McCain Won, Your Guy Lost – Now Do What’s Best for America
Conservative hostility toward illegal immigrants is unjustified and misplaced.
Yes, there is a security concern with illegal immigrants — a concern that should be addressed. The function of government, according to our Declaration of Independence, is to ” secure the rights” to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, rights that all men, having been created equal, possess. Government, then, to do its job, must be able to exclude the entry of those who pose an identifiable, physical threat to those rights — such as individuals with a criminal record or individuals who are members of terrorist organizations or individuals from nations we are de facto at war with or individuals with communicable diseases, etc.
Government, then, may (and should) screen those entering the country to exclude the threats listed above. But this does not justify the imposition of a limit on the total number of immigrants that may enter in a given year. The nation, after all, is not the property of the government — and government has no right to act as if it owns the nation and can decide how many people should be allowed to enter.
Nor does government have the right to devote so few resources to immigrant screening that it takes years to get clearance to enter. We should devote sufficient resources that it only takes days to get a clearance — and a clearance, once granted, ought to be good for a number of years.
Now, the welfare state complicates the situation. But here, conservatives make a big mistake. They protest vehemently against immigrants getting welfare benefits, but in doing so they implicitly concede the premise that U.S. born individuals have a right to those benefits.
This is a concession that conservatives should never have made — and had they fought as hard against the creation and expansion of the welfare state as they have recently fought against amnesty, the welfare state would not be nearly the problem it is today, and there would be far less reason to worry about illegals coming here to take advantage of taxpayer funded welfare benefits.
The mere fact that one happens to have been born within the borders of the U.S. does not confer on that individual a right to the earnings or property of others born within those borders. There can be no such thing as a right to someone else’s money — no matter how “needy” one may be. There can be no such thing as a right that can be exercised by some, but is denied to others.
The logical and consistent position is to favor open immigration — with the government doing the screening discussed above — while opposing welfare benefits to ANYONE, native-born or immigrant. Our nation was founded on the idea that ALL men are created equal and possess the same, individual rights. ALL men, not just those who happen to have been lucky enough to be born in the U.S. And if ALL people posses the same rights, then NO one can claim any sort of special right to any portion of another person’s money or property. This is the position consistent with the original American ideals of equality of rights and a government whose function is limited to the protection of those rights — and this is the position conservatives should take if they wish to remain true to those ideals.
