Immigration Conversation with Jacob Hornberger

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."

TGIF: Immigration in an Nth-Best World

We live in an nth-best society. It's neither fully libertarian (though libertarians disagree over exactly what that would mean) nor totalitarian like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Maoist China, or North Korea. It's somewhere in between, closer to libertarian than many other places but not close enough.

One challenge for libertarians is knowing which proposals to favor and which to oppose in an nth-best society. Merely reciting the nonaggression obligation is not enough if our goal is to persuade many people that the freedom philosophy is both right and practical.

A mixed economy, the system combining markets with heavy doses of government interference, produces problems that libertarians need to address to be relevant. Many problems concern so-called public property, government-controlled land and buildings, many of which are presumptively open to all U.S. residents. Roads, parks, museums, and courthouses are examples. Libertarians would privatize most or all of it. (Roderick Long notes that nongovernmental publicly owned property can exist and has existed.) However, simply proclaiming the pure libertarian vision based on private property fails to address today's acute problems involving public property, such as the obstruction and defilement of sidewalks and parks by disorderly homeless, jobless, and troubled individuals who prevent civil self-supporting taxpayers from using those facilities as intended.

It is equally unreasonable to address those problems by giving politicians and bureaucrats carte blanche to regulate "the people's" property.

If this sounds relevant to the immigration issue, go and buy yourself a cigar. There's a view floating around social media and elsewhere that free immigration, or open borders, is not a libertarian position because "we the people," the true owners of government-controlled property, have the same right as any private owner to set rules for entry and use. Therefore, non-owners properly could and perhaps should be excluded. This rule-setting presumably would occur through the democratic process, that is, voting.

Right off the bat, that seems odd. The democratic process is majority takes all  -- the bloc of minority "owners" would lose out. If 50 percent minus one welcomes new arrivals to deal with and 50 percent plus one does not, the smaller group loses out simply because it is smaller. If a member of the minority persists, he is punished.

This would seem like Rousseauian "general will" libertarianism, except that's a contradiction in terms.

This position is presented as the grown-up libertarian position in today's world. I disagree.

Bear in mind that this proposal is intended to answer naive, immature, likely new social-media libertarians who believe that in today's mixed economy, the government must not set any rules whatsoever for public property. I'm sure such libertarians exist, but libertarians are not logically or morally obligated to favor the no-rules position. On the other hand, a better version of libertarian theory also does not entail restrictions on people's nonaggressive freedom of movement.

Those who think otherwise prove far too much. If "we" through the democratic process may shut immigrants out by keeping them off "our" public property, why can't we make other rules? How about a rule that says if you hold certain political or social views, you can't drive on the roads or use the courts and libraries? Why the distinction between the native-born and the foreign-born? A country is not a country club.

Making rules for today's public property requires nuance and reasonableness. There is a difference between excluding drunken, unwashed, screaming people without clothing from the DMV and excluding civil people without government permission papers from the roads and sidewalks. Forbidding homeless people from defecating, urinating, and discarding drug paraphernalia in public differs from forbidding Americans to hire, sell to, rent to, or live with, and otherwise associate with any peaceful people they choose regardless of where they were born.

The first instances disrupt taxpayers' peaceful use of public property; the second do not. Is the nondisruption principle a distinctively libertarian standard? Not specifically, but so what? We're in an nth-best society, remember. Culture, convention, and context help determine exactly what constitutes disruption, but the spirit of individual liberty never disappears. We can expect hard cases, but that doesn't make the principle worthless.

Is the principle arbitrary? No. In a partially free society, public property is presumptively open to the public: if someone makes it impossible for others to use it as intended, that person can properly be excluded. (Not by any means, of course.)

Could the nondisruption principle be used to justify any government restriction, such as closed borders? No. The case for any given rule should not rest on hypotheticals or highly unlikely events not intrinsic to a situation. That's why a border wall is different from a stop sign. There is no necessary connection between immigrants freely coming here to look for jobs, sellers, buyers, houses, apartments, friends, lovers, spouses, etc. and the disruption of public property. We can easily imagine the orderly movement of people over the border if residency and work were legal and entrepreneurial Americans were free to create businesses that match newcomers with opportunities. If a specific disruption occurs, law enforcement should be directed at actual disrupters, not at whole classes of people just because they might be disruptive. Americans might be disruptive too.

What about the tax burden, which is a different sort of potential problem from acute disruption? For a full discussion, see Bryan Caplan's graphic nonfiction work, Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. Caplan is a libertarian, but more importantly here, a solid social scientist who knows the immigration data as well as anyone. (The Cato Institute also has examined the data closely. For example, here.)

The story revealed by that data is not what most people imagine. Caplan writes: "Free immigration with a U.S.-style welfare state is not a recipe for fiscal disaster. Even under open orders, the burdensome immigrant would be the exception, not the rule.... Most immigrants pull their own weight -- and then some. A few don't [just as with the native-born]. But that's a flimsy reason to ditch the principle of free immigration." (Nor would we ditch the principle of free reproduction because some Americans will produce future net tax-consumers.)

Libertarians would better use their time working to shrink and repeal welfare-state programs than trying to save them from the stresses and strains they're bound to encounter. Despite hard cases in the world as we find it, the presumption should favor liberty for all, even newcomers. How can that not be the libertarian position?

Open borders are moral and desirable because prohibiting free movement necessarily aggresses against nonaggressors, including Americans; condemns the most wretched people on earth to poverty and tyranny; and keeps us all from getting richer. Strictly speaking, the right at stake is not the right to immigrate. Rather, it's the right not to be subjected to initiatory force. The right to immigrate, as Roderick Long might put it, is just one of many specific applications of that one right.

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.

Remarkably, both kinds of opponents make a similar case for why government control of the borders is necessary. Starting from a different basis, they agree on the alleged need for coercive social engineering by politicians and bureaucrats, who might be pursuing agendas that most people would want no part of.

We often hear it said that just as no one has a right to enter your home without your permission, so no one has a right to enter the country without the permission of the purported equivalent of the owner. That owner is said to be "the people," in whose name the government claims to act. The truth of the matter is different.

I can see a collectivist taking this shaky position, but an individualist advocate of self-ownership? A country isn't a home. It's not a country club either. Homes and country clubs are rooted in private property and voluntary contract. But a country is not. The view that a country is owned at all has been the basis of collectivism and tyranny.

A property owner may decide he doesn't want someone or some group to enter his property. Fine. But by what right does he impose his rule on other property owners? It does not matter if a majority of property owners and others likes his rules. The dissenting minority -- individuals with rights -- might welcome newcomers as potential employees, employers, tenants, landlords, customers, sellers, friends, romantic partners, or what have you. Majorities shouldn't be able to nullify the rights of dissenters or those of aspiring migrants.

Relocation in itself violates no rights. If a rights violation occurs, that should be dealt with, not the relocation. We can always imagine dire emergencies  -- "Let justice be done though the heavens fall" is a dubious principle -- but this does not justify routine militarized border control, walls and fences, internal checkpoints, employment databases, etc. By definition, dire emergencies are the exception. The words "Show me your papers" should make Americans (and everyone else) cringe.

People today, like in the past, imagine that they see signs of cultural decline and threats to democracy from foreign-born newcomers. When I hear the latter fear expressed, I want to reply sardonically, "We're capable of growing our own anti-freedom voters, thank you. We need no help from foreigners." Seriously, though, who can be sure how immigrants will vote in the future, especially if their alternatives include a strong freedom party that welcomes newcomers? Meanwhile, let's work on shifting the public's business from the flawed democratic arena to the realm of private property, contract, and social cooperation in the free market.

As for the wish to protect the culture from change, nothing so surely spells tyranny. Imagine what would have to be done to carry out such a plan. Who would you want to run the cultural ministry? It wouldn't work, of course, but trying would be a road to hell. Besides, do you want to live in a place without a constant flow of new restaurants? And why stop at the change that originates outside the country? What about the sometimes radical change that occurs from domestic sources?

The logic of immigration control ought to worry every freedom advocate -- for we can ask, as noted, why stop at national borders? Why not control movement between states, counties, cities, towns, and neighborhoods? (Maybe I shouldn't given anyone ideas.) If you can't accomplish a goal through voluntary exchange, then leave it alone.

That control mentality blinds people. As Bryan Caplan points out, when poor people move to rich places, their productivity skyrockets, so they make not only themselves better off, but also the people around them. Yes, some unskilled high-school dropouts would see some decline in income because of competition from new workers who speak little English. Change --  progress -- always has a relatively small short-term downside for a few people. But even they, and most certainly their children and grandchildren, will be better off: more goods, lower prices, more employees, more employers, and a larger variety of offerings, not to mention fresh energy and cultural stimulation.

Remember the ever-present potential for gains from trade! Despite the impression given by demagogues, we have nothing resembling open borders, and the problems at the U.S.-Mexican line are the homemade product of U.S. anti-immigration policy.

As Oscar W. Cooley and Paul L. Poirot wrote in a 1951 Foundation for Economic Education pamphlet, "The Freedom to Move":

Can we hope to explain the blessings of freedom to foreign people while we deny them the freedom to cross our boundaries? To advertise America as the “land of the free,” and to pose as the world champion of freedom in the contest with communism, is hypocritical, if at the same time we deny the freedom of immigration as well as the freedom of trade. And we may be sure that our neighbors overseas are not blind to this hypocrisy.

A community operating on the competitive basis of the free market will welcome any willing newcomer for his potential productivity, whether he brings capital goods or merely a willingness to work. Capital and labor then attract each other, in a kind of growth that spells healthy progress and prosperity in that community. That principle seems to be well recognized and accepted by those who support the activities of a local chamber of commerce. Why do we not dare risk the same attitude as applied to national immigration policy?

TGIF: Immigration Foes, What's the Beef?

Bryan Caplan

If people are going to hate on immigrants, they should at least get their stories straight. Do immigrants take our jobs or do they sponge off us through welfare? Today, let's talk about jobs.

Recently I was listening to Spiked's Brendan O'Neill interview Batya Ugar-Sargon, the left/right-populist assistant editor at Newsweek, when I heard say: "The elites love low-wage slave labor imported by the cartels to work service industry jobs, that they would rather have cheap labor than have to pay more for it."

This is nutty working-class populism in its most uninhibited form. Ungar-Sargon would have us believe that people who risk life and limb thinking they're choosing to escape political-economic hellholes to achieve better lives for themselves and their families in America are just modern-day Kunta Kintes! They're not people; they're imports! That might come as news to them.

Ungar-Sargon is talking about both legal and so-called illegal immigrants. Interestingly, though, it seems to have escaped her notice that the only immigrants who could potentially be treated like slaves are those branded illegal by the U.S. government. They are vulnerable to abuse precisely because they have to keep themselves out of the clutches of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Legal immigrants can call the cops. Being put on ice has a different meaning these days.

A bit later in the interview she said,

Black Americans have paid a huge price for our essentially open border for the last 40 years. Over and over businesses would much rather hire illegal immigrants than hire black Americans, and so they've literally paid for up to 40 to 50 percent of wages just sacrificed on the altar of progressive pieties about importing people from failed socialist states. They're very angry at that.

That 40-to-50 percent claim astounded me because I've never heard anything like it before. Neither have the two experts I asked, guys who know the immigration-related statistics as well as anybody and better than most. In their view, Ungar-Sargon made it up. She did not tell O'Neill where she got the statistic, and -- shamefully -- he did not ask.

I wonder why Ungar-Sargon singled out black Americans. She claims to reject identity politics in favor of class politics. Is she pandering? Since biology provides no genetic basis for categorizing people by skin tone or other such features -- since the human species does not consist of three to five genetically distinct groups called "races" -- who does Ungar-Sargon or her anonymous source include in the category of "black Americans"? But I digress.

Ungar-Sargon sounds like Bernie Sanders, a strong contender for the least impressive person in American politics, who says he opposes open borders because "the Koch brothers" favor it. That may be a reason, but it's not a good one. What else does he oppose because a rich person favors it? Brushing teeth after meals?

Ungar-Sargon, Sanders, and the others in this camp have their own version of the alt-right's replacement theory, don't they? The "cartels," she tells us, want to bring "slave labor" to America to replace native workers simply to save money. They want the people's (mis)representatives to stop this at all costs. But this is nonsense. Immigrants, especially ones without government papers, do jobs that Americans think are beneath them, particularly when the government supports them.

Make no mistake about what this position says: natives have a superior, if not the only, claim to the opportunities available through voluntary exchange in America. "They take our jobs" is an assertion of a native-only property right in jobs that has no rational basis in morality or economics. It's an ugly "blood and soil" sentiment, which does not suit a free society. Not only that, it cruelly relegates people born elsewhere to lives of misery, poverty, and oppression -- needlessly so because immigration, like every consensual transaction, is win-win. So keeping immigrants out not only hurts them; it also hurts us! Immigrants not only consume; they also produce and even start businesses and hire people, natives included.

True, if an immigrant is hired in America, natives who hoped for that job will be disappointed. But that sort of "negative externality" is a feature of life, not of immigration. People lose jobs in the short run through innovations in technology and business organization, not to mention fickle consumers. Who would outlaw innovation or consumer freedom on that count? The fact is, as history demonstrates, people who are thus harmed will benefit after a brief adjustment to change -- if the government keeps out of the way.

But let's also understand what Ludwig von Mises meant when he wrote in Human Action, in the section he called "The Harmony of the 'Rightly Understood' Interests": "The fact that my fellow man wants to acquire shoes as I do, does not make it harder for me to get shoes, but easier." In other words, mass markets with their economies of scale and falling costs of production, provide everyone with an ever-greater abundance of affordable goods and services. It was, after all, the emergence of the market order that led to mass production for the first time in history.

What Mises was saying about consumption obviously applies to production too because it's the flip side of the coin. Producers hire workers. The availability of a larger labor force furnishes entrepreneurs with opportunities for new and better enterprises that could not have existed with a smaller workforce. Products and services that were beyond reach yesterday are available today. In a society unencumbered by government intervention (unlike the one we have), the increasing demand for jobs more or less creates its own supply.

As for wages, let's see what a bona fide expert says. George Mason University economics professor Bryan Caplan (with illustrations by Zach Weinersmith) addresses the matter in their graphic nonfiction work, Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration." Opponents of free immigration should hold their tongues until they are prepared to answer Caplan's multidimensional case.

As for wages, Caplan writes:

Even economists who emphasize the negative effects of immigration on native wages report small -- and mixed -- effects. [George] Borjas and [Lawrence] Katz ... estimate that, in the long run, extra Mexican migration from 1980-2000 reduced U.S. native dropouts' wages by a grand total of 4.8%, and college graduates' wages by 0.5%. They also conclude, however, that Mexican immigration increased the wages of native high school graduates by 1.2% and those with some college by 0.7%.

And:

Immigration increased labor demand through two channels --- one obvious, the other subtle. The obvious: More immigrants means more potential customers. The subtle: Since migration increases foreigners' productivity [a very important point! -- SR], they have more resources to offer in the marketplace. As a rule, sellers profit from more and richer customers.

And:

How can native workers possibly profit when labor supply rises? Through specialization and trade. When the supply of low-skilled workers goes up, so does the demand for higher-skilled workers to manage them. When non-English-speaking immigrants increase the supply of cooks and dishwashers, this increases the demand for English-speaking waiters.

"But," Caplan's stick-figure interlocutor asks, "won't all these low-skilled immigrants depress our country's average standard of living?"

Caplan replies: "Almost certainly. But there's no need to worry. Your fears rest on the dreaded ... ARITHMETIC FALLACY!" He illustrates the fallacy by asking us to imagine that a group of little kids enters a room full of NBA players. The average height of the group will shrink, of course, but has anyone actually shrunk? Of course not.

"The lesson: When the makeup of the population is changing, averages are deeply misleading. The average can easily fall, even though everyone is better off!" Understanding basic statistics is necessary simply to protect yourself from number-wielding fraudsters.

So, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bernie Sanders, Brendan O'Neill, et al., stop losing sleep over what will happen to native workers if we respect the universal natural right of everyone, regardless of birthplace, to seek a better life. Beyond the very short run, treedom benefits everyone. To appreciate this point, economist Caplan notes that if people worldwide were free to move to where they would be most productive, world output  "could easily double." He writes, "estimated gains range from 50 to 150% of gross world product." In other words, "economically, open borders is like getting an extra ... seventy-five Manhattans a year."

Respecting everyone's liberty doesn't cost. It pays -- big time!

TGIF: Heartless Immigration Restrictions Need Replacing

Some elements of the right-wing are spreading the fear that Democrats are engineering a take-over of America by replacing white voters with nonwhites through liberal immigration policies. It's come to be known as "the great replacement," and in its ugliest form, it is said to be a Jewish conspiracy. Remember the sickening chant at the 2017 right-wing Charlottesville rally: "Jews will not replace us"?

I wish this fear-mongering could be ignored, but since a few fanatics have committed violence apparently to prevent the "great replacement," it needs to be discussed.

Why would anyone lose even one wink over this alleged plot? For one thing, even if such a plan existed, the Democrats can't possibly know how future citizens will vote or even if they will vote. Why assume they will follow the Democrats' orders, as the right-winders expect? In recent years, some Republicans have done fairly well with Latino voters. As long as conservatives talk about the nonwhite population as though it were a group of obedient children rather than moral agents, they needn't wonder why they don't win more votes in those communities. Just a thought, but maybe people who are energetic and entrepreneurial enough to leave their impoverished homes for a shot at greater opportunity, despite the risks, ought to be wooed, not alienated by political activists who pay lip service to individual enterprise.

Regardless of whether some Democratic politicians and left-wing activists think they can carry out the alleged plot or whether their statements praising America's changing ethnic composition are merely quoted out of context, who cares? True freedom-lovers favor whatever ethnic composition results from the freely chosen actions of sovereign individuals -- both current and aspiring Americans. Freedom's champions also favor progressively shrinking government power so that no one -- regardless of ethnicity -- can impose his or her values on others. (Strictly speaking, one value should be imposed on others, the liberal value summed up by the phrase live and let live. In other words, aggressive physical force is illegitimate.)

It would be nice if someone prominent in American politics would say to the conspiracy theorists: "Who needs replacement conspiracy to explain the need for open borders? We already have a perfectly good reason to open the gates: immigrants not only help themselves by coming here, but they also improve our society and the whole world."

But don't hold your breath. Does a Democrat walk the land who favors unrestricted immigration? Please let me know.

On the contrary, some Democrats have their own replacement conspiracy theory about those who favor free (or at least freer) immigration. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the economically illiterate darling of the left, says he opposes open borders because "the Koch brothers," by which he means anyone who favors freedom of movement (that is, libertarians), want cheap labor to replace more expensive American labor. It never occurs to politicians like Sanders that open-borders advocates might just favor individual liberty. Isn't it interesting how much the right and left have in common?

Tucker Carlson leads the right-wing media in "exposing" the great plot to create a new electorate through immigration. His trope is revealing: "Look, if this was happening in your house, your parents adopted a bunch of new siblings and gave them brand-new bikes, you would say to your siblings, 'You know, I think we're being replaced by kids our parents love more.'"

It doesn't get more ridiculous than that. First of all, would you say that? Second, in what respect do new arrivals get better "bikes" than those who were born here? Third, why does the government give anyone "bikes"?

The most revealing bit is Carlson's analogizing the country to a family with the government as parents. It seems that the godfather of American conservatism isn't Edmund Burke, but Sir Robert Filmer. (John Locke's liberalism was a response to the monarchist Filmer.) According to the Encyclopedia Britannica,

Filmer believed that the state was a family, that the first king was a father, and that submission to patriarchal authority was the key to political obligation. Making a strained interpretation of scripture, typical of his time but ridiculed by Locke, he pronounced that Adam was the first king and that Charles I ruled in England as Adam’s eldest heir. Filmer represented that patriarchal social structure which characterized Europe until the Industrial Revolution.

So let's get serious. Drawing on contemporary data, history, and sound social theory, George Mason University Professor Bryan Caplan shows that every one of the common fears about free immigration --  lower wages, a bigger welfare state, radical cultural change, authoritarianism, etc. -- are either concocted wholesale or outrageously exaggerated. So stop worrying! (See this interview with Caplan and check out his graphic nonfiction book, Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration.)

By the way, enacting immigration controls in the name of staving off authoritarianism is a cruel joke because controls on immigration necessarily are controls on whomever the state chooses to define as a citizen.

Instead of favoring heartless restrictions on people's freedom to move, why don't people who worry about immigration instead call for limits on government power so that fewer areas of life are controlled by politicians beholden to blocs of voters? Conservatives must have their own sort of welfare state in mind.

TGIF: Glenn Loury's Collectivist Immigration Policy

Glenn Loury, the economist at Brown University, often has interesting things to say. His YouTube Glenn Show episodes with linguist and social commentator John McWhorter feature valuable insights and eye-opening data about race, woke "anti-racism," and related matters.

Loury is a neoclassical economist who is generally pro-market. He harbors some doubt about government solutions to social problems. But judging by what he says about immigration, his political theory is appallingly collectivist. This is alarmingly clear from his most recent video with McWhorter. (The transcript is here.)

Loury wants to separate the case for tight border control from the polarizing right-wing TV personalities like Tucker Carlson who constantly bang on about it. Loury's purpose is to show that a perfectly nonracist case can be made for the government controlling "the border." (The U.S, has more than one border, but Loury uses the singular form.) He says, in the typical alarmist right-wing manner:

Is it good for the country that we don't have control of the border and that people come in the thousands and tens of thousands and ultimately in the millions without authorization?

So here's an argument that I don't think is a “swarthy hoard” argument. I am an American citizen. That's a very special endowment which I have inherited in virtue of my birth. This is my country. There are 330 million or so of us. We should get to decide what the future of the composition of our polity is going to be through legitimate democratic deliberation. That's what we elect representatives for. That's the purpose of law.

He goes on to say that the American people should decide democratically, that is, collectively, who will and won't "add[] positive value to the collective enterprise of the country." It sounds more like he's talking about a member-owned country club than about a (theoretically) free country.

I see three problems here. First, political decision-making in a representative democracy doesn't work in the pollyannish way that Loury seems to imagine. Second, voters, politicians, and bureaucrats couldn't acquire the information needed to ascertain who will and won't "add[] positive value to the collective enterprise of the country." And third, Loury's approach runs roughshod over individual liberty, private property, and the pursuit of happiness. Aren't those values our actual very special endowment inherited in virtue of our birth?

James Buchanan said that he helped found the Public Choice school of economics to achieve a "politics without romance." By that he meant that if we are to understand the political realm, we must drop the civic-books fairy tales about well-informed voters and public-spirited politicians and bureaucrats. Instead, we must take people involved in politics as they really are. Politicians and bureaucrats do not become saints when they leave the private sector for government jobs. Even when they are not simply corrupt, they still have career ambitions and other self-interested motivations, like those outside the government.

A related point comes from the Austrian school of economics, specifically Ludwig von Mises and F. A Hayek, who showed beginning a century ago that central planners can't possibly know all that they would have to know to guide a society's commercial activities. It's called "the knowledge problem," and it's why socialism and communism fail. The point also applies to governments that presume to plan immigration according to who will be productive and who will be parasitical. That "data" simply is not on deposit anywhere for the bureaucrats' taking. Remember that we're talking about human beings and a future that has yet to unfold.

Moreover, voter decision-making is distorted by perverse incentives inherent in the democratic system. As Bryan Caplan shows in The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, voters tend to indulge their unexamined irrational biases rather than spend their free time studying which positions and candidates would be best for their communities. But why would they indulge their irrational biases? They do so because it is costless to each of them: since no single vote is likely to be decisive, why would busy people trade time with family and friends for pointless research that will have zero impact on an election? One of those irrational biases is the bias against foreigners. (Caplan explains his data-rich thesis here. See my review of Caplan's book.)

The point of all this is to show that Loury's idealized democratic vision -- in which well-informed voters with a birdseye view of the social landscape elect wise and altruistic representatives guided only by the general welfare who will deliberate on an immigration policy aimed solely at creating the scientifically determined optimal population for America, a policy that will then be administered by humane bureaucrats in the executive branch under the guiding hand of an enlightened president -- is a chimera. Rather, the political arena is a sausage factory full of largely unaccountable career-, prestige-, and power-seekers; special interests; and voters, each of whom pays only a tiny bit of the full price of their foolish choices. 

Lastly, Loury overlooks the neglected cost of a collectivist approach to immigration. What cost? The cost to individual Americans who would sell or rent to, buy from, hire, work for, and socialize with immigrants. (The terrible cost to those locked out is obvious). Don't those Americans have rights? Why should their freedom to engage in voluntary relationships with non-Americans require government permission, even if that system is given a democratic gloss? As Chandran Kukathas emphasizes in his book Immigration and Freedom, restrictions on actual and would-be immigrants necessarily are restrictions on American citizens too. It is impossible to enact the former without enacting the latter. 

Watch Loury in action:

If we don't have control, and we simply allow anyone who has the resources to get themselves to the Mexican side of that border and wade across that river into the country, we will look up in 20 years, in 50 years and find that we are a different country than we had been in ways over which we did not exert the legitimate discretion that is our inheritance as citizens of the country. [Emphasis added.]

That's a social engineer speaking.

Loury thinks he's accomplished his goal: since blacks, he alleges, suffer disproportionately from "uncontrolled immigration" (as if we have that) "through the labor market or through competition for public resources," border control could hardly be racially motivated. Does he not see the problem here? Border control might still be motivated by animus toward Mexicans, Latinos generally, or brown people, rather than black people, although I accuse Loury of none of that.

As for his concern about the labor market and public resources, that is, tax revenue, Loury should know better. Immigration experts associated with the Cato Institute and elsewhere have shown repeatedly over many years that immigrants hugely benefit Americans generally on net and in fact the whole world. Immigrants are producers as well as consumers, and their crime rates and consumption of tax-funded benefits are relatively low. If Loury is worried about new arrivals' going on the dole or lowering the wages of the high-school dropouts, he could propose, as second-best solutions, relevant welfare restrictions on new arrivals (they exist for the most part already) or assistance to the small number of low-skilled workers adversely affected in the job market. He could also propose that the government abolish myriad obstacles to creating businesses and housing. Instead, he proposes to keep people he deems unproductive out of the country, people who desperately want to make better lives for themselves and their families in America. Shame on him.

Again citing Caplan, significant wealth creation is to be expected from even the poorest immigrants in America because their productivity vastly increases when they move from capital-poor to capital-rich environments. Machines magnify the power of human labor. Moreover, the more people in a productive environment, the more minds there are to contribute new ideas that will combine with other ideas to become even better ideas. The result is a rising living standard for all. As Julian Simon put it, human ingenuity is the "ultimate resource."

Thus, as Caplan says, an open-border policy is the most effective antipoverty program imaginable. Keeping poor people locked in undeveloped countries is simply cruel. (See Caplan's graphic novel, Open Borders.)

Loury doesn't mention culture in his case against freedom of movement, but it's hard to believe that he doesn't also have that in mind. Suffice it to say here that asking politicians to conserve "the culture" seems, to say the least, ill-advised -- even if it were possible.

I'll close with one more quote from Loury:

So who I don't want to come? Anybody who doesn't have my permission to come. Beyond that, if you were to ask me, and there are more people who want to come than there are “places” for them to come, and we have to decide how many places we want to make available for people to come, I would say, people who are going to come and be a dependent on the rest of us for their support are less desirable than people who want to come and who are going to start businesses or bring skills or things of this kind.

Here we see Loury falling back on the discredited fixed-pie model of society. More people than places for them? Immigrants in a free market create their own places. We also see Loury the soothsayer, for he apparently knows who will be dependent and who will be productive, who will start businesses and who won't. Wouldn't it be nice if the rest of us could see the future so clearly?

TGIF: Anti-Woke Isn't Necessarily Pro-Liberty

I had a reminder this week that those who oppose fashionable postmodernist-style attacks on reason and objectivity, such as "critical" race and gender theories, are not necessarily consistent friends of liberty and the free society.

That reminder came in a recent video commentary by Dave Rubin on a year-old speech by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas before the U.S. Conference of Mayors. What upset Rubin so much that he had to play the video clip several times was this statement from Mayorkas: "Unlawful presence in the United States will alone not be a basis for an immigration enforcement action...." Mayorkas said more (hence my ellipsis), but that's all that Rubin drew attention to. (I'll cover the rest in a bit.)

Here's what Rubin had to say in reaction:

How insane is that?.... We are literally saying, "If you are here illegally, but you don't do anything bad, we just ain't gonna do anything about it." That's not how a country is run. Dare I quote that orange guy, who said, "Without borders you don't have a country"? Well, that's pretty much where we're at at this point.

So what's wrong here? Quite a bit, actually, so it's tough to know where to start. It tells me a lot that Rubin's cognitive system -- the part that chooses words and phrases -- isn't set up to avoid suggesting that anyone could or should run our country. Think about that phrase. To quote Rubin, "How insane is that?" We shouldn't want anyone or any group to even try to run the country (no matter how that is defined) because even though the effort would fail, the attempt would inflict a lot of pain.

Why doesn't Rubin know that a free society (which he says he wants) runs itself -- it's a bottom-up, emergent, undesigned order -- when the politicians and bureaucrats leave it alone, and it does so better than anything the politicians and bureaucrats have come up with? Dave, read your Thomas Paine, whom I quoted recently and will do so again:

Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished. The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilised community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together. The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and every occupation, prospers by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole. Common interest regulates their concerns, and forms their law; and the laws which common usage ordains, have a greater influence than the laws of government. In fine, society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to government.

As to Trump's dictum that you can't have a country without borders, Rubin might want to give that another thought because maybe that definition of country is unnecessarily narrow. On the other hand, if we accept that notion of country, maybe we'd opt for something else after closer consideration.

Rubin and the orange guy beg this question: What kind of society do or should we want? They assume that virtually everyone (or everyone who matters) already agrees on the answer even though that is what needs to be discussed explicitly before we decide. (That's how I still understand the phrase beg the question.)

As the political philosopher Chandran Kukathas points out, "border control" is not really about controlling borders. It's not even mainly about controlling immigrants. Rather it's about controlling citizens. You can't restrict immigration without restricting the peaceful activities of those identified as citizens. That identification process is based on contingent political decisions made by fallible, vain, and even corrupt rulers; it is not a metaphysical process conducted by high priests. (See Kukathas's book Immigration and Freedom.)

Kukathas writes:

[T]he threat to freedom comes not from immigration but from immigration control…. Immigration control is not merely about restricting border-crossing but as much, if not more, about constraining what outsiders might do once they have crossed the border in a society. But it is difficult to control outsiders without also controlling insiders, since insiders are all too ready and willing to hire, teach, rent to, trade with, marry, and generally associate with outsiders. Moreover, insiders and outsiders are not readily distinguishable unless there are instruments of control in place to identify one or the other. [Emphasis added.]

Yikes!

Some citizens may say they are willing to accept those restrictions because the imagined benefits of immigrant control outweigh the costs. Kukathas suggests two responses. First, are those who express such willingness really aware of the costs in terms of lost liberty, prosperity, social opportunities, and cultural vitality?

And second, what about the citizens who think the costs swamp any benefits? Why should their welfare preferences be overridden by people who are more change-averse? Someone who doesn't want to associate with immigrants is free not to do so. Why, then, isn't the freedom to associate extended to those who would welcome immigrants?

Kukathas writes that if we're serious about freedom, we shouldn't think that society “is 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.” In other words, freedom is incompatible with the ancient notion of society that we still labor under in many ways. (See Benjamin Constant's classic 1819 essay, "The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns.")

Needless to say, if someone (immigrant or not) commits aggression against another person or his property, the system of governance (whether a monopoly state or a stateless competitive arrangement) ought to respond appropriately, observing the long-accepted safeguards, such as the presumption of innocence and burden of proof.

Now let's turn to Mayorkas's remarks. As noted, Rubin only quotes a fragment, and in isolation it's not bad. Rubin's rewording highlights its virtue: "If you are here illegally, but you don't do anything bad, we just ain't gonna do anything about it." What's wrong with that?

Mayorkas did not go nearly far enough, however. As I explain here, since U.S. laws do not apply outside of U.S. territory, a person standing on Mexican soil cannot violate a U.S. prohibition against unauthorized border crossings. By the time he is on U.S. soil and subject to U.S. law, the crossing has already occurred. This means that people like Rubin who can't stand the thought of living among people whose first act with respect to the United States was to break the law can rest easy.

If they are concerned about those who overstay their visas, we might ask on what grounds bureaucrats (as opposed to property owners) have the authority to set the terms of visits to America. That implies that the government or the people as a whole own the country, but that's a question that we haven't debated yet. It's more question-begging.

Unfortunately, Mayorkas didn't leave the matter there. He watered down the statement with conditions that are too vague to make a freedom-lover comfortable. That should be unsurprising since the Biden administration has not kept its promise to undo the outrageous Trump approach to immigration.

Mayorkas completed his sentence this way: "we will allocate our efforts, we will allocate our resources on those individuals who present a current public safety threat, a threat to national security, or a threat to our border security, and that is a very important principle."

He's pretty much taken away with the right-hand everything he had given with the left.

At any rate, as Rubin and others make clear, the anti-woke left and right have a long way to go.

TGIF: VP Tells Guatemalans to Stay in Their Place

Shame on Vice President Kamala Harris.

On her recent trip to Guatemala she said, "I want to be clear to folks in the region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border: Do not come. Do not come. I believe if you come to our border, you will be turned back.”

This is what passes for sensitivity to human rights in the post-Trump era. It's the same attitude that marked not only the Trump years but also the pre-Trump era under Barack Obama, the deporter-in-chief, and Joe Biden.

Notice Harris mentioned the "dangerous trek" without acknowledging that the U.S government is a big reason for the danger. If immigrants were welcome, they would have safe ways to travel north to the United States with their children. It's typical of government officials to create a peril and then pose as humanitarians in offering advice about safety.

What's the Biden-Harris solution to the problems that Guatemalans are trying to escape from by migrating to America? Harris promised U.S. help in reforming the government there. "The goal of our work is to help Guatemalans find hope at home,” she said. Her administration has about as much chance of doing that as it has to help Americans find hope at home.

The U.S. government would have a chance to improve conditions in Guatemala and other places, but that would require doing something it has no desire to do, namely, slash its power dramatically. It could start by permitting unconditional free trade and by ending the drug war, which has ravaged Guatemala and Latin America even worse than it has the United States. Do you think Biden-Harris would entertain that truly progressive program? Me neither.

But even if that were to happen and Guatemalans became much freer and safer, many might still want to come to the United States. Yet that would be none of the U.S. government's business. Until someone has been proved to have violated someone else's rights, they should be left unmolested by the state. That's not just a right of Americans; it's a right of all persons. The right to move is a natural individual right that in itself does no harm to others as physical force does. Accepting a job that an American wanted or affecting the culture doesn't count as harm. We benefit from the countless people who have changed the culture over years and from the immigrants who have started businesses, invented products, and achieved great productivity. That some people fear change should not be allowed tilt government policy against immigrants.

All the fear-mongering about free immigration is nothing more than that: baseless attempts to scare Americans essentially into shutting the borders. To see this, one need only consult the heroic work of Bryan Caplan of George Mason University, who demolishes every bogey about open borders in blog posts, journal articles, and graphic nonfiction. Caplan shows that fear of immigrants--about wages, culture, politics, and more--is simply irrational. He also points out how much free movement would increase the wealth of the world, as people in low-productivity countries moved to high-productivity countries like the Unites States. He and others have emphasized that the best global antipoverty program would be open borders.

And as I pointed out recently, a new book emphasizes that restrictions on immigrants and would-be immigrants necessarily constitute restrictions on Americans. Chandran Kukathas writes in Immigration and Freedom: "It is difficult to control outsiders without also controlling insiders, since insiders are all too ready and willing to hire, teach, rent to, trade with, marry, and generally associate with outsiders. Moreover, insiders and outsiders are not readily distinguishable unless there are instruments of control in place to identify one or the other."

Telling Guatemalans or anyone else "Do not come" is no different from telling them to stay in the place where they belong. The long-suffering victims of tyranny, corruption, and government planning are properly resentful of American officials who give them such a condescending admonition.

TGIF: Trump & Co.’s Vile Anti-Immigrationism

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna displayed an odious hostility to liberty at a press briefing this week when he tried to associate immigration with terrorism.

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. Become a Free Association patron today!

TGIF: In Defense of Extreme Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism is under assault from across the political spectrum, both in the United States and abroad. Just yesterday President Donald Trump's chief strategist, alt-right leader and self-described economic nationalist Steve Bannon, told the Conservative Political Action Conference that "the center core of what we believe [is] that we're a nation with an economy, not an economy in some global marketplace with open borders, but we're a nation with a culture and a reason for being," This is a false alternative of course, but Bannon's preference for nationalist tribalism is revealing.

The rejection of cosmopolitanism is bad for liberty, peace, and prosperity because they all go hand in hand. The link between liberty and cosmopolitanism is more than conceptual. Of course freedom includes the freedom of individuals to associate peacefully with anyone anywhere of their choosing, which in turn generates peaceful interdependence and prosperity. But the link is also existential: rising generations, no matter what they have been taught by their elders, naturally will be curious about other people and their ways of living, their cultures. They naturally will question what has been presented to them as sacred (even if "secular") tradition. This will inevitably lead to cultural and material exchanges and hence further social evolution. The "ideal" of a culture insulated from change is a chimera, especially these days; it would be unachievable even if it were desirable -- which it most assuredly is not. Even totalitarian states struggle in vain to shut out "subversive" foreign influences, as the old Soviet Union demonstrated.

We may not go so far as Aristophanes and say that "Whirl is king," but unforeseen change is inevitable and also reasonably assimilable in normal circumstances. In a freed society most change occurs at the margin -- the world does not start afresh each day -- because no central authority has the power to make society-wide decisions. But with freedom, the cumulative effect of change is dramatic and largely benign.

Original cosmopolitan liberalism, what we call libertarianism today, embodies this fact of life. It embraces it with gusto. Liberty and the prosperity it produces enable us to grapple with -- and indeed relish -- the uncertain future that, being the product of human action but not human design, spontaneously unfolds before us. Serendipity happens. We can therefore view liberalism as occupying the ground between conservatism/traditionalism and rationalism/Jacobinism.

As F. A. Hayek wrote in "Why I Am Not a Conservative": "As has often been acknowledged by conservative writers, one of the fundamental traits of the conservative attitude is a fear of change, a timid distrust of the new as such, while the liberal position is based on courage and confidence, on a preparedness to let change run its course even if we cannot predict where it will lead."

Hayek's openness to change may seem in conflict with the apparent conservatism of The Constitution of Liberty (1960) and his final book, The Fatal Conceit (1988). (The fatal conceit lies in believing that our principles of moral conduct were originally the product of reason rather than of spontaneous social evolution as people grappled with reality in search of better lives.) But no actual conflict in Hayek exists. ("Why I Am Not a Conservative" is the postscript to The Constitution of Liberty.)

In the absence of good cause to depart from traditional practices, one tends to accept those practices because, among other reasons, their longevity may be evidence of their value. (Longevity is no guarantee of this.) The case for such "conservative" deference dates back at least to Aristotle. (See Roderick Long's discussion of the importance of endoxa, "the credible opinions handed down" [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy], in his Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand. Long's essay suggests that cultural innovation reasonably begins with defeasible received wisdom as opposed to a wholesale rejection of it.)

But the good sense in defaulting to credible opinions provides no case for freezing traditions in place, for this would imply an unjustifiable hubris regarding the current state of our knowledge. After all, today's traditions were once new: how do we know there aren't hitherto undiscovered better ways to accomplish our ultimate objective, namely, the flourishing of individuals in society? Why would we want to deprive ourselves of the opportunity to learn of such knowledge? And on what grounds do we assume that anything worth knowing is to be found within our national borders? Hence liberal cosmopolitanism, from the Greek suggesting "citizen of the world." (I'm reminded of Adam Smith's observation that "the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market.")

Apparent efforts to romanticize tradition and cultural preservation (aka stagnation) have a way of teaching a different lesson. Think of the beloved musical Fiddler on the Roof, based on the Yiddish stories by Sholem Aleichem. The protagonist, Tevye the dairyman, opens the show by celebrating the tradition that has enabled him and his neighbors (and their forebears) to keep "our balance for many years." As he explains, "Because of our tradition, everyone here knows who he is and what God expects him to do." (At the same time he confesses: "You may ask, 'How did this tradition get started?' I'll tell you. I don't know. But it's a tradition.") At sundown on the Sabbath, Tevye and his wife pray that God will keep their five daughters "from the strangers' ways."

Yet almost immediately the traditional structure that Tevye believes he can't survive without begins to crumble at the margin, and he is powerless to prevent it. When he agrees to marry off his eldest daughter, Tzeitel, to the much older butcher, as arranged by the village matchmaker, she begs her father not to force her to go through with the marriage. A year earlier she and her childhood friend, now the village tailor, had secretly agreed to wed as soon as he could afford a sewing machine. (Aside: when the tailor Motel Kamzoil gets his sewing machine he boasts that from now on clothes will be made quickly and perfectly -- no more handmade things. There's an economic lesson in that for another day.) Now under pressure from the matchmaker, Tzeitel asks her father for permission to marry the man she loves. Tevye at first is furious at her impertinence, but when he looks in his daughter's eyes as she stands by her beloved, he can't help but relent. His daughter's happiness outranks tradition. (Before this scene we saw Tevye celebrating the marriage agreement with the butcher by participating in a Russian dance with Russian gentiles in the local tavern, indulging, it would seem, in the strangers' ways.)

Tzeitel's break with tradition is only the beginning. Tevye's second daughter, Hodel, then falls in love with Perchik, a poor young, radical, secular Jewish teacher from Kyiv, the big, strange, distant city. This was the same young visitor whom villagers had denounced as a "radical" for saying that girls should be educated and for dancing with a woman (Hodel) at Tzeitel's wedding. The "attack" on tradition kicks up a notch when Hodel and Perchik decide to marry: they do not ask Tevye for his permission -- only for his blessing. He is scandalized at this further blow to the structure, but in one of his trademark dialogues with God, Tevye acknowledges that "our ways also once were new" -- a subversive thought for one who wishes to keep his children from the strangers' ways. Again he relents and gives his blessing (and his permission), explaining to his wife, "It's a new world, Golde," one in which people marry for love. He then alarms his wife, whom he had met only on their wedding day, by asking, "Golde, do you love me?" Tevye is clearly warming up to the new world.

But Tevye finally draws the line when his third daughter, Chava, marries a young Russian -- a Christian -- she has fallen in love with. As Tevye is packing to move his family out of their shetl, Anatevka (from which the tsar has expelled the Jews), he relays his blessing to Chava and her new husband. It is noteworthy that Tevye, like Sholem Aleichem himself, moves to "New York, America," not Palestine. (Tevye's brother had previously moved to Chicago.)

So even insular little Anatevka could not shield itself from change and the outside world. Was Sholem Aleichem a subversive? If so, many people seem to have missed it. But how can you celebrate traditionalism while showing the virtually inevitable erosion of particular traditions at the hands of the young and free seeking only to be happy? There's a lesson here for all of us, especially those who seek to "make America great again."

Whirl is king, despite one's wishes and efforts. Of course this does not mean that all change is good, but attempting to prevent all change in order to prevent bad change is futile and self-defeating. Moreover, change that one person sees as bad another person may see as good. People should be free to shield themselves against change they do not like, but coercive power must be kept out of the picture.

The history of original liberalism overflows with acknowledgments that openness to change, which is the essence of cosmopolitanism, is vital to flourishing. The free and competitive marketplace of ideas, like the market for goods and services, was championed by early liberals precisely because it was the way to dispel ignorance not just in how we think but in how we live. Thus they showed an appropriate humility -- a recognition of the limits of knowledge -- in their praise for the free marketplace of ideas.

John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859) is well-known in this regard, so I'll limit myself to one quotation:

"That mankind are not infallible; that their truths, for the most part, are only half-truths; that unity of opinion, unless resulting from the fullest and freest comparison of opposite opinions, is not desirable, and diversity not an evil, but a good, until mankind are much more capable than at present of recognising all sides of the truth, are principles applicable to men's modes of action, not less than to their opinions. As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them. It is desirable, in short, that in things which do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself. Where, not the person's own character, but the traditions or customs of other people are the rule of conduct, there is wanting one of the principal ingredients of human happiness, and quite the chief ingredient of individual and social progress." (Emphasis added.)

To close, here's an earlier example from across the Channel. Charles Dunoyer, a pioneering French radical liberal and one of the originators of class analysis (which Marx explicitly borrowed and distorted), criticized the socialism of Henri de Saint-Simon precisely because it failed to recognize the value of the competitive marketplace of ideas. Dunoyer wrote in 1827 that the Saint-Simonians' "complaints against what they call the critical system, that is to say, against a general and permanent state of examination, of debate, of competition, attacks society in its most active principle of life, in its most efficacious means of development." They don't want to "leav[e] society to itself," letting it develop "by the free competition of individual efforts." Yet they contradict themselves by conceding that "free discussion is necessary" sometimes. But if that's true, Dunoyer asked, what can be the case against freedom?

Dunoyer continued:

"Is there, in the course of centuries, a single instant where society does not tend, in a multitude of ways, to modify its ideas, to change its manner of existence? To accuse liberty of what remains of confusion in moral and social doctrines is to see evil in the remedy, and to complain precisely of what tends to make the confusion cease."

Thus he concluded that "the error of the organic school [Saint-Simonians] is the belief that liberty is only a provisional utility.... It is ... in the nature of things that liberty of examination will be perpetually necessary. Society which lives chiefly by action, acts, at each instant, according to the notions that it possesses, but, to act better and better, it needs to work constantly to perfect its knowledge, and it is only able to succeed by means of liberty: research, inquiry, examination, discussion, controversy[;] such is its natural state, and such it will always be, even when its knowledge has acquired the greatest certainty and understanding."

In pursuit of this life-enhancing knowledge the political program based on liberal cosmopolitanism -- libertarianism -- centers on unconditional free trade and freedom of movement, that is, open borders for people, capital, producer goods, and consumer goods. This program represents not merely an adherence to an abstraction, liberty. Rather it embodies the understanding that the flourishing of flesh-and-blood individual human beings, like the division of labor, is limited by the extent of society and that therefore the boundaries of society should be expanded through peaceful voluntary exchange to include the entire world. Trump's and Bannon's nationalist, tribalist program is thus exposed as a threat to human flourishing.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. Become a Free Association patron today!

TGIF: Trump's Operation Police State

If elected president, Donald Trump says he would create a "deportation force" to carry out his pledge to expel more than 11 million people from the United States merely because they lack government permission to be here. "We have no choice if we're going to run our country properly and if we're going to be a country," he said during the Republican debate Tuesday night.

Wrong on both counts.

Regarding Amnesty

I'd be for amnesty 

were it not for the fact 

that improving your life 

while ignoring the state 

is the essence of 

freedom. 

(Click on image to order.)

Borderlands: What's Happening to America?

The U.S. government regards a large part of the country as close enough to a border or coast to justify treating individuals — citizens or not — as though they have no rights whatsoever. People have been beaten and had their personal belongings seized — without warrant or charge — just because they resented being treated like criminals. This should alarm anyone who thinks America is the “land of the free.”

 Read the full op-ed.

Let the Immigrants Stay

Virtually all commentary about the influx of unaccompanied Central American children into the United States, which some say could rise to 90,000 this year, misses the point: no government has the moral authority to capture these kids and send them back to the miserable situations they have escaped.

The op-ed is here.

Ron Paul: Open-Borders Advocate?

In “Ron Paul & Immigration: A Speculative Theory,” I expressed “my suspicion that Ron Paul secretly favors open borders” because although he says he supports “secure borders,” he opposes all standard measures for achieving that end. Rep. Paul lately has furnished more evidence (HT: Gary Chartier) that my theory is accurate. An Associated Press report from Las Vegas begins, “Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul outlined his views on immigration Wednesday, saying he favors a compassionate policy that doesn't rely on ‘barbed-wire fences and guns on our border.’”

The AP continued:

Paul blasted politicians who blame immigrants for causing the country's economic problems. He compared the situation to Nazi Germany's targeting of Jews in the 1930s.

"When things go badly, individuals look for scapegoats," Paul said. "Hispanics, the immigrants who have come in, are being used as scapegoats."

Paul also told an Hispanic audience he opposes illegal immigration and that “[i]f an individual is found to be breaking the law, serious consideration should be given for them to return.”

But this position may not be what it seems on the surface. Open-borders advocates also oppose illegal immigration. Indeed, we seek to legalize--or better, decriminalize—freedom of movement, making illegal immigration a thing of the past.

Moreover, when Paul talks about immigrant law-breakers, he seems to mean laws other than immigration laws. He followed up his statement about lawbreakers by adding, “I would think 99 percent of people who come here come because they believe in the American dream.”

Note also his reluctant tone: “serious consideration should be given for them to return.” Obviously he is unenthusiastic about deporting even lawbreakers.

Ron Paul clearly seems uncomfortable with government restrictions on people’s freedom to move. His libertarian convictions apparently run deep enough to keep him from sounding like other Republicans (and Democrats) on this issue.

“The one thing I have resisted and condemned: I do not believe that barbed-wire fences and guns on our border will solve any of our problems. You say, ‘Well, this is only for illegals.’ That's a bunch of baloney. How do you sort out illegals from legals? Unless you put papers and identification on everybody.”

Does that sound like an opponent of a key natural right: the freedom to move?