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That's the percentage of Americans who wouldn't think Wilkinson is a loon. His childish dream would allow completely unlibertarian foreign governments to send us people in order to gain political power, just as the MexicanGovernment has been able to do.
Their president recently stated that they're going to be working with U.S. nonprofits to push their agenda inside the U.S. He didn't specify that all of those nonprofits had to be far-left, so maybe Cato could pick up a few coins.
Second, why is radically expanding the number of green cards at odds with the idea of integrating labor markets? Are green-card holders *obligated* to stay in the U.S. if they don't wish to? Does it somehow prevent return migration? If that's the case, why not change those rules instead of adding a guest-worker set of rules on top of it? I guess I don't understand the advantage, in principle, of guest worker programs. But if the advantage is really based on political popularity, I'd like to see the evidence for that.
"On the one side stand scores, indeed, hundreds of millions of Europeans and Asiatics who are compelled to work under less favorable conditions of production than they could find in the territories from which they are barred. They demand that the gates of the forbidden paradise be opened to them so that they may increase the productivity of their labor and thereby receive for themselves a higher standard of living. On the other side stand those already fortunate enough to call their own the land with the more favorable conditions of production. They desire, as far as they are workers, and not owners of the means of production, not to give up the higher wages that this position guarantees them. The entire nation, however, is unanimous in fearing inundation by foreigners. The present inhabitants of these favored lands fear that some day they could be reduced to a minority in their own country and that they would then have to suffer all the horrors of national persecution to which, for instance, the Germans are today exposed in Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Poland.
It cannot be denied that these fears are justified."
Mises concludes:
"It is clear that no solution of the problem of immigration is possible if one adheres to the ideal of the interventionist state, which meddles in every field of human activity, or to that of the socialist state."
The majority of the world favors a meddling, interventionist, socialist state. So why don't you agree with Mises that no solution to the problem of immigration is possible?
Mises appears to have thought getting rid of the interventionist state, along with the creation of a right of secession (see sec.2) were necessary conditions in order to have "universal movement". Libtertarians today assure us they will do those things after the borders are thrown open.
We'd rather be racist than rich, I 'spose.
The American people are not going to support porous borders, cosmopolitan liberalism or not, so long as the social sciences are not an integral part of the solution, as well as free economics.
That's fine. Some libertarians speak as though the right to contract with whomever whenever were some sort of fundamental, inalienable right which ought to trump all other interests.
The fact is, economic concerns are but one-tenth of the argument against immigration. The failure to grapple with externalities (in terms of crime, population density, social cohesion, cultural continuity, etc.) ensures that libertarians absent themselves from 90% of the debate.
To the extent that these concerns are addressed by libertarians, they usually adopt Alphie's technique: the mindless and facile slur of "racism".
The "racism" charged isn't disliked because it "stings"; it's application is resented because, in modern-day America, it has the same relationship to reasoned debate as the atomic bomb has to conventional warfare. It is an ad hominem attack, which bypasses the merits of the interlocutor's arguments and proclaims to an audience "I have looked into my opponent's soul, perfectly understood his motivations, and have decided that he is beyond the pale of civilised discourse; under no circumstances should anything he says be considered".
Because this slur tends to be unanswearble, has enormous deterrent effect (no one wants to be labelled a racist) and helps the user to convince himself that he is battling unadulterated evil rather than engaging in reasoned discourse, it takes some discipline and no small amount of good faith not to engage it at any and all opportunities. Both these qualities are in short supply.
"Mexico’s GDP per capita is about what Poland’s was in 2004. That was the year Poland became a part of the E.U., and started sending a large flow of newly-legal migrant workers to a much wealthier Britain. This neither increased British unemployment, nor overtaxed social services. (EDITORIAL comment: These are both big fat lies, but whatever.)
"It’s been a boon to both the British and the Polish economies, and a higher percentage of Polish workers now circulate back home. Romania and Bulgaria are even poorer than Mexico, but they are now set to integrate their labor markets with the rest of the E.U. in seven years."
The problem is, Mr. Wilkinson, which you so conveniently "forgot" to mention, is that indigenous Britons are leaving their homeland -- where their ancestors have lived for thousands of years -- at the rate of 500K a year, most of them because of the ill effects of massive, inappropriate, and deeply unsettling immigration from a vast plethora of competing non-indigenous, non-compatible cultures. And they are taking their skills and their wealth and their tax base with them. Ultimately this will cause the British economy to collapse, as those replacing the fleeing indigenous population are not as educated, wealthy or law-abiding as the natives. Their number one destination is Australia -- the one Western nation left in the world that has strict immigration policies, and which also offers an approximation of the fleeing Britons' native Anglo-Saxon culture and values.. Your libertarian fantasies are not going to work in a world where First Worlders will simply flee their native lands for ones that are not overwhelmed by immigration anarchy and cultural displacement. If your fantasy world is indeed so much "richer and freer" as you claim, why are all those Brits fleeing the homeland their ancestors have occupied for thousands of years? Closer to home, why are native-born Californians running away from the "richness" of massive immigration at the rate of 300K per year?
Massive immigration has also resulted, in both Britain and the US, in LESS freedom, not more, with the introduction of a huge police state to control ever-burgeoning crime rates (Britain has the largest per capita number of CCTV cameras in the world, California has draconian "three strikes and you're out" laws), totalitarian "hate speech" and "anti-racism" laws that have virulently suppressed native culture and traditions, and Orwellian mandatory "diversity training" classes that resemble nothing so much as Maoist self-improvement sessions.
Also I find it rather amusing that a "libertarian" is using the European Union -- a massive, socialistic, bureaucratic state controlled by unelected elites, which is becoming progressively more totalitarian as time goes by -- as a model exemplar for "freedom."