Ron Paul on Immigration
This YouTube video (3 min:23 sec) provides a good summary of Ron Paul’s position on immigration.
As his typical of his way of thinking, he doesn’t see immigration, legal or otherwise, as separate from other issues like the welfare state. He points out that our welfare programs encourage illegal immigration and that our courts have given illegal immigrants many of the same benefits as American citizens for more than 20 years. The fact that they have had these rights for so many years has only provided incentives for them to come to this country illegally.
His ultimate goal is to get rid of welfare for everyone, not just illegal immigrants.
He does not support amnesty for illegal immigrants.
He also says that the constitutional right to citizenship by birth should be clarified. He doesn’t believe that a person should be able to walk across the border and have a baby, thereby giving the baby full American citizenship with all its benefits.
He also notes that many immigrants work harder and make a greater contribution than American citizens, so he supports a legal, enforcible immigration policy.
The whole notion of enforcing borders seems like an anti-libertarian position and many libertarians believe that it is. Ron Paul is very clear that he wants to enforce our borders rather than worrying about enforcing borders between foreign countries, which is too often a cornerstone of American foreign policy. Certainly restricting/encouraging movement across borders has a big impact on economics, employment and other economic factors. So my question is, how do you have a free market if the government is controlling the number of employees and where they can live and work?
There is no question, however, that forcing Americans to pay welfare benefits like schooling and medical care is also anti-liberty, whether the welfare is for illegals or American citizens.
For Paul the issue of immigration is linked to the issue of entitlements and also foreign policy. So when he talks about immigration, he talks a lot about welfare, entitlements and foreign policy.
Enforcible borders are inevitably statist concepts when individuals are not permitted to cross them freely. That gets into a whole discussion of states v. individual rights which can’t be covered in this post. As irrational, inanimate entities, I don’t believe that states can have rights, only individuals can have rights. A state is merely a social organization for protecting individual rights. For more on that read my book.
I’d like to know more about Ron Paul’s position on immigration because I like how he looks at problems. His view is dialectical and philosophical and therefore his ideas and proposed solutions don’t lend themselves well to sound bites.
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