Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I suppose a better title for this composition might have been “Why I Changed My Mind About Open Immigration”. Dave Kozak is an individual I’ve been arguing with on Facebook about this topic. He holds the admirably anarcho-libertarian position that borders are essentially imaginary lines on the map and that those organizations we call “governments” have no right to prevent people from traveling back and forth across them at will.

This is exactly the opinion I held for twenty years or more, during which I used all of the same arguments he has more recently employed. Back then, I exchanged heated messages with several people, including Lou Rockwell’s columnist Karen De Coster, and once I changed my mind --in an attempt to be more honest about it than Murray Rothbard ever was when he was proven wrong—I wrote to her again, acknowledging her part in making me look at immigration differently. But my earlier vehemence must have offended her, because I never heard from her again.

Over our brief correspondence, Dave has chided me on occasion for being some kind of “collectivist”, while at the same time falling back on a construct that he calls “society” which is no less collectivistic in character. Society is, in fact, a kind of a club that most of us join by being born here. Membership in this club confers many advantages (like the Bill of Rights—the best charter anyone in history has ever thought of for millions of people to live together under—English law, and and the English language, arguably the best communications and computing software that the human mind possesses) which many have labored and fought and died (yes, and killed) to create and preserve. It seems only reasonable to me that the members of this club have some kind of say about those from outside, who wish to become new members. At the very least these prospective new members should be expected to understand and adhere to the rules and values—such as equality before the law—that the club was created and is maintained to promote.

A proper appreciation of Western art, literature, and music is a definite plus.

The promised border wall that weak-kneed, lily-livered, limp-wristed parlor pinks in both parties love to hate is the clearest possible monument to American intentions in this regard: “Get off my lawn!” Of course it deprives the Marxoids of the extra, illegal votes they were counting on to reverse the current revolution. It also means that Richie Rich (so rich, says Wikipedia, that his middle name is a dollar sign) will have to pay his servants a decent wage, as well. If those aren’t changes in the right direction, I don’t know what the hell is.

I am a child of immigrants, myself, of course. My paternal great-grandparents were English newcomers who reportedly buttled and maided for the Denver 400 (I tried to look it up—think of Molly Brown). My mom’s people were Irish. But times were different, then. Both sides spoke English as their first language and shared values with the society they’d eagerly come to. Neither wished to tear it down—and none of them were looking for a cushy existence; they knew there was no such thing as a free lunch—but simply to enjoy the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness it offered them.

And yet I have watched, time after time, as local authorities apprehend known criminals, with a long history of ugly, violent vicious crimes, and release them back into the population because they are illegal immigrants—often with lucrative drug connections, valuable to local criminals— where they robbed, injured, and even murdered innocent people again and again. I don’t know about other locales, but officials in the Denver area seem especially corrupt in this regard. Socialists who call themselves liberals, especially those from California, are fond of claiming that cities with a large population of illegal aliens have a lower crime rate than those that don’t. However, this unsupported assertion violates every principle of scientific criminology that I ever took tests on in college.

How can this be happening? To begin with, the authorities in the nation directly south off us have been herding the least desirable elements of their population over the border as a part of “La Reconquista”, a program to eventually “reclaim” land, the southern strip of the United States, that they lost in war, sold to us, or never actually owned. It was thought up by a couple of traitorous American college professors who ought to be out on street corner selling pencils from a tin cup—preferably in Guatemala. At the same time, according to recent government reports, illegal immigrants have been bringing Third World diseases to America that Westerners haven’t died from for a thousand years.

Face it: the left and its so-called “philosophy” is failing laughably all over the world, and it desperately wants a fresh population of voters which it assumes will prolong its miserable life. That’s why Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi want open borders. In an age of plummeting birth rates among native populations, it also means expanding the tax base, which is why Angela Merkel has nearly destroyed the native culture of her own country.The wealthy silver-spoon right—the weakly-principled entities we call “RINOs”—want cheap nannies and gardeners, and low-salaried workers for their businesses. So individuals like Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio are more than willing to go along with the left at the expense of America-as-they-found-it.

Which brings me to my principal reason for opposing open immigration. Everywhere these newcomers go, encouraged by the likes of the politicians I have named, they change the culture, rather than become a part of it. I’m not entirely opposed to new elements of culture, and not every Mexican or South American is a robber or a rapist or a violent drug dealer, it’s true, but enough are to endanger the cultural home that our ancestors made for us, and damn few believe in the Constitution or the Rule of Law. Not every immigrant from the Middle East is a jihadist, but too many bring with them the unconstitutional mindset of Sharia Law, “honor” killings, death to homosexuals, and so forth. I have come to like the culture I live in, and the values it promotes. I don’t want to see it changed, especially to accommodate hostile strangers,

Unfortunately for the left, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is long gone. It died in a mortal struggle with Ronald Reagan and American culture. Now the New Soviet Minister for Propaganda—one Charles Ellis Schumer—wants you to believe that he is the very fountainhead, the very wellspring, of kindness. But look at his evil, leering face; listen to his voice, which manages to be both whiny and smug at the same time.

“It is not their fault, ” he proclaims of the illegal immigrants he and his ilk call Dreamers, “that they were brought here at an early age through no will of their own.” But get this Chuckie and get it good: it is not my fault, either—and I have no moral obligation whatever to bear the heavy cost, monetarily, politically, or socially of their unwanted presence. You have been allowed to chip away at American Civilization and retard its progress enough; go home to Brooklyn where you belong. Cut hair. Sell bananas. Leave me alone. The reason I pound on this? Schumer is a “progressive”, which means a socialist. No ,less an authority than Vladimir Ilyich Lenin said, “The goal of socialism is communism.” Communism is the system of ideas that murdered 200 million innocent people in the 20th century. It is the system this country fought against in Korea, in Vietnam, and may have to fight again. It is the system that Schumer would use millions of illegal immigrant votes—with dull-witted Republican help --to impose on us against our will. It is no less than societal rape.

All of this has been known and understood for a long time in certain quarters. Fifty years ago, the leftist singing group the Chad Mitchell Trio came to my college, among other things to shame and make fun of the John Birch Society, because of their anti-communist stances on the issues of the day. The left did their damnedest to disarm the West intellectually against communism and they’re still doing it right now. (Happily, they aren’t funny any more.) Why they would want to do it is a study in psychopathology that needs to be pursued. Meanwhile, we must defend the borders of our culture and build that wall!