www.thornwalker.com/ditch/lights163.htm

July 9, 2014

Strakon Lights Up
 

The Camp of the Little Saints

“We are all illegal immigrants”
 

If you find this column to be of interest, please send a donation of $3 to TLD. More information appears below.

 

I came across a preposterous piece of nonsense on immigration yesterday, and I regret to report that I got there by following a link in the daily aggregation sent out by Future of Freedom. At the Forecaster, confessed liberal Edgar Allen Beem writes: "We are all illegal immigrants." His article deals with the Camp of the Little Saints (if you will) that's suddenly taken shape in the southwest.

Here's the worst absurdity provided by Beem: "We are all illegal immigrants in the United States of America. No one has any more right to be here than the next person, with the possible exception of Native Americans."

Certainly we should all enjoy equal liberty. But otherwise, speak for your own damn self, Beem. I'm not an immigrant, illegal or otherwise. I am a native American, having been born in northeast Indiana. If being born on this soil doesn't make me a native of Indiana and of America, then we need a new dictionary. But of course one of those is already emerging, roughly along the lines imagined by Mr. Orwell.

To look at it another way, I am the descendant of immigrants (or colonists), and so are the American Indians. This isn't the first time I've pointed out those facts hereabouts, but I've learned that I do have to keep hammering away.

TLD senior editor Ronn Neff, doing his best to follow the fractured logic, observes:

I would ask anyone who thinks that "we are all illegal immigrants" (and therefore that he himself is an illegal immigrant): So why are you still here? Become a law-abiding citizen and leave.

In fact, one of the absurdities of the claim is the implicit one that the Indians had any immigration laws.

Now, as you probably know, I am not a statist-restrictionist with respect to people's moving about the world. I'm not even one of those "open-borders libertarians." I'm a no-borders anarchist. I want to see political borders abolished and society freed to generate a universal web of property lines. (I would write "private property lines," but that's redundant. There's only one kind of property; criminal gangs calling themselves "government" cannot own property.) With specific respect to immigration, I also want to see — for starters — the abolition of the tyranny denying our right of free association and the abolition of every scrap of government welfare. And of course people must be freed to defend their property against trespass.

Trying to reach those who think that all anti-statists are blind to our civilizational and demographic implosion, in 2006 I wrote a column in which I reminded my readers that "[l]ibertarians do not look to the state to solve social problems." (I was using the ruined word "libertarian" more freely in those days.)

According to the Washington Post, "[t]he White House on Tuesday formally requested $3.7 billion from Congress in emergency funding to deal with an influx of unaccompanied minors from Central America, a far higher amount than the Obama administration had previously signaled." I believe the IRS will not exactly be requesting taxpayers to fork over the $3.7 billion. This is what comes of government's intervening in the affairs of nomadic folk. (A more recent story, from Politico: "Obama requests $3.7 billion for child migrants," by David Rogers.)

My prescription for leviathan would be, Do nothing to hinder or help the Camp of the Little Saints. Send no officials, no social workers, no housing, no supplies, no transport, nada. The liberals and anti-Western activists are free to fork over their own honestly earned dough, if they have any, to support the Camp. Anyone who should accuse me of being hard-hearted needs to consult M. Bastiat and think about that which is not seen as well as that which is seen. If I had any money to devote to this kind of charity, I'd try to help poor and needy children of my own people. That impulse strikes me as normal and natural, and I recommend it to everyone. In any case, there's no charity at gunpoint.

The whole Camp of the Little Saints saga is extremely peculiar, slippery, and messily reported. There seem to be questions about how many of the children are actually unaccompanied and how many actual children are involved, as opposed to dangerous-looking young hombres. I smell liberal brain-fog and statist deviltry. Ω

July 9, 2014

Published in 2014 by WTM Enterprises.


If you found this column to be interesting, please donate at least $3 to our cause. You should make your check or m.o. payable in U.S. dollars to WTM Enterprises and send it to:

WTM Enterprises
P.O. Box 224
Roanoke, IN 46783

Thanks for helping to assure a future for TLD!


Notice  to visitors who came straight to this document from off site: You are deep in The Last Ditch. You should check out our home page and table of contents.