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Why the Government Cannot Ban All Immigrants from a Certain Country – Article by David Bier

Why the Government Cannot Ban All Immigrants from a Certain Country – Article by David Bier

The New Renaissance Hat
David Bier
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I previously reviewed the exceptionally poor arguments that the Trump administration used to defend its blanket ban on immigration from seven majority Muslim countries in the State of Washington v. Donald Trump. Now, in its appeal of the district court’s temporary restraining order to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the government has added a new argument in favor of its position that is still fatally flawed. It claims:

The State continues to argue that Section 3(c)’s temporary suspension of the entry of aliens from seven countries contravenes the restriction on nationality based distinctions in [section 202(a)(1)(A) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA)]. But that restriction applies only to “the issuance of an immigrant visa,” Id., not to the President’s restrictions on the right of entry [under section 212(f)].

The government was right not to attempt this argument initially. Their argument is that a visa does not entitle the recipient to entry in the United States, but merely to travel to the United States. Therefore, they are free to discriminate at the border. To bolster the argument, INA 101(a)(4) does specifically distinguish between admission and visa issuance.  Essentially, they are defining “visa” in section 202 to include only the visa document that permits travel to the border, but does not grant status in the United States. And status is what grants a person the legal right to reside inside the country.

The problem is that the definition of a “visa” in section 202 includes “status” that grants a right to enter and reside in the United States. The State Department’s regulations define visa in section 202 to mean visa or status and have for as long as the INA has been around. Eligibility for status is either determined by an adjustment of status application for immigrants residing inside the United States or at the border for immigrants entering the United States on an immigrant visa for the first time. It is the act of granting entry that confers legal permanent residency status.

Thus, the government would be violating the prohibition on discrimination in section 202(a)(1)(A) just as much by denying entry as by denying visas. An immigration officer cannot deny entry based on nationality without also discriminating in the issuance of status to an immigrant at a port of entry.

Why “visa” cannot be interpreted narrowly

Not only is this interpretation based on the government’s own longstanding regulations, the interpretation of section 202 that the government offered during appeal would require it to adopt a variety of other positions that are at odds with the statute and regulations.

If “visa” in section 202 was interpreted to mean only the visa document, then adjustments of status applications for persons inside the United States would be exempt from the numerical limitations on visas in that section and in section 203. The clear intent of Congress was to control the number of persons who are entering the United States, not visa documents issued, and so the department has always held this view. Thus, the U.S. attorney in oral arguments before the district court admitted that per-country limits were about allocating how many people the United States allows “to come into the country.”

If the person is determined ineligible to enter, the visa is revoked at this point, and the State Department considers it not to have been issued at all. In other words, the department only counts “status” determinations against the visa caps, despite the fact that the section never mentions status. It is interesting to note on this point that the original version of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 actually had consular officers grant immigrants “status” abroad, which could be revoked at entry if they were deemed ineligible.

Why the government cannot be biased in entry but not in visa issuance

This interpretation does not undermine the distinction between visa issuance and admission in section 101(a)(4) because a determination of inadmissibility under section 212 applies equally to admission at the border as it does to visa issuance abroad. Immigration officers inside the country rely on the same criteria to determine eligibility to enter that consular officials use to determine eligibility for an immigrant visa. A person granted an immigrant visa in an unbiased manner would not be entitled to enter at the border. He would just be entitled to similar unbiased treatment.

This proves that the law forecloses the idea that the government could be unbiased in visa issuance but not in entry. This is also why all presidential proclamations under 212(f) are immediately printed in the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual. The manual explains, “Aliens who have engaged in conduct covered by a Presidential Proclamation issued under the authority of section 212(f) may also be inadmissible under other sections of the INA or other statutes. These statutory inadmissibilities are to be considered prior to determining whether a Presidential Proclamation applies.”

The executive order itself admits that the State Department will be enforcing it by suspending visa issuance just as much as the Department of Homeland Security by suspending entry, and indeed, it has suspended visa issuance to nationals of those seven countries.

Another problem for the government’s view is that it implies that Congress intended to create a system in which it required non-discrimination for applicants abroad, but not applicants at ports of entry or inside the United States. Indeed, their argument would free the government to discriminate based on nationality in adjustment of status applications for immigrants who are residing inside the United States right now, even without a presidential determination that they are a “detriment.”

Not only is this plainly absurd, this would create the bizarre result that immigrants adjusting in the United States would have fewer protections against discrimination than immigrant applicants abroad. This leaves the government arguing that immigrants abroad have fewer constitutional rights than immigrants in the United States, while somehow also having more statutory rights.

This obviously cannot have been what Congress intended. In fact, as I have previously explained, Congress debated this very question of whether ending discrimination would allow unvetted individuals to enter the United States from certain countries where information is difficult to obtain. They rejected this argument. No member of Congress in 1965—whether they were for the bill or against it—believed that President Johnson could then have immediately undone their work with a presidential proclamation.

David_BierDavid Bier

David Bier is an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

This work by Cato Institute is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Implied Consent: A Play on the Sanctity of Human Life by G. Stolyarov II – Second Edition

Implied Consent: A Play on the Sanctity of Human Life by G. Stolyarov II – Second Edition

Implied Consent - A Play on the Sanctity of Human Life - Second Edition - by G. Stolyarov II

Implied Consent – A Play on the Sanctity of Human Life – Second Edition – by G. Stolyarov II

 

The 95-year-old self-made multi-billionaire Quintus Grummond collapses from heart failure and enters a state of brain death. Meanwhile, his son Oswald makes plans for his father to never again awaken. Oswald hires a shyster lawyer who attempts to legitimize Grummond’s termination by claiming that the multi-billionaire is no longer truly alive and that he has given Oswald “implied consent” to make decisions regarding his fate. This play depicts a battle over a principle: the question of whether anybody has the right to terminate an innocent individual’s life against his explicit wishes.

This is the Second Edition of Implied Consent, with original and freely downloadable cover art by Wendy Stolyarov. This play was originally written in December 2004 and January 2005; the First Edition was published in May 2007.

The Second Edition of Implied Consent is available in PDF, MOBI, and EPUB formats.

Download the PDF version.

Download the MOBI version.

Download the EPUB version.

The Rational Argumentator welcomes your reviews of Implied Consent. You can submit them to TRA by sending them to gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com. You are also encouraged to spread the word by reprinting the information on this page or your own comments concerning the book on other media outlets.

The Patent Bubble and Its End – Article by Jeffrey A. Tucker

The Patent Bubble and Its End – Article by Jeffrey A. Tucker

The New Renaissance Hat
Jeffrey A. Tucker
February 3, 2013
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“Then they pop up and say, ‘Hello, surprise! Give us your money or we will shut you down!’ Screw them. Seriously, screw them. You can quote me on that.”

Those are the words of Newegg.com’s chief legal officer, Lee Cheng. He was speaking to Arstechnica.com following a landmark ruling that sided with a great business against a wicked patent troll company called Soverain.

What is a patent troll? It is a company that has acquired patents (usually through purchases on the open market) but does not use them for any productive purpose. Instead, it lives off looting good companies by blackmailing people. The trolls say, “Pay us now or get raked over the coals in court.”

Soverain is one such company. Most companies it has sued have paid the ransom. Soverain has collected untold hundreds of millions in fines from the likes of Bloomingdale’s, J.C. Penney, J. Crew, Victoria’s Secret, Amazon, and Nordstrom.

It sounds like a criminal operation worthy of the old world of, say, southern Italy (no offense, guys!). Indeed, but this is how it works in the U.S. these days. The looting is legal. The blackmail is approved. The graft is in the open. The expropriation operates under the cover of the law. The backup penalties are inflicted by the official courts.

To be sure, the trolls may not be as bad as conventional patent practice. At least the trolls don’t try to shut you down and cartelize the economy. They just want to get their beak wet. Once that happens, you are free to go about your business. This is one reason they have been so successful.

Soverain’s plan was to loot every online company in existence for a percentage of their revenue, citing the existence of just two patents. Thousands of companies have given in, causing an unnatural and even insane increase in the price of patent bundles. Free enterprise lives in fear.

Let me add a point that Stefan Molyneux made concerning this case. The large companies are annoyed by the patent-troll pests but not entirely unhappy with their activities. The large companies can afford to pay them off. Smaller companies cannot. In this way, the trolls serve to reduce competition.

[Stefan made his comments on an edition of Adam v. The Man, in which we were both guests. you can watch the entire show here.]

When Soverain came after Newegg’s online shopping cart demanding $34 million, a lower court decided against Newegg, but only imposed a fine of $2.5 million. Newegg examined the opinion and found enough holes in the case to appeal. It was a gutsy decision, given the trends. But as Cheng told Ars Technica:

“We basically took a look at this situation and said, ‘This is bull****.’ We saw that if we paid off this patent holder, we’d have to pay off every patent holder this same amount. This is the first case we took all the way to trial. And now nobody has to pay Soverain jack squat for these patents.”

It’s true. The case not only shuts down the Soverain racket. It might have dealt a devastating blow to the whole patent hysteria and the vicious trolling that has fueled it all along.

And truly, the patent mania has become crazy. No one 10 years ago would have imagined that it would go this far.

“It’s a sign of something gone awry, not a healthy market,” attorney Neil Wilkof told Gigaom.com, with reference to the utterly insane amounts that well-heeled tech giants have been paying for patents. “I think we’re in a patent bubble in a very specific industry. It’s a distorted market and misallocation of resources.”

[Note: This entire racket is anticipated and debunked in the pioneering work on the topic. The new edition of Stephan Kinsella’s Against Intellectual Property is now available for free to Club members.]

Earlier this year, Google shelled out $12.5 billion for the acquisition of Motorola Mobility. Facebook threw down $550 million for AOL’s patents. Apple and Google spent more last year on patent purchases and litigation than on actual research and development. The smartphone industry coughed up $20 billion last year on the patent racket. A lawsuit last year against Samsung awarded Apple $1 billion in a ridiculous infringement case.

These are astronomical numbers — figures that would have been inconceivable in the past. Everyone seems to agree that the system is radically broken. What people don’t always understand is that every penny of this is unnecessary and pointless. This market is a creation of legislation, and nothing more. The companies aren’t really buying anything but the right to produce and the right not to be sued, and that is not always secure.

Let’s back up. Why are there markets in anything at all? They exist because goods have to be allocated some way. There are not enough cars, carrots, and coffee to meet all existing conceivable demand. We can fight over them or find ways to cooperate through trade. Prices are a way to settle the struggle over goods that people grow or make, or services people provide, in a peaceful way. They allow people to engage to their mutual benefit, rather than club or shoot each other.

But what is being exchanged in the patent market? It’s not real goods or services. These are government creations of a bureaucracy — an exclusive right to make something. They are tickets that make production legal. If you own one, there is no broad market for it. It has only a handful of possible buyers, and the price of your good is based entirely on how much money you think you can extract from deep pockets. Sometimes, you actually force people to buy with the threat that you will sue if they don’t.

That’s not how normal markets operate. There was a time when patents didn’t even apply to software at all. The whole industry was built by sharing ideas and the spirit of old-fashioned competition. Companies would work together when it was to their mutual advantage and hoard competitive reasons when it was not. It seemed to work fine, until legislation intervened.

Today the entire fake market for patents is sustained by the perception that courts will favor the patent holders over the victims. The Newegg case changes that perception, which is why it has been the most closely watched case in the industry. This might signal the end of the reign of terror, at least one form of it.

But, you say, don’t creators deserve compensation? My answer: If they create something people are willing to pay for, great. But that’s not what’s happening. Soverain’s bread and butter was a handful of patents that had been on the open market, changing hands through three different companies over the course of 10 years, until they landed in the laps of some extremely unscrupulous wheeler-dealers.

In other words, patents these days have little to nothing to do with the creators — any more than mortgage-backed securities at the height of the boom had anything to do with the initial lender and its risk assessments. Once a patent is issued — and they are not automatically valid, but rather have to be tested in litigation — it enters into the market and can land anywhere. The idea that the patent has anything to do with inspiring innovation is total myth. It is all about establishing and protecting monopolistic weapons with which to beat people.

Many people have been hoping for patent reform. It probably won’t happen and might not even need to happen. If this case is as significant as tech observers say, a sizeable portion of this fake industry could be smashed via a dramatic price deflation. When something is no longer worth much, people stop wanting it.

Patents date from a time when a great industrial innovation made the headlines just because it was so rare. That’s not our world. Government has no business allocating and centrally planning ideas. Here’s to Newegg: Take a bow. Someone had the guts to say no. This time, for once, it worked.

Yours,
Jeffrey Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is the publisher and executive editor of Laissez-Faire Books, the Primus inter pares of the Laissez Faire Club, and the author of Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo It’s a Jetsons World: Private Miracles and Public Crimes, and A Beautiful Anarchy: How to Build Your Own Civilization in the Digital Age, among thousands of articles. Click to sign up for his free daily letter. Email him: tucker@lfb.org | Facebook | Twitter | Google.

This article has been republished pursuant to a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.