Richman, Liebowitz & Immigration

TGIF: Immigration vs. Settler Colonialism

The people performing those mind-boggling contortions to justify, on libertarian grounds, state violence against migrants without papers—restrictatarians, I call them—cite a 1994 article by Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) in support of their double-jointed acrobatics. Rothbard was correct about many things, but a position is not correct merely because Rothbard held it. I expect no disagreement over that.

As a general matter, Rothbard's importance to the shaping of the modern libertarian movement needs no documentation. He was accomplished in economics, social theory, and history. In his time, he was known as Mr. Libertarian, the guardian of the plumb line. (He was also my friend and, informally, my teacher.) His words carry much weight for people who love liberty. It's therefore appropriate to show why, in this case, in 1994, Rothbard was stunningly wrong about immigration, or the freedom to move.

TGIF: The Right to Move

If people individually own themselves and have a right to be free of aggressive force, then they have a right to change their location in ways consistent with other people's rights. Whether you call this moving around relocating, emigrating, or immigrating, doesn't much matter. The default position is that each individual may rightfully move to somewhere else permanently or temporarily.

Inside the United States, nobody questions this. People freely move from state to state, etc., sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. They need no one's permission.

Why should things be different when we talk about countries rather than smaller jurisdictions and when the individuals who do the moving are not recognized as citizens of the destination country? An opponent of the freedom to move might begin by rejecting self-ownership and nonaggression, so the argument with him would take place at that basic level. But what if the opponent of the freedom to move espouses support for self-ownership and nonaggression? That's a different kettle of fish.

Recent Writing in Defense of Free Immigration

"The Trumpian Ice Age: The Frigidity of Collectivism"

"Immigration Policy in an Nth-Best World"

"Free Movement Increases Wealth"

"Static Analysis Clouds Immigration Debate"

"More on Immigration and Public Property"

"Immigration Control Threatens the Rule of Law"

"Immigration and Free Association"

"Reverse Scapegoating in the Immigration Debate"

"Immigration and Liberty"

"No One Has a Right to Make Immigration Policy"

"Immigration Foes, What's the Beef?"

"Heartless Immigration Restrictions Need Replacing"

"Glenn Loury's Collectivist Immigration Policy"

"A Refreshing Way to Think about Immigration"

"The Logical Flaw in Immigration Law"

"Trump & Co.'s Vile Anti-Immigrationism"

"Immigration and Social Engineering"

Report Card

What's the problem? So far the Trump administration has been Pretti Good.

Parallax Views Podcast: The Government Murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti

J. G. Michael invited me on his podcast to talk about the U.S. immigration agents' recent murders of two American citizens in Minneapolis.

TGIF: The Trumpian ICE Age: The Frigidity of Collectivism

Welcome to the Trumpian ICE Age, a vivid lesson in the frigidity of collectivism. Take note, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Compared to Trump, you're a piker.

We've got a problem, and it's not just Houston's. It's the lawless, authoritarian, liberty-flouting Trump, who on all fronts grasps at maximum power—constitutional and statutory limits be damned. The fronts, so far, include immigration, drug prohibition, trade, corporate ownership, and everyday matters like oil prices, credit-card interest, pharmaceutical prices, and home sales. Trump is also eyeing medical insurance. Heaven help us. The guy doesn't have a pro-market sinew in his body. (For his "progressive" inclinations, see this.)

Most concerning of all is immigration, in which poorly recruited and poorly trained agents of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) conduct a reign of terror in a few selected "blue" cities, with more to come. Of course, the latest atrocity, as of this writing, took place in Minneapolis last week, where Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was executed—there's no other word—for failing to show respect to armed and masked ICE agents, cheerfully starting to drive away from an ICE checkpoint, where random people were being stopped for "immigration  checks." The killer violated ICE's own guidelines in at least two respects: he walked (obviously without fear) in front of Good's car, and he fired at her merely for leaving. Her last words, spoken softly and with a smile, as she began to drive away slowly, were, "I'm not mad at you guys."

“At a very minimum, that woman was very, very disrespectful to law enforcement,” Trump said, characteristically, after ICE man Jonathan Ross fired three shots, in under a second, into her car at close range. (Check the video for yourself.) Before that, Trump and his henchman (VP J.D. Vance) and henchwoman (Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem) had called Good a "domestic terrorist" and a "high-level agitator." The government later said Ross suffered internal bleeding and a bruise, supposedly from being bumped by Good's vehicle, but the video provides good reason to doubt that story. Trump and his people's reputation for veracity is negative. However one views the killing, we can be certain that it would not have happened had it not been for Trump's demagogic crusade to deport millions of people, the vast majority of whom live and work peacefully, because they lack government papers.

TGIF: Free Movement Increases Wealth

In a recent interview with Nathan Goodman of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Professor Michael Clemens, a GMU specialist in migration economics, put forth "a strange and striking fact about the world economy." A lower-skilled person's location in the world can make a significant difference in how much wealth he creates, not just for himself but for society in general.

According to Clemens, few people appreciate that, say, a poor shoeshiner in Haiti could earn far more money doing the same work in a wealthy American city because his customers, who are rich by world and historical standards, have much to gain by paying the Haitian to free up their time. By the law of comparative advantage, even a CEO who can shine shoes better than anyone would benefit from paying the shoeshiner.

That principle applies to any kind of work. The free movement of people from impoverished to affluent places increases wealth overall. That's why Clemens titled one of his scholarly papers "Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?" (Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2011).

As Clemens told Goodman:

It's not just taking a fixed quantity away from one person or group of people and giving it to another, a reallocation of resources; it creates value. It adds to aggregate prosperity. And when you have a world in which ... the exact same Haitian worker in Cap-Haitien can [perform] labor whose value is about $10 a day at home, but has a value of $10 an hour in the United States, that means that the same person over the course of a year could go from adding value that is valued by the world market at $3,000 a year to $30,000 a year.

Immigration restrictions leave money on the sidewalk. Clemens said that "those kinds of large changes add up quickly with even modest movements of people. It doesn't take a large movement of people across borders to add quite a lot to the world economy."

He described his scholarly paper this way:

 I just did a back-of-the-envelope calculation that was ... just a scenario to illustrate how large those gains are at the global level. And the bottom line is that even the movement of one in 20 people from poorest countries to much richer countries would add more value in aggregate to the world economy than the total elimination of ... all remaining barriers to goods trade and all remaining barriers to cross-border capital movement put together.... That was a ... calculation to suggest what is the impact of a marginal change in border regulations, and that impact is just vast.

Note well: the new increment of wealth from only one in 20 people in the poorest countries moving to rich countries would be greater than the increment produced by abolishing all restrictions on the global movement of products and capital. How can we afford to keep people out?

Immigration policy favors highly skilled workers, although Trump inexplicably proposes to charge $100,000 for H-1B visas. Unfortunately, the contributions of lower-skilled workers go largely unnoticed. Clemens has some interesting things to say about how such workers benefit us all. The reason is the complementarity of labor in a market economy. Workers in one line of production compete against similar workers, but they also complement the efforts of other workers. They add crucial value. Regarding the disparagement of lower-skilled immigrants, Clemens said:

[T]his is another area where there's just a lot of magical thinking.... Sure, Silicon Valley runs on programmers and highly educated entrepreneurs. What I wish people understood more is that Silicon Valley runs crucially on farm workers. It runs crucially on delivery workers and security workers and construction workers and childcare workers and many other essential inputs to that production process.

In other words, to produce great value, the highest-skilled people require a huge array of supporting goods and services produced by lower-skilled people. Without them the high-skilled workers' productive efforts would suffer or disappear. Here's how Clemens explained it:

The example I often give to students is a surgeon and a cleaner. There are zero people who want to have surgery in a dirty surgery room. There are essentially zero surgeons who are going to clean the surgery room. So there needs to be somebody to clean that surgery room if there's going to be any surgery, and it's not going to be the surgeon. That doesn't mean that the surgeon isn't essential to surgery, but the cleaner is equally essential to the surgery because my demand is zero for surgery in a dirty, bloody surgery room. And the necessity for workers at all levels of formal education and tacitly acquired skill[s] to complement each other is something that I wish were a greater part of the public discussion of immigration.

When you look at the wages of migrants, which reflect their marginal productivity relative to their best option, the surgeon earns more and the cleaner earns less. That doesn't mean that at the margin the economy only benefits from admitting marginal surgeons and never marginal cleaners. They are inputs to a joint production function that complement each other.

Someone is bound to respond that without immigrants, Americans would gain jobs. But, Clemens noted, research earlier in this century indicates that, perhaps counterintuitively, a crackdown on immigrant labor "eliminate[d] employment of native workers....  [T]he net effect was strongly negative." How so? "[B]y deterring business activity, by deterring the formation of new businesses and by encouraging the exit of existing businesses."

In other words, "small landscaping firms that just never get founded, and all of the US jobs that would be associated with that within the firm or outside the firm—to do the books for that landscaping firm, to deliver fuel or supplies to that landscaping firm—and all the ripple effects that would generate US employment in both inside and outside that firm are gone."

Markets are marvelous. Interference eventually harms us all.

TGIF: Immigration Control Threatens the Rule of Law

Immigration control strikes at the heart of the rule of law. That fact is badly unappreciated, even by some libertarians. If for no other reason, people who cherish individual liberty ought to be appalled by what the Trump administration is up to. Trump did not invent this unequivocal assault on a key protector of freedom—blame Congress for that—but never has the assault been so flagrant in America.

To see this, let's look at libertarian political philosopher Jacob T. Levy's 2018 article "The Rule of Law and Risk of Lawlessness." Levy wrote the article in response to the intensification of so-called border protection in the early days of the first Trump term, when children were separated from their parents and locked in cages. (Levy and Nathan Goodman recently discussed immigration and the rule of law in this Mercatus Center podcast.)

Levy begins his article by getting down to the basics of how freedom is protected in the classical-liberal tradition. This is a crucial point because it goes to the essence of the term limited government.

In public law and politics, the core meaning of the rule of law is this: that the executive branch of the government, in control of the violent agencies of state power and the tools of punishment, shall not use them lawlessly. It shall not imprison, execute, or otherwise punish except in accordance with prospective, promulgated law and trial conducted through fair and regular procedures. The writ of habeas corpus is the most famous instantiation of this value in the Anglo-American tradition, with medieval roots that early modern, protoliberal Whigs exaggerated into a full-blown centuries-old legal rule.

Liberty is not protected by magic or by abstractions. Protection requires concrete institutions and procedures to preclude arbitrary power. That is, it requires that politicians, judges, bureaucrats, and armed agents do and not do particular things. That's what we mean by the rule of law.

Citing Montesquieu's original and radical formulation of the classical-liberal approach to liberty-protecting governance, Levy notes that the rule of law importantly "included a separation of powers that distinguished judicial trial from executive punishment and an understanding of liberty as security from extrajudicial punishment.... [T]he key insight was that despotic states punish people even though they have broken no law, or never been properly convicted of it." A separation of powers implies checks and balances.

Montesquieu heavily influenced America's founders. Limitations and flawed implementation notwithstanding, we must credit the group of men who aimed at what John Adams called "a government of laws, not men." That had to be better than regimes of the past and future, such as those in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, in which the rule of law was not the objective. Despite some egregious exceptions, the rule of law has served us well. We would do well to understand that.

As Levy points out, critics miss the mark when they claim that rule-of-law procedures would be consistent even with bad law. Drawing on the theorists Lon Fuller and Judith Shklar, Levy responds, "This is not how terror states and totalitarian regimes function. They deliberately leave their whole populations at the mercy of the executive with its police, secret police, and paramilitary agencies."

In other words, "[W]hile the rule of law so conceived is not sufficient for a free and liberal society, it surely is necessary—and it goes some way toward preventing some of the greatest of political evils." That must not be forgotten. "Where people are constantly subject to the whim of the police and related agencies, they are not free. Even notionally very liberal laws do little good if state violence can be inflicted and bodies imprisoned without crimes or trials."

This brings us to immigration enforcement and a crucial choice. Levy sees "a real tension between the rule of law and what happens at or outside a country’s borders." (Leave war aside for this discussion.) Will the rule of law prevail or not?

Those borderline cases could be approached through the strategy of projecting the rule of law and liberal values out onto them as far as possible. But all too often the influence goes the other way: the lawlessness of the border undermines the rule of law and civil liberty within.

This is ominous not just for "undocumented" persons, but for citizens and legal residents too. "Even at the best of times," Levy writes, "border policing veers toward lawlessness: at the point of entry, the enforcement officer makes a basically unreviewable and processless decision to exclude by armed force. And these are not the best of times."

Those who want immigration ruthlessly controlled will argue that unauthorized border crossings and visa overstays foster lawlessness. Levy challenges that claim: "This circumstance is no more corrosive of the rule of law, however, than the fact that millions of American drivers speed on the highway every day without getting a ticket." Overstaying a visa is a civil violation; crossing a border without permission is a misdemeanor.

On the contrary, he continues, "The threat of lawlessness comes instead from a president" who wants his executive-branch agencies to be free to act unimpeded by judicial review of arrests (by masked agents), detentions (in perilous facilities), and deportations (including to third countries with horrible human-rights records). Levy reminds us that the immigration courts are part of the executive branch (Article II of the Constitution). They are within the independent judiciary (Article III). As Trump put it in 2018, "When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring [sic] them back from where they came." (Emphasis added.) Levy writes:

Mass expulsions without judicial oversight or procedural protection would be not only a violation of international law and of the U.S. Constitution (which guarantees due process to persons, not only citizens). It would also be a grave threat to the liberty-as-security of all American residents. Trump proposed to let the lawlessness of border control seep into domestic American space.

This is no mere purple prose. And it is more than a slippery-slope argument. The area of the country within 100 miles of the borders and coasts is under the jurisdiction of Customs and Border Protection (CBP). That's where two-thirds of the residents of the United States live. What does that mean? CBP "holds expanded authority in that zone to conduct searches and seizures, create checkpoints, and ask for papers, in ways that would be illegal for ordinary police," Levy writes. "The only-partial rule of law at the border has already been projected inward."

Whither the Fourth and Fifth Amendments?

Do you think the current Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, detentions, and deportations have no effect on peaceful life in America? What about the abduction of people who have done nothing more than look for low-skilled work at a Home Depot parking lot, or who write or say things the president dislikes? "[I]n states and localities without the protection of sanctuary status," Levy writes, "residents of Latino neighborhoods often fear calling the police even to protect themselves against violence lest the police begin checking citizenship status." This reluctance extends to seeking medical care for their children and so on. Needless to say, this toxic legal environment also licenses unscrupulous private individuals to blackmail and exploit innocent people.

Libertarians compromise themselves and their honorable philosophy when they applaud or merely ignore how "the cruelty, arbitrariness, and militarization of border policing undermine the rule of law within—through the sacrifice of civil liberties within the hundred-mile zone, the authorization of a terrorizing internal police force outside the normal boundaries of law in ICE, the imprisonment of the innocent, and the threat of deportations without due process."

With few exceptions, Americans have not had to worry about the midnight knock on the door from the secret police or extrajudicial detention and expulsion. Without exaggeration, we can say that Trump's immigration policy moves us in that direction. The terror police state can happen here.

Congress, you have some laws to repeal.

Immigration Control and the Rule of Law

If you think that immigration control does not strike at the heart of the rule of law, you need to listen to this:

TGIF: Immigration and Free Association

Immigration. Despite other headline-grabbing news, this issue persists.

How could it not? Trump's masked goon squad, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), abducts peaceful people off the streets, from their workplaces, and from Home Depot parking lots, then shuttles them without due process to detention centers, including the ominously named Alligator Alcatraz, and prepares to deport them to third countries deficient, shall we say, in their devotion to individual rights. Many detainees have been unable to contact family and attorneys. Even American citizens have been swept up, subjecting them to the trauma of confinement until they demonstrate that they "belong here." Trump's quota of 3,000 detainees per day creates the most perverse of incentives for ICE agents. He reportedly has berated ICE because the arrest numbers are too low.

Need I say that this should not be happening in America, and Americans should not forget that it is happening? Fortunately, some glimmers of hope penetrate the dark clouds. The latest to come to my attention is the reported bad morale among ICE agents. Apparently, they don't enjoy "arresting gardeners." Why don't they quit?

Moreover, recent polls indicate that a growing number of Americans dislike how Trump is handling immigration. Naively, they seem surprised that Trump did not confine his hunt to real criminals (that is, murderers, muggers, rapists, thieves, etc.) but is going after people who hold jobs, live normal lives, behave neighborly, and bother no one. (And, alas, pay taxes.) We're also seeing federal district judges smack down ICE raids and Trump's autocratic bid to rewrite the Constitution on birthright citizenship. (See the 14th Amendment.)

For example, ABC reported the other day, "A Los Angeles federal judge issued a pair of temporary restraining orders today limiting the ability of U.S. immigration-enforcement agents to detain people absent reasonable suspicion beyond merely their race, ethnicity or occupation, while also requiring that detainees be given access to legal counsel." (Emphasis added.) No profiling, that is. It's a start. Yet it still might be good policy for people with accents and darker skin tones to avoid Home Depot parking lots, car washes, restaurant kitchens, and farms. 

We can hope that future generations will look back on this terror with shock and shame.

I've heard it said that libertarians should favor government control of immigration in principle (and so such roundups) because free movement constitutes "forced integration." Specifically, it has been said that laws against discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations violate our freedom of association and, hence, a property owner's right to exclude immigrants, among others. Freedom of association, of course, should be respected, and it logically includes the freedom not to associate, or the freedom to exclude, even when it takes irrational and bigoted forms. Freedom must be defended—even when it is exercised obnoxiously. Absolutely true.

But would open borders increase coercion in America by prohibiting discrimination and exclusion? Before I answer that question, let me pose another one. If all the antidiscrimination laws were repealed tomorrow, would the libertarian restrictionists withdraw their opposition to open borders? I think not. 

As a practical matter, free immigration under today's laws would not effectively compel individuals to associate. Open-borders champion Bryan Caplan explains why in his newest collection of blog posts, Pro-Market and Pro-Business: Essays on Laissez Faire ("Association, Exclusion, Liberty, and the Status Quo").

Caplan writes,

One of my conservative friends keeps telling me that, “The right to associate is the right to exclude.” As a libertarian, I agree.  But the subtext of his slogan is that libertarians focus far too much on government regulations that abridge the freedom of association—and far too little on government regulations that abridge the freedom of exclusion. His claim, in fact, is that the only feasible way to protect the freedom to exclude is to restrict the freedom to associate. Since discrimination laws make it impossible for voluntary contracts to keep foreigners out of a neighborhood, for example, it’s OK for immigration laws to keep foreigners out of the country entirely.

Some otherwise-libertarians make the same argument. Since we are not free to exclude foreigners from our personal affairs, we must not let them in.

That prompts Caplan's question: "To what extent do existing policies that restrict freedom of association and exclusion actually bind? In other words, how different would the modern U.S. look if people were free to live, work, and play anywhere if and only if the property owner consented?" He responds:

Let’s start with exclusion.  Many existing laws restrict the right to refuse to hire workers and serve customers. In real estate, restrictive covenants and home owners’ associations are common, but if you try to use them for racial exclusion, courts won’t enforce them.  Single-gender clubs also occasionally face lawsuits.

I’m against all of these limitations on the right to exclude, but how much do they actually change behavior in the modern U.S.?

His answer: "Only slightly, for a long list of reasons."

Among his reasons are: businesses want money too badly to exclude people without good cause; most people frown on exclusion and would feel funny about a business that practiced it; and alternative methods of exclusion are available, such as "high prices..., dress codes..., and educational credentials." Where there's a will, there's a way.

"I don’t deny, he says, "that laws against exclusion occasionally have important effects.  But their main effect in the modern U.S. economy isn’t to reduce exclusion, but to pressure businesses" to find workarounds.

So much for the consequences of mostly paper violations of freedom of exclusion. What about the consequences of government limits on free association, that is, immigration control? Remember, border restrictions prevent Americans from selling to, renting to, buying from, employing, befriending, dating, and marrying would-be immigrants.

"Indeed," Caplan responds, "they [border restrictions] probably have a bigger effect than all other regulations combined."

It’s simple. Billions of people around the world live on a few dollars a day or less.  Under open borders, tens of millions of them would migrate to the U.S. every year.  Remember: Even if you’re an illiterate peasant from Bangladesh, credit markets and/or employers would be happy to front the money for airfare.

This immigration flow wouldn’t stabilize until real estate prices massively increased and low-skilled wages drastically declined. The U.S. population could easily increase by 50% in a decade. New cities would blanket the country. The level of output would skyrocket—and its composition would rapidly change, too. Whether you love this vision or hate it, you can’t deny that free association would radically and rapidly reshape the face of America.

The upshot: "restrictions on the right to associate are massive, and there is enormous pent-up demand to migrate. Hundreds of millions of people want to move here, landlords want to rent to them, employers want to hire them—but the law won’t allow it.... While restrictions on exclusion are occasionally irksome, they rarely ruin lives. Immigration laws, in contrast, usually condemn their victims to life—and often early death—in the Third World."

Like free trade, free immigration is overwhelmingly win-win.

 

TGIF: On "Public Property"

A dubious theory held by some libertarians has been knocking about. It goes something like this:

The claim that government-controlled land is actually unowned—and thus not properly subject to government rulemaking—would lead to consequences that reasonable people would find abhorrent. Therefore, in the U.S. case, such land should be regarded as owned by Americans with the government as their representative. While privatization is the best course, it is unlikely to occur anytime soon. In the meantime, the government should make policy as though it were a private owner or the agent of private owners. For example, if the politicians think that private owners would want to restrict immigration, that is, keep them off the land, the politicians should do that.

Is government-held land owned or unowned? It is not a simple question. As Simon Guenzl reminds us, some of that land was obtained from its rightful owners by force through eminent domain. Those owners or their heirs could probably be identified. But much government-held land was obtained not by theft but through preemption. Since the government forbade and continues to forbid homesteading, the land has never had private owners. Hence, no owners could be identified. (The complicated matter of the Indians must be reserved for another day.) Guenzl thus distinguishes between state-claimed land and state-seized land.

Stolen land should not be regarded as unowned; it was taken from its owners. The government took it by force (even if it paid some cash), and now it is owned (controlled) by the government—but illegitimately.

What about the never-owned land? Is it unowned? Control is at the core of ownership. The government controls the land. Therefore, it makes more sense to regard it as illegitimately owned rather than as unowned. (How to privatize state-held land is not today's topic.)

Reasonable people will agree that the consequences of treating government-held land as unowned would be substantially negative. The homeless, drug-soaked, unsanitary encampments on public parks and sidewalks have degraded life in some "progressive" big cities. Responsible, self-supporting individuals and their families can't simply walk to shops and enjoy other amenities. That should not stand. Protest demonstrations have sometimes blocked major roads, impeding ambulances and the normal conduct of life.

We may thus regard the unowned status of government-held land as seriously problematic, and I am happy to reject it. The question, then, is: having rejected that status, must we prefer that the government make policy as though it were the private owner?

I'm not sure what that means, but I can't see how it would be possible under any interpretation. Sometimes it's said to mean that the government ought to act on behalf of the true private owners. "How would private owners want the land to be used?" I've already shown that much of the land never had owners. The state would have to imagine how private owners, had they existed, would have wanted the land to be used. But how can politicians and bureaucrats know that? Maybe those imaginary owners wouldn't want schools or libraries on their land.

With government-seized land, a similar problem would confront the policymakers. Moreover, why assume that all the dispossessed owners (if alive) would want the same thing? The socialist-calculation problem is relevant here. People don't really know what they will do until they confront alternatives, prices, and opportunity costs of particular circumstances. How arrogant for the politicians to presume to know what hypothetical people would want! How realistic is "the collectivist notion of the state [making policy] that emulates the market decisions and choices of the taxpayers?" Walter Block and Anthony Gregory write. Not very, I say.

A further problem plagues this approach. Along with the federal government, state, county, and local governments have seized land under eminent domain. Why should the federal government make policy for those lower levels of government, which would also be obliged to legislate on behalf of hypothetical owners? It's an all-around mess.

So where do we go from here? Again and alas, privatization is off the table for now. (How to privatize government assets is no easy question; thankfully, I don't have to deal with it today.)

Before answering my question, I'll raise a matter that is closely related: safety. Part of what governments at all levels have done is reserve to themselves the power to safeguard the people they rule. To be sure, governments endanger us all the time, but they also protect us in various ways, however ineptly. Some police activity protects innocent people from murderers, rapists, and thieves. Politicians have a (self-)interest in this. I remember a button that libertarians sold at conventions: "Don't Steal. Government Hates Competition." Officials will tend to want to discourage private criminals from attacking us if for no other reason than they want the booty for themselves. Plus, they want to be re-elected.

Since the government has forced itself on us as our protector, it seems obligated to carry out that function (in ways that don't further violate individual rights). Here's an imperfect analogy. A pilot friend with a small plane takes you on a flight. At 10,000 feet he informs you he's about to parachute home and leave the flying to you, whom he knows can't fly. (Some friend.) I submit that this would be a serious breach. The same with a surgeon who opens his patient's chest and then decides he'd rather be playing golf.

Similarly, if the government, without notice, closed all the police departments and courts without giving us a chance to form private protection agencies, we'd be in a right fix, especially the poorest, most vulnerable parts of town.

Thus, the government owes the taxpayers protection from private aggression. Among other things, its agents may properly keep public facilities free of real threats, for example, adult strangers using a bathroom in a public school. Further, the state is obligated to forbid aggressive interference with peaceful people who use the facilities as intended. Protest demonstrations that block streets are properly banned, not because of their views, but because others have a right to use the streets too. Noisy, grossly unwashed people may be excluded from public libraries. And so on. (As always, hard cases can arise.)

But assertions of state power that have objectives other than safe and appropriate use should not be allowed to sneak in under what I call the "nondisruption principle (NDP). Immigration control is an example. The general power to restrict immigration is unrelated to keeping "public" facilities safe and usable.

Concerning "public" property, then, we have two conflicting standards for how the government should behave. The first is that it should minimize its own aggression against non-aggressors, whoever they are, and permit the maximum peaceful use of "public" facilities as they were intended to be used. If you violate no one's rights, you're okay.

The second standard is that the government should seek to represent the hypothetical owners of currently government-held land. As we've seen, that is impossible. This standard is often invoked to justify restrictions on immigration, but it could easily license state aggression regarding drugs, guns, gambling, prostitution, and religion, restrictions libertarians rightly oppose. There is no limiting principle. Once you allow the standard to control immigration, you have no grounds to oppose it in other matters. The second standard is tantamount to assuming the government legitimately owns all the property it controls.

Defenders of the second standard will try to defend their position by claiming that people who have not paid taxes in the past have no claim to use public facilities now. That proves too much. Interstate travel entails people using facilities they have not contributed to previously. Children have not paid taxes. In fact, today's taxpayers once used the facilities before they had paid any taxes. Were they free-riding? But here's another problem: people who relocate (from wherever) will, alas, soon start paying sales, excise, income, property, and gasoline taxes and hence contribute to the upkeep of the facilities, including those they'll never use.

So, is it the case, as some have said, that libertarians have nothing reasonable to say about public property except that it should be privatized—that there are no right answers in a statist world? Resoundingly, I say no.

Immigration Conversation with Jacob Hornberger

Some Recent Social Media Posts

(Check back periodically to see what I've added.)

If the choice is between a welfare state and a police state (I despise both), I know which one I would choose.

He who wills the end, wills the means. Serious immigration restriction requires police-state measures.

Simply put, if you want what others have produced, you have to offer them something they want in trade.

Border crossing without government permission is a victimless crime.

Think of all the horrible things that can happen in the absence of a total surveillance state. Is that an argument for the surveillance state?

If you can't see the difference between a Stop sign at an intersection and a Do Not Enter sign at a border, you need an eye doctor.

Libertarians don't bat an eye over law-breakers who violate no rights. But when it's a person without papers -- watch out!

Statists have long tried to scare people into supporting big government. Today even some libertarians do it. It's a topsy-turvy world.

Dear Free Speech Absolutists: I assume it's okay with you if businessmen discuss pricing strategies among themselves. It's fine by me.

What's the point of being the exceptional nation if you can't throw your weight around?

The anti-free-immigrationists know where they want to go and are prepared to pay any price in other people's freedom to get there. The questions are: why do they want to go there, and what aren't they telling us?

Life is inherently risky. In a world of nation-states, do we want a state powerful enough to address all conceivable risks? If so, what else is it likely to be capable of?

When ICE agents burst into restaurant kitchens to round up people without papers, are they trespassers? How about when agents take property by eminent domain to build border fences? Is that trespass and theft? Immigrants don't do that.

Anti-state anti-immigrationists don't hate the state enough.

The essential case for liberty has never been a matter of data. (Sorry, consequentialists.) It's been a matter of moral principle.

If drugs were legalized, more people would use "public" health services. Same if people could ride motorcycles without helmets or ride in cars without seatbelts. Should libertarians oppose those freedoms because people might use tax-funded programs?

The regime intends to rid America of all "undocumented" persons. But a free society would not have *documented* persons. That's how far down we've gone.

Welfare recipients are not aggressors. The aggressors are the tax collectors and the politicians who empower them.

Libertarian border guardians say there's no freedom to move because other people own property. (We never thought of that one!) By the same standard, there's no freedom of speech.

If capitalism is about survival of the fittest, why do capitalists mass produce inexpensive eyeglasses, hearing aids, etc.? Why do they promote the flourishing of the "unfit"?

Libertarian border guardians say there's no freedom to move because other people own property. (We never thought of that one!) By the same standard, there's no freedom of speech.

How great is this: You can get fabulously rich by providing valued goods and services to the masses. Wow!

If you had told people that [see above] a few hundred years ago, you'd have been locked up in a looney bin.

The Abduction of Mahmoud Khalil

The Trump administration's abduction and threatened deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a 30-year-old green-card holder and permanent legal resident of the United States, is horrifying not just for him and his pregnant wife, a U.S. citizen, but as a sign of things to come. Khalil, who is a Syrian-born Algerian of Palestinian descent, has been detained pending deportation without being charged with any crime against persons or property, but because he engaged in speech and other peaceful activities on behalf of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. He was a graduate student at Columbia University at the time.

The government says Khalil's "presence or activities in the United States would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States." That's absurd. It also says Khalil supports Hamas but provides no evidence. That is all outrageously vague, which is how authoritarian governments always operate. Even speech supporting Hamas is protected under the Supreme Court's 1969 Brandenburg decision (not to mention natural law). If he's suspected of committing a specific crime, the government should charge him and give him his day in court. Instead, Khalil was handcuffed and seized at his New York City home and taken to Louisiana where he is to appear before an immigration judge.

However, the system of checks and balances is not dead yet. According to Reuters, "U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman had temporarily blocked Mahmoud Khalil's deportation [last] week, and extended the prohibition on Wednesday in a written order following a hearing in Manhattan federal court to allow himself more time to consider whether the arrest was unconstitutional."

It should be noted that the Trump action is a predictable result of the premises that free-immigration opponents subscribe to. Defenders of the action like Secretary of State Marco Rubio hold that Khalil never had a right to be in the United States but was merely permitted initial entry as a guest. Therefore, Rubio and others argue, the government can revoke that permission retroactively, notwithstanding his change in status from student-visa holder to green-card holder.

That's where bad premises take you.

TGIF: The H-1B Controversy

Does anyone still believe that the market process should set prices, including wages? Apparently not. Take the controversy surrounding the H-1B visa, the program that "permits" employers to hire highly educated and skilled foreign workers, such as hi-tech personnel.

Judging by the narrow range, everyone involved in the debate is a social engineer. Only three options are on the menu: continue the program, reform it to prevent its misuse, and end it. What's missing? The "let the market set wages" option Sorry, that's not on offer.

Let's start with how the U.S. Department of Labor describes the program:

The H-1B program applies to employers seeking to hire nonimmigrant aliens as workers in specialty occupations or as fashion models of distinguished merit and ability. A specialty occupation is one that requires the application of a body of highly specialized knowledge and the attainment of at least a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent. The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States.

The law establishes certain standards in order to protect similarly employed U.S. workers from being adversely affected by the employment of the nonimmigrant workers, as well as to protect the H-1B nonimmigrant workers.

Of course, the government has something to say about wages:

Employers must attest to the Department of Labor that they will pay wages to the H-1B nonimmigrant workers that are at least equal to the actual wage paid by the employer to other workers with similar experience and qualifications for the job in question, or the prevailing wage for the occupation in the area of intended employment – whichever is greater.

Is anyone offended that in a country that thinks itself free, the government decrees that employers need permission to hire "nonimmigrant aliens" and can get it only if certain conditions apply? "Nonimmigrant aliens" are people, in case anyone needs reminding. How's that good for a country supposedly devoted to freedom and free enterprise?

The standard answer is that those jobs are American jobs. However, if capitalist entrepreneurs want the freedom to hire consenting workers living abroad, the jobs obviously are not American jobs. Who has the right to declare them otherwise? A job is a continuing transaction between an employer and an employee. It has no national label. To insist that it does have such a label because the employer operates on U.S. soil is to accept a premise that requires proof, namely, that the government or a majority of voters owns the country. That premise glaringly clashes with the principle of liberty. It makes freedom a delusion.

When left free, the market sets prices, including wages, through the process that emerges from countless choices by individuals collaborating to achieve their personal goals. These choices include selling, renting, and buying material resources and products. Supply and demand generate a vast money-price system that enables everyone to make plans using economic calculation, as Ludwig von Mises long ago spelled out. Without calculation we could not make more than the simplest plans or judge a project's success or failure—through profit or loss—afterward. Waste would abound In a world of scarcity, which would be a disaster. Poverty would rule.

Among other things, prices and wages signal to producers what consumers want most keenly. Again, in a world of scarcity, that's important. Since we can't have everything right now, we must make choices. Resources producing automobiles cannot be producing washing machines or computers. What to do? Let the price system work its magic—except that it is not magic. It is human action and its welfare-enhancing consequences. When the government prohibits the price system from doing its job, scarce resources are wasted as far as consumers are concerned. In a free and competitive economy, their choices shift resources to the purposes consumers most want to be fulfilled. The whole point of an economy is to serve consumers, remember?

This is no less true for labor. If high-tech companies can find satisfactory foreign software engineers who are willing to work for less than their American counterparts, that's a signal to be heeded. The Americans have asked too much. They have no right to those jobs or a higher wage. There's other work to be done—or would be if the government did not interfere. Consumers are never fully satisfied.

Those are the basics. What about H-1B? That is not a market institution. It's an intervention to somewhat ameliorate the predicament of employers who are denied the full freedom to hire whomever they want. It's no more than second-best, and it has downsides. For example, its restrictions enable employers to pay foreign workers less than those workers would have earned if they could work freely in America. To get a visa, foreign workers must have employer sponsors. If they wish to quit their jobs, they must find other qualifying jobs or be deported. That undoubtedly keeps visa holders in jobs they would prefer to quit. That's not right.

But beware those shedding tears over H-B1 "indentured servants." Those are crocodile tears because those opponents would not replace the visa program with open visas, that is, free immigration. They would shut down the program altogether. My hunch is that visa candidates would prefer the current program to closed borders. They wouldn't come here if the conditions were not superior to those at home. So let's hear no more sobbing from "left" and "right" statist populists like Steve Bannon and Batya Ungar-Sargon. These opponents of freedom should not be making economic policy.

Has the program been misused, that is, used contrary to its stated purpose? Undoubtedly. That's standard operating procedure. When the government hands out favors, political entrepreneurship will emerge on the part of those who don't want to be left out. This is purely the result of government violations of freedom. Get rid of the program and you get rid of the misuse.

It is certainly to be expected that if foreign workers can freely come to America, some wages will go down. That's supply and demand. On the other hand, other wages will go up. Immigrants buy consumer goods and start businesses, in some cases, highly successful businesses. Lower market-set wages, by the way, bring lower consumer prices, raising the standard of living. As noted, wage differences signal consumers' most highly valued wants.

Finally, some might say that we Americans could have the benefits of high-skilled foreign workers without importing them. How? Through trade with their countries. But hold on. The same people who want to shut down H-1B also want tariffs against foreign goods to "protect American jobs." Even if we have free trade, however, that is not a good answer. Foreigners are much more productive here than they are over there. Why? Because America has more capital and better management techniques than India and elsewhere. Because capital investment per worker is so high in America, any human being will be many times more productive here than anywhere else. That's good for the workers—and for consumers. Remember: everyone is a consumer.

This matter is not "just economics." Freedom itself is at stake.

Blaming Freedom

Freedom is nearly always blamed for the bad consequences of unfreedom, that is, of government intervention. Take immigration.

We hear these days that migrant gangs are killing, terrorizing, and stealing from Americans. Some immigrants without government papers have definitely committed heinous crimes. Opponents of immigration say that migrants join violent migrant gangs to pay off debts incurred in the process of traveling to the United States. If that's true, we can see that it's not freedom that leads to crime, but rather the black market. Black markets by definition are products of unfreedom, that is, of government prohibition of peaceful behavior. Freedom is not the culprit.

Because legal migration is next to impossible, desperately poor and oppressed people pay thousands of dollars to coyotes to get them from Latin America to the United States. If migrants can't repay the money, they might be forced to work off their debts by joining a migrant gang. Their creditors are likely nasty people because that's what prohibition does. It doesn't make an activity disappear; it simply turns the activity over to organized crime. Think of U.S. alcohol prohibition in the 1920s.

Just as repealing drug prohibition would break the backs of the drug cartels, repealing immigration prohibition would break the backs of the coyote and migrant gangs. Under legal immigration, people would apply at U.S. consulates, gain approval if they weren't violent criminals, buy their plane tickets for a few hundred dollars, and come to America. End of.

Pretending that free immigration causes crime is like thinking that Al Capone was a free-market entrepreneur.

Immigration Talk

I talk about immigration with Michael Liebowitz of The Rational Egoist.

More on Immigration and Public Property

Inspired by scholar Simon Guenzl, it occurred to me that regarding "state-claimed" so-called public property, people have been wronged not primarily as taxpayers but as potential homesteaders. (See Guenzl's "Public Property and the Libertarian Immigration Debate," Libertarian Papers, 2016 vol. 8, no. 1, and listen to his conversation with Bob Murphy's Human Action Podcast.)

Guenzl properly distinguishes between state-claimed land and state-seized land, such as that acquired through eminent domain. In the latter case, government personnel took land from identifiable owners, but state-claimed land never had owners. The state foreclosed homesteading.

Among the people prevented from homesteading are would-be immigrants, people from other parts of the world. In times past, many came to America to stake out parcels on the frontier to make better lives for themselves and their families. They demarcated, cleared, plowed, planted, and harvested it. They built homes on it. They "mixed their labor" with it, Lockean-style, and made it their own.

By foreclosing homesteading to this day of a vast portion of America, the government harms their modern-day counterparts as much as it harms those politically defined as citizens. Libertarians (and others) who would treat citizens differently from foreigners in this matter are obliged to justify that seemingly arbitrary distinction. So far they have failed to do so.

TGIF: Static Analysis Clouds Immigration Debate

Opponents of people's freedom to cross national borders to where the best jobs are, aka open borders, make a rookie error: they engage in static analysis and overlook the dynamism of social processes that freedom produces.

I was recently asked on Facebook: "Are you enjoying Biden open borders?" There's the mistake right there. People who ask that question look at a bad situation, say, the mess at the southern border; imagine one policy change, namely, the removal of restrictions on movement; and stop there. It's as if that policy shift would prompt no changes in how people, including Americans, behave. Because of their static analysis, the opponents of the freedom to move foresee disaster.

But hold on. That's like assuming that a significant change in the tax laws -- in either direction -- wouldn't prompt significant changes in people's tax-related behavior. It assumes that at least some people are not purposeful beings and do not respond to incentives and disincentives. But we know otherwise. For example, since World War II, federal taxes collected have been a fairly consistent percentage of GDP regardless of the changes in the tax rates. Why would that be? You know why. People respond to incentives and disincentives. Elementary to the economic way of thinking.

Pointing out this error is one of the first things a market advocate would tell an interlocutor who committed it. Frédédric Bastiat's wonderful "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen" taught the lesson in reverse: he showed that an obstacle, a broken window, prevented a shopkeeper from acting as he would have acted but for the need to overcome the obstacle, that is, the need to buy a new window. He couldn't use the money to buy books, shoes, or something else. Those who focus on how societies full of actual people work understand this. You can't leave human action out of the picture.

In the real world, decriminalizing foreign workers' freedom to move would represent profit opportunities not only for aspiring immigrants but also for entrepreneurial Americans. Yet the opponents only consider what foreigners would do. How could they have forgotten the Americans? What, they don't like profit?

The southern border is indeed a mess. Many people are assembling there, many of whom are evading the government officers (yay!) and sneaking in or are entering with provisional approval or helpless acquiescence. The government seems overwhelmed. Some governors have cynically shipped the newcomers to other states without their consent, using them cynically as pawns. Shame! Everyone can agree that something has to change.

Freedom-of-movement advocates say the solution is to remove all the restrictions -- not just restrictions on entry but all the restrictions on what people can do once they cross the border. Here's the point: that requires eliminating all the rules on how Americans may deal with the newcomers. Right now, it's illegal to hire and rent to border crossers who lack the "right" government papers. As Chandran Kukathas eloquently reminds us, the government cannot limit the freedom of "outsiders" without also limiting the freedom of "insiders." How easily that is overlooked!

So "open borders" means more than the mere literal dropping of entry restrictions. Laws against American conduct would also necessarily be repealed. Commercial relations between Americans and newcomers would be decriminalized.

Immigrants come here to work (to make better lives and to send money home to their families); they need jobs, housing, medical insurance, and other goods and services. Decriminalization on both sides of the ledger would replace the hazardous black market, with all its dangers of exploitation and worse, with a transparent legal market for labor, tenants, and customers.

Decriminalization, in other words, would invite entrepreneurs to form businesses designed to match newcomers with employers, landlords, etc. Job and housing brokers, or exchanges, would set up shop near the border to offer their services. Other firms might offer transportation to private employment and housing centers. The possibilities are nearly endless. (They'd be even better if the myriad destructive housing restrictions were repealed.) No one can say how exactly it all would look because entrepreneurship consists of discovery. That's its genius.

This open market, by the way, would function as an invitation to workers who want to multiply their incomes 2 to 15 times through increased productivity. That's what happens when people are free to move from poor low-productivity to rich high-productivity countries. It's win-win, as free exchange always is.

There's no excuse for static analysis when it comes to immigration. Dynamic market analysis is not some new thing. It's one of the first points that free-market advocates draw attention to. Unfortunately, even some smart pro-market people overlook dynamism and say dumb things. For example, Thomas Sowell once said, "You can't let everyone come to America because if everyone came to America, it wouldn't be America anymore."