Lately, May Day has been an opportunity for Communists to bash the US Constitution on trumped up charges. A couple years ago, Asheville citizens joined national protesters in marching for the rights of immigrants. For some, it is a right to seek refuge from a horrible tyranny with a devastated economy. I am not one to say these people must remain under oppression. However, others see immigrants rights as extending to social services, law enforcement, and prison all at taxpayer expense.
I am a fan of open borders, but I like Cicero’s approach to foreign affairs:
Were they bound to us with ties of love, they would not ask our gold. They would ask only our laws.
Existing immigration policy welcomes drug dealers and mafia types because they can afford to go through the legal process. The largely unwritten policy of ignoring immigration laws for people expected to support the welfare state will, unchecked, collapse the country. Hard-working, liberty lovers have only a ghost of a chance at coming to America and bolstering its foundational principles.
Borrowing from Carl Milsted, who borrowed from Norman Spinrad, I would reform immigration laws by defining general welfare as a barely-comfortable cot in a 60-degree building and a daily bland energy bar to meet one’s nutritional requirements. Anybody wanting anything else can get up and work for it. Churches can help with serious medical needs.
I don’t have a problem with 287(g). As I understand it, it is supposed to give local governments authority to deport persons engaging in criminal activity. Choosing May Day to demonstrate again, protesters in Hendersonville chose to mess with the concept. The Hendersonville Times-News featured a poster child all pathetic and a quote from an Immigration Rights Coalition member.
“The 287(g) program was originally intended to target and remove undocumented immigrants convicted of violent crimes, human smuggling, gang/organized crime activity, sexual-related offenses, narcotics smuggling and money laundering,” IRC member Carolina McCready said. “However, the program is largely being used to purge towns of any undocumented immigrants, not just those individuals with criminal records, thereby having detrimental effects on North Carolina’s communities.”
We’re used to hearing from anti-American leftists that the rule of law is flawed because of some concocted reason. They’re not fooling anybody by pretending to believe a law should be repealed because people are abusing their powers and breaking it. If I were to try to understand the above quote and put it in my own words, I would conclude we as a country must tolerate all the aforementioned heinous crimes because some goon in some jurisdiction got cocky and didn’t understand the limits of the powers granted by 287(g).