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Libertarians on Immigration

I was reading some random web pages, and came across an article (not linked) advocating that libertarians should support immigration controls.  It was a baffling article, and stuck in my craw, because the old school libertarians were for open borders. They’re way past where the Democrats and some socialists are. They’re way over in anarchy-land.

I had to see if they were still for open borders. Thankfully, they are. This seems to sum it up.

Source: Immigration Controls Violate the Libertarian Non-Aggression Principle – The Future of Freedom Foundation

However, in the name of maximum freedom, I didn’t think that Hornberger went far enough. He ignored emigration. That’s when the state controls who may leave a country.

This was actually a thing: countries used to prevent people from leaving – and some still do.  People cannot leave North Korea, for example.

A world where all nations have strong borders, and restrictions on immigration, is a world that imposes emigration restrictions, by default. If there’s nowhere to emigrate to, you are like a prisoner of your own country.

That’s precisely the situation that many of our undocumented immigrants find themselves: because they cannot travel freely, they are stuck inside the United States.  Now, with the Trump administration, they may feel trapped in specific states. With the increase in the ICE Border Patrol police state, they may feel trapped within specific cities, and even trapped within their own homes.

The anti-war movement argues, persuasively, that building up for war, and keeping a standing army, causes us to go to war.  In the same way, this continued buildup of the Border Patrol, and coordination between ICE and state, county, and municipal police, is created a police-state buildup that will produce a surplus of police enforcement infrastructure. These tools, organizations, and networks will, after exhausting their energies to deport undocumented immigrants, will be used to round up other people.

This has happened, in our history.  During the 1930s, there was a large scale increase in deportations of Mexicans to Mexico, but they overstepped and also sent many American citizens to Mexico as well.  The skills and experiences of these deportations were used to plan out and execute the roundup of Japanese Americans to send the entire west coast community to concentration camps in the 1940s.

Then, again, in the 1950s, “Operation Wetback” deported communities of Mexican people.

https://prezi.com/6cp4egdtnsmp/mexican-repatriation-of-the-1930s/

https://prezi.com/embed/6cp4egdtnsmp/?bgcolor=ffffff&lock_to_path=0&autoplay=0&autohide_ctrls=0&landing_data=bHVZZmNaNDBIWnNjdEVENDRhZDFNZGNIUE1UdnROaC9ZSXU1QU5qY2Y5eGlVSzQzTnlQSnNzV0lEN2REak9pM0h3PT0&landing_sign=Fz23sp2i2la51FOsdlm-qApe1n1d7ByiUpVacgZlCyY


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