A Little Memoir and Some Questions It Raises
The Difference Between an Illegal Immigrant and Me
| Moving here from across a national border matters but not from across a state border. Why is that, wonders this article from the Independent Institute of February 20, 2008. The author received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University (a so-called private university whose entanglements with the Pentagon you’d best not look into) and has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, Seattle University, and the University of Economics, Prague. He has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and Stanford University, and a fellow for the Hoover Institution and the National Science Foundation. He is the author of many books, including Depression, War, and Cold War. |
by Robert Higgs, The Independent Institute
The sovereign states that belong to the federal umbrella state known as the United States of America allow unimpeded cross-border passages. No law forbade my father to leave Oklahoma without approval by the Oklahoma government, and no law forbade him to enter California without approval by the California government. Earlier, in 1937, California did enact a statute that became known as the “anti-Okie law,” aimed at preventing certain Americans from entering the state, but the law was overturned by the US Supreme Court in 1941 in Edwards v. California [314 US 160].Many of the Mexican children with whom I grew up might have told a tale similar to mine. The only difference would have been that for them, the origin of their migration to California happened to be not one of the states of the United States of America, commonly known as America, but one of the states of the United Mexican States, commonly known as Mexico.
The area in which my family settled in 1951 had previously been part of Mexico. As the spoils of this war, the US government snatched not only the whole of present-day California, but also all of present-day Nevada and Utah, most of present-day Arizona, and substantial parts of present-day New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. If only the Americans had invaded Vera Cruz to pick lettuce, rather than to kill the local people.
From time to time, people were rounded up and deported, as if they were criminals. The deportations pleased nobody: neither the individuals wrenched from their homes and places of employment; nor the ranchers and other business owners who readily hired these hardworking people; nor the rest of us, whose relations with the Mexicans were generally cooperative and cordial. La Migra -- the immigration officers -- was like a natural disaster. These obnoxious state functionaries descended on the community like a swarm of locusts, benefiting no one, yet collecting salaries at public expense for their mischief.
Anti-immigrationists say that the Mexicans come here only to go on welfare. Aside from this declaration’s manifest misrepresentation of the truth, one wonders why the obvious remedy for this alleged problem does not occur to them: get rid of welfare—after all, nobody, regardless of his place of birth, has a just right to live at other people’s coerced expense.
Others claim that the “illegals” crowd the public schools and hospitals, sucking resources away from the taxpayers. If so, then the answer is the same: get the government out of the business of schooling and healing. It ought never to have gone there in the first place.
Some Americans charge that the foreigners who come here commit crimes, such as selling drugs and conducting businesses without a license. Of course, drug peddling and working without a government license ought never to have been criminalized in the first place, for anybody, because these acts violate no one’s just rights. No special “preemptive war” against potential immigrant offenders can be justified, any more than I can justify nuking Philadelphia today on the conviction that some residents of that city will commit serious crimes tomorrow.
Whether my father paid any more in taxes than our Mexican neighbors paid I greatly doubt. Everybody, regardless of his birthplace or documentation, paid excise, gasoline, and general sales taxes. Everybody paid the property tax (indirectly) whenever he rented a house or apartment. Everybody paid fees for driver’s licenses, hunting licenses, bridge tolls, and other privileges the state graciously permitted the peasantry to enjoy for a price.
Because my father never earned an enormous salary, he might well have paid less in taxes than the cost of my education in the California schools. Was my family sponging off the longsuffering taxpayers of California any less than the Mexican family down the road from us? And what difference does it make where the sponger comes from? Isn’t the sponging itself the heart of the matter?
If we must choose—and indeed we must—between the world’s most powerful and aggressive state, on the one hand, and a man who wishes to move to Yakima to support his family by picking apples, on the other, which side does human decency dictate that we choose?
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Also see: Immigration Reform: One-Track Loyalties
Mexico: Importing Corn, Importing Disaster
Calm Truth About Immigration |
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