John Fonte at Frontline writes:
In one sense, conservatives are divided between those who seriously believe in democratic self-government, that is to say, that a people that wants to limit immigration has the moral right and the ability to do so, versus those who believe in economic or demographic determinism, who tells us that the market requires and demands continuous mass immigration regardless of what the American people want and that there is nothing we can do to stop illegal immigration anyway.
This is an important point. Missing from the economist side of the ledger, however, is that the market cannot function in the way it would in a world where all relations were voluntary and founded on market principles. In such a society, markets could create the equivalent of large subdivisions, where groups could associate and disassociate from whoever they wanted. There is little ability through the market to express a desire not to live in the vicinity of the large masses of proletarian immigrants who have come in recent years, not least because of the presence of public spaces and the operation of housing discrimination laws. Likewise, in a pure market-based society, property rights, deed restrictions, and other decentralized actions could create a variety of exclusions that are inexpressible under the current order. Markets are inoperable here, so laws must take their place. And in the absence of a functioning market, democratic rule-making mimics what would happen if the country were, in fact, a large home owners association. The Austrian School of Economics has done a great deal to show the pseudo-free market principles at work among today’s immigration enthusiasts even setting aside the strain such newcomers present to our generous welfare state.
So this is really an apparent conflict between free market and democratic principles. In reality, it is a conflict between certain market participants and their prerogatives against a large mass of people who have already expressed their will through laws to disallow these transactions–the entry and hiring of illegals–that benefit individual members of a society at the expense of the remainder. Whether it grows the GNP or not is irrelevant. Wealth is subjective, and people’s desire not to increase the country’s population, import hordes of poor people, and change their culture and language have value as well.
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