Arizona immigration law: enforcing unjust laws are unjust
May 22nd, 2010 | by Brian |U.S. immigration policies are unjust, and Arizona’s attempt to enforce these policies perpetuates the injustice. Immigration restrictions prevent peaceful and ambitious individuals and families from seeking a better life. Restrictions violate the rights of employers to hire who they please, whether they are from Colorado, India, or Mexico.
“The fundamental problem with America’s immigration system is that it forces Americans to justify to their government why they want to bring someone into the country, instead of requiring the government to justify to them why they can’t,” notes Forbes columnist Shikha Dalmia.
Legal immigration can take many years. For a cartoon depiction of this labyrinthine process, search on-line for “America’s Absurd Immigration Waiting Line.”
Local job-seekers cannot rightfully claim “first dibs” on job opportunities. Hiring the best person for the job should not be a crime, but immigration restrictions can make it so. A temporary worker program would remedy this and other problems. “A regulated channel for temporary workers would dramatically reduce the pressure on our borders, aid our economy and ease the task of our law enforcement agents inside the country,” testified former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. “There is an inextricable link between … a temporary worker program and better enforcement at the border.”
Some decry amnesty for illegal immigrants as undermining “law and order.” But valid moral principles trump unjust laws. If it’s moral to apprehend illegal immigrants to maintain “law and order” was it moral in 1850 for authorities to apprehend escaped slaves under the Fugitive Slave Law?
The Daily Camera (Boulder, CO) printed a version of the above on May 22, 2010.
Here’s the cartoon depiction of America’s Absurd Immigration Waiting Line:
On the “wait in line” argument, see also: A related article: “Legal Immigrants: Waiting Forever.”
For a general overview, I recommend the chapter on immigration in the Cato Handbook for Policymakers.
On jobs, I recommend Ari Armstrong‘s On Immigration, Too Many Conservatives Oppose Liberty. He writes:
But won’t legal immigrants and guest workers take American jobs? In a free society, a job belongs to whomever an employer chooses to hire, and to nobody else. And we are frankly tired of alleged conservatives treating jobs as though they were some sort of socialized property of the collective. It’s time for Republicans to stop channeling Karl Marx when it comes to immigration policy.
I also recommend a very informative essay, Is there a right to immigrate?, by Mike Huemer, a Philosophy Professor at the University of Colorado. In the conclusion he writes:
In restricting the flow of immigration, the government does not merely allow a harm to occur, nor does it merely refrain from conferring a benefit; the government actively and coercively interferes with people’s acting to satisfy their needs, in a way that is extremely harmful to most potential immigrants.
Credit for amnesty argument goes to Craig Biddle in his article titled Immigration and Individual Rights in The Objective Standard. I recommend the whole article. Don Boudreaux also has a good comment on amnesty:
But rule-breakers hurt society only when the rules they break are ones that help society when these rules are followed. It’s not at all clear to me that the existing rules that limit immigration are helpful; they are, indeed, much more likely to be simply a species of economic protectionism, buoyed by ugly nativism — rules that create and protect rents — rules that are anti-social in the deepest sense.
Temporary worker program: Thanks to Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute for the Chertoff quote. It’s from his article, “Immigration Reform Must Include a Temporary Worker Program.” Check out his more recent article, U.S. Needs to Let More Workers In.
Notes on immigrants and taxes:
On his blog Boudreaux provides some links on whether immigrants drain the welfare state. One link is to an article by Shikha Dalmia, on how much taxes illegal immigrants pay:
- ” A stunning two-thirds of illegal immigrants pay Medicare, Social Security and personal income taxes.”
- “the 1996 welfare reform bill disqualified illegal immigrants from nearly all means-tested government programs including food stamps, housing assistance, Medicaid and Medicare-funded hospitalization. The only services that illegals can still get are emergency medical care and K-12 education.” [I think this hold for five years after arriving - BTS]
- [I]n 1996 … the Internal Revenue Service began issuing identification numbers to enable illegal immigrants who don’t have Social Security numbers to file taxes. … . Close to 8 million of the 12 million or so illegal aliens in the country today file personal income taxes using these numbers, contributing billions to federal coffers.
- “aliens who are not self-employed have Social Security and Medicare taxes automatically withheld from their paychecks. Since undocumented workers have only fake numbers, they’ll never be able to collect the benefits these taxes are meant to pay for.”
I’d like to find the references to the above. For example, USA Today reports that “The Social Security Administration estimates that about three-quarters of illegal workers pay taxes that contribute to the overall solvency of Social Security and Medicare.”
tags: Daily Camera Editorial Advisory Board, immigration
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