Posted on 10/19/2001 3:17:21 PM PDT by Sir Gawain
The few and the proud who actually cherish liberty intrinsically despise collectivist attempts to control the lives of others. For this reason, open borders seem appealing. Border controls require government to interfere with the individual ability to pursue one's own good in the name of some national collective. Government enforces immigration restrictions against people seeking to improve their lives, while free immigration recognizes their individual right to seek such improvement.
Yet some have begun to question: Does free immigration actually maximize freedom? Are there legitimate grounds to restrict immigration in a free society if that immigration is thought to have adverse consequences for liberty? Libertarians generally see immigration restriction as a violation of individual rights, or at the very least unequal treatment between native and immigrant. Implicit in this position is the premise that there is a right to immigration.
This would be a proposition as strident a libertarian as the late Murray Rothbard would reject. Private property rights do not allow me to dispossess others of their property and my right to leave my country in pursuit of my interests does not confer upon me a right to trespass against those in other countries. Immigration cannot be intrinsically tied to the pursuit of happiness right listed in the Declaration of Independence.
First, unrestricted immigration can undermine a free society from within. Just as the effects of open borders on Israel would be obvious, the character of any other nation can be altered by allowing in large numbers of people from other countries who bring with them different sets of values. If a country imports an increasingly large number of people hostile to the values of classical liberalism, those values will soon find themselves under siege.
In an admittedly unlikely but theoretically possible example I've used before, what if half (or more than half) of the Chinese Communist Party (remember China's population exceeds 1 billion) moved to the United States. If they were allowed to immigrate, how soon would this alter the political makeup of this country? Different cultures have different sets of values regarding the value of the individual versus the value of community. A libertarian should want to nourish a culture that prizes individualism above collectivism, but open borders do not necessarily support that goal.
Few would dispute the right of law-abiding citizens to emigrate, i.e., leave their country provided they are willing to respect the equal rights to of others to do so. But the question of immigration raises the point that a person will need to live somewhere, and unless there is a vast expanse of unsettled land this will presumably be on property they do not themselves own.
Consider the most libertarian regime imaginable, a society living under a system of anarcho-capitalism. As Austrian school economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe observed in an essay recommended to me by Lew Rockwell, if all property is privately owned there is no case for free immigration. Instead, property owners may admit or exclude whomever they choose to that which they own. Any "immigration" so-called would require the consent of some property owner, who would either sell his property to the entering immigrant or allow the immigrant to reside on his property, unless the immigrant was to settle in some unowned open space. This means immigration is reduced to a question of whom independent property owners would admit on their property; any right to immigration implies a limit to the right of people over their private property. Those who are not allowed on anyone in the anarcho-capitalist society's private property would thus only be able to immigrate via a form of forced integration, a coercive violation of negative rights.
This is, of course, a violation of libertarian principle if there ever was one, no matter what Julian Simon's books say.
Of course, no one in the Western world lives in a system of anarcho-capitalism. In a more or less democratic political structure, there still remain rules for those who may be allowed to immigrate. Just as there is no right to immigrate without any limitation because to claim such a right would violate individuals' rights over their private property, an extension of this permits a nation's political authorities to impose reasonable immigration restriction.
Private property may not be occupied by anyone, including immigrants, without consent of the owner. Publicly owned property (which would be the remainder of a country with a mixed economy, such as the United States) could be restricted democratically or by those elected to manage it. If an immigrant poses some negative externality, such as welfare dependency or a propensity for criminal behavior, or a majority for a variety of reasons opposes their admittance (not on a personal basis, of course, but on the basis of previously enumerated objective criteria) no rights-based argument can be made for their entry. Such a potential immigrant may justly be excluded on the basis of the rights of everyone else.
It is of course true that objections to immigration on the basis of welfare subsidies or government racial preferences are in fact grounds for opposing those policies rather than restricting immigration, although one can quibble about the extent to which limiting immigration is more feasible politically than abolishing the entire post-New Deal welfare state. But as long as those policies exist, it is difficult to imagine why libertarians would want to import more government dependency. It seems to be a self-defeating effort to demonstrate allegiance to abstract principle.
Moreover, the practical reality in most countries, such as the United States, is that mass immigration is not the result of open borders. It is the result of deliberate government policies, such as the US Immigration Act of 1965.
This does not mean that immigration is wrong in principle either, or that it is necessarily undesirable. The United States has allowed in immigrants from a variety of nations, continents and cultures almost unprecedented in human history, and it has done manifest good. There are important reasons for a free society to wish to remain a beacon for people seeking freedom throughout the world. Immigration has brought about many significant cultural, economic and scientific contributions to the United States and other countries have had similar experiences.
Similarly, the refusal to allow immigration has at times had morally disastrous implications. In our own history, Jews were abandoned to die in Hitler's Germany because our country refused to admit them after they made it to our shores. Many have historically advocated a racist immigration policy designed to promote white supremacy. Some continue to argue for whites-only immigration today, or for a blanket ban they hope would accomplish the same result. Believers in individual freedom are correct to deplore such things. Specific evils in immigration restriction do not however invalidate the concept of such policies nor mandate universal immigration without regard to the consequences for liberty or the individual rights of others.
A universal right to immigration would clearly violate the rights of everyone else. It would violate a property owner's rights to his private property, it would violate a the rights of a polity's citizens to dispose of their collectively owned property and it would deny members of a community the right to live in the type of community and culture they have freely chosen to live in. Rather than treating immigration as what Forbes magazine senior editor Peter Brimelow calls "a bastard civil right," immigration policy should be fashioned in a way that respects the rights of all involved.
W. James Antle III is a senior writer for Enter Stage Right. He works in information technology and writes freelance articles on a wide variety of subjects. He can be contacted at Jimantle@aol.com.
Time's up!
No.
What if you have the Blue Passport?
Viz. natural law, individual rights, sanctity of life, belief in a representative democracy, etc., etc.
The events of September 11 show everyone what happens when you let JUST A HANDFUL of persons in who believe in the opposite of the beliefs of the host country: I'm talkin' muslims, here, folks.
Let a handful in, and not only do they not get their rights (which they don't care for, anyway) but, EVERYBODY LOSES THEIR RIGHTS.
And the Grand Experiment is dead and gone, once and for all.
So, you really can't have free immigration, whatever the Libertarians think.
Would be nice, but, unfortunately, the world is not what they believe it to be.
With the imposition of the "ex-pat-tax" a few years ago, and the increasing encroachment upon those who leave (isn't it law now that even if you give up US citizenship/subjecthood, you STILL have to pay US federal income for 7 more years), I wonder if we aren't losing that as well.
Worrisome, when you consider the countries in the past who did not allow their people to leave when they want...
Sure that is possible, but it hasn't quite happened yet. We still have the Constitution, and we still at least pay lip service to it. We still have free elections. This is still the Land of Opportunity. While there may be some alarming tendencies and some of our elected representatives may be dunderheads, there are a lot of good things happening such as personal freedom to say what you want. Even if we go to war for real that doesn't mean the Grand Experiment is over. Not yet.
Right. Of course; under specific conditions certain rights can be taken away. It's the general tightening that concerns me. But this is going off-topic so I'll shut up now.
Exactly. To an extent, everyone's beliefs will differ slightly but the immigrants from 200 years ago assimilated into the culture in a way that the immigrants of today refuse to.
Very true. They came here because they wanted to be Americans.
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