On Nov. 17, Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney’s controversial policy of reporting illegal immigrants whom he takes into custody to Immigration and Customs Enforcement inspired a protest by the student chapter of Progressive Dane, Campus Antiwar Network and the Multicultural Student Coalition. Protesters marched to the City-County building in support of an amendment under consideration by the Dane County Board of Supervisors to move funding from Mahoney’s budget. In an overwhelming defeat for the protesters, the amendment was defeated 30-6.

In this battlefront in a national war over immigration policy, the anti-Mahoney forces do a decent job of critiquing the policy on a local level, citing its violation of a Dane County Board resolution and his authority to enforce federal law as a local official. However, the fundamental dispute is still controlled by emotions about our national immigration policy.

The core of the opposition to Mahoney’s policy rests on some convoluted notion of open borders, where countries have no right to control the movement of people across their boundaries and where people have the right to cross international borders as they please. One does not need to look much further than the “No Human is Illegal” signs carried by protesters. However, Campus Antiwar Network member Rob Lewis summarized quite well the feelings of many of his fellow protesters when he said, “What’s going on is racist and inexcusable. They’re trying to intimidate a group of people in this community and take away their rights.”

In order to see the fatal flaw in their logic one must look no further than something familiar to those whose political beliefs fall somewhere this side of Marxism: private property rights. While our government maintains a monopoly on violating our right to do what we please with our bodies and property through taxes, search warrants, eminent domain and declaring the use of certain substances illegal, they do their best to ensure no one else may do the same by outlawing theft, burglary and trespassing.

Those on the left don’t seem to find too much wrong with the government taking peoples’ property through taxation, but once you manage to acquire property they are some of the strongest advocates of your right to do with it as you please. Want to perform acts in your bedroom that would make ordinary Americans cringe with disgust? No arguments from them. Want to purchase illegal drugs? Not a problem. As long as you pay the sales tax.

The right to privacy derived from property rights that is so strongly supported by progressives means you get to determine not only who listens in on your phone calls and whether or not fetuses are permitted to grow inside your uterus; it also means you get to determine who is allowed into your house or onto your property.

When the question turns from private property to public it is only natural that, just like private property, the owner of the public property ought to decide who is permitted to use the property. In most cases this means that the people, through their government, decide who is permitted to use public property, thus the justification for all of our traffic laws and national parks. Thus when the people of the United States, through Congress, decide who can and cannot come into our country, they do have a basis for deciding that some humans are indeed illegal.

While our national immigration policy is desperately in need of reform — a discussion I will leave for another day — unless we decide we want everyone to come into our country who wants to come, that reform ought not include the relaxing of all of our standards of immigration. It may not be in our best interest to exclude someone who wants to come to our country, but that certainly does not mean that we don’t have a right to do so. Until Sheriff Mahoney can come with some better justifications as to why he has the authority to be the one doing the excluding, it’s probably best that he leave it up to Immigration Control.

Patrick McEwen ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in ‘nucyaler’ engineering 😉