Rudy Carrasco @ urbanonramps made an interesting connection between De Soto's ideas on property rights and the poor (extralegal squatters due to problem of inadequate property rights laws) to the current immigration problem (extra legal workers due to problem of inadequate immigration laws). The problem is that when laws don't fit what's going on with economic activity, the laws are generally broken. Here's what Rudy had to say:
Bookworm Brown made a great comment in one of these UO comment threads (it’s around here somewhere). He said something about how our laws are inadequate to deal with the situation facing us. It reminded me of Hernando de Soto’s talk about “extralegal” economic activities around the world, as opposed to using the term “illegal.” de Soto says “extralegal” in some circumstances because it turned out that laws were eventually changed to conform to the norms that people themselves had been practicing. The brilliance of U.S. property law, de Soto argues in The Mystery of Capital, is that lawmakers created new laws in such a way as to incorporate the “illegal” or “extralegal” behaviors amongst the American settlers in the Wild West (and elsewhere in the country). I’ve been wondering if there are not parallels between the development of property law in the 1800s and the immigration law situation we face at the start of the 21st century. (more at urbanonramps)
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