Immigration Controls or Liberty? Which Will It Be?
With his nationwide immigration crackdown, President Trump is unwittingly providing a tremendous service to the libertarian movement. He is demonstrating perfectly a point that I have been making for the past 35 years here at The Future of Freedom Foundation: that America’s system of immigration controls is incompatible with libertarianism.
For all too long, libertarians who support immigration controls have thought about their immigration-control system in terms of a “Do Not Enter” sign. The idea was that posting a series of “Do Not Enter” signs at the border did not violate the libertarian non-aggression principle because such signs did not involve the initiation of force against innocent, law-abiding people.
But America’s decades-old series of immigration controls has never only been about posting “Do Not Enter” signs along the border. Instead, the immigration-control system has always been about immigration enforcement measures, all of which necessarily involve the initiation of force against innocent, law-abiding people.
For 35 years, I have been pointing out how people who live in the borderlands along the U.S.-Mexico border live in a police state. I lived in those borderlands for more than 30 years. I saw that police state up close.
I lived on a farm on the Rio Grande. The Border Patrol would trespass onto our land whenever it wanted and conduct searches for illegal immigrants, without search warrants. It is still the same today.
People who travel on the highway are stopped at highway checkpoints manned by immigration officials who search their vehicles, again without search warrants.
Immigration officials board Greyhound buses and demand to see people’s papers. If they don’t have their papers, they are forcibly removed from the bus and returned to Laredo for investigation.
Roving Border Patrol checkpoints stop vehicles and search them without probable cause or even reasonable suspicion that they have committed a crime
Article from The Future of Freedom Foundation
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