Values and the Border Question

I think I can summarize my political values into seven points. If I ever became a citizen of Canada, Russia, or Nigeria, I would still like to see these values advanced whereever I'm at. And if the USA broke up into independent states, regional confederations, and city-states, I would still promote these values in the new political setting I'm living in:

1. Free enterprise: The right to enter a career field or start a business without restrictive licensing or regulation; private ownership of the means of production.
2. Non-intervention: non-interference in internal affairs of other countries; neutrality in foreign conflicts; peace, friendship, and commerce with all countries.
3. Freedom of expression: The Internet, the public airwaves, the soapbox, public support of political candidates and ideas - all should be unregulated.
4. Freedom of association: The right to enter into business or personal relationships for any reason that pleases one - and the right to refuse such associations for any reason.
5. Right to self-defense: unregulated access to firearms or other weapons one may want to have.
6. Individual autonomy: medical freedom, drug freedom, sexual freedom, freedom of movement, etc.
7. Subsidiarity: political decisions should be made at the most local level possible.

Since I am living in the United States, the question is how I would advance these values in light of America's problems and political realities. That would include, for instance, balancing or prioritizing these values when they seemingly conflict. But how?

Kevin Carson writes that "a specific policy must be evaluated ... in the context of the overall system of power, how it promotes or hinders the class interests that predominate in that system." In the same post (excerpted from Chapter 9 of Carson's Studies in Mutualist Political Economy), Carson quotes Arthur Silber:

there are two basic methods of thinking that we can often see in the way people approach any given issue. One is what we might call a contextual approach: people who use this method look at any particular issue in the overall context in which it arises, or the system in which it is embedded….

The other fundamental approach is to focus on the basic principles involved, but with scant (or no) attention paid to the overall context in which the principles are being analyzed.

Like Silber and Carson, I try to use both approaches. Of course, the conclusions I reach may be entirely different than what either of them would draw on any particular issue.

In commenting to my previous post on the border question, Eric Lemonholm writes, "Jim - follow the money. In whose interest is it to keep up the supply of cheap, non-organized, expendable labor? Who does not mind seeing wages depressed and rents driven up?"

I view Bush's immigration policy in the context of a larger globalist agenda. The President doesn't give a whit about Latin Americans coming here seeking a better life. He cares more about maintaining the interests of global aristocratic elite and creating a class of global serfs. Importing cheap labor is part of that program. Bring in the Mexicans because unemployed black men who would do similar work are instead rounded up and fed to the Prison-Industrial complex. Unlike Bush's claims, the illegals don't do the work "Americans won't do;" as Ilana Mercer points out, they do the work that poor Americans are prohibited from doing. The surplus workers makes jobs scarce, which in turn drives wages down. Combine this with the erosion of America's manufacturing base, and the inflation of the money supply through record deficit spending, and it appears Bush's program is to turn what were once the most productive and prosperous people on Earth into another race of serfs.

This is all to say that immigration, like national security or the best means of tax reform, must be considered not only in light of the political values I want to advance, but also of the system in which we live under. And I perceive the "two sides" of the immigration question not to be xenophobes and libertarians, but nationalists and globalists. That is, those who want to preserve national sovereignty, and those who want to absorb the United States into a hemispheric confederation as a step toward a World Government.

In that contest, I believe the best tactic is to side with the nationalists - at least on the border security question. (I firmly oppose violating the freedoms of American citizens in the hunt for illegal immigrants.) If the border disappeared because the State is dissolving into irrelevence, that would be something to celebrate. But it is disappearing instead to create an even bigger and more authoritarian State.

As a believer in subsidiarity, I must resist this surrender of our sovereignty.