Derbyshire is saying (as the immigrant) that he’s seeking to settle in country x. You say (as the immigrant) that you are seeking to buy or rent a plot of land. These two things are different right? Furthermore, illegal Mexican immigrants aren’t here to buy or rent a plot of land! Ha

I quite disagree with you when you say that those two things are different. Everyone who comes to the U.S. is seeking a place to live in the U.S., so everyone who comes to the U.S. is seeking to rent or buy a plot of land (or an apartment or an attic room or SOME specific location). It’s the owner of that specific location, not “The United States” that the immigrant is attempting to strike a deal with.

On the second point about quotas, I apologize for the fact that the wording of the earlier comments might have misled you. That exchange was not about immigration quotas; it was about import quotas on manufactured goods, and it was referring not to the contents of the post but to a passage in my book that the commenter thought was analogous to this post in some important ways.

“If I seek to settle in Country X, I am asking Country X a favor, which the authorities there might properly refuse. If they do refuse, I have no grounds for complaint. It’s their country.”

but you present it (weirdly) as:

“If a resident of Country X seeks to sell or rent me a plot of land, Country X does me no favor by allowing me to consummate that transaction because Country X does not own that land in the first place. A citizen of Country X owns the land, which is not the same thing at all. All Country X can do is stand between two consenting parties to a private transaction.”

Derbyshire is saying (as the immigrant) that he’s seeking to settle in country x. You say (as the immigrant) that you are seeking to buy or rent a plot of land. These two things are different right? Furthermore, illegal Mexican immigrants aren’t here to buy or rent a plot of land! Ha!

Also, in your second comment you write, “However, I think in this case, we don’t even have a conflict. In the one case we ask “Is it okay to profit from a quota?”, in the next case we ask “Do we have an obligation to maintain quotas for the benefit of those who have trained themselves to profit from them?”. These are very different questions.”

You are being excessively vague here, because you don’t want to really scratch too far under the surface. First, there are no quotas on illegal immigrants, that’s why they are illegals. Second, the ones who have trained themselves to benefit from illegals are businesses that have decided to function with illegal business practices (i.e. hiring illegals). Third, if quotas were actually enforced (zero illegals and limited legal immigration) the ones that would benefit are the people who perform manual labor for money. These are largely poor Americans, mostly black and Hispanic American citizens, to be exact. What you need to explain to us is why you choose to discriminate in favor of wealthy business owners, corporations, and foreign citizens over poor Hispanic and black Americans.

In addition, transferring a piece of land is not the same thing as allowing a person into the country. You are free to sell your land to a Mexican, but whether he can come live on it is a question rightly determined collectively and democratically, because presence within our borders confers the use of all of our common property (parks, roads, many government services, citizenship for one’s children, etc.).

Private land ownership is not a law of nature, it is a legal abstraction: a rule we’ve deliberately and *collectively* made for ourselves because we believe that it gives us, on balance, a benefit.

Similarly, a legitimate national government’s prerogative to determine who is allowed to enter the area under its jurisdiction, is another legal abstraction we’ve deliberately and collectively made.

While you may wish it weren’t so, and marshall your arguments against it, you also need to recognize that it is just as real as land ownership. And you are also undoubtedly aware that there are people who do not believe private ownership of land is a good idea, and who make their own arguments against that. Maybe their ideas would leave us worse off, and maybe your ideas would leave us better off, but at the moment, the state of reality is that both private land ownership and the right of nations to collectively decide who may enter and who may reside, are solidly part of our consensus.

There’s no reason why someone’s wish to rent a plot of land to someone else must necessarily take priority over national laws that say that someone else may not reside within its borders. You need to argue why it would be *better* for us to allow that someone to reside here – and I think you have, and I agree with you on almost all of it – but when you argue that we do not even have the right to make that choice, you’ve stepped into a completely different field (note: I might even agree with you on that one, but I don’t know, and you haven’t even attempted to make the case – you’re just assuming that your assertion is somehow inherently true).

These people are adding an excessive moral dimension to one administrative law (often a misdemeanor) and they feel so *right* about it that they never even admit they’re doing it, nor do they try to convince any of us that it belongs: they just act and think under the assumption that this is a universal belief, that border laws have this excessive moral dimension and everyone knows it and there’s no need to discuss whether it makes sense.

And what’s really frustrating is that they’ve said it so often and so loudly, with so few challenges, that most people seem to implicitly accept the premise without even noticing they’re doing so.

Who the heck is the “you” in that statement? Clearly many Americans want immigrants to come to the United States (otherwise immigrants wouldn’t be finding jobs). Why don’t those Americans count?

And finally, would it make sense to simply annex Mexico? Presumably, those immigrating to the United States from Mexico would be better off if they could take their land with them, while those remaining in Mexico would be no worse off. And in the United States, each additional person on the same amount of land would tend to raise prices, while increasing the amount of land with increasing population would make such competition for scarce resources a bit less. Annexing Mexico might result in more Mexicans better off, with fewer Americans worse off, than simply opening the border.