Conclusion of yesterday’s column.
It is true that some politicians support immigrants for the wrong reasons. Politicians who feel they have the most to gain will naturally support policies such as government welfare, government health care and public education benefits for illegal immigrants. The ferocious debate over these matters tends to boil down to two sides, both of them wrong.
One side argues that, ‘These immigrants shouldn’t get benefits. Benefits are for legal Americans, not illegal Americans.’ The problem is that nobody is morally entitled to these forcibly attained benefits. The Constitution does not provide for a health/welfare/education state, and robbing some of the population to force them to pay for the health care, welfare and education of others is, in fact, nothing more than tyranny.
The conservatives propose that we keep the tyranny in place, but only for natural born Americans. The liberals (in what is clearly a grab for more political power) say we should expand the tyranny to include those from other countries, legally here or not. So long as the conservatives concede the point that such tyranny is warranted and justified in the first place, their liberal opponents will win in the long run.
I sympathize with some of the conservatives on this issue, because many of them state or imply that the end of the road is some kind of U.N. system of world government in which Americans—as the richest and most productive, free society on earth—will eventually be taxed and forced to pay for the welfare benefits of everyone on the planet. That is, of course, the end of the road where welfare state liberalism will take us, if left unchecked as it is now. Immigration has nothing to do with that problem; the growth of state expansion does. Yet conservatives are naïve if they think that supporting such an entitlement state in America, while containing it only to America, will work. Tyranny is like cancer. If you enable its growth anywhere, it will spread everywhere.
There are also the issues of subsidies and government benefits going to illegal immigrants, or simply declaring illegals legal so they can now qualify for transfers of wealth from the government (as all leftists and some conservatives wish to do.) Conservatives are, of course, right that such policies are brazen violations of the law. You can’t be both a citizen and a non-citizen at the same time. It’s morally wrong to send some illegal aliens back over the river to Mexico, while randomly selecting others to live under Obama’s entitlement kingdom. The government cannot declare some individuals ineligible for citizenship on the one hand, while at the same time treating them as legal citizens when it suits their political (read: vote getting) purposes. It’s a transparent move for political power on the part of Democrats, and the foolhardy Republicans, as always, will fall for it.
Once again, the rational solution would be to simply allow everyone into the country who isn’t a violent criminal or any other kind of objective, physical danger. The country and the economy can only benefit from the entry of rational, productive and self-responsible people. That’s what brought this country to greatness in the first place. We are a nation of immigrants.
Unfortunately, since the country is now part welfare state moochers and part productive producers, you cannot guarantee that all those wanting to get into the country are self-responsible. Some are coming for the opportunity to stand on their own, and some are coming for the freebies. The only solution? Get rid of the transfer-of-wealth state and return to a strictly constitutional, limited government republic.
Until or unless that happens, immigrants will continue to seem like a threat. In reality, some of them are, and some of them aren’t. The real threat, however, began when we departed from limited government in the first place, particularly from the twentieth-century forward.
Freedom, and the self-responsibility that goes along with it, is the only answer. And all comers are welcome!
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