3 ms·

> clearly there must be some distance within the US where the CBP must be able to patrol and search. An alternative is to not have a CBP that is part of the Ho

by jMyles 8y ago

> clearly there must be some distance within the US where the CBP must be able to patrol and search. An alternative is to not have a CBP that is part of the Homeland Security apparatus and which does not patrol at all, and only conducts searches at specified border crossings and only based on suspicion of smuggling. This was the configuration of things from 1789 until 2003.

rayiner 8y ago
Any border crossing checkpoint is necessarily not at the actual border (which is mathematically impossible). And it’s absolutely incorrect to claim that historically we only patrolled the border to prevent smuggling. The border patrol was established in 1924. Federal immigration officers have been around since 1891. Exercise of the authority of the US to expel aliens for national security purposes dates to the founding era.
- jMyles 8y ago
  > Any border crossing checkpoint is necessarily not at the actual border (which is mathematically impossible). Sure. To the degree that we still want borders (and I think it's a decreasing degree as time moves forward), this will remain true. > And it’s absolutely incorrect to claim that historically we only patrolled the border to prevent smuggling. Yeah? My understanding of the history of the US Customs Service is that it was a revenue generating agency and not a law enforcement arm. Did it conduct widespread police-style patrols like those we have today? I feel reasonably confident that the answer is "no", but this is not my primary area of historical study. > The border patrol was established in 1924. But again, compare it to CBP today. It was what, a few hundred men on horseback in the desert? At least that's my understanding. Around WW2 it ramped up to a couple thousand, but it still wasn't an established, militarized police force comparable to today's CBP. > Exercise of the authority of the US to expel aliens for national security purposes dates to the founding era. But the Alien and Sedition Act (for example) is nearly universally regarded as a shameful period in the early history of the country. It's certainly not something to point to as a precedent of this being done well.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    > Sure. To the degree that we still want borders (and I think it's a decreasing degree as time moves forward), this will remain true. I suspect you and I disagree quite strongly on that point. Borders are really important (and the U.S. would probably be better with more borders and internal political separation, not less). > But the Alien and Sedition Act (for example) is nearly universally regarded as a shameful period in the early history of the country. It's certainly not something to point to as a precedent of this being done well. Maybe, but they give a pretty good idea of what the founders thought about the constitutional scope of the federal government's power over the borders.
    - nkurz 8y ago
      > (and the U.S. would probably be better with more borders and internal political separation, not less) Could you expand on this?
      - rayiner 8y ago
        Concrete example. I am a Marylander. We recently decided to raise the minimum wage to $15. Over the river in Virginia, it's just $7.25. Even if Marylanders are willing to shoulder higher prices in order to get a higher minimum wage, we can't make that decision in isolation. We have to worry about businesses crossing the border into Virginia and--because the Constitution prohibits internal tariffs--still being able to freely sell to Maryland customers. Or, consider guns. Most Marylanders support gun control. But Virginians love guns. We have no border so whatever gun laws we make are easily circumvented. Likewise, we signed up for ACA expansion (extending Medicaid to poor adults) when it was first offered. Virginia didn't get around to doing it until many years later, and even then put in various additional requirements. If we were a country and controlled our own politics (and we could be--we're bigger than Norway, Denmark, or Finland) we'd have universal healthcare. Instead, we have to accept whatever we can get after compromising with Alabama, Mississippi, etc. Borders enable self determination. When you’re a political unit and you control your borders, you can have your own laws and own institutions. When you tear down borders, you eliminate the ability of smaller political units to control the flow of goods, capital, and people. But those things must be regulated. So there is pressure to push power up to higher level political units to regulate those things. And in the process that pushes politics and political accountability further away from the people. And because it expands the polity, it forces compromises among people with different values and priorities. A concrete example is guns. Idaho has lots of guns (57% of people own a gun). It also has low homicide rates (lower than Belgium). But because of the lack of internal borders, there is little ability to have different gun laws in different places. So there is a huge push to regulate guns at the federal level. So people in Idaho have to fight federal legislation that is proposed because people in Chicago are shooting each other with guns streaming over the border from Indiana. You’re seeing that happen in Europe right now. The EU started by tearing down trade borders. But once you do that, you needed EU-wide rules for regulating the economy. That pushed more power to the EU, and now you’ve got bureaucrats in Brussels who can override popular law in Sweden.
maxlybbert 8y ago
I grew up in Southern California. I can definitively say that INS was conducting workplace raids and detaining people hundreds of miles from the border long before 2003.

by jMyles 8y ago

rayiner 8y ago

Any border crossing checkpoint is necessarily not at the actual border (which is mathematically impossible). And it’s absolutely incorrect to claim that historically we only patrolled the border to prevent smuggling. The border patrol was established in 1924. Federal immigration officers have been around since 1891. Exercise of the authority of the US to expel aliens for national security purposes dates to the founding era.

jMyles 8y ago
> Any border crossing checkpoint is necessarily not at the actual border (which is mathematically impossible). Sure. To the degree that we still want borders (and I think it's a decreasing degree as time moves forward), this will remain true. > And it’s absolutely incorrect to claim that historically we only patrolled the border to prevent smuggling. Yeah? My understanding of the history of the US Customs Service is that it was a revenue generating agency and not a law enforcement arm. Did it conduct widespread police-style patrols like those we have today? I feel reasonably confident that the answer is "no", but this is not my primary area of historical study. > The border patrol was established in 1924. But again, compare it to CBP today. It was what, a few hundred men on horseback in the desert? At least that's my understanding. Around WW2 it ramped up to a couple thousand, but it still wasn't an established, militarized police force comparable to today's CBP. > Exercise of the authority of the US to expel aliens for national security purposes dates to the founding era. But the Alien and Sedition Act (for example) is nearly universally regarded as a shameful period in the early history of the country. It's certainly not something to point to as a precedent of this being done well.
- rayiner 8y ago
  > Sure. To the degree that we still want borders (and I think it's a decreasing degree as time moves forward), this will remain true. I suspect you and I disagree quite strongly on that point. Borders are really important (and the U.S. would probably be better with more borders and internal political separation, not less). > But the Alien and Sedition Act (for example) is nearly universally regarded as a shameful period in the early history of the country. It's certainly not something to point to as a precedent of this being done well. Maybe, but they give a pretty good idea of what the founders thought about the constitutional scope of the federal government's power over the borders.
  - nkurz 8y ago
    > (and the U.S. would probably be better with more borders and internal political separation, not less) Could you expand on this?
    - rayiner 8y ago
      Concrete example. I am a Marylander. We recently decided to raise the minimum wage to $15. Over the river in Virginia, it's just $7.25. Even if Marylanders are willing to shoulder higher prices in order to get a higher minimum wage, we can't make that decision in isolation. We have to worry about businesses crossing the border into Virginia and--because the Constitution prohibits internal tariffs--still being able to freely sell to Maryland customers. Or, consider guns. Most Marylanders support gun control. But Virginians love guns. We have no border so whatever gun laws we make are easily circumvented. Likewise, we signed up for ACA expansion (extending Medicaid to poor adults) when it was first offered. Virginia didn't get around to doing it until many years later, and even then put in various additional requirements. If we were a country and controlled our own politics (and we could be--we're bigger than Norway, Denmark, or Finland) we'd have universal healthcare. Instead, we have to accept whatever we can get after compromising with Alabama, Mississippi, etc. Borders enable self determination. When you’re a political unit and you control your borders, you can have your own laws and own institutions. When you tear down borders, you eliminate the ability of smaller political units to control the flow of goods, capital, and people. But those things must be regulated. So there is pressure to push power up to higher level political units to regulate those things. And in the process that pushes politics and political accountability further away from the people. And because it expands the polity, it forces compromises among people with different values and priorities. A concrete example is guns. Idaho has lots of guns (57% of people own a gun). It also has low homicide rates (lower than Belgium). But because of the lack of internal borders, there is little ability to have different gun laws in different places. So there is a huge push to regulate guns at the federal level. So people in Idaho have to fight federal legislation that is proposed because people in Chicago are shooting each other with guns streaming over the border from Indiana. You’re seeing that happen in Europe right now. The EU started by tearing down trade borders. But once you do that, you needed EU-wide rules for regulating the economy. That pushed more power to the EU, and now you’ve got bureaucrats in Brussels who can override popular law in Sweden.

maxlybbert 8y ago

I grew up in Southern California. I can definitively say that INS was conducting workplace raids and detaining people hundreds of miles from the border long before 2003.