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Comment by devoply | Hacker News Reader

We need a movement to legalize borders as being under control of the legal system of the country. We don't need barbarians running our borders that answer to no law or the Constitution. If they have no covenant with the people like the law or the Constitution, what right do they have to any authority. It makes no sense that any such group of people should have all of this authority for which they are not held to account... and can't be held to account by the people who they are harassing and diminishing.

It's nothing more than an analogue of a protection racket.

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Borders are under control of the legal system and policing them is a right that's granted to the Federal government by the constitution. It makes complete sense that the Federal government, which is elected by US citizens would be able to policy foreigners entering the country without being held accountable to them. That's how every country in the world works. You may not like this system now that "the wrong people" have been elected to run the federal government but that's the way the system works and it's incredibly reasonable.

I can't see how you draw the analogue of to a protection racket, they're not collecting money from anyone here.

Bullshit it's reasonable. First of all it's not only non-citizens that are being constantly stripped of their rights, it's non-citizens and citizens alike. Further, it often goes well beyond reasonable policing to invasive searches into the private lives of individuals including stripping away their rights to human dignity. It may have been reasonable 50 years ago. It's no longer reasonable.

And it's a racket. In that they are supposedly protecting the people who they are robbing via taxes, and they are harassing the same people. And it's more or less security theater in that the point is the harassment and the humiliation. Because you are in fear you are supposed to feel protected.

> It may have been reasonable 50 years ago. It's no longer reasonable.

Why would it become less reasonable?

50 years ago you would have to be MLK or MX to have a whole dossier on you, someone important, notable, or problematic. Today every citizen has a virtual dossier on them that's a click away. The level of intrusion into private lives is excessive and in many ways illegal according to human rights conventions and the Constitution.

Rights routinely infringed:

Article 1 Right to Equality

Article 2 Freedom from Discrimination

Article 3 Right to Life, Liberty, Personal Security

Article 5 Freedom from Torture and Degrading Treatment

Article 9 Freedom from Arbitrary Arrest and Exile

Article 10 Right to Fair Public Hearing

Article 11 Right to be Considered Innocent until Proven Guilty

Article 12 Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence

Article 13 Right to Free Movement in and out of the Country

Article 14 Right to Asylum in other Countries from Persecution

Article 18 Freedom of Belief and Religion

Article 19 Freedom of Opinion and Information

Article 26 Right to Education

Article 30 Freedom from State or Personal Interference in the above Rights

The U.N. Convention on Human Rights does not have the force of law in the United States. While many of the rights in the list above were first codified in the Constitution, others are not specified as rights in that document.

Of course, being natural rights, those not so enumerated are assumed to obtain unless specifically restricted by the Constitution or federal, state, or local law. In the U.S., the place to look for whether this or that right not specifically called out in the Bill of Rights has been restricted is those laws and the court rulings concerning those laws.

So, for example, there is no right to education in the U.S., and while the U.S. historically has been the greatest haven for asylum seekers, that does not mean that non-citizens have an affirmative right to enter the U.S.

The saddest part of all this is that the dossier on you and me was made possible by people like you and me who work in the tech industry. Google and Facebook have information on most people that the Stasi could only have dreamed of possessing.

"Borders are under control of the legal system and policing them is a right that's granted to the Federal government by the constitution"

Barely. Apparently the US constitution gets suspended at the border (and a 100 mile radius around the border)

https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone

> We need a movement to legalize borders as being under control of the legal system of the country.

They are subject to the legal system of the US. It's just that, within 100 miles of any border, Constitutional rights are limited, and non-citizens have fewer rights at border crossings.

What are your Constitutional Rights at border crossing? What are rights of non-citizens? From various incidents that have come out it seems as if it's the Wild West where whatever the idiot harassing you decides, with little recourse if you disagree. Further it makes no sense to arbitrarily take away all citizens rights in certain locations in the country... that's guilty before proven innocent.

> Further it makes no sense to arbitrarily take away all citizens rights in certain locations in the country.

That's not what I said.

> What are your Constitutional Rights at border crossing? What are rights of non-citizens?

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/business/border-enforc...

https://www.google.co.in/url?q=https://www.acluaz.org/sites/...

"From various incidents that have come out it seems as if it's the Wild West where whatever the idiot harassing you decides, with little recourse if you disagree"

you're right to a large extent.

https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone

The legal framework is that searches are permissible incident to a border crossing and some distance from the border after a recent border crossing.

CBP won't get away with using that rule to search someone that has not recently crossed the border.

When they setup checkpoints, they can't do arbitrary searches (they can just check vehicles for aliens). So they have less leeway in those situations than when they are doing a border search.

The CBP checkpoints within the US near the southern border routinely use drug sniffing dogs and stop and search vehicles, including arresting US citizens. They're not just checking identity.

Example from a while back: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/yuma-156221-drug-bratcher...

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