Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
>
> > Frankly I don't find immigration laws to be inhumane.
> > Why are they a bad idea?...
> > ...societies that produce excessive numbers of people should pay the
> > costs of those problems themselves, not pawn them off on others.
>
> I'm surprized at you, Michael. Open borders are a bedrock of the free
> market economy, and a simple consequence of granting the same basic
> rights of free travel and association to those born on one side of an
> imaginary line as we do to those born on the other. Nationalism is
> unbecoming rational minds. "Excessive people" are a resource to be
> cherished, not a burden.
I don't look at it as a nationalist issue, its an economic AND ecological issue.
Open borders for TRADE are a bedrock of a free market economy. The existing
members of a free market economy should also have the ability to control the
quality of life in their communities. If people living elsewhere want a high
quality of life like we do, then they should work to recreate our success where
they are at. Part of that is re-engineering their society. Societies that
produce more people than can be sustained on their resources not only degrade
their own quality of life, by exporting the results of their bad social
reproduction policies to our countries, they not only perpetuate a dumb idea
where they are at, but they export people who will perpetuate those same dumb
ideas elsewhere.
I see this all the time, with flatlanders moving up here to the sticks. THey
want the high quality of life that we have living up here, but once they get
here they go about trying to change our community and its laws into the same
sort of shithole they came from, then they wonder why everything has gone to
shit. When my parents moved up here from Massachusetts when I was a kid, they
understood this, and we learned to live like the people around here lived.
Vermont has the lowest homicide rates in the country, and the most liberal gun
laws, but some moronic woman had the gall to actually complain in a letter to
the editor about her horror at learning how easy it is for a law abiding person
to carry a gun, completely oblivious to the fact that its obviously not a
problem. (There were, as I recall, about 15 criminal homicides in 1999 in
Vermont, which has a population of about 450,000.)
Orwell observed this same problem in England in the late 30's. The British are
famous for their civility and politeness waiting for busses, trains, and
trolleys. When eastern european refugees started coming to Britain in 1939, at
first there were few enough that the eastern habits of pushing and shoving for
the door got drilled out of newcomers by the larger number of native passengers.
However, once the refugee population turned into a flood, the 'quality of life'
of waiting politely in line to get on a bus or train degraded down to that of
the newcomers.
Opening your borders with any economy that does not behave as yours does only
opens your own economy up to being degraded by its association. Take our
relationship with China, for example. We as a nation are benefitting from the
slave labor practices of the People's Republic of China. Their cheap products
are keeping our inflation low. But our morals and ethics have been degraded, we
are externalizing the cost of the products we want onto the backs of the chinese
laborer who is not paid, or is paid little for his forced labor. I personally
try to boycott any chinese made product. If I know a product was made in China,
I won't buy it. I would guess though that probably half of the stuff in my
apartment was made in china, or parts or resources for the stuff was made in
china.
We are now no better than those in the the Pre-civil war US who did not own
slaves, did not allow slavery in our own states or communities, but still
benefitted economically from slavery. Should we then institute an 'underground
railroad' of immigration? In the current case, people are not physically
enslaved, they are enslaved by economic and social memes that create and
perpetuate poor living conditions where they are at. Memetic shackles do not
come off when you cross the border, they stay with you. Slavery did not end with
the underground railroad, you might notice. Only the civil war and the 14th
amendment did so.
If we opened immigration to everyone that wanted to live here, we'd shortly have
6 billion people living in the US, starving to death.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:13:55 MDT