What’s wrong with this picture?

I can think of a few things. Why only 5 million? The government estimates that over 11 million persons live in the United States without its “permission.” Obama presumably is focusing on the 5 million because he does not want to see them forcibly separated from their children. Good for him. That’s a worthy motive and objective. So why didn’t he do this years ago? Many families were split up while he dithered and played politics, falsely claiming he had no executive authority to defer deportations.

Moreover, his order does not apply to the parents of the “dreamers,” so he reserves the power to break up those families. Shame, Mr. Obama. All persons without papers should be protected from deportation, for reasons I will soon make clear if they are not clear already.

Also, the deferral of deportations is only temporary. But I guess we can’t blame him for the fact that the next president could vacate his executive order and deport these innocent people.

Another thing wrong is that Obama thinks permission to work is his to bestow. In terms of natural law and objective morality, no one needs permission to engage in production and free exchange. Governments maintain elaborate machinery to keep people from doing those things without permission (licenses and permits), and they have the guns to enforce it. But this power is illegitimate. It doesn’t matter that a majority of the people’s misrepresentatives say otherwise.

It’s admirable that Obama will remove this one barrier to industriousness. I guess he’s doing what he can under the circumstances, but of course he does not favor repeal of the entire rotten immigration apparatus that makes special permission necessary.

We know he would not favor wholesale repeal because he says his order will also increase “border security.” “Border security” is a term that camouflages the gross violation of individual rights entailed by immigration control. Like his political opponents, Obama is a control freak, even if occasionally he supports loosening control.

Most people have a different list of complaints against Obama’s executive order. Republicans and even some Democrats oppose Obama’s unilateral action. It’s not so much the content of the order, they say, but the process. The legislature is supposed to legislate, and the executive is supposed to execute, so they accuse Obama of unconstitutionally legislating and failing to execute. They remind us that Obama previously said he has no authority to do what he’s now doing. Administration people say he is guilty of no contradiction because what he’s doing today is different from what he said he had no authority to do three years ago. His political opponents respond with the equivalent of: “Flapdoodle.” (Why do Republicans and conservatives have no problem with unilateral executive authority to murder people?)

I discount everything both sides are saying. In politics people say — usually with great conviction — whatever is expedient. Time horizons are short, and they have little incentive to strive for consistency, which they surely regard as the “hobgoblin of little minds.”

I also wouldn’t be too concerned with “process.” The language of every law, including the Constitution, is subject to human interpretation, and therefore the rule of law in any political system we observe today is really the law of men and women. As I’ve written before,

It’s not as if the proper interpretation (whatever that may be) can be hardwired somehow to guarantee that legislators, presidents, and judges will act in certain ways, or that the public will demand it. At every point people will be making the interpretive decisions, including the decision over which interpretation is right.

And as Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “Any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support.”

In “The Myth of the Rule of Law,” legal philosopher and libertarian John Hasnas argues that since no legal language is exempt from interpretation, law can’t be determinate. Another legal scholar and libertarian, Randy Barnett, agrees, at least to some extent. He calls law “underdeterminate.”

Predictably, then, as Hasnas writes, there is inevitably a host of

incompatible, contradictory rules and principles…. This means that a logically sound argument can be found for any legal conclusion…. Because the law is made up of contradictory rules that can generate any conclusion, what conclusion one finds will be determined by what conclusion one looks for, i.e., by the hypothesis one decides to test. This will invariably be the one that intuitively “feels” right, the one that is most congruent with one’s antecedent, underlying political and moral beliefs. Thus, legal conclusions are always determined by the normative assumptions of the decisionmaker.… [I]t is impossible to reach an objective decision based solely on the law. This is because the law is always open to interpretation and there is no such thing as a normatively neutral interpretation. The way one interprets the rules of law is always determined by one’s underlying moral and political beliefs.

“The fact is that there is no such thing as a government of law and not people,” Hasnas concludes. “The law is an amalgam of contradictory rules and counter-rules expressed in inherently vague language that can yield a legitimate legal argument for any desired conclusion.” (Also see Hasnas’s “The Depoliticization of Law” [PDF].)

No wonder that one day Obama can find no authority to defer deportation and loads of authority the next. (Although, my friend the libertarian columnist Shikha Dalmia says his current position is has a strong basis in the immigration law. So does Cato’s Ilya Somin.) No wonder Obama’s Republican opponents can insist they are right.

Rather than fall into that thicket, let’s get Lysander Spooner on them all. What counts is liberty, and lex iniusta non est lex — an unjust law is not a law. As Spooner wrote Grover Cleveland in 1886,

Let me then remind you that justice is an immutable, natural principle; and not anything that can be made, unmade, or altered by any human power.… It is also, at all times, and in all places, the supreme law. And being everywhere and always the supreme law, it is necessarily everywhere and always the only law.

So if a president unilaterally acts to protect someone’s liberty, I say bravo, because he is acting according to the natural law. And if a president acts, whether unilaterally or in concert with Congress, to violate liberty, then that president is in violation of the natural law and the people should respond accordingly.

Government interference with the right to move is a violation of the natural law and of individual liberty. It does not matter that such interference was enacted by a majority of both congressional chambers and signed by a president. It is illegal, and even an isolated refusal on the part of a president to enforce an unjust “law” is to be applauded.

(I hope no one thinks the principle of trespass furnishes justification for government control of immigration. The claim that free immigration constitutes “forced association” is nonsense. In a freed society, newcomers would be welcome on the property of many people looking for fellowship, customers, tenants, and services, as well as on nonstate public property.)

I know better than to think that Obama’s executive order is the start of something big. But that is no reason not to rejoice. Because of his action, some human beings won’t be torn from their children by jackbooted immigration thugs. I can’t see how that’s not a good thing.

The prison system is built on a fundamental paradox of principles. On the one hand, its defenders make pragmatic, consequentialist arguments like “we need to send a clear message to criminals.” But all evidence points to the fact that harsher sentences, longer bids and worse conditions increase recidivism rather than decrease it. It should be obvious, being imprisoned doesn’t make you a better person. It makes you more hostile to the society that put you there and it makes the rest of society more hostile to you — making it more difficult to live a “normal life” once you’ve been released. When faced with these simple arguments, the “tough on crime” crowd sometimes show their true colors — their objective was never to rehabilitate or deter, but to exact vengeance.

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This framing of the immigration issue is entirely wrong. It rests on the assumption that an inflow of “illegal” immigrants is a bad thing. The notion stems from a belief in the morality of nation-states and border control. If we abandon this idea, we can see that the real immigration problem pertains to border enforcement. It’s also related to miserable conditions in other countries. This horrific context is what leads many people to immigrate.

It’s definitely a problem when force is initiated against people simply crossing an imaginary line on a map. That’s one aspect of the real immigration problem. Another is the aforementioned miserable conditions. These consist of poverty and violence. Both of which contribute to people choosing to immigrate. If they lived in a better context, they may not feel the need to do so. This is not to say there is a moral issue with their choice to immigrate though.

This violence is partially the fault of U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. recognition of the coup government in Honduras is one example. Another is the past terrorist wars waged by Reagan in Central America. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to violence unleashed by U.S. foreign policy. It’s the most relevant though.

A just resolution of the problems surrounding immigration would involve ending imperialist U.S. violence around the world. It would also involve opening the borders. These are the positions consistent with radical libertarianism and anarchism. In contrast, the present framing of the issues by politicians is non-libertarian or non-anarchist. The latter statist take is morally grotesque.

One way to go about helping this solution along is to pressure politicians to declare safe havens in areas under their control. Another related approach is to have non-governmental institutions harbor or help refugees from other countries. One could also donate to organizations that push for illegal immigrants to receive legal defense in court like the ACLU.

All of these options are important for furthering freedom of immigration. This principle of freedom of movement follows naturally from the non-aggression principle. Let’s work to implement the above solutions! All we have to lose is our chains. The time to act is now.

Free and open movement is the natural, unconditional right of every single individual, a prerogative that precedes governments and their arbitrary borders and policies. Confronted with this fact, even some self-styled libertarians will cavil and complain, puling that open borders actually amount to “forced integration,” that a free society is in fact one of exclusion and static populations disallowed from free movement simply by facts of “private property.”

And of course these facts and the relationships they implicate are never to be called into question. Never are we to ask what kinds of results and patterns legitimate property rights, properly based on some notion of homesteading, would create if actually developed and held to. Given the limits on the circumstances under which such forms of private property would be regarded as legitimate in a hypothetical freed market, it strains credulity to think that the fear-mongering of anti-immigration “libertarians” is well-founded.

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I happen to embrace the term, rather than run from it. If we’re being precise with our language and defining it properly, then isolationism ought to be the goal of any person who understands the routine and predictable fallibility of government. It is a philosophy grounded in historical fact, one based on a multitude of experiences which all point to the extremely limited ability of governments to accomplish their ends.

Real isolationism thus seeks not the walling off of America from the rest of the world and its problems, but instead, to isolate only the American government from inserting itself into those problems, thereby creating a bigger shitstorm than already exists. But those who create the political lexicon today have turned the term on its head in Orwellian fashion.

The folks who tar others with the isolationist label need to look inward, for it is they who seek to do the isolating. They wish to isolate you from just about everything you stand to come in contact with, both of the living and non-living variety. From the people you associate with, the places you go, what you eat, who you sleep with, where you go to school, and how you medicate yourself, to what you read, watch, hear, and think — the real isolationists seek to control virtually every conceivable human action and interaction. There is nothing the real isolationists don’t wish to restrict, license, tax, or require you to get their permission for. These isolationists, the true ones, are your Congressmen, their administrative minions, and all of their constituents who loudly support them and play their game. They’re here to define your entire life for you, starting on day one.

Nowhere is this paternalistic mindset more starkly exhibited than in today’s immigration debate. The Central American children crossing the border are presented by the isolationists as your enemy, when in fact, it is the American government that turns the children into something resembling a threat.

A recent parody song by Ray Stevens highlights the real American isolationist worldview plainly, and without any of the political-speak that you hear on the nightly news. If only the Fox News talking heads would be this straightforward about their position. Stevens mocks America as the country that hands out “goodies” to all who illegally cross its border. It is apparently lost on Stevens that the ones actually handing out the goodies are the politicians themselves, always with their hand in your wallet. No songs about them, however. As long as Stevens’ Medicare tab is being paid, he’s just fine with the political thievery.

If government handouts are the root problem, the solution is logical — eliminate government, the very source of the handouts. And as Murray Rothbard said, “[o]nly wholesale flailing away with a meat axe could possibly do justice to the task [of cutting government].” But again, that’s the solution only if the goodies are your real problem.

If brown-skinned children are your real problem, then by all means, demonizing them, building a wall, and militarizing the border all seem like appropriate responses. Why would Ray Stevens, or any who share his isolationist views, wish to attack the root (government welfarism) when their real issue is with the foreigners themselves?

Stevens’ song continues by giving examples of other countries that handle border issues by jailing, beating and killing illegal entrants. “Imagine that!” he says, as if these are things America should aspire to. That line of reasoning speaks for itself, and is unfortunately all too common in most Law and Order types.

And no isolationist’s ravings about immigration would be complete without the boneheaded economic argument. You know, the one that says immigrants will take your job if you don’t turn them away at the border, as if you have some kind of entitlement to lifetime employment. Is that attitude not welfare dependency in its purest form?

Professor Donald Boudreaux has destroyed the economic argument against immigration beautifully on his blog. Taken to its absurd but logical extreme, if walling off a territory to prevent competition from flowing in were an economic benefit, then why not apply it on a state level, or even the city, neighborhood or household level?  Wall yourself and your family off from the rest of the world and produce everything in-house. See what kind of prosperity results.

I’ll continue to embrace isolationism as long as the political class is defining the term, but I long for the day when we can call a spade a spade. Yes, it is the government that is the real isolator. Immigration is just one small facet of their isolationist attitude. There are countless other ways in which government seeks to cut you off from the entire world around you.

Hearing that all this was going down just blocks away from where I live, I joined up with some of my local activist friends at a union hall to help out the victims any way I could. When we arrived at the station, we were met with a long line of exclusively adult female immigrants, some holding the hands of small children. Clothes, water, and the use of a cell phone to call family members were the three big items in demand. ICE drops them off at the station without a change of clothes or a bus ticket, so they’ve got to find a way to get clean, hydrated, and procure a ride all in the space of a few hours. The amazing volunteers who helped out that day managed to provide them with all of the above and more, and even though most of the immigrants were limited to washing off in the Greyhound bathroom and forgoing a meal on the bus ride back, they couldn’t have been more appreciative and kind.

This was my first time volunteering with a radical community, and if I wasn’t already convinced of the potential of Direct Action, this experience did it for me.

The very phrase “direct action”- being a deliberate term associated with anti-authoritarian movements – conjures up scenes of aggression and violence against state institutions: Black rows of masked protesters wielding molotovs, improvised raids on animal testing facilities, even communist attempts to “disrupt the flow of capital” are all valid instances of direct action. But to limit the phrase to only its most dramatic manifestations is a mistake. Voltairine de Cleyre said of Direct Action circa 1912:

 Every person who ever had a plan to do anything, and went and did it, or who laid his plan before others, and won their co-operation to do it with him, without going to external authorities to please do the thing for them, was a direct actionist. All co-operative experiments are essentially direct action.

This all-encompassing conception of Direct Action is the most meaningful, because it acknowledges how peaceful, voluntary cooperation toward a given goal can best achieve desired outcomes.

To examine the efficacy of this direct approach, consider the steps one must take to achieve something within the confines of the political system. For instance, you could always vote for the most promising presidential candidate. Going this route, if you’re very lucky, your vote has a “1 in 10 million chance of determining the national election outcome.” Even if you’re one of the lucky few, your candidate will most likely break his more appealing promises, whether he vowed to free political prisoners or you’re reading his lips about “no new taxes.” Aside from the purely theatrical ritual of voting, the very systems underlying politics cause blockage. Bloated bureaucracy and red tape backs up the process and absorbs any genuine attempt at meaningful change. Party members, even at the local level, must “play the game” and play up to special interests if they want to survive the cutthroat world of corruption and nepotism. If there ever was any genuine intent to begin with, it is quickly swept under the rug to make way for “moving the needle forward” and other such nihilistic rallying cries of Whiggish progress for progress’s sake.

The spirit of Direct Action is inherently anti-authoritarian as it bypasses the arbitrary thresholds of negotiation and concession that come packaged with politics. There’s no need to beg politicians for a drink when you can, as David Graeber puts it, “dig the well yourself”.

But behind the tactical and ethical consistency of Direct Action in community volunteering, there’s the invaluable bonus of personally connecting with those in need. The sheer sincerity of helping others is a humbling experience, and for me, the Greyhound station was a sharp moment of clarity when my anarchist principles were more than words bound to the page by logic and rhetoric: They took shape in a way that brought vastly different individuals together for a crucial cause. I went hoping that I could be a part of that cause – I never knew it would become such a big part of me.

The “anarchism” comes from the insight that a society of strict nonaggression is ipso facto incompatible with the existence of the state. Since the state, both in theory and practice, is defined in terms of aggression against innocents, a truly free society cannot endure such an institution. Where, though, does immigration fit into all this theoretical ideation?

Free and open movement is the natural, unconditional right of every single individual, a prerogative that precedes governments and their arbitrary borders and policies. Confronted with this fact, even some self-styled libertarians will cavil and complain, puling that open borders actually amount to “forced integration,” that a free society is in fact one of exclusion and static populations disallowed from free movement simply by facts of “private property.”

And of course these facts and the relationships they implicate are never to be called into question. Never are we to ask what kinds of results and patterns legitimate property rights, properly based on some notion of homesteading, would create if actually developed and held to. Given the limits on the circumstances under which such forms of private property would be regarded as legitimate in a hypothetical freed market, it strains credulity to think that the fear-mongering of anti-immigration “libertarians” is well-founded.

Furthermore, arguments that see open borders as “forced integration” are especially spurious and unconvincing within the context we’re presented today, where governments themselves own and administer most of the land and the rest has been doled out to political favorites under a process in which proper homesteading has never been a real or important consideration. In their essence, anti-immigration arguments come to the laughable contention that merely due to accidents of birth which place some lucky group in one favored locale and others somewhere else, the fortunate group ought to be able to control and impede the movement of others.

We must therefore ask how and on what basis? Stripped of intricate apologies for the status quo, the answers presented are simply, “using force, deadly if necessary” and “because sovereign states have the right to protect their borders.” But even if we grant the premise that the United States ought to be able to protect its borders — itself an enormously controversial one which, as anarchist, I challenge — we must then wonder: Protect them from what? As economist Bryan Caplan observes, leaving out the moral questions implicated by the immigration debate, “even a random illiterate peasant” represents an economic benefit to his new country.

“Immigration laws,” Caplan shows, “trap people in countries where workers produce far below their potential.” When allowed the opportunity to work and produce to their potential, immigrants fill important economic needs and increase the overall wealth in society.

In terms of both basic economic and humanitarian considerations, completely free immigration and open borders are the soundest way forward for the United States and the whole world. Arbitrary, aggressive restrictions on people’s movement trample individual rights, divide families, and hurt the economy. It’s time to end the global apartheid of invented national boundaries and embrace the market anarchist solution of free movement, free exchange and free people.

This claim will strike many people as outrageous. So I ask, Where does government get the moral authority — I’m not talking about legal power — to apprehend and detain human beings of any age who have committed aggression against no one? There is no such authority.

These children are human beings. Whether they are coming here to be with family or to escape danger, they have the same natural rights as Americans have. Our rights can be expressed in many ways, but they boil down to just one: the right to be free of aggression.

We have this right not by virtue of being American, but by virtue of being human. It is a natural, not national, right, so these young Hondurans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans have it too. Locking them up and deporting them should offend Americans, who claim to believe in the natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (Did the Fourth of July have any meaning, or was it just a day off from work?)

For some strange reason, immigration makes people forget about freedom — their sense of freedom gets overwhelmed by their deference to the state and national sovereignty. That’s why most people think “securing the borders,” as Barack Obama is doing, is more important than the welfare of poor people born on the other side of those borders (especially the southern border). I say “strange” because volumes of evidence show that the influx of people from other lands and cultures is also good for the people already here. We need not fear newcomers. It takes initiative and courage to pick yourself up, leave the only home and culture you’ve known, and journey to a new land. Those qualities also lead people to become entrepreneurs and engage in innovation. But even immigrants who don’t start successful businesses still render valuable services as they strive to make better lives.

If this is not obvious to most Americans, it may be because the illegal status forces people without government papers to work in the shadows. That status also leaves them vulnerable to horrible exploitation by people who can threaten to call the immigration authorities if their commands are not obeyed. That appalling condition is reason enough to legalize the so-called illegals.

Speaking of exploitation, the perilous conditions that unaccompanied children face at home and on their northward journeys are direct results of evil government policies. If the borders were open — that is, if the natural right to be free of aggression were respected — children would not need to be entrusted to shady men who can extort large sums of money on the promise to transport the children to the United States. Without government agents hunting them, children and parents could move north together in freedom and safety. They would be welcomed by generous humanitarian organizations, as immigrants were in the past.

Also, if the U.S. government did not prosecute a violent war on drug makers and users, and did not push the war on Latin American governments, those children would be safer to start with. Many children leave today because of drug-related violence, or for fear of being impressed into drug gangs.

But, many people ask, how can we handle all these kids? Who will pay? Under the welfare state, unfortunately the taxpayers will pay. This is what leads many people to oppose open borders. No freedom of movement, they say, until the welfare state goes. The problem is that the welfare state will never go if it is saved from all stresses and strains. While immigrants don’t use the welfare system as much as people think, free immigration might help bring the end of government transfers. Private aid would take their place.

Even today, Americans are humanitarian enough to finance care for these children if people did not assume the government would do it. In other words, the welfare state is morally corrupting.

• Over at the Washington Post’s Volokh Conspiracy blog, Ilya Somin has an excellent reply to the argument that undocumented immigrants have acted immorally by violating the law. As an anarchist I reject the idea that one has a moral obligation to obey the state’s laws. But Somin persuasively argues that even with a presumption in favor of obedience to laws, there are good reasons to believe that other factors make it moral to cross borders without legal permission.
• In other news related to the criminalization of migrants, protests continue across the nation to oppose the ongoing harms of mass deportations. April 5th marked a National Day of Action Against Deportations. Over at PanAm Post, Fergus Hodgson has a good article on the protests.
• Deportations continue to destroy lives and break up families in my home state of Utah. Ana Cañenguez, who I have mentioned previously at this blog, was just told by ICE that her application for humanitarian exemption was denied. This means she will be deported back to El Salvador and her family will be split apart by state coercion. As Ana told reporters,  “I don’t understand why this President can tear families apart.”  We must fight for a world where no presidents or other state actors have that horrible power. As Anthony Gregory puts it, “End deportations now. This is beyond cruel, and such horrors occur hundreds of times a day in the name of immigration control. Obama’s presidency has topped all others on deportations in absolute terms, at least in modern history.”
• Another horror inflicted by the prison state is rape by state actors like police and prison guards. These rapists act with virtual impunity thanks to the state’s institutional power, ideological euphemisms, and the state’s monopoly on law. One of these rapists, Kansas City police officer Jeffrey Holmes, was actually convicted of a crime on Friday. Holmes raped two women, both of whom he accused of prostitution. While prosecutors alleged that he used his position as an officer to coerce the women into sex, prosecutors charged him not with rape or assault but with “corruption.” He was convicted of these charges and sentenced to “15 days in jail and a fine.” This is incredibly lenient compared to typical sentences for rape and sexual assault, and it is yet another example of euphemism being used to shield a state actor from accountability for rape.
• To  understand more about how the prison state enables rape, I highly recommend The Shame of Our Prisons: New Evidence, an article by David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow from last October’s New York Review of Books. The article summarizes lots of recent research on prison rape from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and I find it immensely useful for understanding the specifics of the problem.
• As I write this, I’m listening to a talk by Jonathan Nitzan titled No Way Out: Crime, Punishment & the Capitalization of Power. Nitzan is one of the authors of Capital as Power, and this talk analyzes mass incarceration and punishment through the lens of his analysis of capitalism. This provides an explanation for the seemingly unusual phenomenon of liberal capitalist states incarcerating on a mass scale.
• For another economic perspective on prisons, I also recommend Daniel D’Amico’s talk The American Prison State. D’Amico looks at incarceration and punishment through the lens of free market economics, specifically the Austrian school.

I hope you find these links interesting and informative. I’ll leave you with something you can do to help those imprisoned by the American state. Writing to prisoners can make their life inside the prison slightly less monotonous and more livable. For a good way to start writing letters to prisoners, I recommend writing to prisoners on their birthdays. You can find some information on political prisoner birthdays for April here.

Few aspects of the modern state are more irritating than the control of borders. Our movements are circumscribed by the nationalistic regimentation of migration and travel. This makes it more difficult to vote with your feet. One polity may be particularly oppressive, but the entrance requirements of another can be rather repressive too. This renders it more difficult to escape unjust conditions and reside in a more just area.

I am only here on a visit, but I could very well be migrating to another country sometime in the future. It will be a nightmare to go through this again with different immigration authorities. One of my fears relates to how they will treat my computer and other valuable items. I could be stopped for my political activites too. It would be the restriction of my liberty based upon a political disagreement.

Nation-states have other major disadvantages, but the restriction of movement is definitely one of the worst. A basic human right includes the liberty to move about without arbitrary restrictions on said movement. What could be more arbitrary than imaginary lines drawn in the sand by military and police power? Not much! All such borders are political fictions that benefit ruling classes.

Border restrictions especially hurt lower class people who need to get to a better locality. Such individuals are out to create a better life for themselves and deserve our moral support. They are the ones with the least amount of resources to fight immigration laws. The laws are thus biased against lower income people. They are the most restricted and affected by them.

Strong border controls allow rulers to pick and choose who enters a given territory. It priliveges some people at the expense of others. The individuals who have political connections are at an advantage relative to those who don’t. A base of support can thus be created and cultivated amongst the immigrant populace. Let’s work to open the borders and end nation-states.