Imaginary Dotted Lines

JL Wilson has a thought provoking piece at Independent Country http://independentcountry.blogspot.com/2005/10/who-believes-in-open-borders.html on open borders. I have a lot of mixed feelings about the issue. Since I don’t recognize the legitimacy of the borders in the first place, I am hard pressed to argue that they be closed. Libertarians sometimes face a dilemma when thinking about issues in that while we do not concede the legitimacy of the state and its characteristics, e.g. borders, the illegitimate state is nonetheless there all the same, and the borders are really there in the form of checkpoints and controls and the like. In a perfect stateless world, borders would probably not be an issue as each property owner would control who settled on his land. And each community might well have voluntary covenants about entry and deal with newcomers as they see fit.

Alas, we do not live in that perfect world, and immigration policy is imposed on communities by the central government and the interests that control it and benefit from it. When I left my ancestral village about 30 years ago, I doubt if there were 500 people of Mexican descent in the whole county. I certainly didn’t know any or go to school with any. In the last decade, tens of thousands of Mexicans have moved to the county, recruited by business interests. This has been a benefit to the industrialists in that wages and benefits have arguably been depressed by competition from an influx of poor people willing to work for less than native workers. It has been a benefit to apartment building owners who have seen an increase in rental applications.

In the short term, much of the earnings of the immigrants has been remitted to Mexico rather than enter the local economy. Moreover, the costs of immigration have been socialized and are borne by the taxpayers rather than the industrialists. The schools have had to increase their budgets significantly to accommodate thousands of additional children, and it has been necessary to have bilingual education programs on an unprecedented scale. There has been increased demand on all public services such as public health, policing, courts, parks, etc. without a proportional increase in the local tax base.

The immigrants themselves are by and large fine people with strong families and good values. The soccer teams in the schools are better than ever, and you can get great Mexican food. It is probably a good thing that the folks of the county are exposed to another culture and to Roman Catholics (whom we always distrusted without actually knowing any). In the long term, I reckon that there will be kids named Billy Bob Martinez or Miguel Gassaway, and that a lot of Mexicans will become Baptists or Pentecostal. They’ll eat grits with chile peppers and drink home made tequila.

I suppose what I am getting at is that immigration policy is complex and that, as JL Wilson would probably agree, it is time to discuss it in frank terms as to who benefits and at whose expense. It’s not simply a question of bigotry versus tolerance, and framing the issue in that way serves to obscure some genuine problematic aspects of immigration.