For better or worse, Donald Trump seems hell-bent on keeping a lot of his campaign promises. On one hand, I applaud his pardons, especially Ross Ulbricht, but also the January 6th protesters, many of whom have been in legal limbo for 4 years. What 6th amendment? On the other hand, his obsession with illegal immigration should be cause for concern for everyone. Here is a brief overview of my thoughts on several related sub-topics regarding immigration, crime, and liberty.
Constitutionality
The Constitution of the United States says little about immigration. Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 mentions "To establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization" among the enumerated powers of Congress. Article One, Section 9, Clause 1 allows future prohibition of slave importation. That's it.
The Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1, begins, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." This was part of the Reconstruction era incorporation of former slaves into the populace with legal definitions, and is now at the core of the birthright citizenship debate surrounding immigration.
In short, a pregnant foreigner who gives birth on American soil has birthed an American citizen. Trump is attempting to over-rule this Constitutional provision to fight what some term anchor babies. In Republican circles, this concept is one of the foundational concerns regarding immigration because of the potential tax burdens imposed by people perceived as adding to burden of a welfare state already laden with unfunded liabilities.
History
The US has had varying levels of immigration restrictions, and varying border enforcement compared to seafaring immigrants. As I understand it, the American southwest has tended toward a porous border until about a century ago, and laborers migrated freely.
The US/Canada border crossing only required valid ID to cross until after the September 11th attacks of 2001, and only fully implemented to require passports or other special ID in 2009.
Prior to World War I, there were also few instances where any international travel required passports or visas. I would argue real racism was often more of an issue at those times than at present, too.
It's fair to question whether the increasing demands for "papers please, citizen" has improved safety or helped prevent criminal activity.
Crime
The laziest complaint is that illegal immigration is criminal because it is illegal. Legality has no inherent moral or rational authority. As I have doubtless written before, slavery was legal and the Underground Railroad helping people flee slavery was illegal. The dictates of politicians are no foundation for right and wrong.
A real concern along the US/ Mexico border is the drug trade. There is no denying the violence inherent in Mexican drug cartels or the risks of black market goods. However, placing the focus on smugglers overlooks the root cause. A century ago, bootleggers and Baptists were perversely united in supporting alcohol prohibition, the former earning obscene profits on the artificially-created black market, and the latter puritanical control freaks feeling like they could sanctify society. Today, cartels and congresscritters are similarly united in supporting the drug war.
Addiction is a terrible thing, but vices are not crimes, and prohibition creates new problems which would not otherwise exist. Complaints about smuggling deflects criticism from where it truly belongs.
"Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.
"In vices, the very essence of crime—that is, the design to injure the person or property of another—is wanting."
—Lysander Spooner, Vices Are Not Crimes (1875)
However, it is also important to mention human trafficking as the third major criminal concern. Unlike narcotics, which are an inanimate object, smuggling people for labor or sex is certainly criminal. I do not know the degree, but modern slavery arguably remains a problem here in 2025. Simplifying or removing the process for legal migrant labor would make inroads on one concern, but other forms of human trafficking would require serious border patrols and enforcement.
Fortunately, real progress could be achieved by ending federal drug prohibition, simplifying naturalization, and eliminating most restrictions on migrants and tourists altogether would free up resources to handle real crimes. Unfortunately, I doubt Trump has enough libertarian advisors to encourage him to pursue this kind of policy.
Further concerns
I wrote a post back in 2017, originally on the old blockchain. I've already expanded on a few of its points above, but I'll copy in the remainder here as well, with some revisions.
Jobs are given by employers. Jobs belong to employers to give as they see fit. If you can't compete with an immigrant, your job was not stolen. It was given to someone else by the employer who owns the job and the right to employ whoever he sees fit. This is not fundamentally different from the employer hiring anyone else instead. If you can't compete with an immigrant who perhaps can't even speak English, maybe you are bad at your job. No one owes you employment. You need to earn it.
Of course, the economy is a mess, and government intervention at every level has created a lot of chaos, but blaming immigrants is incredibly misguided. Blame your congresscritters, the presidents, the faceless appointed bureaucrats, and the coproaches who protect them while enforcing their dictates.
They steal our money and ship it abroad!
The money sent elsewhere is not stolen, it was earned. The money was given to them in exchange for work. That work has value you do not see in your hasty analysis because money is only one side of the equation. Both parties benefit in any voluntary exchange. The worker values the money over the labor. The employer values the labor over the money. Wealth was created for both parties.
You can even go full Keynesian here and argue that the money will be circulated back to the US in exchange for more goods and services eventually. Wealth will be created again at some point when the dollars return to the US in more exchanges later.
Welfare, school, and medical care are stealing from us!
Welfare is theft by the government. When A robs B and gives to C, A is the thief. Not C. Whether C was born in the US, Mexico, or anywhere else is utterly irrelevant. Again, blame your congresscritters, the presidents, the faceless appointed bureaucrats, and the coproaches who protect them while enforcing their dictates.
Morality
Almost a year ago, I wrote a post entitled, How Should Christians View the Immigration Debate? I quoted several passages from the Old and New Testaments discussing how God commands His followers to treat foreigners. Some of the most vitriolic anti-immigrant rhetoric I have heard comes from self-professed Christians who seem to have forgotten their duties as followers of a new King.
In May of last year, I also wrote a follow-up which again covered many of the basic issues discussed here from a more secular standpoint. I feel like a broken record at times, but so do the folks cheering Trump, so I hope turnabout is fair play. In addition to the "it's wrong because it's illegal" and black market activity, I tried to address additional concerns I have seen from folks regarding nationalism and culture, abridged below.
Borders matter because national sovereignty matters
Even if I accepted the premise of national sovereignty in the first place, this remains an unsupported assertion. Are strong borders and stringent immigration or trade controls really essential to national sovereignty?
Additionally, many "illegal immigrants" are people who entered the country legally and just failed to leave when their visas expired. Why is government permission to travel necessary in the first place, and why is staying after some papers expired criminal? How is this existence without permission a threat to anything but the egos of authoritarians?
Illegal immigrants are manipulating politics
Undocumented immigrants cannot legally vote. To be fair, I also reject the legitimacy of all elections, but I do acknowledge the escalating concerns with each election cycle that something fishy might be going on.
Maybe Democrat posturing as "pro-immigrant" gets some favor, but if Republicans would stop talking like xenophobic nationalists and start welcoming immigrants while advocating for real naturalization reform, they wouldn't need to fear immigrants. Immigrants who want to earn a better living for themselves are likely to be aligned with a lot of "conservative values," too.
Culture
Lastly, many complaints I hear about immigrants consist of "X people are moving here," and "They have a different culture." I live in a region inundated by Californian immigrants, and this has accelerated over the past few years. This has had a detrimental impact on the local economy and culture. They aren't assimilating. They want to impose their politics on the locals. But they're already Americans, so it's totally OK, right?
Here, I recognize that any mass movement of people can be disruptive, and the US is hardly a homogeneous cultural whole. However, I argue that focusing on nationalism or nationality or race misses the point, and citing such concerns as justification for making innocent people into "criminals" is deeply unjust.
Conclusion?
I know my arguments are well outside the usual left/right paradigm, and my position of radical libertarianism likely rubs folks the wrong way, but I am here because I challenged my preconceptions. Feel free to challenge my arguments here, but challenge your own as well. Meanwhile, beware the Trump immigrant agenda with its jingoistic xenophobia undertones.
While it is individuals that have rights and sovereignty, and that alone is the source of national sovereignty, because nations, or any other institution has no other rights or power not possessed by those that effect it, that collective agreement a nation owning a geographic region does have the right to allow entry to some and refuse it to others.
Just like you do your house, for the same reasons.
It is obvious that polities have always and continue to exceed their lawful and just powers. That is the problem. Just as you don't have to allow people to shoot up in your house, AZ doesn't have to allow people to shoot up in Tucson. That doesn't mean you have the right to chase people down elsewhere and do anything to harm them if they choose to shoot up, as you correctly observe.
It is necessary to correctly limit our claims of rights and power over others, and this is the actual problem of tyranny.
Thanks!
What is the nature of your alleged "collective agreement," and where is the transfer of individual sovereignty to national sovereignty? You acknowledge that politics exceeds lawful and just powers. What are these lawful and just powers, and how can politics remain legitimate when those powers are exceeded?
I do have the right to forbid drug use on my property, as you stated, but I also have the right to permit it. How can government override this?
Government operates entirely through usurped claims of rights and powers over others, and has zero legitimacy because it can only be tyrannical. The difference between governments are only in scale, not kind.
Every institution is no more than an agreement of it's members. Government particularly so. I assert there is no transfer of sovereignty at all, and any supposition that polities have sovereignty above and beyond that of the individuals that comprise them is entirely fallacious.
The rights of individual persons are the only rights they can effect - the only rights that exist - and such agreements as they undertake amongst themselves have no additional rights than those of the individuals that undertake them.
As you just stated, that statement is not accurate. Government mostly acts to effect your personal rights, and those of your compatriots, in mutual agreeement to do many things you and your compatriots seek to do. However, in many - far too many - ways, governments assume rights and powers they do not have, and we do not have, and in those ways commit many tyrannies onerous to free people, individually and collectively. We each of us weigh our options. Should we put our lives, treasure, and honor on the line and actively oppose those transgressions, or is it better and more profitable to us to tolerate those abuses and benefit from the prosecution of our rights and authority to build roads, fund benefits, and effect policies internationally that such opposition would impede? This calculus is carefully designed by would be despots, profiteers, and outright criminals to fall short of action on our parts, again, all too often.
I do agree that corruption inevitably perverts government from our intention to mutually further our collective purposes, and eventually becomes tyrannical. It is the flaw of centralization that corruption usurps our actual rights and authorities to do so. It is the blessing of the Creator of the universe that today decentralization of the means of production is the leading edge of tech advance across all fields of industry, and will increasingly do so going forward. Because of this fact of physics, polities will inevitably decline and become irrelevant. Individuals will resume effecting their rights and authority in agreement with one another, and institutions will become obsolete and fail to be continued in due time. Whatever the challenge facing humanity today, freedom will eventually provide the means to surmount it, because the laws of physics mandate that decentralization outcompetes centralized mechanisms.
Economics will eventually become unable to be ignored. It will not happen easily, peacefully, or without being abused with every means potential, but greater benefit from taking action will eventually impel the actors, we the people, to act accordingly and best profit from our acts.
You're just repeating your assertion that there is some kind of mutual agreement as the basis for government. Where is this mutual agreement? How does government act to effect my personal rights when no such authority has been asked or granted? It is just assumed, or usurped, by the political class. There is no divine grant of authority, and democracy cannot confer authority.
Are you contending that we, you and I, do not agree with our neighbors to assure our neighborhoods are in good order?
Do we? Some people live in HOAs, and those can even be abusive. Even that little power draws the corrupt. Whether in an HOA or not, we probably actually know our neighbors, and there is actual discussion and mutual consent. Do these actual agreement between people somehow translate to legitimizing government?
There is a massive missing link in your chain of reasoning, particularly when it does not matter if my neighbors disagree with something like whether I drink beer, smoke a joint, or even shoot up heroin if I do not violate their lives, liberty, or property.
Believe me, I know the high school civics arguments about government. I'm questioning the validity of those arguments and the reasoning behind them. How do we get from "I need to coexist peacefully with my neighbors" to "government gets to extort, kidnap, or murder them if they fail to abide by arbitrary laws against non-crimes none of us agreed to in the first place"?
It does not have those rights, because we do not have those rights.
We agree that government is corrupt. Do not think I claim any of those things are lawful government.
However, we both have the right to agree with our neighbors to create an HOA, and decide that only plastic palm trees can stand in our yards. It's stupid, ugly, and would lower our property values, but within our rights to govern ourselves by that rule.
That is what government has rights to do, not rape, rob, and murder people that shoot crack into their eyeballs. Other than such lawful and just agreements we might undertake with our neighbors, there is no just government.
Unrelated to this particular post, but since I was sifting through posts, perhaps thematicly aligned. Did you order a gold pan and perhaps a small sluice?
THe sluice might not be appropriate if you are only going to be in gold bearing lands for a few days.
Posted using Political Hive
I don't think a sluice will fit my scale of casual prospecting. I checked at the local hardware store for gold pans, and while they did have the classic tin ones, they didn't have the more modern green plastic designed to make the flakes easier to see. I know of a store that does, but I haven't been by there since that post.
When you get in gold-bearing lands there will be probably be green pans in the hardware stores in that area. I'm thinking this spring I'll head up to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uwharrie_National_Forest and pan one day when the weather is nice. It looks like it's only about 2 hours drive from the house.
Most of this fellow videos are shot in or around Uwharrie
I watch very little YouTube content now - but gold panning videos are relaxing content - it may be the nature and the babbling brooks.
!SLOTH
Odds are I won't make it that far east any time soon on my road trip, but I would like to see the Appalachian Mountains and hike some of the Appalachian Trail. Who knows? Maybe our paths will cross.
Well if it looks like you make it down I-95 let us know and well buy you lunch or dinner!
There are border crossings that are legal because they follow a protocol:
= legal
Border crossing that does not follow a protocol:
= illegal
Asylum seekers who commit criminal offences in the country that receives them are breaking the law of the receiving country and must leave the country.
The only sensible approach is that immigration, if it is not to cause stress, should be slow and moderate (i.e. follow protocols). If it doesn't, if you let a lot of foreigners - millions of them - into the country in a very short space of time, you end up in a crisis. People inevitably take an agitated stance and it usually divides the society of the host country.
So, the critical points here are
If a government is incapable of handling that, it is an incompetent one and should be replaced.
Why is the existence of a government protocol important? I know you say you think there is a need for restrictions, but what supports that assertion aside from your opinion?
Legality alone does not define morality. Saying something is wrong simply because some politicians said it was illegal is not a rational argument. Appealing tot he power of a government to enforce arbitrary edicts is not a rational measure of governmental legitimacy.
I don't mean to stereotype, but your arguments are very Germanic in their circular the law is the law and we must obey it because it is the law cycle, but I may be misunderstanding you.
Without a national government formulating a protocol and deploying executive personnel on your behalf, you have to go to your national border yourself and keep an eye on who enters your country and why, wouldn't you? Question would be: on what protocol?
If you don't want to do that because you don't want to work as a border guard or civil servant, but would rather do something else with your life, then you have to agree to a protocol and a border staff deputising for you that subjects the border to your living space to an order that does not stress capacity and social reasonableness. This staff must be trained and paid. Since this executive personnel is state-run, it is therefore subordinate to the government.
Unless you don't want a national border at all. In that case, however, you have to accept that you are thrown back on your immediate surroundings (house/apartment) and thus on your own skin.
This is because your immediate and wider surroundings can then be entered arbitrarily by anyone and you cannot automatically assume the exclusive goodwill of all people. The same would happen if you had no government. Your world would then be reduced to a much smaller space, as you would have to start joining forces with the people you know in your neighbourhood, i.e. form a kind of citizen militia. But you wouldn't know whether the citizen militia fifty kilometres away from you would follow the same rule, etc.
Your statements include so many assumptions.
Why do we worry about national border in the first place, and why do they need to be guarded in the first place? They are not analogous to private property lines. Why does my rejection of your initial assertion lead to justification for a national border enforcement system? It does not follow.
I am a philosophical anarchist because I reject these presumptions behind national so ereignty and political authority. They do not withstand scrutiny. Why do you assume the goodwill and virtue of the political class? Government now invades our lives, liberty, and property while its centralized power draws the corrupt like moths to a flame. An expropriating property protector is self-contradiction. I trust strangers more than I trust bureaucrats.
Just look at Ukraine and Russia. Those government borders engendered a needless conflict, and the political squabbles of the governments have led to untold destruction and death. People use the term "anarchy" as a bogeyman, but apologists for government are the ones with the burden of proof to justify bloodshed and chaos.
Why do you lock the door to your home and not leave it open?
Why do you call the police when someone breaks into your home or tries to rob you personally? And if you don't or wouldn't do that, can you expect the same attitude from those around you that you say is yours?
Let me ask again: Would you fully accept that you are thrown back on your immediate surroundings and thus on your own skin? Without relying on an existing border with its law and order, you'd have no other chance, is that correct?
Where would you draw the line, one mile, ten miles, fifty miles away from you? Or to the street you live? Or around the place you work? Where?
An order exists already but your former government did not execute it properly. That created such agitation to the other half of the population (to use a simple number) that it now is on drastic mode. But why is it on drastic mode? Does it come out of nowhere? Is there a reasonable explanation, you can give? Since you seem not to have accepted mine in pointing towards "time" and "numbers".
National borders are not analogous to property lines, house walls, or my front door.
I have a gun. If someone breaks in, we call 811 before we dig, not 911 for the cops. But seriously, citing a government-monopolized security service does not legitimize government any more than a government shoe monopoly would legitimize the state because people need to protect their feet.
Society arose before governments as we know them, and functions day-to-day in spite of government, not because of it. Governments routinely violate the laws and principles you claim we need them to enforce, and operates under standards we would not accept from our neighbors. Government is fundamentally a territorial monopoly in violence, or in other words, a mafia.
Order exists from the grassroots up, not from government down. Government plunders the productive economy, spreads a portion of their takings on enough shoddy monopolized services to buy popular support, and then borrow using us as collateral while enriching the politically-connected. This ever-growing cancerous monopoly of coercive power creates agitation as people play-tug-of-war in an effort to control it, engendering the escalating cycle of agitation, hate, and fear we see in modern domestic politics. The political class also diverts our attention abroad by blaming foreign powers, immigrants, and other outsiders as scapegoats. This is the real outcome of government power and border disputes.
As I said before, if you let in too many people in too short a period of time, you agitate the settled society and divide the people. Is that a fact or not?
I find the argument that no government is better because we see highly corrupt governments illogical.
You might as well say that your car doesn't need windows because the windows it has installed are very shitty, if you know what I mean.
There is still a need for windows, is it not? But for functioning ones.
In the same way, I see a need for a government. The old parties must be replaced by a new government, which calms down the stresses of the people inside a country. But since the US and western Europe are so messed up (we would probably agree upon the reasons), these times do not come smoothly but first will increase the multiple stresses that had been caused within decades, before a calm down can even take place.
A lot of californians moving to the Pacific Northwest has been disruptive. This does not justify interstate immigration restrictions.
A welfare state , government monopoly schools, and centralized healthcare systems struggle under the burden of poor immigrants, but by the same logic then, we should be able to forbid the poor here from having babies, too. The problem is divorcing essential services from market transparency and hiding costs and needs alike behind a veil of bureaucracy.
Your argument presupposes that governments provide an essential good or service to society. I argue government is instead the biggest Mafia. National borders are mafia turf. Taxes are mafia extortion. Heck, organized crime syndicates are even known for providing charity and emergency services in many cities, and they do keep rival criminals in check. This doesn't mean mafias are necessary for a healthy city.
Society needs many services governments presently provide, but that does not justify government. As other analysts have suggested before, suppose government monopolized shoes. We all need shoes. But no matter how ill-fitting and ill-made those government shoes may be, a generation accustomed to government "right to shoes" would balk at suggestions shoes could be better provided by market means. "But who would make the shoes, and where? Out of what materials? How would they be distributed? What about people with little money, do you think they can afford $1000 Italian loafers? You just want the poor to go barefoot!" This same kinds of irrational arguments are raised when we suggest government police, courts, and borders are at best misguided, and at worst completely unnecessary obstacles. If we do need functional windows, do they need to be government windows? And do we in fact need these windows as your analogy suggests?
It all comes down to the question if you are willing to govern yourself. That is why I asked you, if you are willing to take into your own hands what is needed to have law and order within your surroundings. Since you cannot assume the good will of all people. You circumvented my question. Neither I nor you have a top solution to the problems we all face.
But it helps to ask the very essential questions, I think.
A government is not there to have it all fixed and done for the single individual, I agree. The less government, the less central, the less big organizations who were never elected but like to think in their tanks and sects all day long for "the whole world", the better.
But since the world is huge and since there are nations with borders, you cannot come up and decide that your nation doesn't need one and you and your little tribe can govern yourself. You just can't.
Cars are built by companies and shall be able to do so, not governments. We know where it leads when government wants to do it all. That is the problem. National governments need to secure the borders, need to spend the state money on necessarry infrastructure like streets, harbours, airports, public buildings and have its military ready to defend the populace.
All else is not their business but the business of the people who must be able to open up small, medium and big companies in order to function as a capable society. So they are able to feed themselves amongst each other and not having been fed by the holy government through oversized welfare progams. They fare well themselves if you leave them room to breathe and drop all this climate, gender, and DEI nonsense. For all the poor, disabled and otherwise needy ones, the society likes and will take care but making the whole of a society poor, disabled and otherwise needy, leads into desaster.