print“Immigration Bill A Statist’s Dream” is now on Economic Policy Journal, which, given its traffic rank and the intellectual vitality of its authors and editor, is fast usurping all others as the premier libertarian site on the worldwide web.
To the analysis offered by the column (always circumscribed by a word count), I’d like to add the following points for your consideration:
What is there to like about the fact that the new, privileged wards of the state will enjoy protections unavailable to nationals or to immigrants who’re in the US on merit?
Ask egalitarians of the libertarian and liberal left.
There is not much you and I can do—much less our corrupt representatives in the House—if General Keith Alexander’s National Security Agency and apparatus sics his spies on us. The same goes for our rights under the successors of Lois Lerner and Sarah Hall Ingram, at the Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt division.
But woe betide the NSA or IRS agent who does unto a “registered provisional immigrant” (RPI) what he did to a tea-party patriot. The “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act” promises to name and shame this wicked government worker. Caught in the improper use of a registered provisional immigrant’s personal data, the agent will incur a criminal penalty.
The Bill (the lengthy summary of which is linked here) specifies that snooping on beneficiaries of S.744 will be permitted only for the purpose of determining benefits. These, to quote the EPJ column, are “carved out of the hides of taxpaying Americans, immigrants included.”
To prevent any “errant” law-enforcement officer from daring to quiz a suspicious registered provisional Democrat about his status, a “document of special protection while waiting” will be issued to The Protected One.
Oh for the privileges of a ‘Registered Provisional Immigrant’ (RPI).
I suppose that we-are-the-world libertarians can rejoice in the fact that the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act” makes “illegal alien” a thing of the past—not due to the promised defense of this country’s borders, but because of a near abolition of the legal versus illegal distinction.
As this column has written, “Would that the American Welfare State did not exist. But since it does and is, unfortunately, likely to persist for some time to come, it must stop at the Rio Grande.”
The same source has also done the work your US representatives won’t do—can’t we export them?—and that is: Read and honestly distill the Immigration Bill.