What would Martin Niemoller think about Arizona?

[classicman]

Now that I think of it, she probably just got handed a years quota in a day.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Once Mexico has a middle class visible without magnification, we don't have these problems any more. The United States doesn't really have an immigration problem; Mexico has a middle class one that it has not solved.

[classicman]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

Once Mexico has a middle class visible without magnification, we don't have these problems any more. The United States doesn't really have an immigration problem; Mexico has a middle class one that it has not solved.

And why are we therefore responsible for fixing it. The sooner we stop enabling the sooner it'll stop. Is that your plan?

[classicman]

PROVIDENCE, RI (AP) - Supporters of Arizona's new illegal immigration law have cited Rhode Island as a state where police have carried out comparably tough enforcement without a court challenge from the Obama administration.

But in Rhode Island, both sides of the debate agree that the executive order issued by Gov. Don Carcieri in 2008 is far less sweeping than the Arizona law, which takes effect this month.

Arizona's law requires local police officers, while enforcing other laws, to check the immigration status of anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally.

The Rhode Island executive order directs State Police to assist with immigration enforcement, but it merely encourages local police to seek the immigration status of suspects they encounter.

Some police departments say they don't want their officers acting as immigration agents.

[Gravdigr]

There is no Arizona.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by classicman

And why are we therefore responsible for fixing it. The sooner we stop enabling the sooner it'll stop. Is that your plan?

No. Because I can't honestly say I've got one. So that sure as hell wouldn't be it. Unfortunately, to be sure.

No, I do not think it falls to us to be "responsible for fixing it." Not as an exertion of the US national will, I mean. From a libertarian point of view, it's a frightful ethical dilemma: property rights are regarded as something sacred and not to be arbitrarily messed with by any entity, but a concentration of all property in the hands of the favored few is clearly the road to stagnated poverty also. That's the very thing the ilegales trek north to escape, and they labor away diligently once they've gotten here (yes, I'm speaking only in generalities -- well-attested ones) to keep free of that. This very thing is all over Oxnard, and all over the inhabited end of Ventura County generally.

It may be summed up as "Regulations be damned, !hay que vivir!" It is hard to gainsay that. But they wouldn't have to come north if they had anything like opportunity down south, would they? Central American countries aren't a solution; they are no more libertarian, no more packed with smallholders, than Mexico is. Ain't a livin' down there either.

And we libertarians don't like fixing problems by force: it isn't fair to the people with property now to rape it from them and parcel it out to others whose qualification for receiving it is they didn't have any previously, and hence it wasn't fair to them. WTF kind of qualification is that, eh? Quite enough to get the libertarian philosopher to disparage "fairness" as any proper policy driver. Unfortunately, it also discourages the libertarian thinker from attaining to any fix for the economic problem at all, and how friggin' useless is that? About all we end up doing is damning and blasting latifundianism as a stagnating force: that's a lot more being said than being done. The old but apt punchline about "33 1/3 revolutions per minute" doesn't seem to have done or meant enough to fix the problem of property and prosperity either.