Nullification or Nothing

Fear not, as soon as there is a Republican president “serious” people everywhere will remember it is obviously unconstitutional and inappropriate.

President Obama also once said that his administration would not be prosecuting people in states that had authorized medical marijuana and who had prescriptions for it, which the administration continues to do apace. So, don’t hold your breath on his actually following through here.

If illegal immigrants could not vote, and their children could not vote, then open borders would correct a very great injustice.

Since in practice they can and do vote, and their children can legally vote, open borders are likely to cause a very great injustice.

By and large, illegal immigrants are forbidden from working, but entitled to welfare, a position that Obama is entirely happy to continue.

I would favor open borders if non citizens were free to work, but not free to vote or collect welfare. We have, however, pretty much the reverse situation.

Brain,

You might be the definition of a clever-silly. Someone so smart they can convince themselves of anything.

What if Obama really was a socialist, like so many republicans believed and the laws he refused to enforce were laws protecting private property. This is what is going on in Venezuela, A group of red shirt-wearing Chavista thugs show up at a farm and seize the farm, under the pretext that the farm is “idle land” and that the law allows them to take it over for “food production.” Of course the actual government doesn’t stop this kind of thing because they don’t believe in private property. Rich people don’t deserve their land, and a collective farm would be much more efficient anyway.

Don’t like Venezuela, how about Zimbabwe, was killing white farmers legal, no, but the government doesn’t really believe it needs to enforce that law. Now the country is in a shambles.

Obama should be impeached for his refusal to enforce laws that our elected representatives passed. If he believes those laws are unjust he should be willing to pay this price.

But Obama doesn’t care about these laws one way or the other, if he believed so strongly he could have done this his first day in office. He is just rewarding a constituency for political purposes, and he is doing it by fiat. This is not OK, its really really bad.

If there is one thing I feel like we have learned in the last few years is that a free market alone isn’t enough for prosperity. It requires all sorts of cultural factors that allow free markets to exist. Rule of law is a big part of that.

Brian, you really need to step back from the ledge and learn some humility. You have no concern for your fellow citizens, no sense that being an American is a privilege, and that what we have here is fragile and shouldn’t be subject to the kind of massive social engineering you wish to impose. You, and your open borders crusade are the worse kind of central planning, because you don’t even recognize that is what you are doing.

I respect Caplan for his intellectual honesty and unorthodox thinking in regards to education but somehow, when it comes to illegal immigration, he forgets rational thought and starts singing the groupthink of Beltway elites (of all parties).

Several questions for B. Caplan in regards to illegal immigration that hopefully he will have the courage to answer:

1. Have you examined the historical record of massive waves of immigration? Its not encouraging, ranging for complete societal destruction (Dorians into Greece, Germanic peoples into the Roman Empire, etc.), to rebellion and war (Anglo settlers into Texas, Germans into the Slavic lands, etc.) to ‘mere’ genocide and displacement (see history of European settlement of N. America and Australia). Given that successful examples of free movements of people without downstream violence and conflict are so rare, where does your certainty that this is a good thing come from?

2. The record of Mexican immigration into the US is not good. The belief The border states which have seen generations of legal and illegal immigration and there is no record of dynamism (especially intellectual or economic) similar to that seen with European waves in the 19th or early 20th centuries nor even the Asian migrations of the ’60s and 70s. This would seem to provide empirical confirmation of what IQ would predict and even if that is completely wrong, it remains the burden of Bryan and his ilk to show just why this intellectual accomplishment wave has not occurred when groups that were similarly poor (Vietnamese, Indians) seemed to have done so much better.

Wow. As a minarchist one of the few things I want the government to do is control immigration. If Obama used his “discretion” to unburden us of ADA pool-lift rules, or racial hiring quotas, or asset-forfeiture robbery by the DEA, I would sure be pleased. And he could do all those things and thousands of others within the law. But you! You want the President to neglect one of the few proper duties of the Federal government; one of the few things it can do to actually help citizens prosper– protecting them and their children from hordes of invaders. I shake my head in amazement.

Funny how the self-proclaimed libertarians routinely come out as the most ardent democracy haters. Sometimes I get the feeling that were it up to them, the whole world would be one Khmer Rouge paradise. After all, why pay attention to what unwashed masses want when WE just know what needs to be done, when and how?

not everything should be up for a vote. we should not be able to vote on whether we should steal people’s wealth for example. we should not be able to vote on whether someone can voluntarily choose to employ someone from outside of the country for the wage he can bargain for.

caplan and the hated libertarians are saying that we should be free as individuals to do what we wish and individuals should not be at the mercy of the angry mob.

democracy does not equal freedom. putting up individuals’ choices for a public vote is the oppose of freedom.

Prof Caplan,

In this case, the end does not justify the means. It has been pointed out above and in the media, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303822204577468872677354992.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop that this is an action by the president to gain more votes rather than something to correct a great societal wrong.

My question is: Are the hundreds of thousands of people who will soon have work permits going to suddenly start following labor laws? Many illegal immigrants work for cash. Many illegal immigrants and their employers evade the taxes, insurance, and rules that businesses and workers with integrity respect.

I am not convinced that the new semi-amnesty will have a positive contribution to our society. Rather, I wager it will embolden rule breakers to continue to live as they have been.

Good grief. Again.

I remember, once, a professor who taught me about systematically biased beliefs about economics. I wonder what he would say to the idea of a presidential dictatorship randomly changing laws.

And by the way, we aren’t talking about nullification, pardon, or selective enforcement. We’re talking about plainly making out a whole new set of laws and standards for certain classes of people.

Which, ya know, doesn’t seem very libertarian to me, allowing the president to do whatever the hell he wants doesn’t.

The main problem is what happens when a future executive decides to start enforcing it again. See here http://www.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/comments/uxzww/thanks_usda_i_appreciate_the_useless_regulation/

Also,
@DK the US Constitution is a fundamentally anti-democratic document. If democracy was safe, why would we need to limit government? What if “the people” WANT to pass laws restricting the freedom of speech?

What libertarians want is for huge swaths of our lives to be carved out as safe zones, free from any possibility of government interference, whether “the people” want it or not. Some of those areas are (nominally) already protected by the Constitution, if imperfectly, such as speech, self-defense, protection from arbitrary police action, etc. Unfortunately many others are not, such as immigration and free trade.

“I just don’t see this slippery slope leading anywhere we should fear to slide.” -BC

I call this government power bias. That is, we typically do not foresee a slippery slope when a government action is something we happen to agree with. I’m surprised BC exhibited it.

Military action w/o congressional declaration of war. A hit list w/o due process. Nullifying of creditors’ senior claims on assets. The Obamacare individual mandate. A recess appointment the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (after which I believe the President was one declaring that the Senate was in recess).

I’d say we’re well down the slippery slope, this isn’t the beginning of it. You seem to be experiencing boiled frog syndrome.

Also, would you make a constitutionality argument against any Fed gov’t that you find objectionable? If so, how would you reconcile to this post to avoid being a hypocrite?

I second what Ghengis Khak wrote. This follows closely with what Bryan wrote in the myth of the rational voter; voters’ preferences are biased in a systematic way, and thus politicians’ platforms are biased in the same way, and so the laws that are ignored will not be random laws. I don’t know what they will be, but I don’t think it would turn out well.

I favor Arnold’s view here.

“I’d say we’re well down the slippery slope, this isn’t the beginning of it. You seem to be experiencing boiled frog syndrome.”

I’d say a lot of the “separations of powers” stuff that people parrot about regarding why it is that the state can and can’t do is either:

1) A lie by a public official trying to cover their ass (ie Eric Holder saying Obama can’t legalize marijuana when the DEA and the FDA are the ones who categorise drugs and they’re both executive agencies)

2) Signaling of “law and order” worries. The government (especially exec branch) can actually do whatever it wants and justify it with legalese afterwards as long as there isn’t +75% opposition in polls. Saying “we need to worry about process in government” just signals that you’re either a “serious libertarian” or a liberal who wants to justify away that the state does bad things. The state is going to do whatever it so structures itself to want, even if we try to care about process.

I have to agree with Brian here. The existing laws and their enforcement are so bad that it seems appropriate for the administration to choose not to enforce some of them. Such a stance does not sit well with some conservatives, but when it comes to border control, many conservatives are unrealistic.

However, I don’t recall Senator Obama giving much support to George W. Bush’s attempt at immigration reform. I don’t think he’s interested in addressing the real problem, he just knows how to use this issue to his advantage.

Since non-citizens can’t vote and since illegal immigrants can’t get welfare (and many legal non-citizens are restricted from some welfare programs), it seems you need to be an advocate of reducing restrictions on immigrant work.

I’d challenge you on the non-citizens not voting thing. It’s laughably easy to commit voter fraud. Not sure how easy it is to get on welfare as a non-citizen or illegal immigrant, but I know for example that there is serious abuse of SS Disability, so it’s not like it’s unreasonable to be concerned that current welfare programs will be provided to people that aren’t eligible.

That said, if people on the left really cared about increasing immigration, they should stop spending so much effort giving non-leftists a reason to worry about immigration. Stop promoting gov’t as a means to take from one group to give to another, work to provide protection of economic rights, and stop fighting voter ID laws, and there wouldn’t be a moral ground to stand on to fight immigration.

Allowing increased immigration is almost certainly still the morally right thing to do as things stand, but it’s hard to blame people for worrying about who is allowed to be in the country when half the people already here think it’s morally legitimate to use the threat of force to do whatever they want, as long as they can get enough politicians to sign off on it.

“My question for Arnold: What’s the best law any future President is likely to nullify due to Obama’s precedent? I just don’t see this slippery slope leading anywhere we should fear to slide.”

Here’s my answer:

“Due to budget constraints, we are disbanding the SEC. The markets have seen the effects of unfettered bank crises. We are better off enforcing the laws in other ways, and stop these regulatory brakes on economic growth. The markets know what will happen if they go too far; they will police themselves better than we can.

(I would like to thank the following political donors…)”

Ghengis_Khak beat me too it. Random enforcement is not the worst case, nor is it nearly as likely as the worst case. As Ghengis_Khak says, the worst case is that the president (and future presidents) will selectively use it ways that (increasingly narrowly) benefit their friends and hurt their enemies.

Moreover, I take issue with this:

“Calling attention” to unjust laws is one of the weakest rationales for civil disobedience. The main point of disobeying an unjust law is to reduce its number of victims by one.

That is an extremely short-sighted view of political change. Real change only happens through widespread shift in opinion. If you simply increase evasion of the law while public opinion remains the same, you just get more draconian laws against the practice and restriction of related liberties.

“The fact that coyotes in Mexico – our closest Third World neighbor – charge about two years’ salary shows that U.S. enforcement is very draconian indeed.”

Laugh, laugh.

That’s border control, not immigration enforcement. The U.S. has essentially zero enforcement anywhere else.

For example, the U.S. has literally no mechanism for detecting and removing visa overstayers (30-50% of illegals).

Employer sanctions are within rounding error of zero.

Interior enforcement (finding illegals in the U.S. and removing them) is near zero save for Secure Communities. Secure Communities is quite real and shows (by the sheer numbers) that immigrant criminality is vastly higher than was previously believed.

A few states have cracked down on illegals (Arizona, Alabama). Illegals scurried out in each case. The ease with which illegals can be removed (with modest efforts) shows how little is being done so far.