Uh, immigration

With thousands marching toward the border, President Trump is prepared to deploy troops to (shoot them?) uh, do something by golly (put them on buses, to be fed, housed, educated, and doctored in humane detention centers? asylum claims filed? given transport home?)

Meanwhile, there are hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Asians who came on student or tourist visas and forgot to leave. No one knows where they are. Ten or twelve million illegal aliens are loose in Los Angeles and San Francisco, swelling welfare rolls, working as casual day laborers with fake identity documents, concealing and enabling  MS-13 gang members.

Since everyone else is talking about immigration, I suppose I'll have to say something, too. I'm supposed to be a sharp cookie, specialized in constitutional theory, right?

Let's begin with previous writing. Liberty trumps property. There have to be public roads to facilitate travel between Point A and Point B. That said, no one has a natural right to trespass on private property, except power lines, pipelines, and other sorts of community facilities like airport approaches that limit airspace and subsurface resources that extend underneath multiple properties and have to be unitized as a matter of equity.

Speaking of equity reminds me of another dozen ways that neighbors can limit what you do with private property. If you invite MS-13 to set up a base of operations on your land, there is nothing in law to stop neighbors from waging war via police or private action. The caravan of thousands marching toward private land on the border are likewise a "public nuisance" that could be ordered to scram, to cease and desist clogging up Border Patrol operations. If a court order is ignored, they could be imprisoned until they comply.

Unfortunately, court orders are appealable, so we'd end up detaining them pending review by a circuit court and conceivably the Supreme Court. If a cake shop dispute can go all the way to the Supreme Court, there's little doubt that thousands of asylum seekers could do it, too, claiming to be wrongfully detained, denied due process, racially profiled, ill-treated while in custody, and so on. It's a sort of No Win clusterfuck.

If it were up to me, I'd build a fenced highway from the border to the nearest Salvation Army soup kitchen, and let private charities deal with refugees, however many make it across the border. Border Patrol should identify and arrest evil men disfigured with MS-13 tatoos, turn them over to ICE for detention, interrogation, and prosecution. I am opposed to the death penalty and cruel punishments, but war powers could be invoked against drug dealing, with POW camps established at the border. MS-13 gang members arrested in Long Island or LA or Chicago can be sent to the POW camp. There's no Geneva Convention privilege to distribute heroin and phentanol, to intimidate and imperil U.S. citizens.

Can Congress declare war on MS-13? Sure. It's a cohesive foreign force.

Obviously, that's not going to happen. We can't rely on Congress to do anything logical or timely. Think about it. What should private actors do when confronted by evil? Turn a blind eye to women and children, help them to reach safety, far from the field of battle.

What would Galt do?

Duct tape math.

There's a formula on the wall of my writing office, 2 + 1 = 0.  It needs to be updated, 3 + 1 = minus 1.  Three years of writing full time, ten titles, almost half a million words, plus a year to clear land and build a house, left me stranded and penniless, begging the neighbors for day labor at minimum wage so I can buy dog food, cigarettes, Oscar Meyer, coffee, and saltines, more or less in that order of priority. The dog has to eat. Not his fault that he got run over by a FedEx van, dislocated hip, broken foreleg that didn't heal right, blind in both eyes with thick white cataracts and crusty goop that has to be softened and cleaned every morning. He has to be bathed two or three times a week, fighting summer fleas that refuse to die.

Summer doesn't bother me. Winter does.

What would Galt do? -- no phone, no car, no money, no book sales. I have successfully exited organized society, worse than a desert island, ignored by the world and forgotten. Once a day I walk up the hill to fill a couple jugs of water and empty spam from my inbox. I get one email a week on average. The last one was from my brother Roger. My sister-in-law expressed an interest in reading Partners, which is a sort of obscenity, a family curiosity, old nutty Alan, a black sheep destined to starve to death. I had to punch two extra holes in my belt last week.

Have at it, Gail. Read two pages and wrinkle your nose, shake your head in disdain and put it down, never to be opened again, no book review on Amazon, no mention in social media. I swear by my life and my love of it that it doesn't matter.

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