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The Immigration Enforcement Police State is Here

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English: ICE Special Agents (U.S. Immigration ...
English: ICE Special Agents (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) arresting suspects during a raid (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

February 7: Muhammad Ali, Jr., returning to the US from a speaking engagement in Jamaica, is detained for two hours at Florida’s Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and questioned about his name and religious beliefs.

February 22: Passengers disembarking from a domestic (San Francisco to New York) flight at JFK airport are held up by US Customs and Border Protection agents demanding their IDs.

February 24: Jeffrey Tucker of the Foundation for Economic Education clears the usual security checks at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport en route to Mexico. Then, while actually boarding the plane, he and the other passengers on the flight are stopped by US Marshals demanding that they submit to retinal scans.

You’re probably thinking that this is the point where I’ll take a break to blame Donald Trump. It isn’t. It’s the point where I’ll take a break to remind Americans who’ve been voting for politicians who promise to “secure the border” and other such authoritarian nonsense that THIS is exactly what they’ve been voting for.

When advocating for the libertarian position on immigration (“open borders,” which also happens to have been the position Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush both took in the 1980 Republican presidential primary debates) I usually prefer to stick to the moral argument. That argument, put simply, is that where peaceful people move to, settle or work is nobody’s business but theirs.

But there are practical arguments against America’s increasingly draconian immigration laws too.  Enforcement is expensive but, fortunately, almost certain to be ineffectual (if it worked, severe economic downturn would be the result).

The most important of the practical arguments, in my opinion, is that a police state built to persecute immigrants will necessarily persecute everyone else as well.

I’ve spoken with friends who traveled in the old Soviet Union and eastern Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They see near-complete similarity between those regimes and the operations of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and Border Patrol forces.

The difference between pre-reunification East Germany and the 100-mile wide “constitution-free zone” along the US-Mexico border is the flag the agencies in question salute. Recent administrations have worked to expand that zone to cover the entire country and the Trump administration seems bent on finishing the job.

The near-total police state blossoming before our eyes is the inevitable result of America’s 70-year romance with the astoundingly stupid idea that it’s the government’s business to monitor and control who travels, lives and works where.

America had legally open borders for its first century as a nation, and nearly so for half a century after that. It wasn’t until after World War Two that one even needed a passport to enter or leave the United States.

Open borders worked. Freedom worked.

The subsequent seven decades of attempts at rigorous immigration control have irrefutably established that our choice is not between open borders and closed borders, but between immigration freedom or totalitarian government. And Americans’ time to stop the stampede toward the latter is running short.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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The Second Amendment and “Weapons of War”

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AR-15 rifles showing their configurations with...
AR-15 rifles showing their configurations with different upper receivers (stripped-down lower receiver is visible at bottom) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Put simply,” writes Judge Robert King of the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals, “we have no power to extend Second Amendment protections to weapons of war.” In Kolbe v. Hogan, the court upheld Maryland’s ban on “assault weapons,” also known as rifles that look scary to people who know nothing about guns.

As talk radio host Darryl W. Perry of Free Talk Live notes, King’s perversely broad statement would cover a ban on the possession of rocks:

“And David put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and slang it, and smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone sunk into his forehead; and he fell upon his face to the earth. So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone, and smote the Philistine, and slew him …” — 1st Samuel, Chapter 17

King also displays a poor grasp of history. No judicial power is required to “extend” the Second Amendment to cover weapons of war, because they’re precisely what it was intended to cover in the first place.

The Second Amendment was ratified only a few years after a citizen army — many of its soldiers armed, at least at first, with weapons brought from home — defeated the most fearsome professional military machine in the history of the world, the army of a global empire.

The express purpose of the Second Amendment was to guarantee the continued maintenance of an armed populace. In fact,  the Second Militia Act of 1792 legally required  every adult able-bodied white American male to own and maintain “weapons of war” (a musket or rifle, bayonet, powder and bullets) just in case the militia had to be called out.

Even in the 1939 case usually cited to justify victim disarmament (“gun control”) laws, US v. Miller, the US Supreme Court held that the reason Jack Miller’s short-barreled shotgun could be banned was that it WASN’T a weapon of war: “[I]t is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense.”

Yes, you read that right: The Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment applies ONLY to “weapons of war.” I think that’s too narrow myself, but at least it comes at the matter from the correct historical perspective.

The purpose of the Second Amendment is best understood in terms of a quote falsely attributed to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto of the Japanese navy at the beginning of World War Two: “You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.”

Shame on King and the 4th Circuit for failing to uphold the plain meaning of “shall not be infringed.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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The Target of the “Border Adjustment Tax” is You

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Federal_Debt-VS-Taxes
Federal_Debt-VS-Taxes (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“[O]n life support,” says US Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) of the “Border Adjustment Tax,” proposed during last year’s GOP presidential primaries  by US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and backed by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI). If the idea is indeed dead, American workers and consumers should heave a sigh of relief. It’s a very bad idea, in more ways than one.

The BAT is promoted as a “tax on imports.” Which, I guess, is technically accurate, but doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s not just a tax on  imports. It’s a tax on people who buy the imports. That is, it’s a tax on you.

For obvious reasons, retail merchants don’t like the idea very much. It would force them to raise prices on lots of items. Which is the same reason you shouldn’t like it, unless you like paying more for stuff than you pay now.

For equally obvious reasons, some American manufacturers love  the Border Adjustment Tax. Every extra dollar you have to pay in tax for something made abroad is a dollar they don’t have to find ways to cut from their manufacturing costs to compete on price. For them it’s the equivalent of running a race in which their competitors have to carry backpacks full of lead and they don’t.

The politicians behind the idea love it because it would let them give their business cronies a huge tax cut — reducing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20% — without reducing government spending.

Ultimately American consumers pay both types of taxes, of course, but the BAT would shift the burden to customers who buy goods made in China, Mexico, South Korea, Pakistan and so on, hurting retailers who sell those things in order to subsidize American manufacturers at everyone else’s expense.

All this talk of “tax reform” is just smoke and mirrors, a way of disguising the reality that every dollar government spends has to come from somewhere, and that that somewhere is taxation. Borrowing money is just promising to tax later. Inflating the currency is just a hidden tax.

Shifting the tax burden around with tricks like a “Border Adjustment Tax” isn’t real reform, it’s just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The first step in any meaningful reform is for Congress to commit to spending no more money than it takes in. The second is for it to start taking in less.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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