Conservatives like Kim DuToit are under fire hereabouts for their immigration-control schemes, but as you’ll soon see, there really aren’t any problems - just exciting new opportunities.

For instance: how does DuToit suppose that the American border guards tell illegals from legals? Well, it would seem that some sort of identification documents would be required. Good thing we have those, right? One problem is that there’s already ten-jillion wetbacks inside the borders, but all we have to do about that is to have the border guards stop and search people at random. Now that by itself will lead to a massive increase in the size and intrusiveness of the American government’s law enforcers, but social conservatives have never cared about that particular issue as long as it’s the reds/wetbacks/negroes/gays/foreigners that are getting the whip. In fact, it’s job creation.

So no problem, right?

Except, oops, it turns out that there’s an enormous demand for illegal (read: market rate) labor, a massive in-place illegal population, and thousands of US counties that issue the fundamental citizenship document, the birth certificate. The only thing that’s preventing the illegal population from obtaining the best papers that money can buy is simply that they have better things to do with their money. DuToit’s scheme would change that overnight.

Once Mexicans start buying themselves identity documents, the conservatives will have to turn to Plan B. And Plan B is…

A National Identification Card, issued by one central agency, complete with biometrics, and backed up by draconian “must carry and present on demand” regulations. Sure, a few civil libertarians, religious fanatics, and homeless kooks are going to refuse to comply and thus get swept up and stuffed into the gulags, but let’s face facts: they probably weren’t voting Republican anyway.

And there’s many more uses for a National ID that just keeping union wages high (or “protecting America for Americans”, as you will). As long as you have a perfect form of ID, you might as well use it to conduct instant background checks for gun purchases. A national drug offender registry? No biggie, the framework’s already in place. Folks with tax “issues” won’t get beyond the next random highway FreedomStop(tm). Criminal background checks would be as easy as sliding the barcode under the scanner, and would come with the added bonus of tracking who was wanting to work where. “Carding” for booze and smokes becomes foolproof, and since computer data storage is virtually free, the fact that you both purchase firearms and use tobacco can be kept in your permanent file, awaiting the dawn of the inevitable National Health Care Plan. “No treatment for you, Mr. Lopez - you’re just too high risk for AmeriCare.”

Hell, with employers footing the bill for the premiums, you’d never even get hired.

And thus the circle is complete: social conservatives get to kick out the foreigners, create millions of new government jobs, and at the same time find a brand new source of cheap agricultural labor: all of the now-unemployable drug users, smokers, and other “uninsurables” that could no longer hide behind some sort of “right to privacy”.

ow.

Simon Reynolds explains the ominous parallels at the blissblog:

We Are All French Today. The Strokes new single: It was on the tip of my tongue and the wife pipped me to the post–”this sounds like if Daft Punk made a rock record”. Marital telepathy or objective truth? It’s no secret that France has a bit of a chequered history with la musique roque. There tends to be this twice-removed, distanced aura to that nation’s guitarband output. It can be enjoyable for precisely that quality: Plastic Bertrand “Ca Plane Pour Moi” (he was Belgian though right? apparently he didn’t even sing on his own records, sez Malcolm McLaren, admiringly), Les Ritas Mitsoukos (not sure ‘bout the spelling) on their one great track whose title escapes me (sounded very T.Rexy though), even things like Metal Urbain (check their great new reissue Anarchy In Paris!, Acute’s best yet) and Les Thugs. And of course Daft Punk took that nonreal vibe and turned it into a positive aesthetic strength. The new Strokes has that artificiel quality–not as in fake, inauthentic, bogus, so much as made out of some ersatz substance that resembles but isn’t real-deal rock. There’s a plasticized glazed gloss to the record, a deep unrocking stiltedness. It’s particular the case with that track which more than any Strokes tune seems plotted out on graph paper, and is delivered in unusually desultory and remote-control mode. But maybe that degree of twice-removed and hyper-selfconsciousness is our common condition today, maybe it’s impossible for anyone anywhere to rock in that basic pure from-the-gut unreflecting scare-quote-free way that was available to James Gang or AC/DC or whoever. (Look at the Darkness or Andrew W.K., where for all their intent to rock, their straight faces… well, let’s just say I’m not convinced). Maybe we are all French today.

Bovard:

Brian Doyle, the #2 spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, has done yeoman work in helping Americans understand how the Transportation Security Administration is protecting them. After TSA air marshals gunned down Rigoberto Alipizar outside of a plane in Miami last December, Doyle justified the killing to the media: “He threatened that he had a bomb in his backpack.” Other TSA spokesmen claimed that Alipizar had shouted that he had a bomb as he ran up and down the plane aisle.

None of the passengers on the plane heard Alpizar say anything about a bomb.

But false statements by federal spokesmen are public service, not a federal crime.

Doyle is getting more press coverage today than ever before.

Like Bovard I’m far more concerned about the fact that Doyle appears to have been part of a conspiracy to cover up a government homicide than the fact that he was caught chatting up a 14 year old girl online.

The government has has still failed to produce a single witness who will support their story that Alpizar said he had a bomb. Quite the contrary.

This isn’t a case of the word of multiple eyewitnesses against the word of Federal Air Marshals - it’s multiple eyewitnesses against nobody but flacks like Doyle.

The HBO series Big Love is of course provoking considerable debate on polygamy. I expect most libertarians to miss the boat on this by focusing on polygamy as a matter of public policy.

I see something far more interesting here: Polygamists simply don’t recognize that government has legitimate authority over their marriages. Whereas many gays complain that they can’t marry the spouse of their choice because the government won’t permit it, polygamists simply defy the law and marry however they please.

Forget policy, polygamists are demonstrating that individuals can and do take their marriages private. As well they should:

The Sovereign Individual argues instead, that one must simply evict the state from one’s own marriage. Your marriage is not properly a matter of public debate so don’t treat it as one. Take and keep private what ought to be private. And all of your life is your private affair.

Leave the institution of marriage to the Institutional Man.

Sovereign Individuals are the Makers of Manners:

You and I cannot be confined
within the weak list of a country’s fashion
we are the makers of manners,
and the liberty that follows our places
stops the mouth of all find-faults

The political superstar of movement libertarianism writes:

We must reject amnesty for illegal immigrants in any form. We cannot continue to reward lawbreakers and expect things to get better. If we reward millions who came here illegally, surely millions more will follow suit. Ten years from now we will be in the same position, with a whole new generation of lawbreakers seeking amnesty.

Memo To Ron Paul,

You bandy about the words “illegal” and “lawbreaker” as if they had moral content. They don’t.

Weren’t Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and all the founding fathers lawbreakers? Wasn’t Thoreau? Or Martin Luther King?

Wasn’t the Declaration of Independence itself an act of lawbreaking?

Men have no moral obligation whatsoever to obey or even recognize immoral laws, including many immoral laws that you are party to. Stop using law as a proxy for morality in your arguments. There is no necessary relationship between the two.

Update: Billy Beck recommends Kyle Bennett’s critique of this post. I respond in comments at Bennett’s post.

I’ve just drafted the Thirty Third Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on Wikiocracy:

The third word of the Preamble is hereby changed from “People” to “Usurpers”.

Changing that single word makes an elegant clarification.

The spectacle of hispanic protests winding through the streets of America has riled the ranks of cultural conservative freedom fighters, it’s given the straight-shooting Liberty Belles a case of the vapors, and it’s even got Kim du Toit laying in the framework for American labor camps.

Addressing the concern that immigrants might get over or under an American Wall constructed at the border, du Toit proposes:

And we catch them doing it, and either repatriate them (first offense), or imprison them in tented labor camps for five years (subsequent offenses). They wanna work here? Fine. Let them do it as convicts, earning $1 per hour.

Du Toit implies that his labor camp solution could be a joke, but it stands to reason that he’s at least half-serious about it in the face of the high stakes game that du Toit, himself, outlines below.

Jokes aside, here’s the thing.

Illegal immigration costs us an untold amount of money each year, in social services, law enforcement and unpaid taxes. That’s just pure currency we’re talking about.

Now add to that the harm done by drug smuggling, terrorist infiltration and increased gang violence.

Ask me again whether the cost of securing our southern border is too much.

Expense, drug crime, terror, and unpaid taxes inflicted on the country as a result of the unauthorized crossings of a line on a map. That’s du Toit’s justification for apprehending and detaining illegal immigrants at gunpoint, but if the consequences of illegal immigration in the form of drug smuggling and unpaid taxes are unacceptable, then why stop at throwing wetbacks into the labor camps when there’s plenty of tent space left for domestic drug dealers and tax evaders, as well? That’s the beauty of your gulag, Kim. It’ll not only keep Club America exclusive, it’ll also re-educate red-blooded American druggies and tax deadbeats.