| | I raised the issue of whether we, as a country, have a right to stop people at the border who are trying to enter the country - even if it's just to do a quick check to see if they are on a terrorist list.
Bill replied,
I don't think this violates individual rights, if one has reason to think that they might be on such a list (e.g., a man of Arab descent). But this doesn't say where the government gets the a moral right to stop someone when there is no probable cause of a crime or a threat. Bill says,
If they fit the profile of a terrorist, then it is on the basis of self-defense. But the only profile he has mentioned is that they appear to be of Arab descent. And he says,
What is true is that every person of the world enjoys the same individual rights as you or I... Based upon this I think that we have not identified why the government has the right to exercise any control at all at the border unless an agent can see a specific threat or has a detailed description and that means probable cause (which would not include apparent Arab descent).
Bill says,
We have a right to detain people for questioning if they meet a certain profile, just as the police have the right to stop someone for questioning, if he or she fits a certain criminal profile. But that needs to examined closely because there are two possible meanings. If by profile you mean a class of people, there is no probable cause and rights are being violated - it would be no different than stopping and questioning someone because they are black. Hello totalitariansm. If profile means a description of a known suspect and it is specific enough to separate the individual from large numbers of people, then yes, there is a limited right (based upon precedent and the logic of necessity).
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Bill states that citizenship provides a person with civil rights that they didn't possess before. He gives the conditions that government should enforce before handing out the citizenship papers (like learning English). But if a citizen can vote and a non-citizen can not, then the citizen can create laws with their votes and the laws can control the border. But are those laws moral? The question still exists.
Bill says no, because that would prevent a would-be immigrant from exercising his individual right of freedom which would include crossing the border into the country.
Bill would agree (I assume) that no one, citizen or immigrant has the right to cross the border that separates my private property from, say, the public street, or my neighbor's yard, without my permission. And that takes me to my argument.
My argument (post #3) has been that there is a property owned by citizens of all countries - it is a very limited set of property rights in certain intangibles that make up their country. These property rights are limited to making full access available to non-citizens (granting citizenship or not) and to controlling immigration. My approach also establishes a objective moral connection for civil rights which are now somewhat logical but otherwise arbitrary.
I see this issue as an artifact of there being multiple governments in our world - thus citizenship is a national issue and there are significant differences between countries. Citizenship in one isn't the same as citizenship in another. If we had one government for the planet it would be different. The government acts on behalf of its citizens to protect their property. The intangibles I am proposing as property include the collection of laws in a nation, and certain aspects of the culture. These constitute values. And they can be changed by immigration. Do the citizen's of a nation have any such property rights such that they can control immigration? That was my question.
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Bill stated,
If the arguments you've given concerning cultural displacement are valid, then they apply to states as well as to countries. Besides, if states have jurisdictional control over the activities of their citizens, which they do (e.g., prostitution is illegal in California, but legal in Nevada), then why, by the same token, couldn't they have a legal "right" to determine who crosses their borders? And if they did declare such a right, with the sanction of the federal government, then what argument would you give against it? Would the argument invoke a right to freedom of action? There are several reasons not to take those as a serious questions. Citizenship is national and includes as supreme law of the land that citizens can cross state lines. After all, those variations of laws between states have to meet the standard of constitutionality - there is only one supreme law of the land. Also, the cultural differences between states are insignificant in comparison to those between countries, making it a false comparison. There is no reason to expect a flood of people from state to another making it a false comparison. The argument I would give against a state law that attempted to control travel across a state line would be that the state's citizens do not possess rights in intangibles that differ from the neighboring state and therefore can't impeded the freedom to cross state lines in contradiction to federal laws that permit it.
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Bill objected to my use of the phrase "moral rights" and stated
There is no such thing as a non-moral right. Then he said that what he
meant is that there is no legitimate right that can be considered non-moral. Yes there is a very valid distinction - Bill may not be seeing the way I am using the term. "Moral rights" are the descriptions of rights at the level of ethics - of philosophy - whereas "legal rights" are descriptions of rights as encoded in the law. And "contractual rights" are the products of voluntary agreements between parties.
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Going back to post 28, Bill had stated,
I would say that... those who make an effort to move here... have a greater right to U.S. citizenship than the people who were born here. And I pointed out that I argreed with the sentiment but that sentiment isn't a valid argument for rights. He replied
I agree that this is not an argument for rights. I never said it was. Well, when you use the words "...have a greater right to U.S. citizenship..." it is starting to quack like an argument for rights.
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As, a personal aside, Bill, I am still confused at your statement that I don't understand individual rights. When I consider what I know that I know and read what you have been writing (here and on the other thread where you challenged my understanding of rights), I can't see how you would come to that conclusion in a rational, honest fashion. Was it just rhetoric on your part? Do you still believe I'm ignorant in this area? Did you mis-speak? Since this is just to satisfy my personal curiosity, feel free to ignore it.
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