Robert Higgs shares his personal story to show that immigration is not bad at all, and that any problems with illegal immigration can be easily solved by getting the state out of our lives (better yet, by getting rid of the state altogether!). An excerpt:
Anti-immigrationists often say that the Mexicans come here only to go on welfare. Aside from this declaration's manifest misrepresentation of the truth, one wonders why the obvious remedy for this alleged problem does not occur to them: get rid of welfare – after all, nobody, regardless of his place of birth, has a just right to live at other people's coerced expense.
Others claim that the "illegals" crowd the public schools and hospitals, sucking resources away from the taxpayers. If so, then the answer is the same: get the government out of the business of schooling and healing; it ought never to have gone there in the first place.
Some Americans clothe their hatred with the charge that the foreigners who come here commit crimes, such as selling drugs and conducting businesses without a license. Of course, drug peddling and working without a government license ought never to have been criminalized in the first place, for anybody, because these acts violate no one's just rights. If people are worried about real crimes, such as robbery and murder, they need to recall that laws against these crimes already exist, and no special "preemptive war" against potential immigrant offenders can be justified, any more than I can justify nuking Philadelphia today on the strength of my absolute conviction that some residents of that city will commit serious crimes tomorrow.
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