| | Steve:
What's more, you have found yourself defending the position that I took originally (which you disagreed with), that it is morally justifiable to control immigration based upon a derivation of property rights.
But this is absolutely not what you had argued before. You didn't base it on the protection of rights, property rights or otherwise, you argued on the basis of protecting a culture, and protecting the legal infrastructure we paid for (a kind of argument for protecting a welfare state), these aren't arguments for protecting rights, since you would just as easily restrict immigrants who have committed no crimes nor intend to commit any on the basis that they would be recipients of welfare or that they would as you said quote "swamp our culture". You had said:
"And those who are going to stay need to be on a path to citizenship that include adopting our country and bringing them in at a rate that allows us to absorb them without having our culture swamped. We lose our culture when the rate of immigration goes too high."
As Mike had wrote: "The principle that we draw the line at is the objective standard of ethics, life qua man, ASSAULT is where that line is drawn."
Not culture, not protection of the welfare state, not for any other reason except to stop assault on the individual.
You wish to argue that I am being inconsistent in my argumentation, but I'm not not, they are entirely consistent with the principle of individual rights.
Everyone can choose to remain anonymous in any voluntary transaction where both parties accept that - this happens all the time. I stop at a store, carry something to the counter, and pay with cash. Entering the store and buying the item and leaving... all anonymous.
We only do this to the extent that we believe we all live under the same jurisdictional umbrella with the expectation that those who walk into our businesses have been documented, and identification is possible should a crime have been committed. Again, this is all goes back to the epistemological problem of knowing who is and who isn't a criminal. I am making an attempt at offering a reasonable level of resolving that problem in a particular context. Notice though in states like Israel where the threat of terrorism is so high, you can't go to places like the mall without walking through a metal detector, being subject to a search and presenting identification, basically in this situation the mall is assuming for itself at least partially the responsibility of police protection. While the mall also has the right to restrict individuals also on any other basis besides protection from assault, the government cannot assume any other role except for the protecting against assault, and not because they're not fond of the culture that individual comes from.
If a mall wants to, it can restrict people with baggy pants from coming into their mall. You cannot give any kind of tenable argument that the government can also discriminate on any number of ad hoc reasons that private business can, it is tasked only with the protection of individual rights. You do not have a right to be free from living in a nation that has (x) amount of Mexican immigrants.
(Edited by John Armaos on 5/12, 1:55pm)
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"Every invasion of individual rights happens with the eager support of people acting in the sincere and thoroughly mistaken confidence that what they permit the state to do to others will never be done to them."
