We Have a Right to Limit Immigration

Yes, We Have the Right to

Limit Immigration to the USA,

and the Duty Not

to Abet Oppression

July 13, 2018

[Also related: "Freedom of Association"]

Big Money is framing the debate in the United States about illegal immigration in a deliberately wrong and maximally divisive manner. As everybody knows, Big Money says the issue is whether to allow the illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America to break the law and stay in the U.S., or to deport them. Big Money thus says the issue is whether to enforce the law or let people break it.

This Big Money framework derives its apparent reasonableness from the widely-shared belief that people in a nation have the right to limit immigration into their nation as they see fit. Obviously if people have the right to limit immigration, then they have the right to deport those who do not enter the country legally. It all seems so perfectly simple.

Yes, people in a nation do indeed have the right to limit immigration into it. But this doesn't mean that the issue that Americans must decide today regarding illegal immigration is whether or not to let people break the immigration laws. Here's why.

Not Letting Somebody Enter Your Home is Not the Same as Forcing Them to Enter and Then Slamming the Door in Their Face

There's a huge difference between a) some individuals deciding they'd rather live in the United States than their native country, for reasons of personal preference or advancing their career or other such non-emergency concerns, versus b) millions of people fleeing across our southern border in order just to survive life-threatening conditions in their country that Big Money deliberately created in order to make big profits at the expense of these ordinary people and also to force them to illegally immigrate just to save their lives.

In the former case, yes, it is appropriate to limit immigration for various sensible reasons and deport illegal immigrants. But in the latter case, the question is not whether or not to limit immigration and deport illegal immigrants but rather whether or not to stop Big Money from forcing millions of people to illegally immigrate to save their lives.

The fact that Big Money has, for decades, been deliberately creating the life-threatening (but profitable for Big Money) conditions that are forcing millions of people from Mexico and Central America to illegally immigrate across our border (at huge risks to themselves, by the way) is never mentioned in the mass media that Big Money controls. But it is a fact. It is the KEY fact. It is the elephant in the living room! You can read the gory details here.

Once one understands what is actually going on, then it is possible to gain some clarity about the relationship between the right to limit immigration and the duty not to abet oppression of innocent people. Here's how the two relate.

Yes, we have a right to limit immigration.

No, we do not have the right to use “limiting immigration” as an excuse for—as a means of—oppressing people, people from Mexico and Central America whom our billionaire rulers are FORCING to cross our border illegally to survive the life-threatening conditions our rulers have been imposing on them for decades.

When we remove the rich from power—with the help of the illegal immigrants who are our friends in this effort and whom we should therefore NOT treat like dirt (as if they were our enemy) by deporting them!—then we all can abolish the life-threatening conditions that presently force them to illegally cross the border, like slaves in the past who illegally ran away, and then we can exercise our right to limit immigration without it being merely an excuse for aiding in the oppression of people.

The ruling class works hard to keep us confused about this. Let’s not let them succeed. Be like the Abolitionists during the days of slavery. They knew that illegal runaway slaves were in the right, not wrong. The solution to the problem of runaway slaves was to solve it at the root, not to side with those who made a fetish of obeying the law and who thus treated the illegal runaway slaves like dirt by “deporting” them back to their master.

Remember, the reason we don’t have a runaway slave problem today is not because we enforce the Fugitive Slave Act but because we abolished slavery. Likewise, we’ll solve the problem of illegal immigration when we remove the rich from power. Then the people who presently are forced to illegally immigrate will want to either remain at home or go through legal channels to immigrate.

We CAN Remove the Rich from Power

Big Money doesn't want us to even think about removing the rich from power, obviously. But that's exactly what we need to think about if we are ever going to stop Big Money from treating us all (legals and illegals alike) like dirt, as I discuss here. Big Money uses its control of the media to censor any expression by people of wanting to remove the rich from power. It does this to make us believe that hardly anybody does want to remove the rich from power, and to make us believe that therefore it's impossible to do it. But the fact is that most people would LOVE to remove the rich from power. Read about how this is true, and how we actually can remove the rich from power here (and here.)