Ron Paul Ad: “No more student visas from terrorist nations”
So Ron Paul is keeping a list of “terrorist nations” ? I wonder what nations are on his list?
D.L.
I seriously doubt that this is his position.
Jeffery, what is with these TV ads? The YouTube ads are wonderful, I gag watching the TV ads. Okay, different audience…just makes me glad I sold my TV right after the invasion of Iraq. [:D]
"instead of spending their money in the country where it was earned it is sent out to other countries. i believe you get the point but want to turn it around and use it against me. nice try but it doesn’t make sense. they are taking more out than they are returning. if they spent earned money here it would be a wash. "
huh? Try that again. If I put half of my earnings in a mattress, somehow I’m taking from the society?? Shoot, If I counterfeit money and print 50% more of my legit income, that would be contribution?? What has a common man’s understanding of economics come to nowadays? Now if you can understand that if someone who can sock away money into mattress is actually delivering more goods and services to his fellow men than he is consuming, then we can continue: if instead of burying the mattress in the back yard, the person dig a big hole across the border . . . what difference does it make? If a Mexican sends money over to his relative in Mexico, that means he is consuming less here than he is delivering here, and his relative is consuming more than the relative is delivering in Mexico. How simple does it have to be?
“You need to go down and hang around your local ER on any given evening.”
I was a at a local ER less than a year ago for a borken finger nail. The bill came to $2700, for a thumb X-RAY and having to wait for four hours to see three paper pushers who were not even nurses. There wasn’t a single Hispanic in the ER, besides the cleaning guy. There are all sorts of reasons why medical expenses have gone up: fiat money, third-party-pay clients, restriction on doctor and nurse supply, mulpractice insurance, etc.. Import labor however helps hold cost down not pushing it up. What’s next? Walmart import goods driving prices up because anecdotal recall expenses?? Get real, without the import, the prices would be a lot higher, just because of all the wasteful paper pushing and protected jobs that we have here.
“your argument is ridicules and deserves no rebutal”
Sure, that’s always the most eloquent argument. The “I’m correct; don’t confuse me with facts” argument.
Theft is not a crime unique to immigrants. What’s next? lock up all people making less than $50k a year because they have a higher propensity to theft?
As for different license plates, making it legal for them to apply and get real license plates would go a long way towards solving the problem.
While we are on the subject of draconian solutions, let’s nuke the entire neighborhoods where neighbors would enter your garage and help themselves to your tools, and entire neighborhoods where there are unlicensed cars . . . before such trashy neighborhoods spread into my neighborhood 
tongue firmly in cheek of course.
Brainpolice - Your experience is very similar to mine. Also started on the “left” but in my case, the timing was unfortunate. Lets just say my “lefty” profs didn’t take kindly to my transition to quoting from von Mises. Could go into detail if anyone were really interested, but its not in keeping with this particular discussion.
Then you don’t know immigration laws as they currently stand. If you are a Canadian, you are free to be in the US for 90 days. In fact, hotels and stores love you if you patronize them, as your spending create new jobs here. Then on the 91st day, you are an illegal alien for having overstayed your visa. Now tell me, how on the 91st day, you suddenly become “dangerous to our health and welfare”?? Likewise, if you legally came in on student visa. Upon your graduation, if you take a job from IBM, you are legal. However, if you start a company called MBI and hire two people, suddenly you are an illegal alien for violating student visa restrictions on non-participation in business, never mind that you are not only not taking jobs away from US nationals, you are actually creating jobs! That’s how crazy immigration laws are today. Yes, the hypothetical founder of MBI wouldn’t be able to get a driver’s license without somehow find a way to push enough paper to make his status legal again. Big surprise? Not really, big business always find a way to twist legistlations to benefit themselves: big companies are far more likely to have a dedicated department to handle immigration paper works, so the government leg breakers serve to provide the big companies with virtually exclusive access to that pool of relatively inexpensive talented labor . . . at the expense of US nationals who might have been hired by the startup or US consumers who would have benefitted from the startups of course.
Is that the kind of arbitrary law that we really want to defend?
Shoudn’t the issue be property right enforcement/protection instead? Making it an immigration issue reminds me of the date rape hysteria of the early 90’s: sure, some men do bad things, but that’s not a reason to lock up all men until proven innocent.
ps. note to host:
I may have pressed the wrong button when trying to reply to the post by xahrx; instead of “reply” I may have pressed “report abuse”; please ignore that. My apologies for any inconvenience; some of the other forums that I read usually have reply button at the lower right.
Regarding the prison population, how many of them are hard crimes, how many of them are crimes created by the legal process, such as driving without license because they are not legally allowed to have one? As for DUI, I actually got stopped once, and the rooky cop tried to insinuate that I was driving drunk because my face was flushed after getting pulled over; I hardly drink any alcoholic beverage at all, much less getting drunk ever. Guess what his first question was? What was my immigration status. I was quite dumb-founded . . . that’s what my tax money is being used for?? I was tempted to tell him that I pay more in taxes every year than he gets paid wearing those jackboots.
What you have described is symptoms of poverty. You can easily find youths, US nationals, who shack up in tiny New York apartments beyond their supposed capacity. That’s what being young and being poor means. Eventually, most of them build up enough wealth to be counted among the middle-class if not upper class; that is, unless we make laws to keep them poor, such as not allowing them to have driver’s licenses or jobs. We used to admire individuals who made themselves upper class upstandign citizens despite their Bohemian origins. What now? People have to be born with parents buying them chatels whenever they relocate?
"A thief may send money overseas, he is not giving more to society than he is taking. "
Sure, so can a lottery winner. Talk about letting a leaf blocking a forest.
“The illegals here use the ER for every conceivable problem.”
Is that what the poor do in general? Like in the inner city or native American reservations, long before there were “massive immigrants.” We libertarians have long advocated a solution to those poverty problems: less government intervention, so the poor can make a decent living on their own. Taking away driver’s licenses and job eligibility are sure ways to make people poor.
Your praise of Japan is at least 25 years out of date. Nikkei is trading today at 1/3 the value of where it was back in 1989, even before inflation adjustment. Japan’s 27-year recession/depression is largely the result of a demographic catastrophy that is partly due to its restrictive immigration policies.
Botswana is facing the influx of equivalent to 20% of its entire population every year, and the issue is logistics for a farming economy. When the US has 60 million a year new illegal immigrants, and the US economy revert back to subsistence farming, we can talk about Botswana again.
The entire EU member bloc pretty much has open borders with each other. A skilled German is certainly far more likely to take a job from a Dutchman than an unskilled laborer from who-knows-where would. For what it’s worth, Hongkong is trying to annex an entire neighboring region (Shenzhen) in order to solve its lack of population growth. If the policy succeeds, it would nearly double HK population.
You don’t have to be an ideologue to be against immigration-control. There are very practical reasons why immigration-enforcement is bad:
(1) It makes our money worth less, because labor becomes more expensive in nominal terms; no it won’t cause real wage to rise because everything will cost more when you spend your money.
(2) Enforcing something against people’s free will is expensive, and we taxpayers will have to foot the bill; just how expensive? enforcing a ban against a “contraband” that has two legs and a brain is probably going to be much much more expensive than enforcing a ban against bottles of “spirits.”
(3) The tools that would be required to enforce a comprehensive immigration control, such as national ID, can be easily turned against US nationals.
It reminds me of the silly politics of “soak the rich” or “soak the Jew/pogroms” or “soak the Hugenots.” Sure, the target population is a minority, so short-term political goals can potentially be achieved through mob rule, but only at the expense of the population at large committing the violence eventually. . . kinda cutting the nose off to spite the face. Even if we set aside the opportunity cost of giving up trade with the target population, after the expansion of the state power in order to implement the violence (“enforcement”), the enlarged state will have to be paid for by the remaining population.
I do not drive benefit from the government when I use public roads. Considering the wastefulness and corruption of government road contracts, I’d probably have much better roads if I were allowed to pick and choose which private turnpike company I invest in, instead of having to deal with government monopolies. If you are extored by a mafia for protection money, would you consider yourself deriving benefit from the mafia just by staying alive?
It’s highly dependent on how the law is structured. Laws limiting the power of government are highly libertarian . . . think the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution. They do not involve additional bureacracy. Laws providing another layer of tax-eating watchers to watch over existing watchers however would indeed be communistic.
Rome destroyed itself through imperial adventures, welfare state and monetary debasement. Without the immigrant labor (in civil economy and in its army), the Roman state probably would have faltered long before when it historically did. Rome had been recruiting soldiers from Germanic tribes for defense for nearly two centuries before its collapse. Without those tribesmen pitching in to help Rome, it would have been over-run long before 400AD.
American Penal Laws against Catholics lasted into the beginning of the 19th century, so yes. I’m certain that many of them did feel that way, seeing as most of your founders were staunch, anti-papists.
not austria, australia - where i was born and currently live. we’re “crocodile hunter”, they’re “mozart”.
now i’ve got that off my chest, the “bondi riots” of 2005…
first, as you correctly imagine, this problem had a very long gestation period, and complex causes. there had been tension between the resident, mainly anglosaxon population of southwest sydney, and the new kids on the block - the moslem lebanese. the trouble-makers on the moslem side were second-generation migrants, the parents of whom had fled the civil war in lebanon, mid 70’s. they came under government sanctioned refugee programmes, so the illegal argument doesn’t hold. the maronite christian lebanese didn’t have any difficulty with integration, but the moslem community’s problems certainly predate 9/11 (australian armed forces participated in both “desert storm” and “enduring freedom” operations).
“burka versus bikini on the beach” - was how it was seen superficially, but you would have to go back to see how multiculturalism had been implemented by successive generations, and also have a eye towards the way police have been reluctant to target particular ethnic groups, for fear of racial vilification. youth unemployment, helped along nicely by minimum wages and welfare subsidies, have seen many youths, both anglos and moslems struggle for a sense of place in society. many find it in the gangs (surfies or bikies, for the anglos), or in the mosque.
yeah, i like pizza, tacos, and chili, too, but you also get mafiya, 'ndrangeta and triads as side-orders. and like the usa before the 1930’s, australia also experienced mass immigration in the fifties and sixties, with negligible unemployment (no benefits), and excellent economic growth. different era, different australia.
we’ve got natural barriers to immigration, but both labor and liberal (left and right) governments have taken a hard line against illegal immigration. genuine refugees are granted asylum once background checks have been concluded satisfactorily, and economic refugees repatriated immediately.
as regards illegal immigration, the biggest offenders arrive with a valid return air-ticket, and are the british and irish. they overstay visas, or work on tourist visas, and they blend in! so the riot problem is only indirectly connected to the immigration debate, and is a social/cultural/economic question.
I suspect that there is a disconnect between the campaign and the candidate, which is what you get in the absence of a slick machine.
Nor do I expect it to. The second the welfare benefits are ended and a lot more property is privatized, I’d shift my position and be in favor of much looser border policy.
RP is trying to win an election though, which means getting more voters, not more libertarians. Like I said, the world is compromise. Put simply you can’t quote Rothbard, Mill, Mises, Menger, Jefferson, et al, and expect the world to change. Any action we take in the current, less than ideal world, is by definition a compromise if only because the current world is the one we live in and it simply would not exist were it not for government intervention. And once more that’s not to say the government was necessary for what we have, likely in hindered a lot of developments and in its economic policies redirected a lot of resources which would have been used elsewhere. But to truly get some change going you do have to work with people with whom you may differ on principle. Education and the agorist approach has its place, but it’s not the entirety of a winning strategy, especially if you want to enjoy some level of freedom in your own time and not just fight for something which may come about decades if not centuries from now.
And, like I said, I don’t consider myself a libertarian, not by a long shot and not anymore. I consider myself a subversive and an otherwise amused spectator when I’m not involved.
There is the underlying issue: the government is stealing our money through various means and giving it away to various people and groups, from businesses to immigrants to bankers. Then there are the immediate issues: the problems this can cause. Even if you take a pure market view then there is some discoverable optimal level of immigration that would exist in a totally privatized society. With the rampant government violation of property rights, nationalization of land, and the offerring of incentives to illegals in the form of government services, by definition we’re going to be dealing with way more immigration than we otherwise would be in an ideal world. Same with pollution, or driving, etc. So the point becomes, at least in my view, do you stick to pure principle and fight against the root causes only, or do you divide your attention and fight against the root causes but also seek some stop gap measures to at least make life easier for people who are alive now. As far as I can tell people have been fighting the root causes, mostly unsuccessfully, since time began.
But then that’s the difference between theory and practice. I can theorize on the web with the best of them, but at the end of the day I have to drive down the government road to a store which might be an eyesore to some and which may have used eminent domain to get built, and buy milk and groceries. Actually getting something done that might make life better and easier, and promote an overall move toward more liberty, means working with people in the real world who I might not always agree with politically. If their goals coincide with mine we work together, if not, not.