Wherein I Flirt with Know Nothingism

I am conflicted about immigration. In principle, in a perfect world, folks would be free to move around without regard to borders, and we would all live free and in harmony amid an ethos of mutual tolerance and respect. However, I don’t live in a perfect world. I live in a world where the people who move into my community or my country influence several levels of meddlesome government. This almost always reduces my freedom.

When folks from Westchester County move up here to Dutchess, they turn our farms into rows of McMansions. They think that our taxes are a bargain (they are compared to where they came from), and they think nothing of voting tax increases to pay for more schools, more police, libraries, parks and all kinds of infrastructure, much of which doesn’t benefit me at all. It’s not that I don’t like the Westchesterites individually. They’re no better or worse than anyone else who feels free to rob me in order to subsidize their desires. At some point, these same people will decide that the process of ruination that they have engaged in has gone too far, and they will vote in a cadre that will curtail development and regulate the crap out of everyone in town. These immigrants are, frankly, destroying my community, and there is nothing I can do about it. Their culture of meddlesome statism is at the heart of the problem.

The same goes for many immigrants from abroad. I suspect that it is no coincidence that increases in government power, and acquiescence in its exercise, have followed closely on the heels of mass in-migrations of people from countries who lack any tradition of limited government and respect for individual liberty. In my experience, my distrust of government and love of freedom are more readily understood and accepted by my fellow Americans with centuries of history on this continent than by descendants of more recent immigrants. I’m not saying that these folks aren’t nice people. They are, like the Westchesterites, no better or worse than other statists with their hands in my pockets. I have also found some more recent immigrants more receptive to libertarian ideals, among them some West Indians and Mexican laborers and entrepreneurs.

Lest you think me a bigot, let me say that I have many likeable acquaintances who descend from Ellis Island Immigrants or potato famine refugees. Mrs Vache Folle has such a heritage and is a perfectly agreeable person. She is also committed to the founding principles of her adopted country. I am all for diversity in religion, customs, language and what not, but the infection of America with statism is not to be borne.

I have proposed disenfranchising immigrants and the descendants of immigrants for 7 generations in order to reduce the influence of the statist meme complex on American politics. If this could be accomplished, I would likely be indifferent to immigration.