Well the difference in this case is that border crossing is a victimless crime, like drug use, and those other two aren't. So technically as an anarchist I don't think that States can ever be contained at the "night-watchman" level that traditional minarchism prescribes... But I think there's a funny thing about victimless crime enforcement... Both in the case of the drug war and immigration you start to have to erode fundamental aspects of 2nd, 4th amendment etc protections in order to do any "practical" level of law enforcement.

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This happens because you're creating categories of crime that are disconnected from specific criminal acts (murder, theft etc) and rather things that are simply ongoing human conditions... I.e. possessing a plant or simply existing on the wrong side of a line in the sand
Ultimately it winds up destroying freedom for everyone, in the same way internet restrictions "for the children" mean that now everyone has to prove they're an adult to access the internet.
Troy's avatar
Troy 1 month ago
The difference between lawful and legal.
Sorry, but I'm not going to get into the boring drug debate. But neither are victimless crimes. This is a very sheltered /deliberately naive view, or you're completely ignoring the consequences of these crimes and the complexities around them. I don't feel as strongly about the drug issue as say Peter hitchens, but he is right to think there is a link with drug use and violence, mental illness. This is just one very small aspect of the link with victims. Having open borders also means an influx is criminals. You can see this very plainly if you walk around an area with illegals. If you adopt your logic theft is also victimless in most cases. This is a (naive, not all) online lefty position. You just don't agree with that one. You'll attest to the consequences in that one I reckon.
Well disagree on both drugs and illegal immigrants. I've been around those two things most of my adult life and have been generally enriched by both. And I think there are significant statistics to back up both of those points, especially if "drugs" includes cannabis, which remains federally illegal.
I assume you are in an affluent area, or very sheltered generally. ('my cab driver is great, a lovely chap', 'whT a lovely Gardner I have!' type thing, that's what it sounds like to me at least). I'm not sure about the stats for the US, nor the situation but the *recorded* serious crime (rape, burglary, murder, violent crime) stats for illegal immigrants is pretty shocking and that is even with pressure to cook the books on this and inability to even police it.
(I'm not sure this works.) Bitcoin is money. Charging interest on Bitcoin loans should be a crime. How money is used for crime is not the fault of money.
Yes I live in a "sanctuary city" that has a significantly lower crime rate than many Red US cities. Yes I place significant value on the myriad of positive market- and non-market based interactions I've had throughout my life with classmates, neighbors, friends, street vendors, & etc, some of whom may very well have been "illegal" or had family that had that designation. And as an individualist rather than a collectivist, I'm not about to create demographic categories of human beings to say "these people are more dangerous than those people, therefore the State should restrict their freedom of movement." Even if that were the case, which I don't believe it generally is in the case of immigrants.
I didn't say immigrants, I said illegal immigrants. But I would probably argue there would be other categories of cultural compatability to take into account, levels of animosity to the host nation, an erosion of a sense of place, rooted ess of native populations, whose opinions are disregarded (despite continually democratic votes against this policy) in favour of globalist sludge. None of this really matters in a nice bubble tho. But you'll find this actually a common and popular opinion amongst immigrants themselves who do not wish it in their adopted homelands (and even more strongly in the original homelands). The US situation is probably fairly different. But I think you live in a nice little bubble from the sounds of it.
'enrichment' usually at a level of 'think of the yummy food' and 'my cab driver was so nice yesterday'.
Scoundrel's avatar
Scoundrel 1 month ago
Your argument is pointless. Jose Huerta Chuma was a violent criminal who Alex Pretti and everyone other "protester" there was trying to protect. If the goal was to protect people who only committed victimless crimes, then personally I think Alex Pretti should have chosen a better illegal immigrant to die for.
Suggesting that trespassing, which border crossing amounts to, is a victimless crime suggests that property rights being violated have no victim. Sort of a hard position to hold unless you're a leftist anarchist. Would it be better if the property were held by individuals and private institutions rather than the state? Sure. Is it still held by someone though? Yes. It's true things get messy when analyzing the real world given that we don't live in Ancapistan. But the idea that political enforcement of relatively open border policy is not an aggressive act, against which retaliation and restitution is justified (in appropriate measure) is not one I can see a good argument for. Specifics of ICE's behavior being a separate matter, and indeed, there's room to rein in some bad actors as of late, as well as improve policy and training. Where this gets hard, though, is that the aggressor, here, is not the group that is being targeted. The ones targeted, in large part, are actually perhaps better thought of as the munition being fired at us by globalist aggressors who are themselves not in ICE's crosshairs. So it's hardly surprising there's a lot of sympathy for them. I've been exploring looking at it a bit from a historical lens of the English unification, wherein Danes, who arguably were spurred into their invasion by the aggression of Charlemagne's restriction of trade routes. By all rights the native population would not have been wrong to evict the Danish incursion (though, doing so entirely likely wouldn't have been possible despite them putting up a very good fight). This seems to be an analogous situation to what we have, though obviously not identical. That said, there's a reason Alfred the Great had his namesake. The sort of threading of the needle it'd take to pull this off in an appropriate manner is not trivial. But it does seem that given the entanglement we find ourselves here, looking to books on anarchist theory are not quite as useful as historic events, as they simply don't adequately address what happens when the two parties in conflict are not the aggressor, even when there has been an act of aggression. It's not a black and white issue, and I do think that far too many are trying to make it out to be one.