In these times, it’s very hard to have a rational conversation about immigration.
If you question Obama’s executive edicts in favor of open-ended, indiscriminate immigration, you’re branded a racist “xenophobe.”
And if you go along with these policies, you’re forced to accept that the United States government is not only economically responsible for all of its citizens, by providing them a minimum income, free health care, free education, etc., but it’s now also responsible for all citizens of the world.
From the point-of-view of a politician like Obama, this is a good thing. Obama ideologically believes in using the force of government to make everyone responsible for everyone else. Of course, in practice this means those who are able and willing to produce income are responsible for those who are unable, or perhaps unwilling, to do the same. That’s what socialism is.
However, from the point-of-view of a free country which respects individual rights, it’s a whole different story.
A moral and just government recognizes the rights of individuals to be left alone, i.e. free from the initiation of force or fraud.
The moment government starts forcing some citizens to pay for the education, corporate bailouts, health insurance, grocery bills or anything else for others is the moment you’re no longer living in a free country.
In the United States, the government has been doing this for decades. What started out as a temporary or minimal “safety net” has turned into a thriving, coercive and self-evidently corrupt and bipartisan government “industry.” This corporate statism costs trillions and trillions of dollars, and the debt rises every year. There’s no end in sight.
As wrong and irrational as this is, it makes internally logical sense for people like Obama to extend it further. If the federal government is responsible for the welfare and well- being of all its own citizens, then how can it not be responsible for the well-being and welfare of the rest of the world?
How can you turn away Mexicans who came into the country illegally? They need the help. How can you prevent Mexicans or anyone else from entering the country? They need the help. What about Muslims, who are high risk candidates for launching acts of terrorism, as in Paris and San Bernardino most recently? Forget about it. They are in need, and that’s all that matters.
Need is the issue here. According to ideological Marxism, the purpose of government is to provide “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
Deep down, this is why so many people are angry. It has nothing to do with Mexicans, or even Muslims, at least not fully. It has nothing to do with race, and it’s not really about immigration.
The injustice is a government redistributing wealth from those who produce and create it to those who did not. This is not the function of government. Government never should have departed from its central and only justified purpose: protecting the rights of individuals, rather than violating them in this way.
Ultimately, any government which gets into the business of wealth redistribution will gradually lose its legitimacy. That’s what’s happening now.
I wish the Republican presidential candidates would talk less about immigration and more about getting the government out of the wealth redistribution business in the first place.
If we got rid of socialism, there would be nothing to fear from immigrants, other than dangerous ones, of course.
Instead, a majority of us have given Obama (and compliant Republicans) the green light to expand the “free goodies” paid for by Americans who still work to everyone else on the planet — Mexicans, Muslims, anyone who will support the welfare state by living off of it. Immigration laws be damned, rationality be damned, because when need is involved, we never dare question what the government is doing.
We have created an aristocracy of need. That’s what socialism is. Whether done on the national or international level, it’s all the same.
Socialism always ends in tears; and it will this time, too.
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