Love-in at the borders

Date: Thursday, July 10, 2003 6:14 PM

JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER

www.ZaZona.com

Ilana Mercer makes a powerful argument that the H-1B visa program is a
subsidy and that importing foreign workers violates property rights.

http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=33484

Wednesday, July 9, 2003

Love-in at the borders

Posted: July 9, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Ilana Mercer

) 2003 WorldNetDaily.com

The ethics of private property ought to guide all libertarians on the
matter of immigration. They don't. An essential attribute of property
and ownership is the right to exclude or include. The right to
discriminate is an undisputed feature of property. In the absence of a
state, or in the presence of a limited government where almost all land
is privately owned, migration would be a very restricted affair. It
would depend on the graces of private property owners.

A newcomer may be invited over by a propertied person, who would
shoulder the costs. If he wishes to venture beyond the invited sphere,
the newcomer would seek consent from the private property owners with
whom he wishes to interface. The more the prevalence and status of
property approaches the libertarian ideal, the less free migration
would be.

Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe has brought to my attention his excellent
"Natural Order, the State, and the Immigration Problem" article. It
comports well with the description in "Displacing Americans" of the
H-1B visa as part and parcel, not of the law of the free market, but of
the law of the State.

In a free society based on absolute private-property rights, the
natural tendency of men a tendency that is most conducive to peace is
to live among their own, but to trade with any and all. In such a
society, commercial property owners will tend to be far more inclusive
than residential property owners. As Hoppe notes, owners of retail
establishments, like hotels and restaurants, "have every economic
incentive not to discriminate unfairly against strangers because this
would lead to reduced profits or losses." Still they will have to
consider the impact of culturally exotic behavior on "local domestic
sales," and will impose codes of conduct on guests.

Seeking low-wage employees, employers would also be partial to
foreigners but, absent the protectionist State, the employer would be
accountable to the community, and would be wary of the strife and
lowered productivity caused by a multiethnic and multi-linguistic
workforce. All the more so when a foreign workforce moves into
residential areas.

In short, reasons Hoppe, in a natural order absent government there
will be plenty of "interregional trade and travel," but little mingling
in residential areas. Just as people tend to marry along cultural and
racial lines, so they maintain rather homogeneous residential
neighborhoods. This is how the chips fall in a highly regulated
society, so much more so in a free society, based on absolute property
rights. Is this contemptible? To the left-libertarian open-border
purist it is else why would he be lending ideological support to the
State's efforts to upset any semblance of a natural order and to shape
society in politically pleasing ways?

His tentative grasp of property leads the leftist libertarian to forget
that public property is property funded by taxpayers through
expropriated taxes. It belongs to taxpayers. Yet at least a million
additional immigrants a year, among them H-1B visa arrivals, are
allowed the free use of these taxpayer-supported amenities. Every new
arrival avails himself of public works like roads, hospitals, parks,
libraries, schools and welfare. Every new arrival is inherently a free
rider.

This is why the H-1B visa program, as I pointed out, is tantamount to a
subsidy to business at the expense of the taxpayer. And Hoppe concurs:
"[E]mployers under democratic Welfare State conditions are permitted by
state law to externalize their employment costs on others" and will
"tend to import increasingly low-skilled and low value-productive
immigrants, regardless of their effect on all-around communal property
values."

Here, the owners of public property do not get to vet the newcomers
the State and big business do. Yet when faced with such economic
fascism (government-business collusion), open-border libertarians
levitate in la-la land, exulting business' every move.

The State-administered immigration policy is based on an egalitarian,
multicultural system, in which a quota is divvied among the nations of
the world, irrespective of the sentiments of taxpaying Americans or
their cultural affinities and origins. This should be an anathema to
libertarians, but it isn't.

The State's laws, moreover, make avoiding forced integration
impossible. A Middle Eastern immigrant enters the country. Despite
post-Sept. 11 jitters, and a wish to protect his tenants, an
apartment-complex owner cannot by law refuse to lease to the new
arrival. The law prohibits property owners from exercising the right to
exclude applicants from housing civil-rights legislation and
affirmative action circumscribe hiring, firing, renting, selling and
even money lending.

Perpetually suspended in some kind of third dimension on a collision
course with reality, to use libertarian Roy A. Child's phrase, the best
open-border libertarians can come up with is, "There should be no
public property or Welfare State." Well there is. From this nether
world they inhabit, the best they can propose is a kind of chaos
theory. The Welfare State, they agree, must go. It is wrong. However,
let the multitudes come, the Welfare State will buckle under and
collapse. Out of the chaos, a free order will emerge.

The State is vested in emasculating Americans. Remove their guns, their
right to defend their property, force multiculturalism and cultural
relativism down their gullets, control their property so that it is not
their own, then import millions of new constituents who lay claim to
their property. Open-border libertarians are on board with the State
for this leg of the journey.

To learn more about Ilana Mercer, visit her website. Also, listen to
Ilana live on the American Freedom Network every Wednesday at 3:00
p.m., MST, with host Robby Noel. And tune into WNTK Talk Radio every
Thursday at 3:30 p.m., EST, with host George Russell. Bookmark Ilana's
appearances page for regular updates.

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