In Ethnic Cleansing or “Amnesty”, Orson Scott Card imagines a talk-show debate between a “fuzzy-headed liberal” and a conservative Republican after all the illegal immigrants have been kicked out of the country:
“So the higher prices we’re all paying, the reduced services, the loss of American jobs, the contempt the whole world feels for American ethnic cleansing — you think it was all worth it?” says the talk-show host.The Republican spokesman nods wisely. “They broke the law even coming into this country.”
“What if it was a stupid law?” asks the liberal.
“It was the law, and they broke it.”
“And so they no longer deserved to live in America?” says the liberal.
“They never deserved to live here.”
“So lawbreakers don’t deserve to live here. Have you ever had a speeding ticket?”
“I’m an American. And I pay my traffic fines.”
“But you broke the law.”
“I was born here.”
“But your ancestors weren’t,” says the liberal. “Your ancestors, somewhere along the line, were born somewhere else.”
“But they came here legally.”
“No sir, they did not,” says the liberal. “I knew we’d get to this point, so I had your genealogy researched. Here’s a list of your German ancestors who broke the law of their German-speaking state by emigrating.”
“Those weren’t American laws, so they weren’t criminals here.”
“And here are your Puritan New England ancestors, who came here as criminals because of their defiance of the laws concerning religion in England.”
“They wanted freedom of religion.”
“But they broke the law. And look — here are your Scotch-Irish and German ancestors who settled in Pennsylvania and North Carolina without getting legal title to their lands. They were all law-breaking squatters, and they kept getting caught farming on other people’s land and had to move on.”
“It was wide-open country then, and the laws were different —”
“And look — here are your ancestors who crossed over the Appalachian Mountains like Daniel Boone, into areas that the federal government absolutely declared off-limits to white settlers. Then when the Indians attacked them for illegally trespassing, they demanded that the US Army come and kill Indians so your ancestors could keep their illegally occupied land.”
“I know the Indians were badly treated, but —”
“In fact, through most of the territory of the US, the first settlers were illegal immigrants, weren’t they? US treaties supersede all other laws except the Constitution. So what about it? Do you favor the expulsion of all these white illegal immigrants to restore the land to the legal titleholders by US treaty?”
“That was a long time ago.”
Card paints his hypothetical free-market economists with a peculiar brush:
The reporters talk to the free market economists who swore that when the illegal immigrants left, all those great jobs would return to Americans. “They just have to raise the wages higher to attract the workers they want,” say the economists.
[...]
The people who starved to death in Mexico aren’t here to enjoy the growing prosperity in their country, with so many American jobs now available to them – but free market economists never mind a few thousand deaths here and there. The free market always recovers. “Let them die,” the free market economists said, “and reduce the surplus population.”
That’s not even a good caricature of a free-market economist.