Immigration Is A Natural Right
The topic of immigration is particularly pugnacious in the United States. The most common argument you will hear, is that illegal immigrants are taking American jobs. While this may appear to be true when you witness immigrants working, when this topic is viewed through an economics lens, it shows us not only the seen effect, but the unforeseen effect which is not visible presently.
Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference – the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen, and also of those which it is necessary to foresee.The number of jobs in a country is not fixed like a pie that everyone takes a slice of. There is no pool of jobs. The numbers show that in general, when the available workforce increases, so do the number of jobs.
- Frederic Bastiat
There was a massive influx of workers after WWII: the
baby boomer generation. This did not create mass unemployment, just as
people currently think will happen if too many immigrants come into the
US now.So what is the correct number of immigrants that should be let into the US? No one knows, not a lone individual. Even a room full of a thousand of the brightest minds in the world could not figure out how to direct the lives, and travel patterns of over 300 million people.
Immigration and Natural Rights
If you live in New York, and you have relatives from Italy, should they be able to come to your house freely, just as your other relatives who live in a neighboring state do? If you decide to open a food stand in New York, and you want to hire one of your relatives from Italy to work there, does the government have any business being involved in this process at all, so long as they pay taxes and obey the law? If you are a believer in the natural law, then your answer would be, no. Here is Judge Andrew Napolitano on the natural law:
The natural law is a term used to refer to human rights that all persons possess by virtue of our humanity. These rights encompass areas of human behavior where individuals are sovereign and thus need no permission from the government before making choices in those areas.This sounds simple enough when explained, so why the hostility against such basic human freedom?
Collectivism, nationalism, and positivism.
Firstly
we shall start with the terminology used, such as illegal immigrant. A
person can not themselves be “illegal”. We don’t call a murderer or
rapist, an illegal, they are simply individuals who broke the law, and
it is the same for immigrants. It could be argued that using this term
has been an effort to dehumanize citizens of other countries.Collectivism and nationalism are used to create an us vs. them mentality, and oh my does it work! This mentality portrays America as the almighty, and everyone else as much lesser. The problem is that a country consists of millions of individuals, and vast geographical areas, you were born in your country by chance, and that alone doesn’t make it “your country”.
You as an individual do not own the entire country, you own yourself and all property that you have acquired through peaceful and voluntary transactions, nothing more. If a criminal is breaking into your house, you have every right to be concerned for your safety and to do something about it. However when someone is crossing the border, you have no right to prevent them from doing so as they are not on your own property.
A common remark is that since the immigrants have broken the law when they crossed the border, that they should be punished. This is a disturbing trend of positivism, which means that the law is the law, no matter what the law may say. A positivist would not object to the outlawing of wearing a blue tie, and he would have no sympathy for those prosecuted for wearing the blue tie, simply because “the law is the law.” But an unjust law is no law at all, so you can imagine, how this type of thinking can and has, in the past led to the rise of tyrants. So, if one is a believer in natural law, then the issue of immigration is an issue of individual freedom.
The smallest unit of any group is the individual, and each person is an autonomous person, deserving of respect and dignity equal to that of all others. This entails the freedom to pursue ends of his or her own design, provided this doesn’t infringe or devalue the similar freedom of others. If we don’t accept this simple idea, how can we consider ourselves free?
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