A Revealing Take On Immigration Policy

Well, considering he has no interest in actually participating in any kind of discussion with me, I suppose there's no harm in dispensing with the appeals to conversation and focusing on destroying the inane arguments*. Today, the Anonymous Reach provides us with a revealing window into the mind of an anti-immigrationist in the form of what would happen if the writers of Friends attempted a Socratic dialogue:

YOU: Did you not hear the part where I said the guy in Ohio wants to hire the foreign guy? 

PERSON: Yeah but so? Reality check: The foreign guy can’t legally get here. That’s the law. 

YOU: But he should be allowed to get here! The law should be changed, or a special exception made. 

PERSON: Wait why again? Where’s the actual argument for that? 

YOU: The guy in Ohio wanting to hire the foreign guy! 

PERSON: Let me get this straight. Against a background of existing, legitimately-enacted laws, anytime someone gets a job offer but has a legal status that would – if unaltered – prevent his getting to the job, the law should be bent/changed?

Throughout this dialogue, "YOU" is Socrates and "PERSON" is Glaucon**. Or, if you prefer, "YOU" is Joey and "PERSON" is Chandler. "YOU" is the open borders advocate, and "PERSON" is the anti-immigrationist.

The first thing you should notice right off the bat is that Chandler assumes that an existing law is reason enough to oppose immigration. We could compare that to, say, the US military's drone-bombing of American citizens without their Constitutionally protected right to due process: Because it's currently happening, it must therefore be "fallacious" to argue that the US should stop assassinating its own citizens. That would be ridiculous, right? (Apparently not.)

Here's what I wrote at OpenBorders.info:

It is full cognizance of and respect for property rights that moves us to make the case for open borders through persuasive reasoning. We certainly know that you are freely entitled to oppose immigration. But we think the benefits are clear, obvious, ethical, and rational; hence, we aim to make the case for opening the border to human migration – by choice.

So let's sum up the dialogue so far:

1. People want to employ each other across borders, but laws prevent them from doing so.
2. I say, employment is a good thing, so let's change the law accordingly.
3. The Anonymous Reach counters that this argument is "fallacious" because of point #1.

It's hard to take that kind of argument seriously, even despite the Friends-esque condescending writing tone employed to clearly convey to me that 1 implies 3. This is an utter failure of coherent logic.

But, I said at the outset of this post that The Anonymous Reach's post was revealing, and poor reasoning and failures of logic aren't particularly "revealing." What's revealing is what happens next:

CHANDLER: Okay so if I want to hire a guy without a driver’s license to be my pizza delivery driver, the driver’s licensing laws should be bent/changed. 

JOEY: Um… 

CHANDLER: If I want to hire a registered sex-offender to be my daycare worker. 

JOEY: Uh… 

CHANDLER: If I want to hire a convicted murderer serving a life sentence in jail to be my travelling salesman. 

JOEY: ! 

CHANDLER: All of those legal statuses should automatically just be bent/altered so that the person I Want To Hire and Gave A Job Offer To can perform the job task in question? My desire to hire the person and the mere existence of my job offer trumps all other considerations? 

JOEY: I mean, yeah. That is fundamentally what I’m saying, I guess.

So The Anonymous Reach has decided to compare would-be immigrants with job offers to... sex-offenders and convicted murderers. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Anti-immigration sentiment amounts to nothing more than a hateful ideology steeped in xenophobia and ethnocentrism. Those who feel otherwise should at least stop comparing immigration to murder and sexual abuse. Right? 

I think the surest sign that The Anonymous Charmer will someday become an open borders advocate is his by-now-obvious inability to write a cogent response to anything anyone is saying about immigration. Compare this post to the tone, quality, and rigor of Fake Herzog's recent reply to me. The difference is night and day. FH's reflects a genuine interest in reasoning and dialogue, while The Anonymous Reach's reflects nothing more than a hystrionic display of poor reasoning and hyperbolic comparison.

One can only assume the next step is admission of total defeat and acceptance of the open borders idea. I hope so, anyway. 

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* Pro-tip: You can usually spot inane arguments by the inane, juvenile language in which they're phrased.
** Hmm, on second thought maybe PERSON is more like Thrasymachus.