On anarchy and immigration
Let me get straight to the point: There’s no difference in principle between a “national border” and the turf claim of a street gang.
None. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada.
“National borders” and “gang turf lines” are imaginary lines drawn on the ground in order to assert baseless claims of territorial authority. The only thing which differentiates them is that most governments are better-armed than most street gangs. Not better-behaved, just better armed.
The passage of a Jim Crow/police state law in the US state of Arizona last week, based on alleged threats to that state’s civil order and economic health, is a fitting hook on which to hang a brief history of travel over the “national borders” claimed by the United States. To hear the Know-Nothings complain, you’d think that the US has a history of strict border control and that the federal government has only recently begun to lie down on the job.
Nothing could be further from the truth. For close to a century, the federal government exerted precisely zero control over immigration. People decided where they wanted to be and then they went there, with no need to request permission.
It was a quintessentially anarchic process – and it worked. Westward expansion and industrialization over the course of only a couple of generations would have been impossible without an unrestrained flow of immigrant labor. America’s resident population couldn’t breed fast enough to transform itself from an agrarian society to an industrial society.
…When someone claims to be for “smaller government” while simultaneously clamoring for “border security” and against “amnesty” for peaceful people whose only “crime” is crossing an imaginary line drawn on the ground by a street gang on steroids, they’re contradicting themselves. There is no smaller form of government than anarchy, and anarchy worked when it came to immigration. It would still be working today if not for the fact that an unrestrained government (and no government allows itself to be restrained forever) grows into every niche, and strangles every outgrowth, of human activity.</em>
