Author: Bill Vallicella

Immigration Legal and Illegal

A reader from Down Under poses this question:

America is experiencing immigration problems somewhat like Australia's. The idea of  'multiculturalism' some would say is beginning to show its flaws. Who do you believe should be allowed to enter your country? Please feel free to be as politically incorrect as you like.

1. First of all, one must insist on a distinction that many on the Left willfully ignore, that between legal and illegal immigration. (Libertarians also typically elide the distinction.)  Legal and illegal immigration are separate, logically independent, issues. To oppose illegal immigration, as any right-thinking person must, is not to oppose legal immigration. So, to answer one of your questions, no one should be allowed to enter illegally. But why exactly? What's wrong with illegal immigration? Aren't those who oppose it racists and xenophobes and nativists? Doesn't everyone have a right to migrate wherever he wants?

2. The most general reason for not allowing illegal immigration is precisely because it is illegal.  If the rule of law is to be upheld, then reasonable laws cannot be allowed to be violated with impunity simply because they are difficult to enforce or are being violated by huge numbers of people.  Someone who questions the value of the rule of law is not someone it is wise to waste time debating.

3. There are several sound specific reasons for demanding that the Federal government exercise its legitimate, constitutionally grounded (see Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. constitution) function of securing the national borders, and none of these reasons has anything to do with racism or xenophobia or nativism or any other derogatory epithet that slanderous leftists and libertarians want to attach to those of us who can think clearly about this issue.

There are reasons having to do with national security in an age of terrorism. There are reasons having to do with assimilation, national identity, and comity. There are considerations of fairness in respect of those who have entered the country legally by satisfying the requirements of so doing. There are reasons having to do with the importation of contraband substances into the country. There are reasons having to do with increased crime. Last but not least, there are reasons pertaining to public health. With the concern over avian influenza, we have all the more reason to demand border control.

Borders are a body politic's immune system. Unregulated borders are deficient immune systems. Diseases that were once thought to have been eradicated have made a comeback north of the Rio Grande due to the unregulated influx of population. These diseases include tuberculosis, Chagas disease, leprosy, Dengue fever, polio, and malaria.

You will have noticed how liberals want to transform into public health issues problems that are manifestly not public but matters of private concern, obesity for example. But here we have an issue that is clearly a public health issue, one concerning which Federal involvement is justified, and what do our dear liberals do? They ignore it. Of course, the problem cannot be blamed solely on the Democrat Party. Republicans like Bush and McCain are just as guilty. On immigration, Bush was clearly no conservative; he was a libertarian on this issue. A libertarian on some issues, a liberal on others, and a conservative on far too few.

4. Many liberals think that opposition to illegal immigration is anti-Hispanic. Not so. It is true that most of those who violate the nation's borders are Hispanic. But the opposition is not to Hispanics but to illegal entrants whether Hispanic or not. It is a contingent fact that Mexico is to the south of the U.S. If Turkey or Iran or Italy were to the south, the issue would be the same. And if Iran were to the south, and there were an influx of illegals, then then leftists would speak of anti-Persian bias.

A salient feature of liberals and leftists — there isn't much difference nowadays — is their willingness to 'play the race card,' to inject race into every issue. The issue of illegal immigration has nothing to do with race since illegal immigrants do not constitute a race. There is no such race as the race of 'llegal aliens.' Opposition to them, therefore, cannot be racist.

"But aren't some of those who oppose illegal immigration racists?" That may be so, but it is irrelevant. That one takes the right stance for the wrong reason does not negate the fact that one has taken the right stance. One only wishes they would take the right stance for the right reasons.  Even if everyone who opposed illegal immigration were a foaming-at-the-mouth redneck of a racist, that would not detract one iota of cogency from the cogent arguments against allowing illegal immigration.  To think otherwise is to embrace the Genetic Fallacy.  Not good.

5. The rule of law is a precious thing. It is one of the supports of a civilized life. The toleration of mass breaking of reasonable and just laws undermines the rule of law.

6. Part of the problem is that we let liberals get away with obfuscatory rhetoric, such as 'undocumented worker.' The term does not have the same extension as 'illegal alien.'  I discuss this in a separate post.  But having written thousands of posts, I don't quite know where it is.

7. How long can a welfare state survive with open borders?  Think about it.  The trend in the USA for a long time now has been towards bigger and bigger government, more and more 'entitlements.' It is obviously impossible for purely fiscal reasons to provide cradle-to-grave security for everyone who wants to come here.  So something has to give.  Either you strip the government down to its essential functions or you control the borders.  The first has no real chance of happening.  Quixotic is the quest  of  strict constructionists  and libertarians who call for it.  Rather than tilting at windmills, they should work with reasonable conservatives to limit and eventually stop the expansion of government.  Think of what a roll-back to a government in accordance with a strictly construed constitution would look  like.  For one thing, the social security system would have to be eliminated.  That won't happen.  Libertarians are 'losertarian' dreamers.  They should wake up and realize that politics is a practical business and should aim at the possible.  By the way, the pursuit of impossible dreams is common to both libertarians and leftists.

8. Even though contemporary liberals show little or no understanding for the above arguments, there are actually what might be called 'liberal' arguments for controlling the borders:

A. The Labor Argument. To give credit where credit is due, it was not the conservatives of old who championed the working man, agitated for the 40 hour work week, demanded safe working conditions, etc., but liberals. They can be proud of this. But it is not only consistent with their concern for workers that they oppose illegal immigration, but demanded by their concern. For when the labor market is flooded with people who will work for low wages, the bargaining power of the U.S. worker is diminished. Liberals should therefore oppose the unregulated influx of cheap labor, and they should oppose it precisely because of their concern for U. S. workers.

By the way, it is simply false to say, as Bush, McCain and other pandering politicians have said, that U.S. workers will not pick lettuce, clean hotel rooms, and the like. Of course they will if they are paid a decent wage. People who won't work for $5 an hour will work for $20. But they won't be able to command $20 if there is a limitless supply of indigentes who will accept $5-10.

B. The Environmental Argument. Although there are 'green' conservatives, concern for the natural environment, and its preservation and protection from industrial exploitation, is more a liberal than a conservative issue. (By the way, I'm a 'green' conservative.) So liberals ought to be concerned about the environmental degradation caused by hordes of illegals crossing the border. It is not just that they degrade the lands they physically cross, it is that people whose main concern is economic survival are not likely to be concerned about environmental protection. They are unlikely to become Sierra Club members or to make contributions to the Nature Conservancy. Love of nature comes more easily to middle class white collar workers for whom nature is a scene of recreation than for those who must wrest a livelihood from it by hard toil.

C. The Population Argument. This is closely related to, but distinct from, the Environmental Argument. To the extent that liberals are concerned about the negative effects of explosive population increase, they should worry about an unchecked influx of people whose women have a high birth-rate.

D. The Social Services Argument. Liberals believe in a vast panoply of social services provided by government and thus funded by taxation. But the quality of these services must degrade as the number of people who demand them rises. To take but one example, laws requiring hospitals to treat those in dire need whether or not they have a means of paying are reasonable and humane — or at least that can be argued with some show of plausibility. But such laws are reasonably enacted and reasonably enforced only in a context of social order. Without border control, not only will the burden placed on hospitals become unbearable, but the justification for the federal government's imposition of these laws on hospitals will evaporate. According to one source, California hospitals are closing their doors. "Anchor babies"  born to illegal aliens instantly qualify as citizens for welfare benefits and have caused enormous rises in Medicaid costs and stipends under Supplemental Security Income and Disability Income.

The point is that you can be a good liberal and oppose illegal immigration. You can oppose it even if you don't care about about increased crime, terrorism, drug smuggling, disease, national identity, national sovereignty, assimilation, the rule of law, or fairness to those who have immigrated legally. But a 'good liberal' who is not concerned with these things is a sorry human being.

I hope I have been politically incorrect enough for my reader's taste.

  

Emile-Auguste Chartier

Alain Emile Chartier (1868-1951) was a French professor of philosophy among whose students were Raymond Aron and Simone Weil. Chartier's sunny disposition, however, did not rub off on the brooding Weil. Under the pseudonym 'Alain,' Chartier published thousands of two-page essays in newspapers. What follows is a striking sentence from the essay "Maladies of the Mind" in Alain on Happiness, F. Unger, 1973, p. 25:

An old man is not a young man who suffers from old age; a man who
dies is not a living man who enters into death.

Latest Lunacy from Planet Left: The Right to a Vacation

Political disagreement has become 'planetary':  Right and Left occupy different planets. The proliferation of 'rights' is a central feature of Planet Left.  If it were April Fool's Day I'd suspect the following of being a bad joke.  But I fear it is not: 

Milton Contra Cloistered Virtue Unexercised

Near the end of Richard Weaver's essay, "Life Without Prejudice," he quotes Milton:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world; we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by that which is contrary.

This fits nicely with Keat's notion of the world as a vale of soul-making.

What the Fight is About

As Michael Barone understands, " the issue on which our politics has become centered — the Obama Democrats' vast expansion of the size and scope of government — is really not just about economics. It is really a battle about culture, a battle between the culture of dependence and the culture of independence."

A Question About Self-Referential Inconsistency

 From the mail bag:

I’m hoping you can help me with an  annoying question that came up in conversation recently. I’m sure you can answer it much better than me.

Statements are self-refuting when they are included in their own field of reference and fail to conform to their own criteria of validity. Thus ‘there are no truths’ is self-refuting because if it is false, then it is false. But if it is true, then it is false as well because then there would be no truths, including the statement itself. So what about the statement ‘all statements are self-refuting’?

You are right about 'There are no truths.'  If true, then false.  If false, then false.  So  necessarily false.  Therefore, its negation — 'There are some truths' — is not just true, but necessarily true.

There is exactly the same pattern with  'All statements are self-refuting.'  If true, then self-refuting and  false.  If false, then  false.  So necessarily false.  Therefore, its negation  — Some statements are not self-refuting — is not just true, but necessarily true.

Now an intriguing  question arises.  Are these necessities unconditional, or do they rest upon a condition?  The second necessity appears to be conditional upon the existence of statements and the beings who make them.  Statements don't 'hang in the air'; a statement is the statement of a stater, so that, in a world without rational beings, there are no statements.  'Some statements are not self-refuting,' therefore, is not true in all possible worlds, but only in those worlds in which statements are made.  Given that there are statements, it is necessarily true that some statements are not self-refuting.  But there might not have been any statements.  The existence of statements is contingent.

Now what about 'There are some truths?'  Clearly, this sentence (or rather the proposition it expresses)  is not contingently true, but necessarily true.  But is it true of absolute metaphysical necessity, or does its necessary truth rest on some condition?  Suppose something gives the following little speech:

I see your point.  There have to be truths.  Forif you say that there aren't any, you are saying that it is true that there aren't any, and you thereby contradict yourself.  So there is a sense in which there cannot not be truths.  But all this means is that WE must presuppose truth.  It doesn't mean that there are truths independently of us.  WE cannot help but assume that there are truths.  The existence of truths is a transcendental presupposition of  our kind of thinking. But it does not follow that there are truths of absolute metaphysical necessity.  If we were not to exist, then there would be no truths, not even the truth that we do not exist.

Is the little speech coherent?  The objector is inviting us to consider the possible situation in which beings like us do not exist and no truths either.  The claim that this situation is possible, however, is equivalent to the claim that it is true that this situation is possible.  But, on the transcendental hypothesis in question, the existence of this truth is relative to our existence, which implies that it is not true independently of us that it is possible that beings like us not exist and no truths either. But then it is not really possible that beings like us not exist and no truths either: the possibility exists only relative to our thinking.  So I conclude that the transcendental hypothesis is only apparently coherent, and that 'There are truths' is true of absolute metaphysical necessity.  So it is not just that we cannot deny truth; truth is undeniable an sich.

 

Death Bed Reading

What will you have on your death stand? Whose thoughts will occupy your mind in your final moments in the dying of the light, as the breath comes short and the cancer cells conquer organ after organ?   Speaking for myself, I'll take Plato over Putnam, Boethius over Butchvarov, Aquinas over Quine, the Psalms over Sartre. Reading Quine at a moment like that would like looking for bread among the dusty and jagged shards in a stone quarry.

It is not too soon to begin making a list.

Consciousness: What Evolutionary Good Is It?

Bear in mind that the word 'consciousness' has several distinct meanings. 'Consciousness' can refer to the state of being awake, to the ability to introspect internal states, and to the phenomenon of attention. But 'consciousness' insofar as it poses a 'hard problem' for physicalists is the subjective quality of experience.

These subjective qualities can be features of sensations, but they need not be. Smashing my knee against a table leg elicits a certain unpleasant sensation. The felt quality of that sensation is an example of a conscious datum in the relevant sense. But so is the shimmering quality of a magnificent Saguaro cactus standing sentinel on a distant ridgeline as viewed in the lambent light of the desert Southwest. Qualia, then, can be associated with intentional objects and not merely with non-intentional states like sensations. Pressing some Husserlian jargon into service, we might distinguish between noematic qualia and hyletic qualia.

Anti-Tea Party Bias in the New York Times

The usual left-wing tilt of the NYT's Tea Party coverage is not so egregious in this recent piece.  But even when they try to be fair they can't seem to pull it off.  The piece opens with the following sentence:

The Tea Party Movement is a diffuse American grass-roots group that taps into antigovernment sentiments.

"Diffuse American grass-roots group" is just right: accurate and ideologically neutral.  But then, right on its heels, two pieces of blatant bias.

First, the movement is not fairly described as "antigovernment."  To be opposed to an ever-expanding government, one that recognizes few or no limits, constitutional or otherwise, to the extension of its powers, is not to be opposed to government as such.   To put it in simple terms that even a liberal can understand: to oppose BIG government is not to oppose government.  Tea Party supporters are for the most part conservatives, with a sizable admixture of libertarians.  Neither conservatives nor libertarians are opposed to government as such, though they disagree as to its legitimate size and scope.  But neither want no government.  (The only exception to this is the extreme fringe of the libertarian movement that shades off into anarchism.  But these fringe folk are few in number and negligible in political clout.) 

Second, it is not "sentiments," feelings, emotion, anger, that are at the source of the Tea Party protests but legitimate concerns based in fact and reason.  It is precisely the Tea Partiers arguments that lefties will never address.  Their tactic is to deflect attention from the arguments by psychologizing their proponents.  And so they go on ad nauseam about voter anger and the like.

The piece I am quoting from is not on the OP-Ed page.  It is supposed to be a piece of reportage.  But we cannot get through even the first sentence without banging into leftist bias. 

Scenes From a Tea Party

The party line of the Democrats and their fellow travellers is that the Tea Party Movement is fueled by racism.  The moral scum who make these absurd and scurrilous allegations ought to be ashamed of themselves.  I name names and go into details in other posts which you will find in the Race and Leftism categories.  But just to verify what I already had excellent reasons for believing, namely, that there is no racist motivation to speak of behind the Tea Party protests, I decided I'd better attend one, which I did today.  I visited one of the lesser gatherings of the day here in the Valley of the Sun, one held at Freestone Park, Gilbert, Arizona.  The main speaker was Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.  There was no racism apparent in the signs, the speakers, or the people I observed and spoke with.  No racism, no extremism, no xenophobia, no overheated rhetoric, no incitements to violence.  Just trenchant political dissent in the good old liberty- and free speech-loving American style, something that leftists don't understand, laboring as they do under the strange conceit that they own dissent, as if dissent were something inherently leftist. Here are some amateur shots of the event by your humble correspondent.

Continue reading “Scenes From a Tea Party”

Fruitful Tensions

Mike Rand e-mails,

I was interested to see your recent correspondence and post on the radical vs the conservative. I couldn't help but notice that there is a potential parallel between this and a common interest of yours [ours?], the productive tension between Aristotle and Plato. A radical may be liable to point out that it because Plato is prepared to build a state upon rational rather than traditional grounds that he is prepared to consider women as equally well qualified to rule the state on meritocratic grounds (a la Mill), a thesis which is well supported in the contemporary world though unthinkable in ancient Greece. They may also contrast this against Aristotle’s impression of women which appears indefensible in the modern era but natural in his own time, and they may also draw attention to Aristotle’s defense of slavery. The conservative Aristotle on these points alone appears monstrous to a modern audience against the radical Plato. In accord with the recent post, we might very well conclude that the conservative is a reality-based thinker (within his own environment), whilst the radical is a utopian (prepared to look beyond his environment). The conservative in reply would of course draw attention to the realistic and practical view of Aristotle on running a state and compare this to the proto-communist authoritarian and elitist Plato who would construct a state, mentally at least, that would appear equally monstrous to a modern audience.

This is very perceptive.  Since I am first and foremost an aporetician keen to isolate and sharpen problems under suspension of the natural tendency to glom onto  quick solutions, it interests me and indeed worries me that there may be a tension between my tendency to give the palm to Plato over Aristotle and my conservative tendency.  As I said recently:

One cannot be a philosopher unless one believes that at least some important truths are attainable or at least approachable by dialectical and argumentative means.  Thus there is no place in philosophy for the misologist, the hater of reason, and his close relative the fideist.   Reasoning and argument loom large in philosophy . . . .

But now I must add that to the extent that I favor reason over experience and tradition, the universal over the particular, the global over the local, the impersonal over the personal, to that extent I am in some conflict with my conservative tendency.  One of the differences between conservatives and their liberal/left/radical brethren is that they are skeptical aqbout the value of reason in the ordering of political affairs.

Continue reading “Fruitful Tensions”

Antony Flew Dead at 87

Here.  ". . . it is clear that Flew’s repudiation of atheism was heartfelt and seems to have been largely rooted in his dislike of polemical atheism. His own atheism was always cautious, nuanced and respectful of Christian tradition.  [. . .] Professor Antony Flew, philosopher, was born on February 11, 1923. He died on April 8, 2010, aged 87."