As longtime readers know, I’m no libertarian. Yet I’m not unfamiliar with libertarianism. I was a Koch Fellow. I studied at the Von Mises Institute summer school with the late Murray Rothbard. I think libertarians, even operating solely under their own principles, should reconsider their support for open borders. With libertarians, I share many beliefs in common: faith in free markets, a high regard for property rights, concern for economic efficiency, and a belief in limited government. I disagree particularly that in the mixed world of individual rights and social control that we live in that the best way to maximize social welfare and respect human liberty is to have open borders.
Hans Hoppe, an economist of the Austrian School, agrees. I have remarked before that the current immigration regime is rigged; that far from being an expression of free markets, it reflects a breakdown in market control because the common property of the United States is under state control. Under this system, individual preferences, which could be expressed in a purely market-based form of social organization, can only be expressed, if at all, through laws made through democratic controls. In other words, even under libertarian notions of value, that give high regard for individual subjective preferences that do not amount to harming others, there is no reason the preference to hire a lower wage willing worker is necessarily more economically value than any individuals subjective preference not to have such a worker enter his community. In a free society, sub-communities can be based around both of those preferences, with a proliferation of subcultures and smaller forms of social organization to reflect every preference along the spectrum. As it stands, we have a national policy which mandates uniform immigration rules.
Hans Hoppe notes something else important. Far from being just an incomplete expression of market principles, open borders created would amount to imposing the opposite harm of the alleged violence of immigration restrictions: the state-sponsored violence of “forced integration.” In other words, in a market society, subgroups could organize in any number of ways and exclude those whom they wished to exclude, even if the “economic” value expressed were merely the expression of the subjective preference for a lack of congestion, a common language, or neighbors who look and act like oneself. Today, there is no legal way to express these preferences and the opposite economic value, that is the economic values of only a part of the society, are expressed contra the values of the other part.
He writes rather provocatively:
The current situation in the United States and in Western Europe has nothing whatsoever to do with “free” immigration. It is forced integration, plain and simple, and forced integration is the predictable outcome of democratic ââ¬â one-man-one-vote ââ¬â rule. . . . One would be well on the way toward a restoration of the freedom of association and exclusion as it is implied in the idea and institution of private property, and much of the social strife currently caused by forced integration would disappear, if only towns and villages could and would do what they did as a matter of course until well into the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States: to post signs regarding entrance requirements to the town, and once in town for entering specific pieces of property (no beggars or bums or homeless, but also no Moslems, Hindus, Jews, Catholics, etc.); to kick out those who do not fulfill these requirements as trespassers; and to solve the “naturalization” question somewhat along the Swiss model, where local assemblies, not the central government, determine who can and who cannot become a Swiss citizen.
What should one hope for and advocate as the relatively correct immigration policy, however, as long as the democratic central state is still in place and successfully arrogates the power to determine a uniform national immigration policy? The best one may hope for, even if it goes against the “nature” of a democracy and thus is not very likely to happen, is that the democratic rulers act as if they were the personal owners of the country and as if they had to decide who to include and who to exclude from their own personal property (into their very own houses). This means following a policy of utmost discrimination: of strict discrimination in favor of the human qualities of skill, character, and cultural compatibility.
More specifically, it means distinguishing strictly between “citizens” (naturalized immigrants) and “resident aliens” and excluding the latter from all welfare entitlements. It means requiring as necessary, for resident alien status as well as for citizenship, the personal sponsorship by a resident citizen and his assumption of liability for all property damage caused by the immigrant. It implies requiring an existing employment contract with a resident citizen; moreover, for both categories but especially that of citizenship, it implies that all immigrants must demonstrate through tests not only (English) language proficiency, but all-around superior (above-average) intellectual performance and character structure as well as a compatible system of values ââ¬â with the predictable result of a systematic pro-European immigration bias.
I agree wholeheartedly. I don’t completely endorse the Austrian concept; I think the anarcho-capistalist model is lacking because there are “objective” values that should be adopted by societies, even against expressed subjective preferences. But I do think this analysis is useful, if for nothing else, to show that even libertarian principles do not require open borders. While libertarian critics of immigration try to run off opponents of open immigration as un-American, unprincipled, and socialist, it is they who are expressing a mere policy preference and doing so under the false banner of philosophical consistency.
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I don’t think Hans Hoppe is the sort of person you should be relying on to describe what libertarians think; many libertarians and Austrian economists think he’s a kook and an embarrassment.
Your reliance on his work for this post says far more about your character than it says about the strength of your arguments against immigration. While there is a grain of truth in the idea that “forced integration” is indeed coercive and contrary to free markets and individual liberty, I fail to see how your preference–that the government do the discriminating on our behalf–is any less so.
If anything, this post makes a case for open borders and closed, private communities–that’s the only way the competing preferences of low-wage workers versus cultural isolation can be provided. Your argument–and Hoppe’s–is much more reasonable as a call for allowing localities to organize and discriminate as they choose, not a call for closed borders. Presumably, some localities wouldn’t choose the cultural isolation that your preferred community clearly would.
Since we’re not getting rid of the welfare state or repealing anti-discrimination laws anytime soon, we are often left with second best choices. In this world that we actually live in, it’s hardly plain that the open borders when combined with these other facts of life is pro-liberty, any more than it would be pro-liberty to let me move into your house on the theory that in a free, state of nature I could so.
This is to say, even if one thinks liberty is the first principle among equals, it does not follow that the best way to maximize it is to ignore the consequences of behavior and the character of those around us when their actions and their characters will necessarily affect us.
Take something like speed limits. In the “anarcho-capitalist” ideal societies envisioned by many libertarians, including others besides Hoppe, there would likely be a flourishing of different traffic rules in different societies and even within the same society as toll roads competed with one another on the basis of different characteristics and amenities, including safety and speed limits. But as it is we must share roads, and something like speed limits and other traffic laws is the best solution.
I don’t see why Hoppe’s an embarrassment, other than because he shows that many people want liberty for racist, traditionalist, and not particularly progressive purposes and that liberty is equally suited to pursue these ends. Libertarians often contrast their “open-mindedness” and progressiveness on various social issues with the alleged prejudices and backwardness of traditional conservatives. But libertarian societies can easily be reorganized through large sub-communities to pursue all kinds of nefarious ends, and that, indeed, is why the traditional advocates of liberty above other political principles have been aristocrats of one stripe or another, including the aristocrats of the slave-holding South. Hoppe reminds us that libertarians are unrealistic and somewhat dishonest insofar as they ignore and dowplay this heritage and to the extent they want to take advantage of certain equality-producing features of American life, even while promoting other liberal measures.
So I’m sorry if Hoppe is alone in connecting the dots, but there’s no shame in pointing to him whether you find him embarrassing or not.
“Since we’re not getting rid of the welfare state or repealing anti-discrimination laws anytime soon, we are often left with second best choices”
Exactly. This is something pro-immigration Libertarians refuse to concede. When it’s pointed out to that mass immigration will likely increase the size of the welfare and regulatory state, increase support for and the costs of affirmative action, etc., many Libertarians respond by saying “Get rid of those” or “I don’t support those”, as if we live in world with without trade-offs. That people who view the world through the prism of economics (at least conciously) to deny that there are trade-offs is perverse.
It’s true. They masquerade as these realists, whose realism has led them to be suspicious of big government. OK, fair enough. But then when they live in a world constrained by that government and its structures and popular opinion, they say well I’ll just support a deonotlogical commitment to liberty even if that leads to increasing government spending and an altogether unpleasant way of life. It’s no different than pacifists who say they hate tyrrany and won’t lift a finger even to defend their own peaceful regime from outside encroachments. That kind of moral commitment may be fine for individuals, but communities that want to survive don’t have that luxury.
It’s very plain that unrestrained immigration is the biggest liberal social engineering project yet. It’s next in a long line of liberal activist judge projects beginning with forced busing in the 70′s, affirmative action/racial quotas, Title 1 dictating what Universities spend on men’s athletics…etc, etc.
Remember that the Liberal judges have mandated that for the purposes of “affirmative action”, the racial composition of the local population, including illegal immigrants must be used for calculating racial quotas for access to job and educational opportunites, as well as the host of “minority” Government programs that were originally supposed to be about native-born African Americans.
Working class white Americans are watching Latin American immigrants getting subsidized housing, free medical care, special consideration for Small Business Administration Loans that native born Americans can’t get…I’ve heard that some places have a program where immigrants get a $2000 grant and special credit terms so they can purchase new cars to get to work!
Libertarians talking about theoretical ‘free markets’ are like the Catholic mystics speculating on how many angels could dance on the head of pin. The current invasion we are experiencing is being encouraged and enabled by government bureacracy, and you can’t separate the immigration from the rest of the economic and cultural system as it exists.
Perhaps some day, Jesus might come back to earth in a blaze of heavenly glory, and some day we might have a “free market” too. I dearly hope both come to pass.
But until then you’ve got add some prudence and some reality as the splash of cold water in the face of the utopian visions on which some Libertarians base their some of their public policy pronouncements.