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Lou Barletta’s Hazleton

by Chris Paige

Imagine living in a country where you can’t rent an apartment without presenting your identity papers to a government official.

Imagine living in a country where you could lose your business—your life’s work, your family’s sole means of support, and your life savings—just because one of your employees was unable to produce his or her identity papers on demand.

Imagine living in a country where citizens are encouraged to report their friends and neighbors to the government whenever they suspect they might have violated the government’s constantly-changing rules on identity papers.

Sounds like North Korea or some other police state, no? In fact, I’m describing Hazleton—or at least, Hazleton as it would have been if the federal courts had not struck down its anti-immigration laws pushed by my potential primary opponent, Mayor Lou Barletta.

For argument’s sake, let us assume that Hazleton’s anti-immigration laws would have worked as their framers intended (and, for conservatives, assuming that any government program will work as its framers intended is a stretch). Even so, would it have been worth it?

There’s no doubt that free societies suffer more lawlessness than police states, where the government enjoys a monopoly on crime. And it’s equally true that an omnipotent state could wipe out illegal immigration, prostitution, drugs and a host of other social ills, but conservatives believe that an omnipotent state will inflict far worse injuries upon its people than any criminal because the government is uniquely capable of institutionalizing and perpetuating its crimes. That is, conservatives—by definition—believe in limits upon the government’s power even if those limits render the government too weak to achieve Utopia because we believe that government’s attempts to achieve Utopia lead only to tyranny.

Indeed, our well-justified fear of government’s potential for tyranny is precisely what makes us conservatives and what separates us from liberals, who trust government’s good intentions and who believe they can “reform” the government to achieve the Utopia they so ardently desire.

In this instance, any government powerful enough to evict approximately 14 million illegal aliens from our shores is far too powerful for conservatives to trust. Deporting this nation’s illegal immigrant population would create social upheaval on a scale rarely seen outside of war; at the very least, it would create millions of orphans, as many illegal aliens are the parents of young U.S. citizens. How can anyone who calls themselves a conservative believe that government should have such power?

And what happens next? Rather than dismantle its anti-illegal immigration verification apparatus when it runs out of illegal aliens to deport, the government will divine new uses for its expanded investigatory powers. Perhaps it will verify your health insurance coverage, your gun registration, or your immunization record, or perhaps it will confine itself to verifying that you’ve paid your taxes and fees, but it will never stop “verifying” something once it begins. After all, it has bureaucrats who need something to do, and politicians who need something to oversee.

If liberals expand government to redistribute wealth and conservatives expand government to achieve “conservative” objectives, then how can liberty survive? If the only difference between liberals and conservatives is what they want an omnipotent government to do with its powers, then why should we care which side oppresses us?  A conservative tyrant is still a tyrant. Surely, the debate between liberals and conservatives is over more than how the leviathan will be used; surely, conservatives believe in small government even if that means government is too small to eliminate illegal immigration.

Granted, our laws must be enforced, and illegal aliens must be punished, but blending mercy, pragmatism and a healthy mistrust of government into a reasonable policy is the essence of conservative leadership. We need not choose between amnesty on the one hand and a police state on the other; instead, we can develop a framework that enables otherwise law-abiding illegal aliens to suffer an appropriate penalty in order to attain legal residency.

If Hazleton’s approach to immigration is constitutional, then there isn’t anything government can’t do. Once we, like Hazleton, decide that the ends justify the means, it will mean our liberty is at an end.

The writer is a Republican candidate in the 11th Congressional District.

December 7, 2009 at 1:56 pm

--Chris Paige

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