If you ever visited my campus, you would realize that I am the welcoming committee. ;) I am both the high tech and human touch in High Tech With a Human Touch.

Rand was an illegal immigrant and violated both her code and mine to do so. She intentionally deceived.

Regarding the tax issue, I am an owner, and I expect to pay some limited taxes to a limited government.

Objectivist reality says, it is none of your business unless you choose to trade. ie. who made you the welcoming committee? the fact you were born here? the fact you pay taxes (you are a slave). slave picking other slaves. get to the root-check your premises. Rand was an illegal immigrant.

Of course they are not evil for fleeing violence, but what in Objectivist morality requires me to welcome every stranger who comes to my doorstep? That sounds more like a Christian "Do tread on me" morality.

actually he did not. If he was using them as synonyms he would have said "or" instead, he said "and." feel free to school gulchers on pragmatism, Db did last week. but not Zen.

yes. we absolutely do NOT want these men to cross our border. https://www.facebook.com/sictichai/vi...
you apparently are evil for fleeing this

Thanks, Mike.
In this immigration debate, my absolute is "No moochers allowed." For most of the people I am not in complete agreement with, their absolute is "Everyone has the right to travel unimpeded." Reconciling those competing absolutes is possible, but not easy. I think the US got this balance right prior to 1900 and perhaps a little later than that.

This issue is probably the biggest reason why starting our own micronation to effectively "start over" is intellectually appealing.

You use "practicality" and "pragmatism" as if they were synonyms. Moreover, as demonstrated in Atlas Shrugged the meaning of "practical" depends on what it is you intend to practice. Pragmatism, of course, is not the kind of program that an Objectivist would advocate.

In the whirling Heraclitean flux which is the pragmatist’s universe, there are no absolutes. There are no facts, no fixed laws of logic, no certainty, no objectivity. -- http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/pra...

[The Pragmatists] declared that philosophy must be practical and that practicality consists of dispensing with all absolute principles and standards—that there is no such thing as objective reality or permanent truth—that truth is that which works, and its validity can be judged only by its consequences—that no facts can be known with certainty in advance, and anything may be tried by rule-of-thumb—that reality is not firm, but fluid and “indeterminate,” that there is no such thing as a distinction between an external world and a consciousness (between the perceived and the perceiver), there is only an undifferentiated package-deal labeled “experience,” and whatever one wishes to be true, is true, whatever one wishes to exist, does exist, provided it works or makes one feel better. -- http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/pra...

j; I fully understand and appreciate what you're arguing for. It's practicality and pragmatism. But that requires ceding my principles to those that wish to have a statist society and despise the idea of individual freedom. I won't do that.

It is a bygone era when America was also committed to the principle of individual freedom. I see many of my students from other countries come with the expectation that America is what it once was. It is so depressing to destroy their image of America as the shining city on the hill. My point in this immigration debate is that, when immigration worked for this country, the concepts of individual rights were both taught and expected. Now the concepts of individual rights are neither taught nor expected.

Khalling said that what I wanted was a club, not a nation. I won't disagree with that. Because the concepts of individual rights are neither taught nor expected, the country to which immigrants are traveling must expect to attract moochers, rather than producers.

What I am arguing for is that a country must set standards for what is acceptable behavior, or else its welcome mat will be trampled over. The country must set standards for a value-for-value exchange with the immigrant, or else the country's citizenry will become fodder (pun intended for Hungary) for the invading multitudes.

j; As I've stated before, I'm committed to the principle of individual freedom. These arguments have played out throughout our history against any numbers of different peoples that have looked to this country for a fresh start or escape from oppression and war. This situation wouldn't exist if everyone understood the concepts of individual rights vs state rights.

Of course, that was no surprise.

Driven by the UN of course. They decided their funding was insufficient, so they cut rations at the refugee camps.