Sixteen Volts

I wonder if I am the only one to see the unintentional humour in the common leftist complaint that a wall that prevents immigration is just like and as oppressive as the Berlin Wall, considering which gang it was that put up the latter wall in the first place. Also the subtle distinction between a wall that keeps people in and a wall that keeps people out seems to be completely lost in them. Some countries need to use force to keep other people out, whereas some other countries need to use force to keep their own people in. But naturally we shouldn't make any inferences about either country being better or anything like that, tut tut. Leftists wouldn't like that, since they don't come up very well in such comparisons. If there is one thing leftists cannot tolerate, it is putting their ideas to the free market test, preferring to dictate them with a totalitarian political system and enforcing them with a thought police.

Now that illegal immigration is the hot topic du jour, I would like to link to my old post "Ceuta, Melilla and the avoidance of responsibility", which contains a translation of Jussi Halla-Aho's essay of the same name. The essay is about Spain and its recent problems with illegal African immigrants, but there is a universal message in it for also the Americans and Canadians to think about. If you don't want to read the whole thing, the money paragraphs are here, with my additional emphasis:

In my opinion, it is perfectly justified for somebody to believe that all restrictions of immigration must be lifted, but such change must be done in legislation as a democratic decision. First you must remove the goal, preventing illegal immigration, and only after that you can start removing the instruments that serve this goal, that is, the fence, guards and the procedure for sending people back. The human rights crowd, at least the ones that have made their voice heard, have not demanded changing the immigration policy, or even taking down the fence. They merely demand that border guards and immigration officials stop doing their jobs. Guards should have no right to stop Africans from crossing the fence, and the officials should have no right to send back illegal immigrants that were caught.

Why is this so? Why don't these people demand making the borders wide open? Because even the most ardent human rights activist knows perfectly well what would happen. If anybody who wants in was allowed to come in, there wouldn't be hundreds or thousands of them, but millions. The ironclad argument "but there's only so very few of them" of the tolerant crowd would collapse overnight and Europe would fall into chaos that even the most pedagogical diversity education could not explain to be a good thing. For this reason, the tolerant crowd secretly thinks that it's good that the fence is out there to keep the swarm of illegals in a manageable level. They are content to loudly condemn the border guard for shooting the fence crosser and the sneaky immigration official for sending the illegal immigrant back to Morocco. What is it that the border guard should have done, if we start from the fact that his task, guarding the border and preventing illegal crossing, is legitimage? Was he supposed to persuade the fence crossers to turn back by talk alone?

Actually, there are some honest leftists who do demand that all immigrants who want to come in should be allowed to come in to enjoy generous welfare payments, so that nobody should ever be deported. What such people typically have in common, as you can easily observe by simply looking at them, is that they are bitter and envious losers who have no significant stake in society, and who therefore want to use illegal immigrants as a weapon to bring down the hated Western society and the meritocratic free market that has mercilessly put them in their place as the losers that they are. On the other side of the political spectrum, we have the libertarians who also demand completely open borders, as long as they get to live far enough from the immigrant slums that they avoid the crime and other problems statistically associated with them, but not too far so that they get to hire a cheap gardener or a maid. A little bit of honesty would also be refreshing with the latter gang.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Thursday, April 13, 2006 at 4:08 PM