Tom’s Big Picture

I have to admit I was rather disappointed for a couple of days after the VDARE interview with Ron Paul, especially after my wife and I’s maximum statutory contribution to the man and his campaign. Call it donor’s remorse. Let’s take a look at some of the immigration positions he advocated:

Bear Stearns made an estimate about three years ago that there were 20 million in the country. [The Underground Labor Force Is Rising To The Surface, Robert Justich and Betty Ng, CFA January 3, 2005(PDF)] What would you do with them?

I think when you know where they are, and you know they’re illegal, they should be sent back. Especially if they’re caught in a crime.

I think you have to be realistic. I mean, having an army to go around the country to round them up and put them in trucks and haul them out, that’s not feasible. But certainly if they’re signing up for a benefit, they should be sent back home, instead of given the benefit.

You’d like to restore the presumption against being a public charge?

Right. Or if they’re caught in a criminal act—rather than sending them through the court system and spending all that money and then putting them up in prison, we can get them shipped out pretty fast. Unless they are a very violent criminal.

What would you make of the argument that in order to be in favor of free trade you ought to be in favor of free immigration?

Well, I guess there’s a little bit to that, but I don’t think it’s an absolute. Trade is different from people coming in, especially when they get benefits and when they come in illegally. I guess you can say it’s an ideal that you could work toward.

We’ve done pretty well with Canada over the years.

How do you mean?

Well, I’ve lived on the Canadian border—it’s almost like going into another American state. I think the racial component and the economic discrepancy south of the border make it much different living in Texas than living in Michigan.

The freer the people are, the healthier the economy, the more tolerant the people become and the more open the borders would become—like the Canadian border. But as our economy shrinks, people get more concerned about their well-being, they blame people for it. It’s a lot easier to blame poor people who come over the border than it is to blame Canadians from the north.

I think if we hadn’t gone in the wrong direction, it would have gotten even easier to go back and forth to Canada. But now it’s becoming more difficult.

I mean just think of it—what is it, 5,000 miles? Nobody can find the boundaries. I think it’s fantastic!

But the U.S. and Canada are two very similar societies.

Yeah, that’s a difference too. But if we didn’t keep drifting toward what Mexico is doing, becoming more socialistic, the problem would be lessened.

At the moment, legal immigration is largely driven by “family reunification”, which means that an immigrant who is here can sponsor a wide range of relatives. Is that something you want to take a look at?

Once again, I don’t see that it’s a great danger except under today’s circumstances.

Well, it’s the reason legal immigrant skill levels degrade over time. They’re not being selected on the basis of skills, they’re being selected on the basis of relationships.

I think we need to do both. It was a good principle to say that when immigrants come in, they’re on their own. They better have a sponsor. You either have a job or you have a family; you’re not going on the dole.

That’s not what happens now, of course.

No. It isn’t. That’s bad.

But you don’t have a proposal do deal with that right now.

Not specifically. I’m more interested in stopping illegal immigration, stopping subsidizing illegal immigration and trying to straighten up the economy.

What about Plyler v. Doe, the Supreme Court Ruling that the children of illegals have to be educated in public schools?

I don’t like that. I would remove all federal mandates. I would turn it back to the states.

What do you think of the H1-B program?

I’ve supported that because it’s legal. I know some people say they don’t follow the law….

The argument is that it’s a form of corporate subsidy—powerful interest groups have arranged to break down their workers’ wages by bringing in temporary workers.

Well, the market always works to put pressure on the businessman to spend the least amount of money to provide product. So what some may call a corporate subsidy is also a subsidy to the consumer. The consumer is the one protected in the free market. The object of labor is to push wages up as high as possible. The object of business is to get the most efficient labor at the best price. In the free market, that works out. But the problem is we have too much welfare and we have a currency that’s losing value.

If you’re President, various interest groups are going to come to you and say, there’s a shortage of nurses or teachers or (goodness!) possibly journalists; therefore we have to have these temporary work programs to bring in labor in this area. If the labor is organized, it’s going to say to you, look, the problem isn’t that there’s a shortage, the problem is business doesn’t want to pay higher wages. What will you do?

Well, whatever we do will be legal. Congress has to have a say, they have to pass a law, and the President has to decide to sign it or not.

And I would lean in the direction of saying, if there is indeed a shortage, and this is a legal process, this shouldn’t be threatening to us.

How would you determine that there was a shortage?

Well, I don’t think it would be easy but if there’s a need and immigrants can get a job, that means there’s a shortage. If there was no shortage, they wouldn’t have jobs. Obviously the companies can’t fill some of these jobs and they’re looking for people to fill them.

Well, the counter-argument is that they can’t fill them at the price that they’re offering.

That’s right, but the market has to set the price. Set the product and set the price of labor.

But the argument of the displaced software engineers is that the government is colluding with the business owners to break down the price by importing temporary workers.

I don’t think we should have minimum wages to protect the price of labor. I want the market to determine this. At the upper level as well.

It’s really a question of defining the rules, isn’t it? Is it fair for corporations to increase supply by bringing in temporary workers?

Which, means they’re going to fill a need for a certain time at a certain price, by people who have come here voluntarily. Otherwise, you have to be anti-immigrant and I don’t think our country is anti-immigrant. I think its anti-illegal immigrant. I think the problem you identify is occurring because we don’t have a healthy free market economy and we reward people for not getting training and becoming the type of individual who might get a job in a software company.

But the question is, whose interests are you going to go with? The interests of the worker or the interests of capital?

A free market always goes with the interests of the consumer. Never the businessman and never labor. Everybody’s a consumer, not everybody’s a businessman.

Milton Friedman once told me that it was not possible to have free immigration and the welfare state—not possible to combine the two. You agree with that?

Maybe I read that somewhere! Maybe that’s where I get my views! That’s what I’ve been arguing here.

But that applies equally to legal immigration, you see. Because the taxpayer subsidies to legal immigrants from the welfare state are very high.

Yes, it is definitely imperfect when you have the welfare state. That’s right. And corporations benefit from that too.

Which can be altered first: immigration or the welfare state?

Well, you work on both. The most important is the welfare state, but you can still beef up your borders and get rid of some incentives for illegals. The welfare state will disappear. But the odds are that it will disappear with a good deal of chaos because we’re going to have a financial crisis and maybe it’s already started. And then people are going to be struggling.

When our citizens see illegals using food stamps, they have to wait in line in the emergency rooms, they see illegals in our schools with bilingual education, then the resentment builds. And sometimes the resentment is out of proportion. It is my strong belief that if we had a truly free market, it would be so much healthier, that we would need a lot of people to come in and it could be done through temporary work programs. There wouldn’t be this resentment and irritation. But it should be done legally. It shouldn’t be done by rewarding anybody who breaks our laws.

I mean, the other people we like to blame for our problems is China. It’s all China’s fault! And yet we don’t save money and we become dependent on them buying our goods. We become dependent on cheap labor that is encouraged by our system. So it’s our economic climate and our lack of respect for our Constitution, our lack of respect and understanding of a free market that leads to our problems.

My comments:

1. A lot of us on the nationalist right who support Paul based on his Constitutional view of national sovereignty are going to have to adjust to Paul’s libertarian roundabout way of looking at issues. He may be right or wrong in his principles, but the thing we should like about the man is that he does have principles and sticks to them. To a libertarian, all problems begin and end with the state, and the presumption is that a voluntary exchange of goods (i.e. money for labor) between two different individuals, even if one is an immigrant, should be encouraged. The fallacy of individualism informs their whole way of thinking, though as I’ll cover below, more reasonable paleolibertarians (with whom Paul associates) have found workarounds for the more ridiculous implications of such a position without collapsing the whole libertarian ideology. Paul is an ideological candidate, and his ideology, not practicality or even obvious consequences, informs his positions. Given the fading of the Tancredo candidacy, Paul is the best we’ve got.

2. I’m somewhat tempted by the great libertarian bargain. Would I give up nation-building adventures like Iraq (yes!), expensive law enforcement projects like the War on Drugs (maybe) and federal “enforcement” of immigration policy (such as it is) in exchange for a 95% reduction in my taxes? Given the feds’ incompetence to actually accomplish anything meaningful with my tax dollars (and most things actually harmful), I have to admit I would probably take my money and run.

3. Paul is an analytical thinker, and in the full interview (outside of the excerpt above, which highlights the worst), he mentions the two big draws of immigration: welfare and birthright citizenship. Welfare (which includes free education and healthcare for immigrants) has two effects: it attracts low-productivity low-skilled immigrants (as their employers can simply pass their social carrying cost onto everyone else while pocketing the profit from their low wages) and it artificially lowers the available low-skilled labor supply of US citizens. The ghettos of our country are filled with US citizens who won’t work for an honest dollar because the government subsidizes their laziness. With an increase in native labor supply and less of a “honeypot” for outsiders, the problem will be partially ameliorated.

Birthright citizenship basically subsidizes employers of immigrant labor as well by providing automatic “bonuses” in the form of US citizenship to the children of immigrants. On the Indian dowry market, US citizenship is worth about $50,000. In other words, an Indian male with US citizenship can get $50,000 more in dowry from a bride’s family, as this will eventually entitle the bride and her children to US citizenship.

The cost of birthright citizenship, like the national debt, will be paid by future generations of legitimate US citizens, as their political power is diluted by voters from incompatible (and largely anti-liberty) cultures.  Even economically successful and partially assimilated Asian-Americans vote in 70% blocks for the Democratic Party, showing that their anti-liberty political biases are intact (and ironically, demonstrates that their very prosperity is dependent on a large native ethnic core to counteract their self-destructive political tendencies).
The key issue here is whether a President Paul would make elimination of the welfare state and birthright citizenship a precondition of any expansion of legal immigration. If this is the case, then we are possibly talking about radically different kinds of immigration. In interviews, Paul has also stated that it us “up to Congress” to decide what the qualifications for legal immigration should be. This is not an unqualified open borders position.

4. There is some evidence to suggest that Paul is a right-libertarian, a paleo-libertarian due to his association with the Ludwig von Mises Institute and LewRockwell.com (which Paul has called his favorite website, and who hosts his regular column). These are libertarians who reject egalitarian dogma, and in some ways are more conservative in a real way than nationalist Republicans like Tancredo. For example, Paul and the paleolibs tend to support the free right of association, and reject federal “civil rights” laws as immoral and unconstitutional. That is a brave and admirable position of high principle, as an acid test for respectability in the Right these days is to accept the legacy of LBJ and MLK as just and proper.

Agree or disagree (and I tend more to object to their occasional Leftist tone than anything in principle), the paleolibertarian position is the only political ideology that would be palatable to the Founding Fathers, were they alive today.

Most notably, one of the leading immigration theorists among the paleolibertarians is Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Hoppe is not a minor figure, as he is the editor of the Mises Center’s journal. Hoppe is the author of groundbreaking work in this area, as revealed by this article (PDF) and this slightly modified column on the LewRockwell.com website. Hoppe is not the only anti-open-borders libertarian associated with the Mises center.

A column released today by the LR blog noted that a symposium on the issue featured only one unqualified open borders enthusiast:

In fact, an entire Journal of Libertarian Studies symposium issue a few years ago (Volume 13) about immigration had only one open-borders advocate (as I recall)–Walter Block. The rest–Hoppe, Machan, Raico, Simon, Hospers, et al.–if I remember right, were all against completely open borders/unrestricted immigration.

And Hoppe himself, after presenting a whirlwind tour of the real state-driven causes of unnatural mass migrations and the resultant multicultural sprawl and unpleasantness, recommends a particularly reasonable stop-gap strategy:

What should one hope for and advocate as the relatively correct immigration policy, however, as long as the democratic central state is still in place and successfully arrogates the power to determine a uniform national immigration policy? The best one may hope for, even if it goes against the “nature” of a democracy and thus is not very likely to happen, is that the democratic rulers act as if they were the personal owners of the country and as if they had to decide who to include and who to exclude from their own personal property (into their very own houses). This means following a policy of utmost discrimination: of strict discrimination in favor of the human qualities of skill, character, and cultural compatibility.

More specifically, it means distinguishing strictly between “citizens” (naturalized immigrants) and “resident aliens” and excluding the latter from all welfare entitlements. It means requiring as necessary, for resident alien status as well as for citizenship, the personal sponsorship by a resident citizen and his assumption of liability for all property damage caused by the immigrant. It implies requiring an existing employment contract with a resident citizen; moreover, for both categories but especially that of citizenship, it implies that all immigrants must demonstrate through tests not only (English) language proficiency, but all-around superior (above-average) intellectual performance and character structure as well as a compatible system of values – with the predictable result of a systematic pro-European immigration bias.

In Hoppe’s vision, we should create the sort of society that will attract desirable immigrants (i.e. skilled Europeans for the most part, or maybe Afrikaners and Rhodesian farmers, as I’ve suggested before) and discourage undesirable immigration. The immigrant population should look more-or-less similar to the population of people who are invited into our homes and property as guests. Legal immigration, under such a scenario, would indeed be a blessing.

Given Paul’s longstanding association and friendship with paleolibertarians, it would not be unreasonable to suggest their positions would inform his immigration policy.

5. Paul is a successful politician, unlike so many in the far right who intentionally say things at times to marginalize themselves and appear extreme. This is a young man’s mistake (as the Apostle Paul says in his letter to Titus, young men are most often harmed by pride), and I have at times in the past been guilty of saying things that “shock” instead of things calculated to convince. As I move from my early 20’s to my late 20’s, wisdom is slowly gaining the upper hand and moderating the tongue. The principles remain the same, but I am tuning in more to the subtext of language, particularly the need to come across as “nice” and “respectable” and avoid public expression of emotions like anger, which the media have trained us to associate with “extremists”.

Unfortunately, many on the far right (who I agree with in principle) have never moved beyond the 22-year-old’s propensity to shoot his mouth off. Having been marginalized and ignored, they seek attention through self-defeating rhetoric. Indeed, we see such a young man’s rhetoric in a younger Ron Paul, from this clip from the late 1980’s (scroll to the three minute mark for the fireworks to begin):

Ron Paul’s much more affable personality on the 2007 campaign trail shows the wisdom of age. Part of this wisdom may be the realization that, in order to win, he must recruit significant numbers of anti-war left-liberals into the Republican primary to vote for him. With Hillary now a lock on the nomination, the liberals will have little opportunity cost in doing so (and the nice thing is that Paul’s federal vision will help them achieve their aims much more easily than the Democrats- Paul’s views would grant Vermont the right to be socialist if it wanted to be, of course bearing all consequences of that decision). Paul is also attracting significant support among the high-tech crowd, unusual for a pro-life Republican with the most conservative voting record in Congress.

If I were Paul, I would be very careful how I talked about immigration around these folks, as the only thing liberals and the tech-heads hate more than the war is the scent of “racism”. Their ideology is built around imaginary worlds where everyone is nice to each other, helps each other and gets along. This makes perfect sense to a small-town Vermonter or Google employee, who naturally assumes that everyone is just as nice, caring and peaceful as they and their friends are. Only exposure to real diversity in its natural state, which will happen soon enough, can possibly cure these erroneous assumptions about the universal niceness of humanity. Even such exposure, as I observe our own pathetic homegrown southern liberals, is no guarantee of success. Yet these are people who are otherwise intelligent, with significant resources and organizing ability. They also vote early and often, and represent a prime opportunity for the Paul campaign.

Already, Daily Kos, the premier liberal tech-head portal, is doing damage control for the fake neocon opposition (Hillary, Obama, Edwards, basically every Dem except for the loony communist Kucinich) by using past Ron Paul newsletters to tag him as a nut and a “racist”. Paul may need some rhetorical flexibility on these issues to soothe the left antiwar portion of the coalition. If anything, the very comments cited as problematic by Daily Kos, though expressed in the crude and direct language of a political newsletter, should give comfort to those of us with a more nationalist bent that Ron Paul is not the sort of person who believes that human beings are universally interchangeable.

Conclusion:

I really don’t want my money back, though I admit I was disappointed for a good while after reading the VDARE interview. Indeed, reading it over again as I prepare to publish this post, some of the answers seem outright bizarre, like sound bites from a neoconservative tool like Rick Perry or John Cornyn instead of a paleolibertarian. It just doesn’t sound like Ron Paul, and that’s the core of the disappointment.

It would be nice for the Paul campaign to communicate more clearly on the issue of legal immigration, particularly in view of what seemed to be a great deal of callousness and/or misunderstanding in the interview by Rep. Paul on the plight of skilled American workers displaced by indentured foreign labor. After all, many of his supporters are just the sort of middle-aged white male programmer types most impacted by a policy that basically replaces them with foreigners willing to work 80 hours a week for entry-level wages. A little compassion for people caught in the gale-wind forces of a bubble economy propped up by fiat money, that’s all.

To the extent this interview is not indicative of his views, Paul should find a way to soothe the nationalist-Buchananite wing of his coalition, of course without alarming the fragile antiwar liberals.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 15th, 2007 at 9:39 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.