TGIF: No One Has a Right to Make Immigration Policy

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says "no one has a right to immigrate" to the United States. "We determine as Americans," he says, "what type of immigration system benefits our country. When you're doing immigration, it's not for their benefit as foreigners. It's for your benefit as Americans. So if there's legal immigration that's harming America, we shouldn't do that either."

I'd turn that around and say that no one, including a state legislature, has a right to forbid or restrict immigration, the peaceful movement of individuals from outside to inside America. That doesn't mean that landowners cannot set rules for who enters their own property. That is not immigration policy.

We're talking about a political concept. You can see this in DeSantis's words "We determine as Americans." Apart from immigration, "we" do not "determine as Americans" who can and cannot come to my home. I do that as the owner. Normally I need no one's permission to invite or exclude. (It's more complicated in the business context, where association can be legally required rather than forbidden.) But if the person I wish to invite lacks the government's permission to be in the country, then it's a different story. That's not a natural limitation on a normal and natural right. It's the result of a decision by a group of politicians, a decision that may well conflict with what many people want to do. How dare the politicians interfere?

DeSantis says that a good immigration policy should benefit the country, or "Americans." It's hard to miss the conservative collectivism in theory and elitism in practice. The collectivism lies in what appears to be decision-making not by individuals, but by a purported entity, namely, the "country." What about dissenters? They don't matter. What counts, presumably, is the Rousseauian general will. Dissenters must be forced to be "free" by going along with the majority. In theory the majority rules.

But the elitism lies in the fact that majorities don't really rule. They pick the officeholders (although not the bureaucrats), but what happens next can hardly be called rule by the majority because what the majority may want on a given issue must pass through a very thick filter before it becomes enacted. That filter is administered by special interests inside and outside of the government that typically have preferences that can differ vastly from the majority of voters. To keep the people in the dark about this, those interests not only lie and propagandize, but they also obfuscate and use other tactics to make it difficult for the people to know what the government is really doing or to change it if they find out. (Charlotte Twight's Dependent on D.C.: The Rise of Federal Control over the Lives of Ordinary Americans spells out the theory and history of this.)

The upshot is that DeSantis's position -- which is widely shared on the right and left-- is incoherent. "America" does not and could not make immigration policy. Democracy is a facade that blocks our view of reality.

But even if "America" could make the policy, it would be unjust, not to mention self-defeating, to block or restrict immigration. No one, not even a majority of congressmen backed by a president, has the right to tell individuals, wherever they were born, that they cannot consensually enter other people's property to live, rent, buy, work, or otherwise associate peacefully. Even if a lot of people band together, they can have no right to block free exchanges between Americans and foreigners. A group cannot have any rights that its individual members do not have. Zero multiplied by any number is still zero. So "America" has no right to keep immigrants out. The right to move about while respecting other people's rights is universal, and anyone is innocent until charged and proven guilty. The Declaration of Independence speaks of rights that precede government as belonging not only to Americans but to all people. Those rights include the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What's so hard to understand about that?

The idea that the country ought to control immigration should disturb advocates of individual liberty. According to classical liberal principles, a country is not a country club with a membership committee. Rather, it's a free association where individuals and their associates may live and prosper in peace. And they are left in peace unless they harm other people's bodies or steal or damage their belongings. If one of them wants to sell to, rent to, employ, or befriend someone whom others regard as an outsider, no one has a right to interfere.

If anyone does interfere, he's not only interfering with the "outsider", he's also interfering with "insiders." It can't be otherwise, as political scientist Chandran Kukathas points out. Kukathas "put[s] freedom at the centre of the immigration question. At stake are the liberty of citizens and other residents of the free society and therefore the free society itself. To put it simply, immigration controls are controls on people. and it is not possible to control some people without controlling others. More to the point, it is not possible to control outsiders (aliens, foreigners, would-be immigrants) without controlling insiders as well…. The conclusion ... is that if we value freedom–as we should–we ought to be wary of immigration control."

Going further, Kukathas challenges the view that society is “made up of members“ and that it's “some kind of unit comprised largely of people who belong together in some way, and whose belonging entitles them to determine who may or may not become a part of that unit, or indeed even enter the geographic space or territory it occupies.”

"The thought running through this book [Immigration and Freedom]," he writes, "is that membership is an ideal that is not only overrated but also dangerous from the perspective of freedom. It is at odds with the idea of people living together freely, for it subordinates that freedom to an altogether different ideal–one that elevates conformity and control over other, freer, ways of being. If we are to live freely, we must be able to relate to one another not as members but as humans."

Where there are members, there must be nonmembers -- which licenses the politicians to do unlimited mischief. The young century has taught this lesson well.

DeSantis and all others who think "America" can forbid or restrict immigration without violating the natural rights of both foreigners and Americans, or without reducing all our own well-being, are knowingly or unknowingly mistaken. Once again we're being ruled by presumptuous social engineers, cheered on by unreflective supporters.

TGIF: Has Libertarianism Passed Its Sell-By Date?

Ron DeSantis, who could be the next president of the United States, made his views frighteningly clear: "We understand that freedom is not just about the absence of restrictions.... I think we have to understand that the threats to freedom are not simply as a result of what happens in legislatures. Yes, you've got to win those fights. The left is trying to impose its agenda through a wide range of arteries in our society, including corporate America."

On another occasion he said, "Fighting for freedom is not easy because the threats to freedom are more complex and more widespread than in the past. The threats can come from entrenched bureaucrats in D.C., jet-setters in Davos, and corporations wielding public power."

Why do I call this frightening? Because DeSantis, although he started his political career as a limited-government advocate, has abandoned that position for an activist conservatism that is becoming more prominent. He has gone from budget hawk to culture warrior. (He has long been a war hawk, though lately he's voiced doubts about the U.S. proxy war against Russia.)

He is especially eager to use the power of the government, as he has shown in Florida, to fight woke cultural positions from public schools to private corporations like Disney. I raise this not because I think the champions of woke culture are right -- far from it -- but because DeSantis is perfectly willing to build up the government to face down forces that themselves have looked to government to impose their preferences on people. He's done it as governor of Florida (often ineffectively), and we have every reason to think he'd do it as president.

Whether he knows it or not, DeSantis is voicing an old and mistaken objection to the laissez-faire libertarian philosophy. It's an objection I'm hearing more frequently from right and left. It is that the philosophy of indivdiudal liberty and constrained government -- the original liberal project -- has become irrelevant. There's some dishonesty here because it implies that the critics once found that philosophy relevant. But never mind that.

Why isn't it relevant? Because, they say or imply, it does not address new threats to freedom. Here's why that's an old complaint: for decades people who opposed free markets but remained attached to other parts of classical liberalism (freedom of conscience and toleration) liked to say that Adam Smith made his case for the "system of natural liberty" back when the government was the only threat to the individual and the separation of economy and state was the only answer. But now things have changed, those critics continued, because the new threat is no longer the government but the corporations. Today's right has broadened the list of threats to include academia, the old mass media, the new digital-age media, and other institutions. (I've critiqued that old case before.)

What both forms of that objection miss is that the new threats are derived from the old one. It's "the dangerous derivative." Just as "corporate power" would be impossible without government power (see Adam Smith's view), so those other forms of power would be impossible -- or certainly much less formidable -- without government power. If you look closely, you can see this principle in horrifying action with the housing bust and financial fiasco of 2008. (See my "Wall Street Couldn't Have Done It Alone.")

What explains this principle of derivation? It is the government's exclusive "legitimated" power to initiate force: the assumed authority to give orders compelling people who have violated no rights to do some things and not do other things. Only individuals who hold certain positions in government use compulsion legally. Try collecting charitable donations by force from your neighbors or preventing them from drinking alcohol or using heroin. You'll soon see the police, which of course are personnel of the government.

In those circumstances the people with the power -- of taxation most prominently but hardly exclusively -- inevitably will use it to subsidize some members of society and impede others. For libertarians and classical liberals, this is the root of class conflict. (Marx's version was a distortion of the liberal insight.) This will happen in a representative democracy, where providing goodies is crucial to assembling voter blocs, but it also happens in autocracies, because autocrats cannot go it alone.

Without secondary access to government power, private crusaders would be unable to impose their preferences on society. Conservatives miss this point and do not see the government as fundamentally flawed. They see something they don't like and immediately look to the government to stop it. In the process, they enable their opponents to use power against them later.

Why can't the conservatives see that without such access, those who aspire to force their dubious preferences would have to resort to persuasion, which apparently is what they don't want to do? If the government could not finance education, social and hard science, and other influential stations in society -- money that always comes with strings -- the link between opinion shapers and power would be broken. Those institutions would change from state-succored monopolies or oligopolies to competitive enterprises that would have to prove their worth every day because people would be free to take their money elsewhere. The revolving door between those institutions and government agencies would be blocked, preventing the rotation of activists from nongovernment institutions to bureaucracies where they can shower benefits on their pet causes.

Taxation is merely one way that this perverse situation comes about. The power to regulate peaceful conduct is key. When the social networks complied with "suggestions" from government personnel about deleting or suppressing inconvenient posts, the network executives knew they were at the mercy of the regulatory state. Social networks were not the only sort of firm that thought it prudent to comply with government requests.

Since government power remains the exclusive source of private institutional power, the government still should be the target of those who champion liberty. It is just wrong to think, as DeSantis and others do, that we need to increase the government's power to protect liberty. Even seemingly innocuous measures, such as the legislative prohibition of wierd subjects in schools, will necessarily be vaguely written and precedent-setting for causes that conservatives oppose. (Decentralized control of schools, if we can't have a separation of school and state immediately, would be better.) We should never forget Robert Higgs's lesson about the "ratchet effect": government easily grows, but it is tough to shrink it.