Amnesty

The following article originally appeared in Grand Junction's June 23 Free Press.

Government granted amnesty -- and should do so again

by Linn and Ari Armstrong

Amnesty is offered to those who have killed and wounded thousands of Americans. These illegal individuals have shown no respect for the borders or laws of the United States. Many among Congress and the public think the president has greatly overstepped his authority. But there it is. Lincoln's plan of reconstruction, the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, December 8, 1863.

President Andrew Johnson's Amnesty Proclamation of May 29, 1865, was similar to Lincoln's plan. Many historians have noted that the importance of these proclamations was twofold. They healed the wounds of the divided country by bringing full citizenship to those who would play a future role in the greatness of the country. And they restored justice. Johnson issued his proclamation "that peace, order, and freedom may be established."

If our presidents could offer amnesty to treasonous individuals responsible for over a half million deaths, surely we can offer amnesty to our neighbors from the south guilty only of working hard and providing for their families.

Recently Jill -- we'll call her Jill to protect her privacy -- was sitting in Senator Ken Salazar's office in Grand Junction describing to the senator's aide her husband's immigration problem. As a young child his parents brought him to the U.S.

Jill relates that they have been married for five years and have two beautiful children. They have been trying to work through the immigration system to legalize her husband at the cost of several thousand dollars.

Jill's husband had returned to Mexico to request permission to return to the U.S, a process he was told would take probably no more than three weeks. Jill vented her frustration with the immigration system to the senator's aide because she had just been informed that her husband and father of her children would have stay in Mexico for three years before he could apply to return.

Jill told the aid, "My husband came to this country as a child, his Spanish is poor, and he cannot find a job in Mexico. I am going to lose my house and car and go on welfare. But worst of all, the children will not be able to see their father."

We find it ironic that the "family values" crowd is most insistent on breaking up families in such situations.

Jill's husband did break the law, though he was too young to control his path. Neal Boortz mentioned to your elder author that illegal aliens have broken the law and therefore have to suffer the consequences.

However, our nation has a long history of disobeying unjust laws. Would you have condemned the Boston Tea Party for destruction of property? Would you have arrested the signers of the Declaration of Independence? Would you have convicted your fellow citizens for helping to free slaves in defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act?

Two pillars of a free society are property rights and the right to contract. Business owners have the right to hire willing employees of their choice, whether they're from Grand Junction, Mack, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, or Mexico City. (Honestly, a lot of people from Los Angeles are more alien than many from Mexico.)

We should be particularly aware of this issue, as agriculture and other industries in this valley and this nation depend on migrant workers from Mexico.

Yes, U.S. citizens properly have greater freedom of movement within the country than people from other countries do coming in. Immigration should be controlled so that we know who's crossing to stop criminals and carriers of contagious diseases. But we should not stop people from freely contracting with U.S. citizens to rent housing, buy goods and services, and work for a living.

Some illegal immigrants get welfare benefits and "free" health care and education, you say. We agree that's wrong. But is it less wrong for a local-born citizen to take our money by force? The problem of welfare can and should be solved without restricting immigration.

Thankfully, Colorado made a modest step in the right direction this year with Marsha Looper's bill 1325, which points out, "Colorado's agriculture industry employs an estimated nine thousand seasonal workers annually, and the agriculture industry faces critical shortages of seasonal workers." The bill established a "seasonal worker pilot program."

While the bill takes needed steps to ensure local fruit doesn't rot on the ground, farmers shouldn't have to beg the state legislature for permission to hire people. This is America, the land of immigrants and the land of individual rights. To work for a living and contract with others for business is among our most important rights.

Mexicans and, yes, even Canadians should be allowed to freely seek work here, and business owners should be allowed to freely hire them. Amnesty is not a dirty word to us; it is necessary "that peace, order, and freedom may be established."

Doug, Doug, Doug

As a long-time advocate of open immigration, I'm as annoyed as anyone by Douglas Bruce's comments about the "5,000 more illiterate peasants in the state of Colorado" should Marsha Looper's guest-worker bill pass. While I have not read the details of the bill in question, I support the general idea. I first met Looper before she joined the legislature when she was working for property rights, and I respect her all the more for sponsoring such a bill.

However, The Denver Post is having a bit more fun with this than is necessary. Jessica Fender's article, which also includes a link to the video recording of Bruce's comments, carries the headline, "Bruce barred from speaking after 'illiterate' remark." Fine. But, for a time on Monday night, the Post's web page blared, "Bruce calls Mexicans 'illiterate'." That claim is not accurate.

It's obviously not true that workers from Mexico are illiterate as a group, though I suppose a fraction of them are. I suspect that migrant workers are less-well educated than average citizens of both Mexico and the U.S. I've also met Mexicans -- both in Mexico and in the U.S. -- who are a lot smarter and better educated than either Bruce or me. Moreover, I suspect that a greater fraction of immigrants from Mexico are literate in two languages relative to the native U.S. population. However, while, according to the CIA's World Factbook, 99 percent of the U.S. population is literate, only 91 percent of the Mexican population is so.

But Bruce's main problem is not that he's wrong in claiming that mostly-literate people are illiterate, but that suggesting that literacy is relevant to the issue. Even if it were the case that all 5,000 new immigrants would be illiterate, that would not justify a vote against the bill. U.S. employers have a right to hire willing workers, and people have a right to seek work, whether or not the employees are literate.

I knew as soon as Bruce kicked the photographer on his first day on the job that he had set himself up as a story. He now has a reputation that he'll never be able to shake. And the Post is more than happy to report all of Bruce's zaniness, because the Post has a long-standing antipathy to the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights, which Bruce was instrumental in promoting. The Post loves the idea of making Bruce the poster-boy for TABOR. Which means that Bruce has done more than tarnish his own reputation; he has made it harder for advocates of restrained taxation to make their case over the noise.

The fact that various conservatives simultaneously claim to back TABOR and oppose immigration shows only that they don't understand what economic liberty is all about. Not only do I welcome peaceable, productive Mexicans to the U.S., but I want them to bear the lowest tax burden possible.

Biddle Defends Open Immigration

Craig Biddle, editor of The Objective Standard, has written a persuasive defense of open immigration. Biddle explains:

Open immigration means that anyone is free to enter and reside in America -- providing that he enters at a designated checkpoint and passes an objective screening process, the purpose of which is to keep out criminals, enemies of America, and people with certain kinds of contagious diseases. Such a policy is not only politically right; it is morally right.

Biddle basis his central argument on the principle of individual rights. Consistent with their right to live, pursue their happiness, and act on their own judgment, people have a right to move to a new region, and the residents of that region have the right to voluntarily employ and otherwise associate with the immigrants. After explaining this central argument in detail and illustrating it with examples, Biddle then goes on to answer seven particular objections. He explains why each objection to open immigration either implies a violation of people's rights or, when properly understood, actually supports the policy of open immigration.

I would add only two points to Biddle's analysis.

First, in his discussion of jobs and wage rates (the third objection that he considers), Biddle rightly emphasizes the moral point that forbidding free association of employers and employees violates the rights of both. However, Biddle might have offered a brief economic analysis here to the effect that free markets, including free migration, ultimately enables a nation's residents to create the most wealth. Economics shows, for instance, that a free economy can accommodate any number of workers, and that real wages depend foremost upon production and can expand even if monetary wages remain flat or go down. Liberty in employment is moral, and, because it is moral, it is practical; any rational producer in a region stands ultimately to benefit from open immigration in the context of free markets.

Second, in answering the objection about culture (the second objection), Biddle doesn't directly counter one important variant of the objection. Biddle rightly rejects the racial argument out of hand, and he strongly counters objections about language and lifestyles. Yet some critics will invoke a fourth variant of the general objection.

The objection runs as follows: the United States is built on and sustained by a set of cultural traditions involving limited government and personal responsibility. These cultural traditions are what keep America strong (economically and otherwise), and letting too many people move in who lack these traditions threatens to undermine the American way of life. Limited immigration is fine (by this objection), but it must be restricted so that new immigrants absorb American traditions rather than impose the traditions of their homelands. Basically, the fear is that the government of the United States will start to look more and more like the government of Mexico, with increasing levels of welfare, unemployment, and political corruption. Various regions of Europe, to take another example, are struggling with Muslim immigrants who do not always assimilate to the culture of their new homes.

Biddle implicitly replies to this objection elsewhere in his essay.

One important point that Biddle raises against the objection is that immigrants are not, on the whole, interested in living under the political traditions of their homeland; that's why they moved. Immigrants tend to be independent, hard-working, and industrious, and they tend to be at least as likely as native-born Americans to support the institutions of liberty. (Writing from personal experience, some of the truest Americans I've ever met are immigrants.)

Biddle also points out that restrictions on immigration, along with the welfare state, are the greatest barriers to attracting industrious immigrants. The restrictions keep out many of the best potential immigrants, while the welfare state attracts some of the least-industrious ones. The solution to this problem is not to restrict immigration, but to repeal the policies that have created the problem.

What about the problem of immigrants trying to import, say, sharia law? Biddle point out that objective, rights-protecting laws should be fully enforced by a government "with a monopoly on the use of physical force in a given geographic area," which means that rights-violating policies and actions should be prohibited. Biddle also makes the more general point that free markets tend to encourage immigrants to participate in the broader economy and thus the broader culture. (In addition, Biddle notes, the issue of immigration is separable from the issue of citizenship.)

Biddle also suggests a central contradiction with the objection about cultural traditions: you can't support the American traditions of free markets and industriousness by actively undermining those traditions by imposing rights-violating anti-immigration policies. The best way to promote good American institutions, both at home and abroad, is to fully achieve them at home. Immigration restrictions send the message, "America is so devoted to free markets that its policies prohibit free markets in labor." In fact, immigration restrictions actively violate and tear down the best American traditions. You can't support free markets and industriousness by prohibiting free markets and barring entry to industrious people.

I want to add a couple of points specific to the conservative motivation for this objection about culture.

Conservatives hold that beliefs and values gain force primarily when they are inculcated by society at large and passed down from parents to children within families. There is an element of truth to this; many people never develop the independence required to think through their ideas and reach their own conclusions. Instead, many people passively pick up the ideas expressed by those around them. However, individuals always remain free to question the ideas with which they are surrounded. As Biddle explains in his essay:

People, including immigrants and would-be immigrants, have free will; they choose to think or not to think, to act on reason or to act on feelings, to respect individual rights or to violate them. A person's choice to respect or violate individual rights is not dictated by his national origin or his race or his language, but by his philosophy, which can be either rational or irrational, depending on whether or not he chooses to think.

The conservative objection about culture is actually a variant of collectivism, for it presumes that an individual's ideas are determined by the surrounding society. In fact, individuals have the ability to think for themselves, and many immigrants do so.

By seeking to impose immigration restrictions, conservatives do not in fact promote the American traditions of free markets and personal responsibility. Such conservatives actually promote the traditions of statism and collectivism.

For many conservatives, the objection about culture assumes a more political form: Hispanic voters tend to vote for Democrats over Republicans. Yet if Republicans actually stood for free markets and industriousness, they would seek to repeal restrictions on immigration (as well as welfare support for immigrants), and thereby win the political support of many immigrants.

Biddle's essay effectively answers every serious objection to open immigration, though Biddle addresses the objection about cultural traditions indirectly. Biddle's essay serves as a blue-print in immigration policy for those who actually want to foster what is best about America.