Debating Our Make-Believe Immigration Laws
FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED APRIL 23, 2000
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
Debating our make-believe immigration laws
Reader J.M.C. wrote in to ask my thoughts on the ongoing soap opera of little Elian Gonzalez, plucked from the waves as the last survivor of a ramshackle refugee craft fleeing Castro's Cuba.
I replied:
Given the number of Haitian children who have been sent back to grinding poverty -- and the number of children stuck living under other oppressive regimes around the world because of our racist federal immigration quotas -- the fuss over little Elian (though the lad has my sympathy) verges on the obscene.
Libertarian science fiction author L. Neil Smith put it in pretty good perspective when he asked us to imagine a mother literally dying in the effort to get her child to the United States in 1940, and the U.S. government promptly ruling that said Jewish child must be returned to the custody of his father -- in a German concentration camp.
Cuba is a communist slave state -- the vital factor which someone like President Clinton should have pointed out by now.
For Castro -- who has imprisoned many innocent men of conscience, depriving their children of fathers -- to here play the "family togetherness" card is also obscene.
The best solution would probably have been to accept Costa Rica's kind offer to provide residence permits for the entire family -- Elian and his father and every other member of the family who wanted to come. After a year or so out from under Castro's secret police, let the dad then decide whether he wants to come to the U.S. with the son, or instead take him back to Cuba ... though it appears to me that's the kind of free choice neither government wants to encourage here.
A bad precedent, you see. For good or ill, "the state" must decide.
J.M.C. wrote back:
"Thanks for your response.
"Do you propose completely open borders, instead of immigration quotas or blockages? Using Cuba as an example -- in the case of the Marielitos -- this open arms approach hardly seems wise. Especially in light of the demonstrably negative effect unchecked (or nearly unchecked -- at the least highly preferential) immigration has had on U.S. culture over the past 30 years. ..."
I wrote back one more time:
One of the prerogatives of any "state" is to control its own borders, and I'm not willing to call for an end to "the United States" just yet -- though of course I'd rather see it function as the loose amalgam of sovereign states envisioned in 1781 (no, that's not a typo for 1787), leaving a lot more discretion to such sovereignties as Texas, California, etc. (each of which would be free to secede at will.)
If we got rid of the government "welfare state," we would simultaneously get rid of the main objection to open immigration -- that immigrants of any kind "come here just to get on the dole."
Likewise, getting government out of the business of running a schooling monopoly would de-fuse the question of whether "bilingualism should be the policy of the schools" -- all schools would be private and parents would decide; most parents would doubtless be smart enough to insist their kids learn multiple languages at an early age, with English getting top but not exclusive priority.
Face it: in a society even relatively free, there's simply no way to control the borders. We supposedly have harsh immigration quotas right now. So why is the INS staging roadblocks and bus searches hundreds of miles from any border? What's the "punishment" for illegal immigration? Being bused to Tijuana and dared to try again tomorrow?
Such a "system" punishes those who foolishly obey the law and cool their heels for years in some eastern European backwater waiting for their "visa" to come through -- while teaching Mexicans and Central Americans that our laws are nothing but a joke.
RESIDENCY here should be virtually unlimited, providing the newcomers can pay their own way. If foreigners want to come work for $3 an hour picking my celery and lettuce, let them -- I sure don't want to do it.
But CITIZENSHIP may be something else again. I would have nothing against a written test in which the applicant, turning 18, is required to demonstrate the ability to write a brief, grammatical essay explaining what it means to have a government with powers limited to those specifically delegated, accompanied by a multiple choice test identifying Madison, Washington, Jefferson, etc. -- as well as a practical test of the applicant's ability to exercise his or her Second Amendment rights and duties by loading, charging, and hitting a five-inch bull's-eye from 100 yards with an M-14, four out of five shots, in 30 seconds.
Be prepared, though -- a lot of so-called "wetbacks" might well pass these multiple tests and thus qualify to hold public office (welcome, brothers in freedom!), while the number of our native-born recent government school graduates (not to mention current congressmen) who would likely fail such an exam and thus be denied the vote, would immediately become a national scandal.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available by dialing 1-800-244-2224.
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
