Jason Soon responds to my post on Theodore Dalrymple, but gets his logic confused. As he observes, Dalrymple and some libertarians have argued for an intellectually consistent libertarian policy, namely allowing free immigration while cutting off all welfare services to immigrants. I made the point that most Australian free-marketeers take an intellectually inconsistent line, attacking government intervention the welfare state and barriers to cross-border flows in general, while supporting extreme ‘border protection’ measures in relation to asylum-seekers.
Jason writes ” If Quiggin is prepared to endorse this most radical experiment [the Dalrymple line] he should speak up. Otherwise he should stop accusing people of hypocrisy. ”
It should be obvious to Jason that my support or lack of it for the Dalrymple line can make no difference to the question of whether the IPA, CIS and so on are intellectually inconsistent. Jason suggests I am accusing them of “hypocrisy”, which implies conscious dishonesty rather than inconsistency. I don’t have the evidence to make a judgement on this.
For the record, my view, which I expressed in the Fin before the election is that neither ‘border protection’ on the Howard model nor open slather is a good policy. I favor an increase in the total refugee intake, and attempts to make more orderly arrangements with source countries. (Among other things, this would bring into reality the fictional ‘queue’, that asylum-seekers are regularly accused of jumping). This should be combined with an approach to ‘boat people’ which is based on humanity and good sense rather than scaremongering. This would include detention of those at high risk of absconding, but would not use detention without trial in desert camps as a method of deterrence. We manage a reasonable balance in relation to bail for those accused of crimes considerably worse than breaches of immigration laws. If it weren’t for the racial/religious panic that has been deliberately whipped up, we could do the same in relation to this issue.