Comically flimsy arguments from the open borders “braintrust.”
When we close borders, we aren’t doing the same thing as putting fences around our houses. Suppose there is a neighborhood made up of 10 landowners. 8 out of 10 of them vote to keep out all foreigners. 1 out of 10, Larry, votes to let them in because he wants to rent his house to them. 1 of them votes to let them in because he’s a decent human being, but he doesn’t himself plan to rent his house. When the 8 put up a fence around the neighborhood, they don’t merely keep immigrants off their own property. Rather, they keep the immigrants off Larry’s property, against his will.
Far from protecting property rights, immigration restrictions abrogate the rights of property owners who want to rent their property to the excluded migrants, associate with them, or employ them on their land.
Putting aside the judgmental moral posturing that letting immigrants invade your territory makes you a “decent human being” (will Israel become more “decent” and let in the great unwashed from the Third World…or merely some of their Arab neighbors?), this argument can be neatly turned on its head. Imagine 8 of 10 landowners want to let in migrant invaders, but Larry objects because he doesn’t like aliens, doesn’t want to see them or associate with them, doesn’t want to see them employed to drive down local wages, doesn’t want his property values to decline, doesn’t want to be criminally victimized by aliens, doesn’t want his womanfolk groped (or worse) by them, he just doesn’t want them, no sir, no way. The other landowner objects to immigrants because, as a decent human being, he opposes genocide against his own people, he doesn’t want the carrying capacity of his neighborhood filled with aliens, he wants to preserve the land for his posterity and that of his co-ethnic neighbors, he doesn’t want his ethnic genetic interests abrogated by a genetically alien influx, and he doesn’t want his civilization ruined by culturally incompatible peoples. But the other eight get their way! In come the hordes! Against their will, Larry and the other landowner see their neighborhood, their way of life, everything they hold dear, submerged under the tidal wave of an alien flood. Thus, far from protecting property rights, mass immigration abrogates the rights of property owners who want to keep their property and surrounding land excluded from migrants, not associating with them, or employing them on the common land. Far from protecting the common social good, the collective goods, the social common, mass immigration fritters away the fruits of social goods to free-riding aliens and selfish, short-sighted natives who (think they) benefit from the invasion.
Looks like we have a conflict of interests, exactly the kind of thing the state is designed to adjudicate. There are no unlimited “property rights” in any reasonable organized society, and certainly not in the ”liberal democracies” that open borders fanatics lionize. Taxation, jury duty and the military draft (or merely selective service registration) – isn’t one’s self, one’s life, and one’s time the highest levels of property? – and laws and restrictions of all kinds, including “fair housing laws” and the like. Whither property rights? Interestingly, freedom of association is abrogated within the nation without question from the Left, but open borders now looms as a freedom of association and property rights issue. What hypocrites! What low rent, low life scumbags! What unmitigated sophistry!
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