DavidOdden

I'll play along: Rahi Digar.

Applied consistently, prohibition of imports from less-free nations would effectively prevent all imports to the US, which may be Trump’s plan. The distinction between “prohibited” and “prohibitive” is spurious. There have been flippant proposals to legalize all drugs or other vices and then “tax the hell out of it” – like Norwegian alcohol taxes. Gasoline taxes in the US (and Norway only way more so) are generally punitive, being a method to “prohibit” driving without actually outlawing internal combustion engines. Raising taxes on imported goods is one way to make sure that no other country has an “advantage” over the US, thus protecting the US from outsiders. Existing US and EU law already incorporates a restriction on “un-free trade”, where goods imported to the US or the EU at an actually unfair price owing to government subsidy are subject to a tariff, and this is one of the few legitimate uses of import tariffs. The reason why we don’t trade with Cuba is mainly political inertia and the fact that Cuba used to be an existential threat to US security (you remember the Cuban missile crisis, I assume). The majority of US trade sanctions are directed at specific evil persons and not the entire nation, for example there is a list of individuals in Somalia who have aided terrorist organization or who have engaged in acts of violence against civilians; restrictions on imports from Sudan are aimed now at the military overthrow of the government, again not “any trade with Sudan”. Sure, France is less free that the US because it represses “hate speech”, but penalizing Americans for the sake of the speech interests of the French is quite literally self-sacrificial.

There is an analogous problem in education. Teaching and education does not generate a tangible physical good. Knowledge (which is not a physical good) can be counterfeit or real, it can be “printed” with much greater ease than money can be printed. You can say that it is not “real” knowledge, just as you can say that money not printed to represent physical production is not “real” money, but the two kinds of money are utterly indistinguishable. Actual counterfeit money can be detected though it is getting harder to detect, and harder to produce counterfeit money that passes superficial detection. Reality-detection when it comes to knowledge and education is almost impossible, until you subject the claim to the train-in-tunnel test. Fake knowledge is more of a problem, by orders of magnitude. How is it even possible to manufacture a car that runs on batteries, and sell it for around $50,000?

There is not even evidence of no evidence of forced labor in Canada or the US. Is there evidence of evidence of US companies subcontracting labor in China? The existing law prohibits import of goods produced via forced labor or labor by minors, regardless of who owns the company. I am always trying to figure out your position, it now seems that you want to change to a system of tariffs rather than prohibitions, but also apply the tariffs at a nation-wide basis (i.e. anything from China, presumably also Vietnam, the Philippines, Burma, Bolivia, Chad, India, Kenya, Russia, Belarus and so on. Of course, high-enough universal tariffs could liberate us from income taxes, as Trump has promised.

Do you actually have evidence that there are US companies using forced labor? I am very surprised.

Following your suggestion. "Not allowed" is stronger than "must pay extra for". "Not allowed" means "banned".

US law forbids importing goods tainted by slave labor, but (a) there are exceptions (to everything, it seems: Congress is averse to strong principles) and (b) it does not apply to whole nations. You proposal, presumably, is to expand import bans so that goods coming from a nation found to have produced goods via forced labor, i.e. a drop of slavery-sewage entirely disables imports from that nation. Is that the proposal?

TMJ’s position was “show ID only”, but then changed it to “whatever it takes so that citizens have enforceable employment privileges that prevent the entry of foreigners”. That’s a fairly substantial whiplash-inducing change, so I guess he is back to “no foreigners allowed except some H1B cases”, I don’t know what he is trying to preserve. You on the other hand seem to have in mind a “known to have committed many crimes” exclusion, where common sense of some arbitrary person or a Duly Appointed People’s Court must vet all persons, to judge whether a government let them get away with the crime. Like OJ Simpson. Exiling criminals isn’t a totally bad idea, as long as the set of crimes subject to exile is proper. Not tax evasion, drug sales, or prostitution I would assume. I don’t know if two murders counts as “many” in your book. In that case, maybe France could have denied him entry, or they could have allowed entry, I don’t see that that make any difference. You don’t have to go to France, you just can’t stay here. I don’t see how H1B visas would have any role at all under your scheme of “rights to be in the US”.

I don’t see what a pragmatic solution would be, other than abolition. I suppose Congress could set a maximum wage for H1B employees that is low enough that foreigners would not find it advantageous to be employed under those circumstances, maybe $10/hr, which would probably dry up the foreign labor pool. That would be the same intended effect as abolishing the H1B visa, just a different method. It would actually enable an important aspect of the progressive political plan to make us equal by chopping down from the top. We don’t actually have maximum wage laws, and it would probably get challenged in court, but if the law were upheld, Marx’s dream would be a major step closer. Of course, the other solution would be to subject H1B visa to scrutiny by the Citizens’ Council of Workers (Гражданский Совет Трудящихся).

This is a difference between your two positions: you would allow any serial murderer in (you can always backpeddle on you position in the face of a decent argument). Sounds like you are already backpeddling, and want to make exceptions for people "legally acquitted" (where the government allows the guilty to get away with it), and also for citizens vs others (natural born only?). Indeed, so in fact your new position now seems to be to eliminate H1B visas. Plus ça change...

A corollary is that OJ Simpson should have been exiled from the US. The government allowed him to get away with it.

This is surprising progress. Apparently you do accept that “legally recognized forms of ID should be presented to officials at the border”, and nothing more. I am stunned, yet pleased. Your rationale is regrettably weak, because a writ of habeas corpus can be obtained without first ‘establishing’ the plaintiff’s correct ‘identity’ (plaintiff is named John or Jane Doe). Maybe you didn’t know that. Even with a show-identity requirement, a Canadian tourist can be unlawfully ‘detained’ and executed. No ‘law’ is guaranteed to protect ‘individuals’ from illegal execution by corrupt government employees. So there is not a very good ‘reason’ for demanding presentation of ID at the border. Even a system of statutory rights could in practice lead to ‘illegal’ detention without ‘remedy’. Still, following up on your proposal, this would eliminate 99.99% of existing immigration restrictions, and certainly as a first step, I support such an elimination. It would apply to all persons entering the US, that is it. In a separate thread, we might investigate consequences of the entry-after-identification law. E.g. annoying details about records retention and privacy, but that is minor. Well, just to get the ball rolling, this same rationale would also justify a national ID presentation law, because it is equally possible for a person to be illegally seized within US jurisdiction, and proving – and tracking – identity anywhere and everywhere in the US would further protect the right to obtain a habeas corpus writ without using the generic plaintiff name ‘John Doe’. Surely you would ‘agree’ to this application of your ‘rationale’.

The fundamental flaw in this thread is that the initial question is “Do you agree with Brook? Why or why not?”. There is no statement about what Brook’s position is, nor what time is assumed to define the relevant context. The only statement offered is “The solution to illegal immigration is to make it legal”, which cannot be verified being from a source that no longer exists. There is a currently-existing video of Brook talking, but (perhaps because it is two and a half hours long, nobody has posted a transcript of the lecture, and a reason-based objectively-verifiable statement of “Brook’s position” simply is not possible. How about this: “Do you agree with Tara Smith’s position on immigration?”. How in the world can this even be answered, unless it is clear what Smith’s position is? The OP is invalid ab initio. Most to the point, why would any person bother with an utterly subjective question of agreement or disagreement with another person, when the right question to be addressing is “What should be the law of immigration, within the confines of Objectivist philosophy?”. The opponents of immigration have staunchly declined to state what that law should be. The closest we have come is TMJ proposing at least that “legally recognized forms of ID should be presented to officials at the border”. That could be amended to “and that is all”, but we know very well that is not the proposal. Nor has there been a shred of justification offered for even that minimal law.

Fun fact! A little sweep of the pen similarly settled the question of whether people could enter the US without prior approval – the legal became the illegal by a silly little swipe of the pen.

The “default state of affairs” is that might makes “right”, the strongest guy with the best sword get to rule the village, eventually leading to kings and even emperors who control vast territories by force. The ideas that Objectivists adhere to are generally exceptional, though they are widespread in Europe and North America, and have spread to a few other countries not part of European colonization. Treaties themselves are not a “default state of affairs”, they are tools to limit wasteful destruction of the resources of the sovereign. The entire idea of natural law, as opposed to positive law where moral questions are irrelevant to assessing law, is a distinctively non-default state of affairs. The tragedy is that the moral foundations of law have been eroding in the west, being replaced with positivist views. The main difference between modern theories of law and ancient-medieval ones is that in the olden days, there was a greater tendency to acquiesce to the whims of the sovereign, whereas in the modern world, we acquiesce to the whims of “society”, almost always via a system of plural law-makers, with preference being expressed for some system of elections to select the law-makers. “Democracy” substantially overrides moral rules regulating the concept of “proper law”, to the point that “the people want” obliterates consideration of “it is right that”.