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Professor Hoppe has done some very good work in the past, including a remarkable justification of the right of private property that has no parallels in the work of other rights theorists. However, I think he misses the boat when he argues that border control is a matter of rights.

The pressure against our borders, and the demand for border control, arise from violations of rights: by oppressive governments in other lands, and by our own overextended, redistributive state.

The current state of the world is very sad. Essentially, if you're not a resident of one of a small group of countries, your life is likely to be nasty, poor, and brutish, and possibly short -- largely because most of the governments of the world are so predatory that the Cosa Nostra would have nothing to teach them. The desire to become a resident of one of the more civilized countries, among which our own ranks highest, needs no further explanation.

In the years before our welfare state really got cranked up, Americans had no real objection to immigrants. Anyone who came here had to support himself, just as did anyone who was born here. He had to learn English to get along here. He had to obey the laws, respect civil order and observe public peace. He was cut no slack -- and maybe was held to a stricter standard than native born Americans -- simply because he came from another land.

Today, law-abiding American citizens are at a tremendous disadvantage in coping with non-taxpaying, non-English-speaking, non-civil-peace-preserving immigrants who are frequently adopted as mascots by the professional victimists. The citizen feels a tremendous sense of unfairness about all the allowances that are made for immigrants, particularly Hispanic immigrants. Combine this with some "amateur sociology" -- Hispanic and Southeast Asian gangs rampant in our cities; Hispanic and Caribbean dominance in the drug trade; the amazing incidence of AIDS and other venereal diseases among persons of Caribbean origin -- and the prevailing distaste for immigrants, legal or illegal, needs no further explanation.

But let the deeds of governments be subtracted from the equation, and the pressure on our borders would fall to much lower levels. Of course, I'm talking wave-a-wand Utopia, here; no one believes that either the tyrannical, predatory nature of Third World governments or the American welfare / victimism state can be banished that easily. But without those drivers, why would immigrants seek America in such large numbers? Our streets aren't really paved with gold, and by now everyone knows it!

My point is this: There's no aspect of the problem that requires that we establish a positive right to control the borders, as a matter of rights theory. Professor Hoppe would have to work pretty hard to persuade me that any such right exists, even though we're agreed that these mass movements of population are part of a great geopolitical illness that must be corrected. The problem arises from the tramplings of rights by various governments.

Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
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