Rather than encouraging the migration of millions of low income govt dependents, we should encourage the immigration of millions of high income productive taxpayers looking for low taxes.
This is the actual, 2004 text of the Libertarian Party Platform on immigration.
COMPLETE PLATFORM TEXT
INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND CIVIL ORDER
IMMIGRATION:
“”The Issue: We welcome all refugees to our country and condemn the efforts of U.S. officials to create a new “Berlin Wall” which would keep them captive. We condemn the U.S. government’s policy of barring those refugees from our country and preventing Americans from assisting their passage to help them escape tyranny or improve their economic prospects.
The Principle: We hold that human rights should not be denied or abridged on the basis of nationality. Undocumented non-citizens should not be denied the fundamental freedom to labor and to move about unmolested. Furthermore, immigration must not be restricted for reasons of race, religion, political creed, age or sexual preference. We oppose government welfare and resettlement payments to non-citizens just as we oppose government welfare payments to all other persons.
Solutions: We condemn massive roundups of Hispanic Americans and others by the federal government in its hunt for individuals not possessing required government documents. We strongly oppose all measures that punish employers who hire undocumented workers. Such measures repress free enterprise, harass workers, and systematically discourage employers from hiring Hispanics.
Transitional Action: We call for the elimination of all restrictions on immigration, the abolition of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol, and a declaration of full amnesty for all people who have entered the country illegally.””
of course they are.
if they were hard core small govt types, do you think we’d be talking amnesty?
of course not. they’d be rounding them up while building a massive wall... on both borders
Gee, they just figured that out?
I wonder how much money they had to spend?
Illegal immigrants, and Mexican nationals living in the US legally for that matter, tend to be low income, uneducated, and dependent on government aid in various forms. Once given citizenship and the right to vote, does anybody think they would vote for a political party that will cut these state-funded social welfare programs for the sake of lower taxes (that most of them don't pay anyway) or less regulation for property and businesses (that they don't own anyway)?
The whole "hispanics are natural Republicans" seems to boil down to wishful thinking and one grain of truth - Hispanics are socially conservative (anti-abortion, Church-going, anti-homosexual, etc). But guess what? So are blacks, and their social conservatism hasn't stopped them from voting for Democrats by a 10:1 margin.
BTTT!
Re: “The right question is whether or not Amnesty would be good for America.”
I have a better question:
Will the political destruction of American Conservatives be good for America?
Remember this....
(1) First generation Hispanics vote 80% for the Democrat Party.
(2) Fourth generation Hispanics vote 60% for the Democrat Party.
Ransome is being unduly kind to the GOP Establishment creatures who make this argument. They argue it disingenuously, as a plausible cover for their actual agenda of instrumentalism and, as Ransome puts it, treating immigrants "as factors of production". It's just an excuse to abet the illegal importation of vast numbers of underpaid indocumentados.
GOP-E policy is a left-handed bracero program that rips off both Mexican and American workers by depressing wages artificially below market-clearing rates.
Ransome, where have you been? Ever hear of a guy named Barack Obama?
No. RiNO arguments of this kind show minds corrupted by large freshets of political money from cynical wage-breaking employers, their PACs, and their double-domed, double-talking "enterprise" thinktank stooges in the E-GOP.
Yeah, let's dial things back to the way they were in the good old days, when every employer had 1000 immigrants fresh off the boat from Lower Slobbovia lined up at his front gate and people worked 84-hour weeks for straight pay, and damned little of it.
Let's go back to the days when you had to be flush, even to send someone from your family to the PTA meeting -- oh, wait, there was no PTA, Mrs. Gotrocks and the school principal, her toady, were the PTA. Yeah, that worked well for civic involvement and "public awareness" of "public" affairs. (Which had largely been taken private anyway.)