[I]f there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here…
-Ronald Reagan, Farewell Address

With the situation on the border boiling over, Americans have divided up into the usual camps: those who support the immigrants, many of whom seek asylum in the United States, and those who do not. There are some good reasons to turn the caravan away at our border, but some isn’t most, and racism isn’t ever acceptable.

Let’s not kid ourselves, the anti-immigration position in America has always been tinged with (racist) nativism, and it’s just not unreasonable to suspect racism as a motive when the people advocating for these arbitrary and often overtly prejudicial immigration policies are by and large uneducated, white, working class slobs.

Sure, they insist they aren’t racist and say the left has used the charge of racism to shut down reasonable debate, which, of course, isn’t untrue. Unfortunately for them. I’m not on the left, and the nationalist cause, even when not necessarily racist, is at the very least a nativist ideology and invariably has common cause with racists.

Regardless, does this mean every nationalist is a racist? No, to be fair, it doesn’t, but it does mean that among every group of nationalists of any size, there will surely be some number of nationalists who are in fact racists. It simply doesn’t matter that the nativists whine they shouldn’t be judged by their racist cohorts.

After all, these nativists are perfectly comfortable slandering immigrants as disease ridden criminals, simply because some number of them may be diseased or criminal. By their very own bigoted logic, it is absolutely reasonable to treat all nationalists as though they are racists, even if only some of them are.

That’s the problem with applying the composition/division fallacy to an opposition group. You can’t whine about your own bad standard being applied to yourself without revealing yourselves to be total hypocrites, but that’s exactly the problem the anti-immigration nativist nationalist crowd faces, isn’t it?

To be clear, though. No one is seriously arguing there exists an unrestricted right to come to the United States from anywhere in the world, and the United States shouldn’t necessarily become the dumping grounds for the world’s never-do-wells. We’ve got so many of them here that they are spilling into the White House.

And whatever the position of the hysterical progressives may be, the individualist argument remains abundantly clear: it is wrong to advocate for the government to interfere in the lives of individuals without good cause. No, “they are going to compete with us and drive down the price of labor” isn’t “good cause“, either.

An actual individualist would recognize that if the market price of a commodity (like labor) can be pressed downward by an influx of competition, then it was overpriced to begin with, but I’m certainly not accusing nationalists of being individualists or capitalists, since they are demonstrably opposed to both of those ideals.

Suffice to say, the point here is it’s impossible to be for “limited government” while weaponizing the government against others simply because you don’t like them, even when they do not pose an actual threat to your life, liberties, or property. As it turns out, weaponizing the government against individuals is what the left does…

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Liberty is For The Win!