I am okay with checkpoints, and I'd probably be okay with fingerprint scans. But I see nothing beneficial in the current immigration bureaucracy. I see no reason to interfere with people coming here to get a job.
That seems contradictory. On the one hand you have no problems with security measures at the border, but on the other hand you say that "workers" should not be interfered with. If we are to have freedom of movement across the border why should we have checkpoints? Conversely, if we can have checkpoints, why not have an immigration policy that controls border entry? Pretty much every country I know of does that.
When the laws essentially entrench a black market underground in immigration and labor trade, why would you expect a different outcome?
What I expect is not the issue. What's actually happening is. If a "black market" in labor allows in an extremely high number of immigrants and many of those are engaged in inappropriate behaviors, those same people (and a whole lot more) would enter the country and engage in those behaviors under an open border policy. To suggest otherwise is to suggest that a better class of people would visit my home in the wee hours of the morning if I simply left my door unlocked. Or perhaps it suggests that a terrorist with bomb making equipment might come to the border and say "Sweet Mohammed! How will I ever slip this material past those invisible guards?"
Perhaps, but someone crossing the U.S. border is not tresspassing on your land unless your land is on the border and the someone steps on your land.
Yes, they are trespassing on my land, because while the proprietor may be anyone from a private citizen to a business to the US Government itself, the border protects my nation from invasion. I don't own New York or the Pentagon either, but I still insist Al Quaeda attacked my land. The right of the individual to protect his own private property extends to the right of this society to protect its territory.
People move from state to state within the U.S. all the time, and yet I see no one saying that such a violation of private property. I see no reason at all why someone crossing the U.S border would be trespassing when crossing the nearest state-to-state border is not.
That's simply a false analogy. The relationship between the sovereign states established in the Articles of Confederation and perpetuated in the Constitution (and clarified in the fourteenth amendment) make state border control of individual movement moot. No such relationship exists with Mexico, Canada or any other nation. To look at it from another angle, if an illegal alien crosses the border from Mexico to Texas he has committed a crime. If he then crosses the border from Texas to Oklahoma, he has committed no further crime (at least I don't think he has). If Oklahoma catches him, they aren't sending him back to Texas. They're sending him back to Mexico.
Someone coming here to find work is not stealing any more than someone moving from Wyoming to California to look for work would be stealing. Why can we allow one but not the other?
Because they are NOT the same. Someone traveling from Wyoming to California is a citizen of the United States - of which both states are members. Someone coming from Mexico is a different story. If they are coming legally to seek work that is NOT a problem. But simply ignoring the law is not asserting one's rights, but ignoring the rights of others. There are laws - such as Jim Crow laws - which are inherently evil and ought to be changed (and, while still in force, resisted). National immigration laws are not inherently evil. It is entirely possible, and in many cases quite probable, that there are serious flaws in some immigration laws that ought to be changed. But they do not equate to Jim Crow and the like. Acts of conscience like those of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King or Sir Thomas More are courageous and praiseworthy. Jumping a border - especially when doing so for immoral reasons - is simple trespassing.
Yes, I know it's a national border, and I am willing to make allowances for that.
As you are comparing interstate travel of legal citizens with international travel of illegal aliens I find that concession puzzling.
But I see no good reason to trample on the poor immigrants and would-be immigrants who want to do what people within the country do all the time: find employment in a different place.
Let them do it legally. I have no problem with that. If a person from another country enters this one in an APPROPRIATE manner with the intent to seek a better life by ABANDONING his previous one and ASSIMILATING into this culture, fine. Even if he only intends to be here temporarily and obtains the appropriate work visa, I haven't the slightest problem. But don't come to my country illegally - and don't come here legally and try to turn it into YOUR country.
