A Libertarian Opposed to Open Immigration
It would appear that the vast majority of libertarians favor “open immigration”. This is clearly the position of the Libertarian Party, as laid out on their web site. I consider myself a libertarian, but I’m not really on board with this idea of simply opening wide our borders.
First off, I have to wonder what is really meant by “open immigration”. Surely, there must be restrictions at some level, right? Otherwise, an invading foreign army could simply land on the beach and walk in unopposed. If this sounds silly, I’d ask you to define “open immigration” in such a way that it would avoid this case, including the more subtle case in which the foreign army comes over one at a time over the course of a year.
Maybe open immigration simply means that you allow lots and lots of people in, so long as they have a good story about why they want to come, and they don’t have any obvious open sores or leprosy.
I’ve come across a few major arguments in favor of this undefined “open” immigration. The most common is the economic argument. In this argument, open immigration is equated with free trade in labor. It would be impossible to argue that, from a very narrow economic perspective, free movement of labor is a bad thing. I won’t attempt to, because I don’t believe it. To my mind, if we can get jobs done here on the cheap, all the better.
The problem with this argument is that open immigration is not the same thing as free movement of labor. Free movement of labor is a subset of open (im)migration, and the former could quite conceivable be achieved alone. The latest term being used to describe the movement of labor without full fledged immigration is “guest worker”. If people in foreign countries can be hired by American companies, and work within the borders of the U.S., we have the desired economic effect.
Open immigration is a totally different animal. With that, people can simply wander in to the U.S. – uninvited - and maybe look for a job, maybe not. Furthermore, “open immigration” would imply that these people can immediately become American citizens with full voting rights and access to all manner of social services. A proper guest worker program would not grant these privileges.
I’d like to note that many libertarians have an ideal world in their mind when they discuss immigration. They imagine an America with next to no (or no) free social services, and in this context they see open immigration as a beautiful thing since immigrants wouldn’t have the option of coming in and becoming parasites. Inexplicably, they go on to advocate open immigration under our current welfare state conditions.
To be fair, some advocates of open immigration claim to have statistics showing that immigrants pay more in taxes than they consume in social services. Personally, I find these stats impossible to believe, given that immigrants are generally at the bottom rung of the economic ladder. People in that position don’t generally pay any appreciable income tax at all.
Furthermore, Mexican immigrants vote approximately 70% for Democrats. Since they also tend to be socially conservative, they must be attracted to the Democrats’ economic quasi-socialism. I’d conclude that they want more government freebies, and at current rates of immigration they’ll soon have a lot to say about whether they get it.
Does it seem right for someone to come into the country and then right away vote to have the current citizens pony up a bunch of free money?
To give the “libertarian utopia” argument for open immigration any credibility, I think we’d have to ignore the fact that most immigrants would come over and immediately begin voting to destroy that very utopia. But even if we do ignore voting, only the most radically unrealistic variant of the libertarian utopia would even (kind of) work: virtually no welfare, no homeless shelters, no treatments for drug addiction, no tax funded prisons, no public land, emergency rooms must turn away the sick and dying, and so on. And this still ignores any drains on private charity.
I’ll be criticized as xenophobic for bringing this up, but there is also the issue of cultural assimilation. If, for example, all my neighbors suddenly sell their property off to people from a foreign country who don’t speak English and who have strange (to me) customs, this would impose a cost on me. I’m not saying that it would impose a cost on everyone, but it would impose a cost on me, and surely many others. This fact ought to be included in the calculation, though I realize many libertarians prefer to ignore uncompensated negative externalities in other contexts.
By the most extreme among libertarians it is argued that in a “real” libertarian society no immigration policy would be required at all. That’s because there would be no public property and the policy, such as it is, would boil down to the whims of those who happen to own property at the border (or should I say “border”). This whole concept raises many other questions (such as, what does national defense reduce to in such a context) and is so divorced from our current reality, that I’ll just mention it in passing.
This way of thinking does relate to another major argument for open immigration. It’s not actually so much of an argument, but a general anti-government sentiment summarized by: “Why do you think you get to decide who’s allowed to walk past some arbitrary boundary?” The view here, it seems, is that all humans have a natural right to go anywhere on earth that they want … sort of. In actuality, people who speak this way seem to think that only private property counts; public property belongs to one and all (or something). To the extent that there is an argument here, it’s supposed to be a principled, theoretical argument; that limiting immigration is an overreach of government and a violation of rights.
It seems obvious to me that the citizens of the U.S. have every right to set whatever immigration policy suits us. We don’t owe anything to those who are outside wanting to come in (though we may occasionally feel a moral obligation, as in the case of people seeking political asylum). We should set our policies to maximize our own benefit.
The land within the borders of the United States is jointly owned (to one degree or another and varying from place to place) by the citizens of the country. Some people refuse to accept it, but no land here is fully privately owned. If it were, it would be a sovereign country. At the same time, no land here is unowned either.
If you have a problem with jointly owned property, consider a home, owned by a husband and wife (jointly owned). Does this joint ownership imply that the family should adopt a policy whereby anyone is allowed to walk in off the street and camp in the living room?
A more clear analogy would be a private road running through a gated community. Would you really hold that it is somehow morally wrong for the residents to decide who is, and who is not, allowed to drive or walk on the private road? What then is the difference in the case of an American owned road leading to Mexico?
I hope I’ve made a case that we are not obligated to let everyone in the world into America. If you buy that, then we are left with the question of what immigration policy is in our best interest. From the narrow economic perspective of allowing the free flow of labor across the borders, a guest worker policy could be made to work without granting full citizenship rights to everyone we bring here to pick lettuce.
The question may remain, why not just let them all in anyway? My response would be security, welfare burden, and cultural assimilation. By security, I mean that you still need to define what is meant by open immigration; can the Chinese army just walk in?
The welfare burden exists at the present time, so don’t set policy at this time by simply assuming it away.
Finally, cultural assimilation includes (at least) two components. The first is the basic fact that new immigrants, in large part, do not appear to be coming here to become Americans. They are moving small versions of their home country here. This matters more or less to different people, but a very liberal immigration policy would eventually amount to a peaceful invasion of the southwestern U.S. by Mexico.
More important to a libertarian might be the fact that immigrants don’t appear to share the American cultural heritage of freedom and limited government. A massive influx of poor immigrants would mean a massive political shift to the welfare state left. juegos de poker online gratispoker de dadosstud pokerpoker en internetprobabilidades pokerel mejor poker onlinepoquer lineajuego al instante lineaonline pokerpacific poker comjugadas texas holdemcartas de pokerjuego poquerpoker online multijugadorno deposit bonus pokerjugar poker online gratispoker para jugarjuego poker omaha en lineajuego al instante webbonus de poker en lineastrip poker gratisreglas de pokerjugar omaha poker en lineapoker pcforo poquerholdem poker gratis,poker texas holdem gratis,holdem pokerjuego de poker online gratiscaribbean poker webstrip poker pcprogama codigo pokerdescarga gratis juegos pokerdescarga pokerpoker texas holddouble bonus poker downloadholdem poker descargarjuego texas holdempoker freestrip poker downloadjuegos poker,juegos pc poker,juegos de poker para descargar gratiscaribbean poker paginas internetworld championship pokerlas vegas casinowww slotsweb casinotop casinos onlinetrucos casino onlineblack jack en linea gratisvideo poker internetjuego de casino gratis,casino gratis,descarga gratis de casinosistemas ganar ruleta