What happened to ‘Government for the people?’
People should have more rights than corporations. It should be enshrined in our constitution. Corporations are not people. They should be second-class citizens if anything.
Governments should not have more rights than people. Anybody who thinks that governments and nations should be able to tell people where to live or what to do for a living has a lot of political ideology in common with Josef Stalin.
People should have the right to make a living where and when they can, within the laws of the nation wherein they chose to make a home. If your problem with immigration is there are too many undocumented immigrants, the solution is to make it easer to immigrate. If your problem is that immigrants might compete with locals for jobs, make it easier for locals to up-train for better jobs.
Notice I am arguing for people to have the right to make a living. I don’t know of any situation where a flood of immigration came from people wanting to live off of welfare. Most immigrants want to work, produce, contribute, send money home, not lay in bed and collect a check. If you can find someone who moved to another country to live off welfare, they’re probably an American living in Europe. America’s welfare system is certainly not robust enough to be the envy of anyone.
I also don’t know of any situation where a country imploded because of too much immigration. Generally speaking, population growth is good for economies. It’s only when populations begin to decline that economies crumble: think Rome.
If I want to go live in Germany, or Asia or Central America, work, produce, and make a living, I should have that right, with little or minimal government red tape in the way.
Government should be of the people, by the people and for the people – no just the people fortunate to be born there, the people of a certain race or color or the people who have money. No one should be told they can’t leave their home to throw their lot in with another country. Get the laws out of the way of human rights.
Then the countries that are run right, with a minimum of infringement on individual rights, with a minimum of corruption and gridlock, and in the spirit of taking care of the people – all the people – will and should attract more migrants. Document those people, remove barriers to participation and help them to contribute. Let the free market determine where people want to live.
Ultimately, those countries that are successful will gain population until the lure is less strong and people will stop moving there in such numbers. Countries that fail to provide rule of law, open markets and human rights will loose population until their governments can no longer function, allowing new blood to take the reins and try to do better.
Governments fail because they fail to provide those basic ingredients for a just, open and equitable society, not because they attract too many immigrants. Let anybody provide evidence to the contrary. I’m open.
Karl Hille lived and breathed local news beat reporting in Greenbelt and the Baltimore/Washington region for more than 12 years until the 2007 recession. While learning and improving the online side of the Baltimore Examiner operations, his platform dropped out from under his feet, then his rebound job at a regional business news magazine downsized him three months later. Now, working for the “dark side” – public communications work by day for the awesome government agency – he is going back to school to find the critical intersection of news, investigation, and the Internet – and re-learning how to be a student while he’s the only guy on campus sporting a fedora.