In fact, I would see a program like this as a way to increase our regulatory control over foreign immigration. It seems self-evident that we have a much better chance of upholding a social contract with a documented guest than we do with a clandestine resident. Like I said above, the documentation proposal outlined here would go a whole lot further to address the “freeloader” problem you discussed than our current strategy does now.

I’d distinguish between government benefits and human rights. Obviously, voting is a privilege of citizenship, and I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to limit taxpayer-funded benefits to citizens. But I think everyone has certain fundamental rights, including the right to freedom of movement and the right to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor that aren’t contingent on the generosity of any one nation’s taxpayers. I think that denying these rights, and effectively confining millions of people to a life of poverty and fear, is wrong. And I don’t see how it’s morally relevant whether the people whose rights we’re violating were born in the United States or some other country.

As you know, I come from immigrant stock. Both my parents are immigrants who became naturalized Americans well into their adulthood. My parents’ two siblings are also immigrants who were naturalized as adults. Both my mother’s brother and my father’s sister married other immigrants, who were born outside the US.

For decades, literally, my father’s sister and her husband have made their home in Westchester County New York a sort of “way station” for people they’ve known from Romania who are in transit, possessing legal residency and at different points in the naturalization process.

All of this background may be extraneous, but here’s the point: my family’s prior generation is NOT made up of anti-immigrant nativist racists, and your broad-brush characterization of different types of immigration skeptics is a little offensive.

Under the constitution, and I think it’s especially relevant to concentrate on the 14th Amendment, every citizen has an equal right to life, liberty, and property, due process under the law, and privileges and immunities under the law.

Now I think you’re trying to smuggle in some natural rights and natural law principles into the Constitution that neither exist in the four corners of the text, nor are they reasonably interpolated to exist between the lines, nor do Constitutional lawyers think they exist, nor do normal Americans think they’re there. Seriously, you are taking the most radical position possible. Your insistence that this is “now deeply-rooted and emotional commitment to the principle of equality before the law” is a brazen inversion of the facts. To the extent you think that Americans hold views that basically commit them to a maximally liberal, non-discriminatory immigration policy, public opinion data invalidates that positive interpretation of Americans’ values. Indeed, you point to other groups that we now view as being previously treated unfairly and glibly assume that, by analogy, our treatment of illegal immigrants is morally parallel to those situations we now regret.

That there is a fundamental difference between what we owe to citizens and to non-citizens is hair’s breadth from being tautological. The American government has fiduciary duty to its citizens who are its voters, taxpayers, and comprise its armed forces. It has no such fiduciary duty to every other person in the world. It is a central liberal idea that the government is an agent of (“works for”) the people. The people in question are, pace some ahistorical utopian fantasy, the members of the democratic polity. Given that the modern development of liberalism has deeply incorporated the idea of “social citizenship”, any state lacking infinite resources will have to distinguish those who are entitled to elements of public provision from those who ineligible. Libertopia it ain’t, but that’s the real world.

Whether they come from liberal societies or illiberal countries, I’ve never met an immigrant who questions this basic idea. In my experience, it wouldn’t occur to them. While certainly many would complain that our current system is overly bureaucratic, complicated, irrational, redundant, frustrating, and even unjust, I’ve never heard anyone from outside the west argue that nations shouldn’t have the prerogative to make policies about whom to accept as citizens.

I find this argument frustrating because it’s so irrational that it crowds out more moderate liberalizing proposals. I, for one, believe (with the Cato authors) that our nation could benefit from naturalizing more citizens. But this a priori, rights-based, blanket argument–which has no use for small things such as empirical facts–is positively maddening. First of all, the quick and thoughtless reliance on tacit accusations of racism is, to be charitable, a cheap shot. Secondly, Fourth,culture matters. Third, this sort of fanatic, indiscriminate, dogmatic belief in universal open borders undercuts more serious, empirical arguments that take into account facts that don’t fit the oversimplified and pre-determined narrative. Fourth and finally (for now), simply characterizing the opponents argument as illegitimate on the basis of being possibly unconstitutional, illegal, immoral is simply bad argumentative form. In short, this is the opposite of persuasive; it actively antagonizes those who do not already agree with you.

Among free-market types, this argument has a parallel at a higher level of abstraction. Advocates of minimal government tend to make subtler, more empirical, more ambivalent, and more falsifiable claims. Anarchists, with certain notable exceptions, tend to have more deontic, a priori, and absolutist arguments which must accepted or rejected as a whole.

The world is a complex place and a too-eager tendency to reach bracing, sweeping conclusions will not help us understand it.

This is rich. Arianna Huffington hires a nanny who does not have your preferred skin color and she is the racist?

Ahh. Never mind.

You also ignore a huge inconvenient truth: the people illegal immigrants are hurting the most are African-Americans. As Professor Carol Swain has demonstrated, not only have illegal immigrants taken “ladder jobs” traditionally used by low skilled African-Americans to climb out of poverty, they empower white racism. Or do you really think Zoe Baird and Arianna Huffington couldn’t find an African-American willing to be their well paid nanny during a deep recession?

Nor is it just economic — it’s political. Just when African-Americans were getting a semblance of their fair share of political power, illegal immigration comes along to rob it within a few generations.

But hey, middle class whites can save a few dimes on their produce and will have cheap labor to mow their lawns and clean their office buildings. Enjoy.

Which I always thought was funny since illegal immigrants pay taxes on a lot for things they aren’t allowed to use. We were freeloading off them.