Confessions of a Libertarian on Immigration

Texas Senator Dan Patrick has just filed Senate Bill 126, which would require law enforcement officials to check legal documentation of lawfully stopped individuals. Other states will likely follow suit.

Let me confess how this immigration business is especially poignant to me. I teach college students and have every ethnic persuasion imaginable in my class. If S. B. 126 becomes law, I will turn to my black students and say, “If a cop stops you, you will not have to carry papers to prove you’re legal.” I will turn to my Asian students and say, “If a cop stops you, you will not have to carry papers to prove you’re legal.” I will turn to my western European students and say, “If a cop stops you, you will not have to carry papers to prove you’re legal.” But if I turn to Yolanda Garcia (pseudonym), who is legal and came from Spain three years ago, I will have to say to her, “If a cop stops you, you will have to have papers to prove you’re not illegal, or otherwise be fined, if not jailed.”

A New Yorker cartoon depicts this prejudice accurately. It shows a police officer putting a handcuffed man into a police car, warning, “Anything you say with an accent may be used against you.” S. B. 126 will come to this.

There is something downright sick in this prejudicial treatment. Conservatives and libertarians usually champion the supremacy of the individual over the collective. We judge individuals as individuals, not as members of a group. But too many conservatives are now demanding that we prejudicially judge people as members of a group. They have become the collectivists that they supposedly reject.

The Constitution will not help their case. The Framers designed it to protect, more than anything else, the freedom of the individual.

It gets even worse.

These same conservatives then demand that we construct a vast, inordinately expensive government bureaucracy for the purpose of judging individuals as members of a collective. How else can 12 million illegal immigrants be located, tried in court, then deported? The further irony is that this Brobdingnagian bureaucracy will remain permanent. That is why Friedrich von Hayek wrote a piece arguing, “Why I Am Not a Conservative.”

When I speak at Tea Party rallies, which I often do, I bring up this paradox of their wanting a collective bureaucracy, and they are choked to respond. It is not only ironic, it is unthinkingly hypocritical. Conservatives oppose Big Government when is it is liberal, but often approve when it is conservative.

I, too, do not like illegal immigrants sponging freely with impunity. But there has to be a realistic way to resolve the problem as much as possible. Dr. Johnson once said that “the purpose of travel is to govern the imagination with reality.” A reality check is needed in this immigration feud.

John Stuart Mill wisely observed that “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” Open, honest debate–even on the contentious issue of immigration–is healthy because it takes us closer to truth and resolution. Let refutations–not just anger–begin in earnest.