In all times and all places, the people in charge have
certain primary duties, obligations that come before anything else they like to
do. It does not matter what form of government is in place, the rulers,
for example, have to maintain public order. Being the tribal chief is useless
if your people and lands are in chaos. For that matter, having a tribal chief
is useless if it means living in chaos. Therefore, one of the primary duties of
all rulers in all times and all places is to maintain public order by enforcing
laws and local customs.
There are other primary duties of the ruler, like organizing the
common defense that are universal to all people and forms of government. Then
there are primary duties that are peculiar to a people or to a form of
government. If the ruler is understood to be a god, then the ruler and his
people have a duty to maintain that myth. A central part of that social order
is the transcendent nature of the order itself. In modern western countries,
protecting property rights and enforcing contracts is counted as a primary duty
of the state.
One of the more destructive
things to happen to America over the last half century is the sacralizing of
immigration by the followers of Emma Lazarus. The endless repetition of the
nonsense phrase “nation of immigrants” has turned a temporary necessity a
century ago into an essential element of the nation’s founding mythology. The
fact that immigration is a violation of the state’s primary duty to the people
is excused, because the immigrant now has a superior place in the moral order.
The state is now in service to foreigners.
In a nation like America, one that allegedly is built on consensual
government, citizenship has great value. In fact, the most valuable
thing to a citizen of a representative democracy is his citizenship. The reason
for this, is that citizenship is an ownership stake in the nation itself. In
theory, the American government was voluntarily founded as an agreement
among individuals, invested with the right to secure mutual protection and
welfare and to regulate the relations among its members. In short, we are
shareholders in America.
If you had the option of selling your citizenship, let’s say at
some sort of auction, where you get money for your place as an American
citizen, there would be no shortage of bidders. For example, there is no
shortage of buyers for the EB-5 visa, which costs $500,000. That’s right,
you can buy citizenship from the US government. Your citizenship is something
of value and therefore, the state has a duty to protect it, just as they have a
duty to protect your property rights. This is a primary duty of government.
When the American government
willy-nilly hands out citizenship papers to millions of foreigners every year,
it is, in effect, stealing the value of your citizenship and giving it to
someone else. This is no different than a company diluting the value of its
shares, by selling additional shares. It’s why open borders fanatics swear that
immigration makes us all richer, despite the mountain of evidence to the
contrary. They know it is essential that people believe this as even the sacred
immigrant is not enough to justify theft.
Now, the argument from open borders people and libertarian loons
is that immigration is not just holy and beneficial, but that the duly elected
officials are passing these laws, so it is legitimate. The trouble is, we don’t
live in a democracy. When 50% plus one vote to rob the 50% minus one, it is
still theft, even if it comes after an election. This is why America is not a
democracy and it is also why democracy was famously called two wolves and a sheep
voting on lunch. The very nature of democracy makes it an immoral form of rule.
Additionally, a primary duty of the modern state is the
maintenance of equality before the law. In fact, this is what makes the law
legitimate. Not only do all citizens have a say in what laws are passed, but
those laws apply to all citizens equally. The very nature of immigration
violates this principle. Immigration steals from some citizens for the benefit
of foreigners and the benefit of a small number of connected citizens. This is
true for quasi-immigration schemes like guest workers, as well as for permanent
settlement.
If the primary duty of the state is to safeguard the citizens,
including the value of their citizenship and maintain equality before the law,
then immigration by its very nature is a direct violation of the social
compact. It makes a mockery of the very idea of consensual government and sows
distrust among the people. It is why all mass immigration quickly leads to a
breakdown of order, because it erodes the legitimacy of the ruling authority,
as the people see they are no longer willing or able to fulfill their basic
duties as rulers.
That does not preclude
all immigration. It’s just that the bar is is extremely high. In order to
justify that which is naturally and always immoral, the offset must exceed the
cost of the deed. Since this is impossible in the modern age, the followers of
Emma Lazarus have been forced to turn morality on its head, claiming the first
duty of the state is to foreigners at the expense of its own citizens. It has
turned America into a bust out where everything of value, including
citizenship, is sold for the benefit of a few.