Iron Sharpens Iron

That is a saying from martial arts.  To hone your skills, you must practice and compete with other skillful opponents.  The same can be said for intellectual endeavors.  To refine your thinking, you must have skillful opponents.  This is something I confess I don’t do enough.  My circle of friends thinks quite like me, so I don’t often need to defend my thinking to them.  But that is not always the case.

I went for lunch a couple of days ago with a friend I have not seen for 2 years.  My friend is very intelligent but from my perspective he lets his emotions get in the way of his logic at times.  I tell him it is his highly developed feminine side.  He then uses profanity urging me to travel.

That is really the only major difference between us.  He is generally conservative but much more idealistic than me.  He thinks we can do better while I am too quick to accept that some things are not worth changing.   His optimism and my cynicism led to a very interesting conversation about Donald Trump and the latest “controversy” about Kilmer Abrego Garcia.

I had not really given this matter much thought.  I was not at all upset about what happened.  My attitude was that deportations happen every day and this was just one more deportation.  I also thought it was just one more example of the media cherry picking events to craft a narrative.  My friend’s attitude was different.  He believes it is a slippery slop if we start denying people their due process rights.

I heard this argument from the media, and I always dismissed them because I know the reality is that most deportations happen with no due process.  Border patrol has authority to turn people around at the border and deport them immediately without a deportation order.  But does that make it right?  My friend doesn’t think so.

This is where I get to the iron sharpening iron part.  I knew what my position was, but I had never really thought about it before.  Was there any logic to my ambivalence to Garcia?  My friend’s spirited opposition has caused me to think a lot about it for the last couple days.

Over lunch our conversation started with my friend making the statement that everyone should have the same rights.  If Americans get due process, then Garcia gets due process.  To my friend’s credit he changed his position later to say that anyone in the country legally should have the same rights as citizens.  But I want to start with his opening position.  Should everyone have the same rights regardless of status?

In a perfect world this would be the case.  But we do not live in a perfect world so after careful consideration I say no.  My position has not changed but at least now I know why I take that position.  If everyone has the same rights, then there are no countries.  This is globalism.  There will be no borders.

Citizens can’t be deported or prevented from entering their home country.  If you extend those same rights to everyone then you cannot prevent anyone from coming and once, they are on your soil you cannot deport them for any reason.  People outside your country would also be allowed to vote in your elections.  All they would need to do is request an absentee ballot.  This obviously can’t work so it can’t happen.

This may seem very simple, but it has a very propound implication.  It establishes that there is a hierarchy of status.  Citizens must have more rights than non-citizens or you have erased all borders.

So now we know that a caste system of rights is unavoidable. How do you draw the line?  Which rights do you choose to extend to non-citizens?  And are there different classes of non-citizens?  Should someone in your country with a tourist or student visa have the same rights as someone with a work visa?  Even though we have not thought about it we have already made that decision.  Visas all have different conditions, so those people all have different rights.

Now what about people in your country illegally.  Should they have the same rights as other non-citizens?  I would argue that illegals should be the bottom of the rights totem pole.  They should be afforded only the most basic rights.  So, this brings us back to the topic of my lunch conversation.  Should Garcia have a right to due process?

To me that is up to each country.  Different rights for non-citizens are inevitable so we need to decide what they will be and be consistent.  America’s lack of consistency on this topic is the root of this controversy.  Most illegals get deported with no due process, but Garcia got in front of 3 different judges.  Why was Garcia given more consideration than other illegals?  Had Garcia been treated like most other illegals he would have been deported years earlier without ever seeing a judge.  No one would even know his name.

Is this right?  Should illegals have no access to due process?  I think again reality will intrude.  If you give illegals the right to due process you will spend billions or maybe even trillions every year on immigration courts.  There are 8 billion people in the world.  7 billion of them live in shit holes.  If you give every illegal due process your borders will be flooded with people searching for a better life.  I don’t blame them for that.  But if you allow it your own citizens will suffer.

So, my epiphany was that human rights are only a very small subset of citizenship rights.  This will upset idealists, but it is unavoidable.  So, what do you think?  What rights should we give to the various levels of non-citizens?  It really is something that we can choose, and it is a conversation we need to have if we want to avoid another incident like Garcia’s.