. Precisely why is it that we are trying to stop them? Who actually benefits from that?

Let’s evaluate all the interested parties in this real life exchange. First, the residents of the house are clearly better off. They needed the work to be done, weren’t that willing to do it themselves because of their circumstance. To them the yard work was worth more than the cost of hiring the workers. By their own estimation, they are richer, since then now have something of value, which is worth more than the value of the money they parted with.

Second, we have the immigrant workers. Clearly they wanted the money and were willing to exchange some labor for the cash. They did so because they perceive themselves richer with the extra cash, than with extra leisure time. There is no shortage of leisure time when you have no work. These workers are better off. And I presume that their families are better off as well.

Is the “native-born” worker, who didn’t get the job, worse off? No, he wouldn’t have gotten the job either way. His labor cost more than the residents were willing and able to pay. He didn’t lose a job since the job was never his to lose.

The yard looks better, and that has some value to the neighbors who live nearby. They prefer to see a neat and clean yard than one looking like jungle bush. All these people are slightly better off because a transaction was made voluntarily between willing buyers and willing sellers.

Of course, Homeland Security is working hard to make sure this doesn’t happen any more! And, think, the Boy Scouts are learning how to engage in armed assaults on gangs of illegal gardeners, nanny’s, busboys and maids. God bless America.

Illegal immigration drops proving anti-immigration crowd wrong.

The New York Times reports that that census data from Mexico “indicate an extraordinary decline in the number of Mexican immigrants going to the United States. They report:

Mexican and American researchers say that the current decline, which has also been manifested in a decrease in arrests along the border, is largely a result of Mexicans’ deciding to delay illegal crossings because of the lack of jobs in the ailing American economy.
The trend emerged clearly with the onset of the recession and, demographers say, provides new evidence that illegal immigrants from Mexico, by far the biggest source of unauthorized migration to the United States, are drawn by jobs and respond to a sinking labor market by staying away. “If jobs are available, people come,” said Jeffrey S. Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group in Washington. “If jobs are not available, people don’t come.”

Doesn’t the anti-immigration lobby find this curious? Under their theory of immigration these people should still be coming to the United States at the same pace as before. The anti-immigration crowd argues that immigrants are only coming to America to “get on welfare” and “live off the taxpayer.” Did someone abolish the American welfare state when I wasn’t looking?

Nope, it’s still there. What has changed is that lots of jobs have disappeared. With fewer and fewer jobs the immigrants are not coming in. Since welfare remains, since the “free” health care remains, since the public schools remain, then the this sharp downturn in immigration is a very, very strong indication that most immigrants come to America to work, not to live off welfare. I fear that the tendency to sponge off the state is a habit that is indulged in more by the native born than by migrants.

Destroying American jobs in order to deport Mexicans.

The perpetual whine of the xenophobic nativist is that immigrants are “stealing our jobs.” The idea is absurd on the face of it -- jobs are not the private property of one individual. They are a contract between a willing buyer of labor and a willing seller of labor. No one owns a job. No one has a right to a job. But even if we grant the unspoken premise of this whine it still doesn’t pan out.

Pretty much once a day I stop into a local food establishment for lunch. Actually I have around half a dozen such outlets that I frequent with varying regularity. Ours is a relatively small town with only around 26,000 people. Of these around 10% are Hispanic.

The restaurants have signs posted in their windows that they are seeking employees. So who works there? for the most part it is Hispanic young people in their teens and twenties.

Several of the restaurants seem to have almost completely Hispanic staff. The rest seem to have one or two white kids working there but are predominantly Hispanic. Do these major chain restaurants actively discriminate against white kids? There is no indication that they do.

Certainly it’s possible but highly unlikely that six different restaurants are actively working to discriminate against whites. And if they were doing this where are the whites with their complaints?

Let’s talk reality and not Right-wing fantasy. The staff of these restaurants are mainly Hispanic, not because they are “stealing” jobs from whites but because whites have thrown those jobs away.

Kerry Howley, over at Reason, wrote an article on employer sanctions in Arizona that forced companies to fire “illegals” from their jobs. And the net result isn’t white Arizonians flocking in to take those jobs -- the result is empty jobs. She quotes Sheridan Bailey, the president of Ironco Enterprises which was forced to let go of about one third of their workers. Wagers were forced up in the hope of attracting workers. Training programs were created and still the company can’t grow because it can’t find employees.

The owner of a masonry business says he goes to job fairs and is offering a starting salary of $13 an hour without any experience. He’s having trouble finding workers.

These companies are losing revenue because they can’t find staff willing to work. Yet the workers who are willing to take the jobs are forbidden from doing so. It sure sounds like a government program to me.

In Texas, J. Allen Carnes grows onions on 500 acres of land. Come harvest time he could only find half the field workers he needed. MSNBC reports that he fell two weeks behind schedule, ended up leaving unpicked food to rot in the fields and saw his farm income drop by $150,000. The U.S. Department of Labor, just a few years ago, estimated that just over half of all farm laborers were illegal immigrants.

According to NPR farmers in Arizona have been dropping certain crops such as lettuce, strawberries and broccoli because the have to picked by hand --- they can’t find enough pickers. And in New Jersey tomato growers are reducing the size of their crops because they can’t find field workers.

Keith Eckel grows tomatoes in Pennsylvania, lots of them. “We normally harvest 200,000 25-pound cartons of tomatoes.” But he can’t find workers. He used to have them: “Many of them have come to our same farm for 25 years. These people do extremely hard work and are doing jobs that our local people will not or care not to do, and that would include myself... They are critical to our process. Without those harvesters, we’re out of business.” Of course those workers were Mexican migrant workers. They averaged a pay in excess of $16 per hour but Americans don’t want the work so Eckel is closing down.

Eckel planted around 2.2 million tomato plants last year. Now he will plant none. He says that the cost to plant and harvest his crops was between $1.5 and $2 million. He can't afford to make that sort of investment if he faces the risk of not having workers to harvest the crop. He estimates that the number of jobs directly lost by his having to cut production is 175. That doesn't count jobs created by these jobs. The president of the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, Carl Shaffer, told a press conference that other farmers will be following Eckel's example. "The American consumer really needs to wake up to this issue. It's not just an immigration issue, it's an issue that's going to affect everyone's food supply." True, but the bigots don't care.

In 2005 the US had 131,800 acres dedicated to field grown tomatoes. In 2006 it dropped to 127,900 acres. In 2007 it dropped again to 124,400 acres. Perhaps Americans no long want tomatoes? Apparently not, imports of tomatoes have increased every year. In 2005 we imported 2.098 billion pounds of tomatoes, in 2006 it was 2.188 billion and in 2007 it was 2.361 billion.

Less and less of the food we eat comes from American farmers. In 2005 35% of the tomatoes we consumed came from outside the country. By 2006 it had risen to 36.7% and by last year it was 38.5%. American producers of tomatoes are closing down and they are saying it’s because they can’t find workers.

Do you know the number one foreign source for tomatoes consumed in the United States? It’s Mexico, from whom we import 2,093.3 million pound. In second place is Canada, with a fraction of that amount. This seems to indicate that what American immigration restrictions have done is not to protect American jobs at all -- instead, it exported them to Mexico.

There are jobs that need filling. There are people that need, and want, those jobs. The moronic nativists have pushed an authoritarian-inclined administration to stop the people who want the jobs from coming here to get them. But when jobs and workers need to come together moving people to the jobs is just one alternative. The other is moving the jobs to the people. And America is now exporting those jobs thanks to petty bigotry.

The short-sighted nativists don’t care. They imagine that their policies prevent those “damn Mexicans” from “taking our jobs”. Wrong. The jobs are being taken and being taken outside the country.

Some may say that if U.S. workers don’t want the job no harm is being done. Mexicans who would have come here to work now stay in Mexico for the work. They think that means there is no reduction in work for Americans and they succeeded in keeping “those people” out of the country. That typically looks at only one aspect of the production process. Yes, work that Mexicans would have done in the U.S. is now being done in Mexico. But more than the just field workers were involved.

American farmers, who used to grow those tomatoes, are now not growing them. Mexican farmers who didn’t used to grow them are doing so. When the anti-immigration bigots transferred the field work outside the United States they also transferred the profits outside the United States.

Go back and consider Mr. Eckel and his farm. No doubt his work force included far more than field workers. He spoke about having his accounts audited to see how much he was paying his field workers. And with the amount of tomatoes he was growing that would be a lot of records. No doubt he hired accountants. And I suggest they were not illegal aliens but Americans. They lost the work they were doing when he shut down his farm. He had truckers who delivered his produce to market, they are no longer moving his tomatoes.

Mr. Eckel bought farm equipment from local companies and sales agents. He bought fertilizer, irrigation equipment and mcuh more It’s unlikely he drove to Mexico to pick up any of the hundreds of other things he needed to successfully grow tomatoes on a massive farm. He’s no longer buying any of that.

And his profits are gone. What did he do with his profits? He may have fixed up his home, or bought entertainment, or new furniture. Whatever he would have spent those profits on is no longer being purchased. The stores where he spent profits don’t get his income any longer. So the loss of his profits translates into the loss of jobs for Americans.

His field workers were only a small part of the entire labor force needed to produce tomatoes. But while they were just a part of the labor needed they were a necessary part. Without them the entire process shuts down and lots of non-immigrant workers lose their jobs as well. The anti-immigration crowd nevers talks about that.

When the nativists stopped Mexicans from coming to America to pick local crops they inadvertently sent the crops to Mexico instead. The farming left the country with the workers. Along with those field workers we exported the profits from those farms. The nativists did deport the Mexicans--and don’t they feel proud?. But they also deported other jobs in the process. They put Americans out of work in order to indulge their prejudices. They made America less prosperous, they hurt the farmers who produced these goods and they hurt all the local workers and industries who relied on them.

As they are busily deporting jobs and capital from the United States to other nations these nativists have the audacity to call themselves “patriots”. Patriots? They are damaging the economy, destroying American jobs (not protecting them), and exporting capital to other nations. I argue that their actions are destructive and dangerous. They are hurting America and in return all they get is the satisfaction that they chased some hardworking people out of the country.

The idea that that they protecting American jobs is ludicrous and it is a smokescreen. They are not saving jobs for Americans but destroying them. But it was never really about the jobs, it was always about the Mexicans. The nativists are merely couching their racism in economic terminology. Unfortunately it is ill-informed economics based on fallacies and absuridites. These bigots aren’t just hurting Mexicans. They are hurting the entire country. And when a group works to harm a country they really ought not be called “patriots” at all. There are words to describe people who work insidiously to harm their own country. I don't think "patriot" is one of them. What could they be?

Anti-immigration panic costs $2-$4 million per mile.

The cost of big government has gotten even bigger. You remember that damn Wall that conservatives want to erect on the border? It is not being built very quickly -- after all, it is government work. And it is coming in way over budget -- just as this blog predicted.

I argued that faux libertarians who support this Wall were going to inflict billions in taxes on the country. These fakes pretend they can authorize spending without authorizing taxing. You can’t separate the two. If you authorize $1 billion in new spending then you have to come up with $1 billion in new government revenue. And that is called taxes. It is basic economics but these days conservatives, even those in libertarian drag, don’t seem to know anything about economics.

The furhrers at Homeland Security had a goal of 670 miles of “secure border” for 2008. They have managed 341 miles. And you should consider the border they are trying to secure is about 2,000 miles long. At this point they are wanting an additional $400 million. Since 2005 Congress has flushed $2.7 billion down this toilet.

Now it is reported that the Government Accounting Office has said “the Homeland Security Department had no projections for the total cost of building or maintaining the fencing.” So the super agency that was hastily and stupidly created to solve all America’s problems by stripping away rights, just doesn’t have any idea how much they need to spend to build the Wall.

The GAO also says that the average cost per mile built has been steadily increasing. The more experience Homeland Security has the more they spend. In February of this year the GAO said the average cost for 1 mile of pedestrian fencing was $4 million. And if they built a mile of fencing to merely stop vehicles from driving through it was $2 million.

Now that Homeland Security has more experience the cost for one mile of pedestrian fencing is averaging $7.5 million. And the cost for vehicle barriers, which are just pipes stuck in holes in the ground to prevent cars from driving through, is now $4 million per mile. Think about that.

If you want to stop a vehicle from driving through an area, and you are putting a metal pipe as a barrier into the ground it is not a particularly complex project. A pipe about every 3 feet is sufficient to prevent a car from driving through -- very few cars are less than 3 feet wide. You would need about 1,760 pipes in total for one mile.

Let’s say we get really heavy pipe and we dig a hole that is six feet deep. We then put the pipe in the hole so that about 3 feet of it are above ground. And we fill the hole with cement. If you were in the private sector what would that one pipe in that one hole cost you? I don’t know. But I can tell you that Homeland Gestapo is paying about $2,300 to dig that hole and plant a pipe. I bet they could do it for half that if they used undocumented workers from outside Home Depot.

With 2,000 miles to fence in we are spending between $2 million and $4 million per mile in order to protect America from busboys, gardeners and fast food clerks. But it sure makes the nativists, xenophobes and bigots feel good. Of course more than bigots benefit from the Wall. Add in the morons who think this Wall is somehow making them safe. It won’t help the economy -- quite the contrary, it is very harmful to the economy. But the emotional comfort that bigots and morons get from it has to be worth something. Unfortunately, like most government schemes the people who think they are benefiting have managed to pass the bulk of the cost off on other people. Let’s face it -- the Minutemen types and their closet supporters are major Welfare Queens. To give themselves comfort they are ripping off the taxpayers to the sum of between $2 million and $4 million per mile.

You call that small!

I find conservatives to be a fraudulent bunch. They spout how they are advocates of “small government” and they continually whine that government is big enough on the issues that concern them. Take this outfit that calls itself SmallGovTimes as a prime example of the hypocrisy.

Take a look at these two charts which indicate the amount of money that our immigration “enforcement” agents spend every year. Remember this data is before the big increases in recent years. Also note the number of personnel specifically hired to patrol the borders and close every avenue of escape, I mean entry. These are very large increases in a very short period of time. And that is only at the federal level and doesn't include the massive expenditures by local cops who want to play G man.



Our nascent police state, in the form of the dictatorial and misnamed Department of Homeland Security, is well funded to attack immigrants, the Bill of Rights, and other examples of “terrorism”. These brownshirts are getting $40 billion for their budget next year. That is $2.2 billion than they flushed down the toilets this year.

They added $800 million for armed agents to track down dishwashers and gardeners committing the heinous crime of working without a permit from a politician. They allocated to the Immigration gestapo just under $5 billion dollars. There is $775 million to install cameras on the borders. And don’t forget the $50 million being used to force the states to implement the internal passport system known as Real ID which will crack down on those Americans who think they have a right to exist without state permission.

So what does this have to do with SmallGovTimes and why do I say they are hypocrites. Simply put this outfit is a bunch of paranoid lunatics who are whining about illusionary plots like the alleged “North American Union” while bitching that “our federal government has done almost nothing to rectify the situation” of immigrants getting in to work.

Almost nothing! Billions flushed down the toilets. Walls being built on the borders. Controls put on every company in America in regards to hiring people, forcing Real ID down the throats of every citizen, cameras along the borders, thousands of more “agents” scouring the borders and the country. Controls, regulations, rules, and billions and billions of the productive economy squandered to chase down dishwashers. And this conservative says this is “almost nothing”.

If this is “almost nothing” then how many more billions do they want? How many more armed federal agents do they want smashing down doors and raiding “chicken processing” plants? How many more walls? How many new rules and regulations are they demanding?

And they have the audacity to call themselves “small government” advocates. Sure they are --- much the way Mussolini was a small government advocate -- at least when compared to his friend Adolph.

This Birch Society inspired lunacy spends a great deal of time lamenting the alleged lack of “fighting” immigration while bitching about the phantom North America Union. And like good paranoid nutters they alleged the two are connected. Actually they are, both claims are bogus, but that is all they have in common. The government is doing a lot of fight dangerous Mexican yard workers and there is no NAU plot.

But our friends at Big Government Times, as they ought to be known, claim that the secret plotters are refusing to do anything about immigration because “the free flow of humans and money facilitates something known as ‘the North American Union’.”

Consider what this person is saying. He clearly is against the “free flow of humans and money”. How do you prevent people and their wealth from moving? The only way to do that is to impose massive amounts of control. That means massive government. That means government interfering with individual liberty over and over again. You can’t have “small government” while stopping the “free flow of humans and money”.

Yet this author calls himself a “conservative-libertarian”. That makes no sense to me. Hayek wrote that libertarianism is in the corner of a triangle. At equal and opposite distances are the two other corners, one occupied by socialists and the other by conservatives. There is no such thing as a “conservative-libertarian” anymore than we can have dry-water.

And what I find is that these so-called “conservative libertarians” are always conservatives first and libertarians last. There is barely a freedom that they wouldn’t sacrifice in the name of their conservative values. The author of this clap trap on immigration and secret plots claims he writes in support of “small government” and “open markets”. But does he?

There are three major components to open markets. One is the free flow of goods and services. Many conservatives do hold to this position. Not this author who whines about free trade agreements which actually bring about increased trade. But the other two aspects of an open market is the free flow of labor and of capital. In other words it is the “free flow of humans and money”. But that is the very thing he said he is against.

The free exchange of goods and services is merely one third of the “open market”. When you advocate that government control two-thirds of the market you are not advocating a free market but a state-controlled market. Now if you want to call that “conservative” go right ahead. Conservatives have always been lovers of state power and imposed order. But don’t call that “libertarian” and don’t pretend you are advocating “small government”. Embrace your inner fascist and admit that you hate freedom. Be honest with yourself and with others.

The only thing we have to fear....

Now and then the New York Times really gets something right. Admittedly it isn’t nearly as often as it should be but when they do they deserve some praise.

Their editorial on the great immigration panic is spot on. Of course the Right is pushing anti-immigration hysteria. They have milked antigay sentiment for all they could and the backlash to that is setting in. They know they lost that fear campaign and are moving on to a new one. But the Right is not the only participant. Historically one of the most bigoted and vicious movements in America has been the labor unions. And they have always been xenophobic.

The Times excellently stated the problem with the panic. They argue that the greatest cost is not the billions squandered by government in this campaign. “The true cost is to the national identity; the sense of who we are and what we value. It will hit us once the enforcement fever breaks, when we look at what has been done and no longer recognize the country that did it.”

That is true. But I would note this is true of one panic after another. Even when there are legitimate problems politicians tend to overreact because it is politically beneficial to do so. America is being destroyed by fear. It could be fear of terrorism, fear of immigrants, fear of environmental disaster, fear of communism, fear of homosexual, fear of “sexual predators”, fear of.... just fill in the blank. Terrified people surrender their liberties and their deepest held values. And that is why politicians, Left and Right, use fear to grab power and inflate their importance.

F.D.R. once said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That is more true than he knew. Fear is decimating this nation. We are surrendering liberties at an unprecedented pace and 95% of the time we do so over imaginary threats. Immigrants are just one of the series of scare stories which help along the process.

The Times wrote:

An escalating campaign of raids in homes and workplaces has spread indiscriminate terror among millions of people who pose no threat. After the largest raid ever last month — at a meatpacking plant in Iowa — hundreds were swiftly force-fed through the legal system and sent to prison. Civil-rights lawyers complained, futilely, that workers had been steamrolled into giving up their rights, treated more as a presumptive criminal gang than as potentially exploited workers who deserved a fair hearing. The company that harnessed their desperation, like so many others, has faced no charges.

Immigrants in detention languish without lawyers and decent medical care even when they are mortally ill. Lawmakers are struggling to impose standards and oversight on a system deficient in both. Counties and towns with spare jail cells are lining up for federal contracts as prosecutions fill the system to bursting. Unbothered by the sight of blameless children in prison scrubs, the government plans to build up to three new family detention centers. Police all over are checking papers, empowered by politicians itching to enlist in the federal crusade.

One argument that the anti-immigrant crowd makes about “illegals” is that they should “get in line like everyone else”. These people say things like: “My great grandparents came here legally so should they.” Such statements only betray their ignorance about the current state of “legal immigration”. There is no line to join and their ancestors came to America at a time when immigration was open. To be legal all they needed to do was show up, present themselves and basically be disease-free. It didn’t take much more than that. The Times understands this:

This is not about forcing people to go home and come back the right way. Ellis Island is closed. Legal paths are clogged or do not exist. Some backlogs are so long that they are measured in decades or generations. A bill to fix the system died a year ago this month. The current strategy, dreamed up by restrictionists and embraced by Republicans and some Democrats, is to force millions into fear and poverty.

No one wants illegal immigration including the illegal immigrants. But for 99.9% of them no other option is open. Consider this analogy: No libertarian supports theft. But imagine a world where government provided all the food you owned. Now imagine that the government tells one group of people that they can’t have any. No food is available on the private market, it is all state controlled. And these poor people are starving, their kids are starving. So they break into a government warehouse and help themselves. Government gave them no other option but to break the law.

Purist libertarians will talk about the immorality of government streets but they use them. Why? The simple answer is that government has monopolized streets so it is justified to use them as other options don’t exist. Yet when government denies immigrants all the other options some of these same “libertarians” (conservatives in libertarian drag if you ask me) scream about them breaking the law.

I read the website of one of these revisionist types of libertarians offering advise to Bob Barr. The author said Barr should make it clear that illegal immigrants are “criminals” who should be deported. What shocked me is that this was the first time I had a read an alleged libertarian equating crime with violation of law. Historically libertarians have said that a crime is a violation of the life, liberty or property of others and most certainly not a violation of some politic ally-created mandate. Harboring Jews in Hitler’s Germany was illegal but it was not a crime. Marrying someone of a different race was illegal in the Jim Crow South but it was not a crime.

These “new libertarians” have reversed one principle after another. They are smuggling in conservative ideas and calling them libertarian. The “law and order” mentality is not a libertarian one but conservative. While immigrating without state permission may violate the law, it is not a crime.

If the bus boy at the local restaurant doesn’t have documents from bureaucrats giving him permission to live where he lives and work where he works, that doesn’t mean he is a criminal. He has violated the rights of no one even if he has violated the law. And in libertarian ethics, when the law violates rights, then it is moral to violate the law. U.S. immigration laws, as they currently stand, violate rights. By closing off legal options they force moral people to violate the law. The only immorality around is the law itself, not the would-be immigrant.

The Times notes that all this ugliness and hatred means the major political candidates are cowards. “John McCain supported sensible reform, but whenever he mentions it, his party starts braying and he leaves the room. Hillary Rodham Clinton has lost her voice on this issue more than once. Barack Obama, gliding above the ugliness, might someday test his vision of a new politics against restrictionist hatred, but he has not yet done so.” Here is an opportunity for Barr to set himself apart from the politics of hatred and to uphold liberty at the same time. But I won’t be holding my breath. If Barr follows the advise of these faux libertarians, and starts bashing immigrants, then he is beneath contempt.

In closing the Times wrote:

Every time this country has singled out a group of newly arrived immigrants for unjust punishment, the shame has echoed through history. Think of the Chinese and Irish, Catholics and Americans of Japanese ancestry. Children someday will study the Great Immigration Panic of the early 2000s, which harmed countless lives, wasted billions of dollars and mocked the nation’s most deeply held values.

That is true. The Red Scare of the 1920s turned into dust. The Red scare of the 1950s was much to do about nothing. Every wave of previous immigration has terrified the native born and proven benign. In fact the grand children of the immigrants previous targeted for hatred are now often the haters themselves.

Most of the bogeymen used by power-hungry politicians to terrify the populace have proven to be lies or gross exaggerations. Most the solutions offered for these “problems” have turned out to make matters even worse.

I suggest, like F.D.R did, that the only thing we have to truly fear, is fear itself.

Film review: La Misma Luna (Under the Same Moon)

I rarely get out to the theater these days though I watch more films per week than the average person -- I just do so from home. So it was a treat to go out with friends last night. That they took me to see La Misma Luna, or Under the Same Moon, made it a double treat.

I was attracted to this film for several reasons. First, it was a serious film tackling a serious issue. Second, the story line was compelling and interesting. Third, the story itself is informative. Fourth, it portrays the lengths to which people will go to be with those they love. Fifth, it shows the role that government plays in stifling the happiness of individuals. Sixth, the cast for the film was perfect, the acting was superb, the dialogue was believable, the plot was compelling. You get my drift. For me this film was as near to perfection as I could reasonable expect.

Filmed in Mexico and the United States La Misma Luna tells the story of a family split by the American border and circumstances. The back story is that Rosario Reyes, who is played superbly by Kate del Castillo, has a young son, Carlitos, played by Adrian Alonso. Rosario’s husband left her and she is left to provide for Carlitos by herself. She makes the difficult decision to leave the boy with her mother, Benita, while she seeks work in the United States.

Every Sunday morning at 10 am Rosario calls a pay phone where Carlitos is waiting to speak to her. Her absence of four years is breaking both their hearts. But the money Rosario earns by cleaning people’s home provides the cash which she sends to Mexico to keep her son fed, clothed and educated.

Benita’s health is obviously an issue. She is the only one who can really care for the boy, other than his mother. But her death forces the boy’s hand. He takes the money he has saved from what his mother sent him and begins a journey across the border to be with his mother.

Throughout the process the United Government stands ready to prevent the boy from being with his mother. His first obstacle is crossing the border but with the funds he has saved he finds a way. He faces the dangers of crossing illegally because he must.

But once in Texas he faces the difficulty of getting to Los Angeles while avoiding La Migra (immigration authorities) and other scoundrels. Along the way Carlitos learns the difficult plight of the immigrant worker and realizes just how much his mother must love him to endure that life.

Carlitos is forced to team up with others in order to survive. Unfortunately for him his first “friend” is a junkie who is only helping because the boy has money that he wants. But when the money is lost the junkie, in desperation for cash, decides to trade Carlitos to some unsavory individuals for the money the boy had promised him. Only the intervention of a local woman prevents the transaction and she takes it upon herself to help Carlitos get to Los Angeles to be with his mother.

Through various circumstances, again involving the hated La Migra, Carlitos finds himself in the company of Enrique. Enrique is played by Eugenio Derbez. But Derbez clearly didn’t learn the lesson about never starring in a film with dogs or children. Derbez may be one of Mexico’s most popular actors but tis Alonso who steals scene after scene.

The juxtaposition of Carlitos and Enrique is fascinating. Enrique is the fish out of water, the adult who doesn’t how to be an adult. He lacks the self confidence that Carltio exudes. Carlitos walks into any situation and masters it through a combination of charm, intelligence and hard work. At one point it becomes unclear as to exactly who is protecting whom. Alonso never flubs his role for a moment. He is a child who plays an adult trapped in a child’s body.

Along the way Carlitos sees the plight of illegal immigrant workers. He realizes that their illegal status means they are easy victims for the unscrupulous types who prey on the vulnerability of others. As the film moves back and forth between the parallel stories of mother and son we also see what Rosario must do in order to survive. She cleans the homes of wealthy Americans for a low salary. When one employer decides to fire her Rosario asks for her back pay only to be told she can’t have it. The employer taunts her with a telephone challenging her to call the police and then saying: “Oh, that’s right. You can’t. You’re an illegal.”

This sort of exploitation, of course, is the plight of anyone who is a legal outsider. That is, someone who is not violating the rights of anyone else, but who is considered a criminal by the law. Such situations always subjects the outsider to exploitation by the unscrupulous. (Another film that portrays this reality, though in a different context, is Victim with Dirk Bogarde, 1961.)

La Misma Luna is a winner. It not only tackles a controversial topic but does so without sermonizing. The plot is believable and the dialogue avoids being cheesy or melodramatic. Each of the roles seems perfectly cast, including an appearance by America Ferrara of Ugly Betty fame. This is more than a film with a good libertarian message, it is a film that works as a film. I recommend it highly to anyone who loves good films or who cares about individual freedom. If you are passionate about both then run to theater now. See the trailer below.

Victimless crimes and the traitors to capitalism.

What is meant by a victimless crime? It is when a voluntary action between consenting adults, is made illegal. It is victimless because all individuals who are involved are consenting. Too many people, especially on the Left, think of victimless crimes only in terms of things like using drugs or hiring a prostitute.

Yet most victimless crimes are what you would call capitalist acts between consenting adults. If the law says I must pay you X dollars per hour but you offer to work for half that, and I accept, that is a victimless crime.

I’ve been party to victimless crimes of this type. I needed some painting done. So I asked someone to paint my walls in return for $10 per hour. The painter agreed. But politicians, who are not party to my contract, had decided that they wanted different terms. They demanded that I not hire the painter I wanted at all. He didn’t have a permit, called a Green Card, from the government to earn money.

In my eyes what I did was negotiate a labor contract with another human being. It was his business and it was my business. It wasn’t your business or anyone else’s. We voluntarily engaged in a capitalist act. For that the clowns in public office think we were criminals.

Of course there are real criminals involved in the labor market. For instance just yesterday hundreds of people were kidnapped by armed thugs. The armed thugs were Immigration agents of the federal government.

At Pilgrim’s Pride (misnamed as you will see) hundreds of workers were carted off by these armed gangs. What had these people done? They were cleaning chickens. There is a serious crime for you. These were people who were doing the horrible crime of working so they could feed their families. Yet somewhere between 300 and 400 of them were shackled by armed government goons.

I should note that the collaborators who helped arrest these people were the cowards who run Pilgrim’s Pride. The original Pilgrims came to America to seek freedom and a better life for themselves. They did it without the permission of the inhabitants of this continent as well. The arrested workers did nothing different from what the Pilgrims did. No charges were filed against Pilgrim’s Pride because they were the snitches involved. They said they “terminated” everyone that got arrested. I hope they had the decency to pay them what was owed them but I suspect they didn’t. By the way you can bet I won’t be buying from Pilgrim’s Pride.

These employees were called “illegal workers”. Think about that for a second. Work is supposed to be good. Nature makes it necessary for survival. We applaud people for being hard workers. Yet we have this asinine concept of “illegal work”. If work is a virtue then making it illegal is the height of folly. Would we ban honesty, criminalize charity, or outlaw compassion? There is often so damn little virtue in the world that the very idea that we make virtue illegal is beyond comprehension.

The xenophobic nativists and fear mongers argue that these workers “took” jobs from Americans. Apparently they think there are entitlements to jobs. But a job is a voluntary contract between consenting adults. No one can take a job from another person because NO ONE has a right to a job or owns a job. Jobs are not property. If I hire a so-called “illegal” to paint my walls I didn’t take a job from you. It wasn’t your job. The job only exists when I consent to hire someone and then only if they consent to work for me in return. If I didn’t offer the job to you I didn’t take it from you since you have no right to demand I enter into an involuntary contract with you. You have no more right to demand jobs from me than I have the right to demand work from you.

This is what is so baffling about modern conservatives. These hypocrites of the Right fraudulently claim that they believe in capitalism, free markets, private property, the sanctity of contract, and small government. But they propose policies, and push ideas, that entirely contradict those ideas.

The job I offer is a private contract between me and whomever I wish to hire. But the conservatives nationalize the job market and make government a partner to every transaction. They demand that I only hire people that they approve of. They think they have a right to rig my contracts according to their own wishes and desires. That sounds like bloody socialism to me.

A free market is one where people trade voluntarily. Yet these conservatives want to ban voluntary trade unless they first approve of all the participants in the exchange. That is not a free market. The modern conservative hates free markets. Sure they say they love free markets. Many a wife-beater claimed he really loved his wife as well. Actions speak louder than words.

I find it hilarious that these fake “free marketeers” whine that immigrants just “want our welfare” and then they cheer so loudly when people are arrested for working. The people working were not living off welfare. They were making a living by cleaning the damn chickens that we eat.

Conservatives prattle about the sanctity of the family. So what have they pushed for? They want harsh, cruel enforcement of laws that prevent people from finding productive jobs that enable them to feed their families. Apparently the are so pro-life that would happily force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term but then don’t give a damn if the child starves because daddy and mommy are forbidden to work people who are willing to hire them. Someone once defined a conservatives a someone who believes a fetus has rights right up until the moment it is born. Sad, but true.

The modern conservative, especially the brain-dead types that have infested the Republican Party are walking contradictions. They are so mentally screwed up that they can’t see that they are just as much statists and advocates of big government as the worst sort of socialist. The only thing that separates the Republicans from the Democrats is that Republicans want to cram Jesus down your throat while forcing you to obey them.

The biggest advocates of regulated labor markets today are Republicans. They want absolute state control over who you hire. They want to create a data base of approved workers which you must use before you hire anyone. If your employee doesn’t appear in that data base the Republicans will send thugs out to punish you. And the Republicans call that a “free market”.

The political Left may oppose free markets. But the political Right is actually worse. They are traitors to free markets. They are the kind of lowlifes who, in a battle against a tyrannical enemy, open the back door to let the enemy in because they are cowards. Conservatives are worse than the enemies of free markets because the feign a love for them while betraying them every single chance they get.

What Milton Friedman really said about immigration.

There has been a lot of purposeful distortion, and some confusion, over what Milton Friedman said about immigration. He is often quoted by the xenophobic activists as saying that you can’t have open immigration and a welfare state. What they don’t do is quote him in his entirety. They always stop before he clarifies what he means and that is why I think they are dishonest.

I have heard Dr. Friedman on several occasions and I’ve heard him address the immigration issue. I clearly remembered his clarification during a speech I heard him give at Stanford University. But, all I could do was broadly state his comments without giving a precise quote.

Now, thanks to the DVDs that Fr33minds is offering, I have Friedman on video stating precisely what he believes about immigration. And, instead of giving you half quotes, like the anti-immigration crowd does, I want to give you his precise words. What follows are direct quotes from Friedman in his lecture, What is America.

Friedman referred to the millions of immigrants and how most came “with empty hands.” He noted that some immigrants in the audience were more recent and said: “You are the modern wave that we ought to be welcoming as immigrants. In the same tradition, as the tradition, which enabled the rest of us to get here.”

You had a flood of immigrants, millions of them, coming to this country. What brought them here? It was the hope for a better life for them and their children. And, in the main, they succeeded. It is hard to find any century in history, in which so large a number of people experience so great an improvement in the conditions of their life, in the opportunities open to them, as in the period of the 19th and early 20th century.

Friedman then goes on to discuss the institutions that are necessary to allow people to become prosperous before ultimately returning to immigration.

He mentions how regulations strangle the ability of people to do good things. And he said he’d like to take, as one example, the issue of free immigration. “I’ve always been amused by a kind of a paradox. Suppose you go around and ask people: ‘The United States before 1914, as you know, had completely free immigration. Anybody could get in a boat and come to these shores and if landed at Ellis Island he was an immigrant. Was that a good thing or a bad thing?'”

You will find that hardly a soul who will say that it was a bad thing. Almost everybody will say it was a good thing. ‘But what about today? Do you think we should have free immigration?’ ‘Oh, no,’ they’ll say, ‘We couldn’t possibly have free immigration today. Why, that would flood us with immigrants from India, and God knows where. We’d be driven down to a bare subsistence level.’

What’s the difference? How can people be so inconsistent? Why is it that free immigration was a good thing before 1914 and free immigration is a bad thing today? Well, there is a sense in which that answer is right. There’s a sense in which free immigration, in the same sense as we had it before 1914 is not possible today. Why not?

Because it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promises a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.

Up to this point it sounds as if the xenophobes are quoting Friedman accurately. Of course they left out that bit at the beginning where Friedman said to the immigrants in the audience that they are a new wave of immigrants who “we ought to be welcoming.” But Friedman isn’t finished with his comments. And when I heard him at Stanford he said pretty much the same thing as he’s saying here. He clarifies himself in way that the xenophobes never quote!

If you have free immigration, in the way we had it before 1914, everybody benefited. The people who were here benefited. The people who came benefited. Because nobody would come unless he, or his family, thought he would do better here than he would elsewhere. And, the new immigrants provided additional resources, provided additional possibilities for the people already here. So everybody can mutually benefit.

But on the other hand, if you come under circumstances where each person is entitled to a pro-rata share of the pot, to take an extreme example, or even to a low level of the pie, than the effect of that situation is that free immigration, would mean a reduction of everybody to the same, uniform level. Of course, I’m exaggerating, it wouldn’t go quite that far, but it would go in that direction. And it is that perception, that leads people to adopt what at first seems like inconsistent values.

Now Friedman goes even further with his clarification. And pay special attention to what he says here.

Look, for example, at the obvious, immediate, practical example of illegal Mexican immigration. Now, that Mexican immigration, over the border, is a good thing. It’s a good thing for the illegal immigrants. It’s a good thing for the United States. It’s a good thing for the citizens of the country. But, it’s only good so long as its illegal.

There is no question that Milton Friedman said that in the welfare society “illegal immigration” is precisely the kind of the immigration that the country needs. The xenophobes have turned his views inside-out. They will pay lip-service to legal immigration and damn illegal immigration. The fake libertarians, social conservatives, and racists try to make it sound as if Friedman was against illegal Mexican migrants. In reality he said that such immigration is “a good thing” for everybody concerned. And his reasoning is that this is the closest thing to pre-1914 immigration possible in today’s welfare state. Friedman says this is the paradox of government intervention that turns an illegal act into a beneficial one, while legal immigration is a potential problem. Notice that the groups that quote Friedman never quote his saying that illegal Mexican immigration is good.

That’s an interesting paradox to think about. Make it legal and it’s no good. Why? Because as long as it’s illegal the people who come in do not qualify for welfare, they don’t qualify for social security, they don’t qualify for the other myriad of benefits that we pour out from our left pocket to our right pocket. So long as they don’t qualify they migrate to jobs. They take jobs that most residents of this country are unwilling to take. They provide employers with the kind of workers that they cannot get. They’re hard workers, they’re good workers, and they are clearly better off.

Friedman’s position is exactly the one I remembered from his Stanford lecture and precisely the one I’ve taken on this blog. And I have long credited Friedman as the source of my view.

The opponents of immigration, who attempt to use Friedman to bolster their case, are dishonest in the way they do it. They distort his view, and cherry-pick comments that sound good to their case, while ignoring the actual clarification of his views that Friedman makes a special effort to express. In addition, they don’t ever propose Friedman’s solution. They merely say that the only possible choice is to stop immigration to the United States.

There are three options that we can take which are consistent with Friedman’s view, and the xenophobes reject all three of them. First, we could abolish the welfare state entirely. They assume this won’t happen anytime soon, so acknowledging this position is a safe one for the racist, since it is unlikely it will mean immigration by “those people” any time soon.

The second option is actually quite easy to implement. That is to selectively abolish welfare benefits denying them to any immigrant. This denial could be for their lifetime or require them to be gainfully employed for X number of years before they qualify. This solution, which is feasible now, is not one suggested by the “libertarian” anti-immigrant crowd. It is not suggested precisely because it is possible now, and might actually lead to immigration. What these people oppose is not the welfare, as much as immigrants.

The third option is one that the xenophobes have actively campaigned against—and that is the illegal immigration of migrants across the Mexican border. This is the one that Friedman specifically said was “good” for the country, the American people and the immigrants themselves.

Now you know what Milton Friedman actually said.

All quotes are verbatim transcripts from comments made by Milton Friedman in the 15 lecture series being sold by Fr33minds.

Editing Note: Since the piece was published Laissez Faire Books changed hands and we can not in good conscience endorse that business anymore. For an explanation of why read this. The people responsible for turning Laissez Faire over to bigots should be ashamed of themselves. As a result we have instead pointed to a new source for libertarian books that is everything that LFB used to be, but is no longer. Mary Ruwart destroyed Laissez Faire.

A nonPC message to the immigrant haters.

I would like to address one type of argument which I have heard, mainly from conservatives and from some self-labeled “libertarians” who I think are closet conservatives. It is normally used against undocumented immigrants. It goes along the line that they are glad when decent individuals, who are not violating the rights of others, have been arrested because “they broke the law.”

Right-wingers and faux libertarians who use this line are hypocrites and hiding their true reasoning. How do I know this?

Members of the so-called Patriot movement, where such bigots reside in large numbers, get weepy about the Founding Fathers and the Declaration of Independence. They worship the Constitution as a god-given document. The Founding Fathers were criminals. The Declaration of Independence was an illegal rebellion The American Revolution was AGAINST the law. I’m glad they were criminals but they were criminals.

Yet they are thrilled about these illegal acts!

Consider one of the favorite sayings among the far Right -- “From my cold dead hands.” Remember when Charleston Heston held up that rifle and uttered those words. I would bet that 99% of the anti-immigrant Right cheered Heston for saying it. (And I am not making an argument for gun control, which I oppose.)

What does that statement mean? It is an act of defiance against legislation. The full context of that statement is that “They will get my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.” Unpack it a bit more. What does it mean to “get my gun”? This term was in specific reference to attempts to legislate gun control.

It is a statement that says: “If you pass laws to confiscate my gun I will fight you to the death. The only way you can take my gun, no matter what the law saws, is to kill me.” It is a promise to violate the law and the Right has political orgasms over the statement.

I know some so-called libertarians who use the “against-the-law” argument against immigrants and then applaud an activist who refuses to get a driver’s license. Which of those two laws is the bigger impostion on rights? They rally around activists who won’t pay their income taxes. In each case these individuals are violating legislation.

The Constitution specifically allows the legal confiscation of private property for “public” purposes. And while some such eminent domain cases have nothing to do with “public” use ,that doesn’t matter to most on the pro-property rights Right. If a homeowner, holds out in their home against the state, a large number of individuals on the political Right will applaud them and offer them support.

Frequently these people are staunch opponents of a law to the point that they justify breaking that law. They will offer material assistance to the lawbreakers. They will rally for them, petition on their behalf. Many of these selfsame moralists will themselves break the law. And they do so happily and with a certain amount of self-satisfaction.

Yet, when it comes to immigration, these people, who are practically ready to run up the black flag and start slitting political throats, suddenly become the Hall Monitors of the State. They want to be snitches for government or cheerleaders for the law. The term “fucking hypocrite” comes to mind.

The settled issue for any advocate of human decency and morality is that there are plenty of times when one has the right, nay the moral duty, to violate a law. The question is not whether this ought to be done but when. Anyone who blindly obeys all laws, no matter how repugnant or vicious, is not being moral but evading morality.

For the libertarian the position is simple. If an individual is not violating the rights of others they are not the proper object for legal attention. The function of law is to protect the life, liberty and property of each individual from criminals. And crimes are those actions which violate these things. If the State violates your life, your liberty or your property, then it is acting in a criminal manner and it is your right to disobey it in that regard. You are not morally obligated to cooperate with a criminal. You may choose to do so but you are not acting immorally if you disobey the State under these circumstances. That includes immigrants without bureaucratic permission slips.

I can see reasons for wanting to make sure that the individuals being admitted are not criminals or carrying bubonic plague. But the law does not spend much time about such things. The truth is that 99% of the immigration laws are meant to protect us from people who want to work and who pose no threat to anyone. The obstacles that the bigots and labor protectionists put in their way to legally immigrate strips them of legal options thus leaving only illegal options. Under such a regime I personally believe they have every right to break the law.

In addition I think there is a moral justification to help them do so. If I were to witness an immigration raid against peaceful workers, and if one of those immigrants was fleeing immigration authorities and I could hide them, I would do so. Happily!

I would not help the police arrest someone for smoking pot nor would I report someone merely for owning a firearm even if the law said that guns were illegal. I wouldn’t report you to the IRS nor would I willingly cooperate with IRS agents if they came looking for you. If I could warn you they were coming I would do so.

But beat your wife and expect the police on your doorstep and if need be I’d take a 2x4 to your head myself. If I’m in my car and see someone mugging an old lady on the street they can expect me to drive straight toward them and if I smash them against a brick wall and their life seeps out of them while they wait for the ambulance --- well tough! I won’t weep.

If you harm an innocent person you are my enemy, even if the law allows it! If you are peaceful, non-aggressive and violating the rights of no one you are my friend, even if your actions violate the law. I will do everything in my power to hinder my enemies and help my friends.

So you authoritarian “libertarians” who want to arrest immigrants. You are not libertarians. You are not friends of liberty just because you want to protect your own rights. Even the Nazis were adamant about protecting their own rights. Just because you have wet dreams over owning guns doesn’t make you a libertarians. I don’t give a damn if you hate the IRS -- if you still want to violate the liberty of peaceful workers then you are not a libertarian but an enemy of liberty. You are not quite the rapists or the robber but you aren’t that much different either. You are willing to use force against peaceful individuals and that makes you an immoral criminal in my books.