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> Any border crossing checkpoint is necessarily not at the actual border (which is mathematically impossible). Sure. To the degree that we still want borders

• 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.
  • dragonwriter 8y ago
    > 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. Well, it shows what the Federalist Party thought; the Democratic-Republican Party didn't support the acts and was systematically targeted under the pretext of the acts. (And actually went to state legislatures in D-R leaning states to pass bills protesting the unconstitutionality of the federal laws and declaring them void.) “The Founders” were split between the parties (both Madison and Jefferson were Democratic-Republicans), and the Federalists were the more authoritarian faction. The idea of “The Founders” as a unified group with a singular view on issued like this is ahistorical.
  • jMyles 8y ago
    > I suspect you and I disagree quite strongly on that point. Borders are really important Indeed it seems we disagree. Moreover, I'm inclined to assert that you are simply incorrect. It's hard for me to see how something wholly capricious can also be "really important" - I acknowledge that there are some manifestations of man's imagination that are critical in the functioning of the social and political spaces today, but I'm not prepared to go so far as to call them "really important." The US border specifically is quite destructive. It separates families, inflames (in concert with the childish and abysmal policy of drug prohibition) the ongoing state of civil unrest in Mexico, and creates a huge and arbitrary barrier for people seeking rest, shelter, and work. A return to a more open immigration policy (and indeed an evolution past the border as a part of political identity) will be a wonderful happening.
  • lovich 8y ago
    >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 Some of the founders also thought the Constitution should be rewritten every 20 years and that binding future generations to the rules sent down in the past was immoral. They're not infallable gods and their opinion here should be taken as only that, an opinion