Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.
Once you buy the argument that some segment of the citizenry should lose their rights, just because they are envied or resented, you are putting your own rights in jeopardy - quite aside from undermining any moral basis for respecting anybody's rights. You are opening the floodgates to arbitrary power. And once you open the floodgates, you can't tell the water where to go.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote warns that allowing some people to lose their rights due to envy endangers everyone's rights and invites arbitrary authority.
Thomas Sowell's quote elaborates on the dangerous precedent set when a group of people is stripped of their rights based on societal resentment or envy. By suggesting that it's acceptable for certain citizens to lose their rights, one invites the risk that their own rights may be compromised in the future. This perspective encourages a moral obligation to uphold the rights of all individuals, as permitting the erosion of rights for some undermines the integrity of rights for all and paves the way for unchecked power.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a debate on civil rights, this quote can emphasize the importance of protecting everyone's rights.
More from Thomas Sowell
All quotes →Blacks were not enslaved because they were black but because they were available. Slavery has existed in the world for thousands of years. Whites enslaved other whites in Europe for centuries before the first black was brought to the Western hemisphere. Asians enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved other Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans, and indeed even today in North Africa, blacks continue to enslave blacks.
One of the reasons for conspiracy theories is an assumption that people in high places always know what they are doing. When they do something that makes no sense, devious reasons are imagined by conspiracy theorists, when in fact it may be due to plain old ignorance and incompetence.
You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
The real problem, both in discussions of mass shootings and in discussions of gun control, is that too many people are too committed to a vision to allow mere facts to interfere with their beliefs, and the sense of superiority that those beliefs give them.
Why is history important? Without history, many people have no idea how many of today's half-baked ideas have been tried, again and again - and have repeatedly led to disaster. Most of these ideas are not new. They are just being recycled with re-treaded rhetoric.
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Ah! How I hate the crimes of the new generation: they are dry and sterile as darnel.
Poverty is a reaper: it harvests everything inside us that might have made us capable of social intercourse with others, and leaves us empty, purged of feeling, so that we may endure all the darkness of the present day.
Few are open to conviction, but the majority of men are open to persuasion
I'm for democracy, but imposing democracy is an oxymoron. People have to choose democracy, and it has to come up from below.
You are always in the process of creating. Every moment, every minute, every day. You are a big creation machine and you are turning out a new manifestation literally as fast as you can think.
I live in my house as I live inside my skin: I know more beautiful, more ample, more sturdy and more picturesque skins: but it would seem to me unnatural to exchange them for mine.