Nobody's business

A look at immigration and other victimless crimes.

As I write, there are ICE raids all around the country, reaching into private businesses with undocumented immigrant workers (or insufficiently documented workers due to red tape that isn't their fault). President Trump has deported people without due process of law. He called up the National Guard to quash protests against ICE in Los Angeles, and even plans to deploy the Marines there. The legality of Trump's National Guard order, made without the consent of the California governor, is under federal court review.

Is Trump overreaching? Is he acting beyond the scope of Presidential power? Based on my understanding of the Constitution, he is. However, the overreach is a product of a political culture that also tends to overreach. The people on both sides of the aisle in "our democracy" believe they have the right to interfere in my business and your business. That's the first overreach, and it is a moral one, regardless of what the Constitution says.

Law enforcement officers, with their guns, batons, tasers, and handcuffs, represent violence. The cops escalate a situation; a non-violent situation has become threatening, has become violent, just by their showing up. Why, then, send them to break up peaceful activities and be violent toward non-threatening people?

June 14, 2025, marks the 25th anniversary of the death of Peter McWilliams. Ten days after his death, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote a column about McWilliams that changed the course of my life. I began to think less about the theoretical dangers of government overreach and more about the actual suffering it causes.

Peter McWilliams died because he was denied access to his anti-nausea medication, which was marijuana. Although Buckley was incorrect - McWilliams died from a heart attack, not directly from vomiting - his body was in a weakened state due to frequent vomiting.

McWilliams died because he was facing medical marijuana charges; medical marijuana was illegal at the federal level and still is. But years earlier, before he needed marijuana himself, McWilliams authored Ain’t Nobody’s Business if You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country. You can see the issues he tackled in the Table of Contents (Part III), and you can read the entire book free of charge.

"Victimless" and "consensual" don't necessarily mean "harmless." It means that the parties involved consent to the activity and understand the risk.

I posted this last night, borrowing the phrase "nobody's business" from McWilliams:

I don't care - and it's nobody's business - if my neighbor consorts with prostitutes, owns guns, uses or sells pot or hard drugs, hosts secret, untaxed high-stakes poker games, is vaxxed, is unvaxxed, or takes non-approved medicines. Victimless, consensual activities shouldn't be crimes at all.

I would certainly not call the cops on him for these things.

And if he was born in this town, or in El Paso, makes no difference to me.

But if he was born in Juarez, THEN I'm supposed to care?

In the last sentence, I was placing immigration into the same category of "victimless crime," although it's even more absurd to consider it a crime. While I believe it's wrong for busybodies to demand the government save us from ourselves, from our potentially unhealthy, addictive, or dangerous choices, I do acknowledge they carry risks. Some activities may be victimless but harmful..

But moving? That's victimless and harmless. How is anyone hurt by an activity most people do several times in their lives?

The question of whether the government should prohibit or regulate any of these activities, including immigration, amounts to: "Is violence the answer to stop non-violent activity?"

If we can't point to an activity and name its victim, why can't we tolerate it? If toleration extends only to words, but not activities, how is that a free country?

Peter McWilliams died because the feds treated him violently. In a case decided five years after his death, the Supreme Court's decision Gonzales v. Raich ruled in favor of Congress's power to regulate home-grown medical marijuana, which on the face of it goes well beyond Congress's constitutional power to regulate commerce "among" [not within] the states. The federal courts sometimes put the brakes on Congressional or Presidential overreach, but often not. They're not reliable protectors of our liberties.

The problem is that such overreaching laws exist because the American people believe the government ought to ban things they dislike. Don't like (some kind of) drugs? Ban them. Feel frightened by "uncontrolled" immigration? Regulate it. After all, I won't get arrested.

We have failed to realize that getting the government involved to impose your preferences on others is the same as doing violence to your neighbors who may have different preferences.

But now, we're seeing the consequences of overreach: violent crackdowns on the "crimes" of moving and working. A nation of moderates who have said, "I'm not opposed to immigration, only illegal immigration," is now appalled by Trump ignoring due process and deploying the military on American soil.

The people should make up their minds: Are the current immigration laws just, or unjust? If they're just, then you are against immigration to some degree. If they're unjust, then why are you angry with people who dare to break unjust laws?

Let's say there is due process for every allegedly undocumented immigrant, and they're all found guilty of breaking immigration laws. That means they were found guilty of harming no one.

I suggest an examination of the heart. Why was the law there in the first place? What (real or potential) victims was the law protecting? Who was harmed involuntarily, so that we needed these immigration laws to stop it?

If the enforcement of the law is worse than the so-called evil it's trying to prevent, why not repeal the law?

"Due process" in immigration cases wouldn't be such a problem if there were no immigration cases to prosecute.

It's time to repeal those laws and all other victimless crimes.

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James Leroy Wilson writes The MVP Chase (subscribe) and JL Cells (subscribe). Thank you for your subscriptions and support! You can contact James for writing, editing, research, and other work at jamesleroywilson-at-gmail.com.