84 Lumber bought airtime within the broadcast of the 2017 Superbowl, and presented a video of a Latina mother and daughter travelling through what seems to be Mexico, plainly in hopes of entering America. Inter-spliced with the scenes of their travel are scenes of Americans, clearly constructing something. When the mother and daughter reach the border, they are confronted by a grey and terrible wall. But, as they seek for some hope, they find it — sunlight somehow shining through a section of that wall. Running to it, they find a door. In the awful wall, it was a great door that the Americans in the other scenes were building.

84 Lumber is being attacked for their video, on a theory that its purpose were to defend illegal immigration. Naturally, 84 Lumber denies that their message were any such defense; they now claim that the door were a metaphor for the institutions of legal entry.

I don't encounter a lot of people who will honestly speak in favor of illegal immigration. They ought to do so. There is nothing wrong with illegal immigration. Nothing.

The vast majority of people who oppose illegal immigration or want greater legal restriction on immigration do not do so from racism, and I am very sorry that they have been slandered and libelled; but recognizing the inappropriateness of that accusation doesn't serve to support a case for denying people entry.

Indeed, immigrants might come to our nation and do a variety of things that are violations of the rights of the people who are here now, or that are otherwise undesirable; but every genuine right that might violated by an immigrant could also be violated by someone born and raised here; more generally, every socially corrosive act that might be perpetrated by an immigrant could also be perpetrated by a native. A man or woman who was born here can violate the property and person of someone else; a man or woman who was born here can demand that his or her religion or language be give a privileged legal status; a man or woman who was born here can live at the expense of the taxpayers. None of these behaviors is made better or worse by virtue of where the person were born, nor by whether he or she were allowed to immigrate by the law. I will grant that groups coming from some foreign cultures have a greater share of members likely to do undesirable things of some sorts; but some groups native to America have a greater share of members likely to do undesirable things of some sorts.

There is a dire confusion of the legal with the moral, both on the part of those who insist that illegal immigrants are already in the wrong by virtue of having broken laws that are ostensibly ours in coming here, and by those who insist that there is no such thing as an illegal immigrant. Law can be wrong, and when it is wrong then it may be ignored without doing wrong. Those immigrants here in violation of law are neither wrong simply for being illegal, nor legal because they are not wrong to be here.

America is not a club nor a corporation. The persons and properties within the area occupied by America are not ipso facto in any way the property of all Americans. The right to trade, the right to give without condition, and the right to take that which is freely offered are not rights that in any way reflect nationality. Those who would do business with newcomers are within their rights; newcomers who would do business with those Americans are within their rights.

It's offensively absurd to claim an entitlement to exclude people by pointing to state-managed infrastructure and programmes. They weren't brought into existence through some sort of social contract; ultimately, they were effected through threats of violence; and generally they crowded-out alternative institutions that would have been created by free people. Of course, the welfare state cannot survive in a world of such freedom; it could not survive even if the progressives were allowed to pursue their wildest dreams of taxation, nationally or globally. But so much the worse for the false generosity and false security of the welfare state, which cannot avoid bankruptcy in this century, regardless of whether it keeps all of us trapped on one side or another of its jurisdictional boundaries.

Many people who are going or went through the process of legal immigration may feel that it is unfair for others now to jump the queue; but the queue should never have existed in the first place, and one only compounds the injustice by imposing it upon others.

There should be no queue, no wall, no need for doors.

Tags: immigration, law

This entry was posted and is filed under commentary, ethics, ideology, news, public. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.