Whether we’re talking about illegal immigration from
Mexico and Central America, or birthright citizenship, or the migrants coming
from the Middle East and Africa, the subject of immigration has been in the
news and widely discussed for months now. It is an issue fraught with
potentially perilous consequences, so it is especially important for
libertarians to understand it correctly. This Mises Circle, which is devoted
to a consideration of where we ought to go from here, seems like an opportune
moment to take up this momentous question.
I should note at the outset that in searching for the
correct answer to this vexing problem I do not seek to claim originality. To
the contrary, I draw much of what follows from two of the people whose work
is indispensable to a proper understanding of the free society: Murray N.
Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
Some libertarians have assumed that the correct libertarian
position on immigration must be “open borders,” or the completely
unrestricted movement of people. Superficially, this appears correct: surely
we believe in letting people go wherever they like!
But hold on a minute. Think about “freedom of speech,”
another principle people associate with libertarians. Do we really believe in
freedom of speech as an abstract principle? That would mean I have the right
to yell all during a movie, or the right to disrupt a Church service,
or the right to enter your home and shout obscenities at you.
What we believe in are private property rights. No one
has “freedom of speech” on my property, since I set the rules, and in the
last resort I can expel someone. He can say whatever he likes on his own
property, and on the property of anyone who cares to listen to you, but not
on mine.
The same principle holds for freedom of movement.
Libertarians do not believe in any such principle in the abstract. I do not
have the right to wander into your house, or into your gated community, or
into Disneyworld, or onto your private beach, or onto Jay-Z ‘s private
island. As with “freedom of speech,” private property is the relevant factor
here. I can move onto any property I myself own or whose owner wishes to have
me. I cannot simply go wherever I like.
Now if all the parcels of land in the whole world were
privately owned, the solution to the so-called immigration problem would be
evident. In fact, it might be more accurate to say that there would be no
immigration problem in the first place. Everyone moving somewhere new would
have to have the consent of the owner of that place.
When the state and its so-called public property enter
the picture, though, things become murky, and it takes extra effort to
uncover the proper libertarian position. I’d like to try to do that today.
Shortly before his death, Murray Rothbard published an
article called “Nations by Consent: Decomposing the Nation State.” He
had begun rethinking the assumption that libertarianism committed us to open borders.
He noted, for instance, the large number of ethnic
Russians whom Stalin settled in Estonia. This was not done so that Baltic
people could enjoy the fruits of diversity. It never is. It was done in an
attempt to destroy an existing culture, and in the process to make a people
more docile and less likely to cause problems for the Soviet empire.
Murray wondered: does libertarianism require me to
support this, much less to celebrate it? Or might there be more to the
immigration question after all?
And here Murray posed the problem just as I have: in a
fully private-property society, people would have to be invited onto whatever
property they traveled through or settled on.
If every piece of land in a country were owned by some
person, group, or corporation, this would mean that no person could enter
unless invited to enter and allowed to rent or purchase property. A totally
privatized country would be as closed as the particular property owners
desire. It seems clear, then, that the regime of open borders that exists de
facto in the U.S. amd Western Europe really amounts to a compulsory opening
by the central state, the state in charge of all streets and public land
areas, and does not genuinely reflect the wishes of the proprietors.
In the current situation, on the other hand, immigrants
have access to public roads, public transportation, public buildings, and so
on. Combine this with the state’s other curtailments of private property
rights, and the result is artificial demographic shifts that would not occur
in a free market. Property owners are forced to associate and do business
with individuals they might otherwise avoid.
“Commercial property owners such as stores, hotels,
and restaurants are no longer free to exclude or restrict access as they see
fit,” writes Hans. “Employers can no longer hire or fire who they wish. In
the housing market, landlords are no longer free to exclude unwanted tenants.
Furthermore, restrictive covenants are compelled to accept members and
actions in violation of their very own rules and regulations.”
Hans continues:
By admitting someone onto its territory, the state also
permits this person to proceed on public roads and lands to every domestic
resident’s doorsteps, to make use of all public facilities and services (such
as hospitals and schools), and to access every commercial establishment,
employment, and residential housing, protected by a multitude of
nondiscrimination laws.
It is rather unfashionable to express concern for the
rights of property owners, but whether the principle is popular or not,
a transaction between two people should not occur unless both of those people
want it to. This is the very core of libertarian principle.
In order to make sense of all this and reach the
appropriate libertarian conclusion, we have to look more closely at what
public property really is and who, if anyone, can be said to be its true
owner. Hans has devoted some of his own work to precisely this question.
There are two positions we must reject: that public property is owned by the
government, or that public property is unowned, and is therefore comparable
to land in the state of nature, before individual property titles to
particular parcels of land have been established.
Certainly we cannot say public property is owned by the
government, since government may not legitimately own anything. Government
acquires its property by force, usually via the intermediary of taxation. A
libertarian cannot accept that kind of property acquisition as morally
legitimate, since it involves the initiation of force (the extraction of tax
dollars) on innocent people. Hence government’s pretended property titles are
illegitimate.
But neither can we say that public property is unowned.
Property in the possession of a thief is not unowned, even if at the moment
it does not happen to be held by the rightful owner. The same goes for
so-called public property. It was purchased and developed by means of money
seized from the taxpayers. They are the true owners.
(This, incidentally, was the correct way to approach
de-socialization in the former communist regimes of eastern Europe. All those
industries were the property of the people who had been looted to build them,
and those people should have received shares in proportion to their
contribution, to the extent it could have been determined.)
In an anarcho-capitalist world, with all property
privately owned, “immigration” would be up to each individual property owner
to decide. Right now, on the other hand, immigration decisions are made by a
central authority, with the wishes of property owners completely disregarded.
The correct way to proceed, therefore, is to decentralize decision-making on
immigration to the lowest possible level, so that we approach ever more
closely the proper libertarian position, in which individual property owners
consent to the various movements of peoples.
Ralph Raico, our great libertarian historian, once wrote:
Free immigration would appear to be in a different
category from other policy decisions, in that its consequences permanently
and radically alter the very composition of the democratic political body
that makes those decisions. In fact, the liberal order, where and to the
degree that it exists, is the product of a highly complex cultural
development. One wonders, for instance, what would become of the liberal
society of Switzerland under a regime of “open borders.”
Switzerland is in fact an interesting example. Before the
European Union got involved, the immigration policy of Switzerland approached
the kind of system we are describing here. In Switzerland, localities decided
on immigration, and immigrants or their employers had to pay to admit a
prospective migrant. In this way, residents could better ensure that their
communities would be populated by people who would add value and who would
not stick them with the bill for a laundry list of “benefits.”
Obviously, in a pure open borders system, the Western
welfare states would simply be overrun by foreigners seeking tax dollars. As
libertarians, we should of course celebrate the demise of the welfare state.
But to expect a sudden devotion to laissez faire to be the likely outcome of
a collapse in the welfare state is to indulge in naïveté of an especially
preposterous kind.
Can we conclude that an immigrant should be considered
“invited” by the mere fact that he has been hired by an employer? No, says
Hans, because the employer does not assume the full cost associated with his
new employee. The employer partially externalizes the costs of that employee
on the taxpaying public:
Equipped with a work permit, the immigrant is allowed to
make free use of every public facility: roads, parks, hospitals, schools, and
no landlord, businessman, or private associate is permitted to discriminate
against him as regards housing, employment, accommodation, and association.
That is, the immigrant comes invited with a substantial fringe benefits
package paid for not (or only partially) by the immigrant employer (who
allegedly has extended the invitation), but by other domestic proprietors as
taxpayers who had no say in the invitation whatsoever.
These migrations, in short, are not market outcomes. They
would not occur on a free market. What we are witnessing are examples of
subsidized movement. Libertarians defending these mass migrations as if they
were market phenomena are only helping to discredit and undermine the true
free market.
Moreover, as Hans points out, the “free immigration”
position is not analogous to free trade, as some libertarians have
erroneously claimed. In the case of goods being traded from one place to
another, there is always and necessarily a willing recipient. The same
is not true for “free immigration.”
To be sure, it is fashionable in the US to laugh at words
of caution about mass immigration. Why, people made predictions about
previous waves of immigration, we’re told, and we all know those didn’t come
true. Now for one thing, those waves were all followed by swift and
substantial immigration reductions, during which time society adapted to
these pre-welfare state population movements. There is virtually no prospect
of any such reductions today. For another, it is a fallacy to claim that
because some people incorrectly predicted a particular outcome at a
particular time, therefore that outcome is impossible, and anyone issuing
words of caution about it is a contemptible fool.
The fact is, politically enforced multiculturalism has an
exceptionally poor track record. The 20th century affords failure after
predictable failure. Whether it’s Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, the Soviet
Union, or Pakistan and Bangladesh, or Malaysia and Singapore, or the
countless places with ethnic and religious divides that have not yet been
resolved to this day, the evidence suggests something rather different from
the tale of universal brotherhood that is such a staple of leftist folklore.
No doubt some of the new arrivals will be perfectly
decent people, despite the US government’s lack of interest in encouraging
immigration among the skilled and capable. But some will not. The three great
crime waves in US history – which began in 1850, 1900, and 1960 – coincided
with periods of mass immigration.
Crime isn’t the only reason people may legitimately wish
to resist mass immigration. If four million Americans showed up in Singapore,
that country’s culture and society would be changed forever. And no, it is
not true that libertarianism would in that case require the people of
Singapore to shrug their shoulders and say it was nice having our society while
it lasted but all good things must come to an end. No one in Singapore would
want that outcome, and in a free society, they would actively prevent it.
In other words, it’s bad enough we have to be looted,
spied on, and kicked around by the state. Should we also have to pay for the
privilege of cultural destructionism, an outcome the vast majority of the
state’s taxpaying subjects do not want and would actively prevent if they
lived in a free society and were allowed to do so?
The very cultures that the incoming migrants are said to
enrich us with could not have developed had they been constantly bombarded
with waves of immigration by peoples of radically different cultures. So the
multicultural argument doesn’t even make sense.
It is impossible to believe that the U.S. or Europe will
be a freer place after several more decades of uninterrupted mass
immigration. Given the immigration patterns that the US and EU governments
encourage, the long-term result will be to make the constituencies for
continued government growth so large as to be practically unstoppable.
Open-borders libertarians active at that time will scratch their heads and
claim not to understand why their promotion of free markets is having so
little success. Everybody else will know the answer.
This talk was delivered at the Mises
Circle in Phoenix, AZ, on November 7,
2015.
