It seems to me that if you oppose "illegal" immigration, you are averring that you belong to "your" government and that the immigrants belong to "their" government. If only they would jump through the hoops that give ownership of themselves to your government, then you would welcome them here. Right? After all, you may say: "There are legal ways of immigrating." What else could you mean?
Why should immigrants obey the laws of a country they don't live in? I certainly don't even pretend to obey Mexico's or Canada's laws. In order to "legally" immigrate, according to statists, I would have to put myself under those laws before I crossed the government borders. If I felt that I needed to escape to another country, for whatever reason, I would not feel any obligation to sell myself to the government of that country first. Why should anyone do that?
To claim that a government has ownership rights to you and the land you stand on is odd to me. I suppose if you own yourself, you can give yourself to anyone you choose, even a government. But then you wouldn't own yourself and could not give yourself away in the first place. Independent migrants have exactly the same human rights as me or anyone else, regardless of where they stand on our planet. Governments have exactly zero rights of any sort. So, guess who gets my sympathy.
It seems that many people have a strange worshipful attitude about an imaginary line on a map. Lines drawn by governments through treaties and wars. The only thing governments are good for is waging war. War is the main product of government. Do you really want to belong to the War Factory?
Therefore, the answer to the title of the post is: No government owns them (or us).
Besides that, end ALL welfare and you deflate the only reasonable argument against "illegal" immigrants, leaving only the racist excuses.
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