‘Norders’: The Job of a No-Orders, No-Border Guard in the Economies of the New World Norder
The year is 2024 and immigration control officer Zane Alvarez, a Northern Zone Norder Guard, is completing a routine migrant clearance: “Yes, Sir, you and your family are free to enter our zone to stay. Our norders are to allow you to do that. All that is required is that you come and that you will look for or try to create at least one job opportunity. Can I make you a cup of coffee?”
The spiffy uniformed Officer Friendly Norder Guard then proceeds to explain that under the terms of the NWN “No Orders” immigration and migration control policy, the only order he and his fellow officers have to follow is to enforce nothing and to allow national borders to be transformed into “norders”, in a second sense of that term: “No-border borders”, as a centerpiece creation of the New World Norder.
To this he chirpily adds, “Have a nice stay!”
(The NWN represents a revision of the earlier concept of a “New World Order”, a change considered necessary given the degree to which, all around the world, border order pretty much has ceased to exist now in 2024—”norder”, in this instance being a portmanteau word combining “no”,”(b)order” and “order”, with a third sense suggesting creative disorder, much as some laissez-faire theorists say the concept “capitalism” does.)
The Spirit of 2014 and the Right of Pursuit
With the success of America’s mass amnesty program back in 2014, under which millions of illegal migrants were allowed to enter, remain and reshape the U.S. (and its voting blocks, some say) upon the stroke of a pen, the feasibility of a world-wide norders program was demonstrated. Legitimized by the argument for and triumph of human rights unconstrained by citizenship requirements, the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness no longer ground to a halt at some arbitrary, bureaucratically defined border. Pursuit that can be forced to halt is nothing more than a permission, rather than an absolute right—or so the argument went.
This viewpoint has been mirrored in the new global law enforcement pursuit policies, introduced in 2017: Just as the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness must not be impeded by any national borders, the pursuit of criminals, terrorists and other bad eggs shall not be obstructed by an obstacle as artificial as some other nation’s or region’s border.
Unfettered pursuit, hot or not, large or small scale, brazenly on land or stealthily from above, is the new norm—as the obverse side of the right-of-pursuit coin. The cutting edge of that coin is, of course, the comparable right of multinational corporations to pursue profits wherever they can be found or created, untrammeled by any one nation’s or region’s laws, demographics, costs of labor, or other barriers.
The justification for this de facto erasure of borders was articulated in a February 17, 2013 article “5 Reasons to Grant Illegal Immigrants Amnesty “—by Ed Krayewski, associate editor with Reason 24/7 (www.reason.com) and formerly a producer and associate producer at Fox News.
The case he laid out comprised moral, statistical and metaphysical arguments. On the moral side, he asked, “But what’s wrong with granting amnesty to hard-working, tax-paying individuals whose only crime is their immigration status?”
From a logical and abstract point of view, that was a very interesting and puzzling argument. It’s form amounts to this: “What’s wrong with forgiving a crime X when the only crime was the commission of X?” Applying that plea and its implicit logic, an ax murderer should be granted amnesty, acquittal or a pardon if that was his only crime and he otherwise was a hard-working tax payer.
When the sophistry of that argument was noted in 2014, it took a back seat to the two other sorts of reasons for amnesty—the statistical and the metaphysical. (The retort that illegal immigration, unlike ax murdering, is only a minor crime begs the question, in assuming what needs to be proved—especially to those who disagree.)
In the 2019 charter of the New World Norder, this rationale is not mentioned directly or even alluded to.
Stats vs. Logic of Norders
The soundness of the statistical arguments hinges on data, claims about data and inferences from those data, e.g., his argument that illegal immigrants economically contribute more to an economy than they take from it. Basically, Mr. Krayewski’s claim was that by taking all the grunt jobs nobody else wants, illegal migrants generate the benefits for all of us that 18th-century economist Adam Smith associated with the notion of a “division of labor” (rendered as an analogue or broader concept— “specialization of labor “—in the article and argument).
Like the millions of Chinese workers who continue to make almost everything we buy, and sell it to us cheaply, these illegal migrant workers will “afford us more wealth to enjoy and invest” (Mr. Krayewski here approvingly quoting another writer)—presumably without the massive job and manufacturing losses associated with outsourcing (or, in this case “in-sourcing” to new arrivals).
Another of his arguments blends statistical claims with puzzling logic much like what I’ll now call the “ax murderer amnesty” argument presented above: Mr. Krayewski argued that illegal immigrants/migrants should be granted amnesty because they “are otherwise law-abiding”. The vulnerability of that argument is twofold:
1. It has to be shown to be true by the stats (some of which Mr. Krayewski offers);
2. It can be used to excuse or acquit the ax murderer because he was “otherwise law-abiding”.
The problem with the logic is that, on one interpretation, it rests on a tautology: rather than on any statistics: “Everyone who has committed a crime or crimes is, apart from those, otherwise law-abiding.” (And therefore should not be punished—but instead rewarded?)
The only way out of appearing to proffer a vacuous tautology like that is to claim that the bulk of illegal migrants commit only that one crime—which then restores the statistical testability of Mr. Krayewski’s claim, while raising the crucial question “How many crimes is one too many for anyone’s otherwise being law-abiding to carry any weight?”. Equally germane to the issue is the question of whether or why illegal migration is morally and legally not such a big deal, especially since the widespread, persistent conviction that, on the contrary, it is a very big deal indeed.
The Metaphysics of the New World Norder
Now twenty years later, the historically most influential of his arguments has also been the most metaphysical and the one that is at the core of the New World Norder vision: It is the claim and argumentation that illegal migration/immigration should be protected not merely as a privilege, but as a “natural right”, which Mr. Krayewski, citing Fox’s Judge Andrew Napolitano, explains this way: “A natural right is a right inherent to our humanity, and the freedom of movement is such a right. The idea that immigration needs to be ‘authorized’ by the government flies in the face of that freedom.”
Initially rejected as being too broad a claim in failing to distinguish the reasonable right to emigrate from the far more controversial right to immigrate, with repetition this “right to alight” as well as a “right to flight”, e.g., from an oppressive regime, eventually won over the mass media and therefore the masses.
The claim that such natural rights exist is, of course, metaphysical, since proving rights exist in any but a verified legal sense or by confirmed cultural or social consensus, is not something accomplished with a butterfly net or microscope.
The New Win-Win Order
As a NWN Northern Region Norder Guard, officer Alvarez finds himself in a win-win employment situation: If he likes his job, like his medical care, he can keep it; if he doesn’t like the right to uncontrolled migration, he can capitalize on and exercise it, and go to another region where he can get a better job or try to find a country that still has strict border control. But if he thinks about it clearly, he’ll see that the NWN has been very good to him.
After all, under what other global governance could he possibly be rewarded more for doing so much less?