Love-in at the borders

The ethics of private property ought to guide all libertarians on the matter of immigration. They don’t. An essential attribute of property and ownership is the right to exclude or include. The right to discriminate is an undisputed feature of property. In the absence of a state, or in the presence of a limited government where almost all land is privately owned, migration would be a very restricted affair. It would depend on the graces of private property owners.

A newcomer may be invited over by a propertied person, who would shoulder the costs. If he wishes to venture beyond the invited sphere, the newcomer would seek consent from the private property owners with whom he wishes to interface. The more the prevalence and status of property approaches the libertarian ideal, the less free migration would be.

Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe has brought to my attention his excellent “Natural Order, the State, and the Immigration Problem” article. It comports well with the description in “Displacing Americans” of the H-1B visa as part and parcel, not of the law of the free market, but of the law of the State.

In a free society based on absolute private-property rights, the natural tendency of men – a tendency that is most conducive to peace – is to live among their own, but to trade with any and all. In such a society, commercial property owners will tend to be far more inclusive than residential property owners. As Hoppe notes, owners of retail establishments, like hotels and restaurants, “have every economic incentive not to discriminate unfairly against strangers because this would lead to reduced profits or losses.” Still they will have to consider the impact of culturally exotic behavior on “local domestic sales,” and will impose codes of conduct on guests.

Seeking low-wage employees, employers would also be partial to foreigners but, absent the protectionist State, the employer would be accountable to the community, and would be wary of the strife and lowered productivity caused by a multiethnic and multi-linguistic workforce. All the more so when a foreign workforce moves into residential areas.

In short, reasons Hoppe, in a natural order – absent government – there will be plenty of “interregional trade and travel,” but little mingling in residential areas. Just as people tend to marry along cultural and racial lines, so they maintain rather homogeneous residential neighborhoods. This is how the chips fall in a highly regulated society, so much more so in a free society, based on absolute property rights. Is this contemptible? To the left-libertarian open-border purist it is – else why would he be lending ideological support to the State’s efforts to upset any semblance of a natural order and to shape society in politically pleasing ways?

His tentative grasp of property leads the leftist libertarian to forget that public property is property funded by taxpayers through expropriated taxes. It belongs to taxpayers. Yet at least a million additional immigrants a year, among them H-1B visa arrivals, are allowed the free use of these taxpayer-supported amenities. Every new arrival avails himself of public works like roads, hospitals, parks, libraries, schools and welfare. Every new arrival is inherently a free rider.

This is why the H-1B visa program, as I pointed out, is tantamount to a subsidy to business at the expense of the taxpayer. And Hoppe concurs: “[E]mployers under democratic Welfare State conditions are permitted by state law to externalize their employment costs on others” and will “tend to import increasingly low-skilled and low value-productive immigrants, regardless of their effect on all-around communal property values.”

Here, the owners of public property do not get to vet the newcomers – the State and big business do. Yet when faced with such economic fascism (government-business collusion), open-border libertarians levitate in la-la land, exulting business’ every move.

The State-administered immigration policy is based on an egalitarian, multicultural system, in which a quota is divvied among the nations of the world, irrespective of the sentiments of taxpaying Americans or their cultural affinities and origins. This should be an anathema to libertarians, but it isn’t.

The State’s laws, moreover, make avoiding forced integration impossible. A Middle Eastern immigrant enters the country. Despite post-Sept. 11 jitters, and a wish to protect his tenants, an apartment-complex owner cannot by law refuse to lease to the new arrival. The law prohibits property owners from exercising the right to exclude applicants from housing – civil-rights legislation and affirmative action circumscribe hiring, firing, renting, selling and even money lending.

Perpetually suspended in some kind of third dimension – on a collision course with reality, to use libertarian Roy A. Child’s phrase, the best open-border libertarians can come up with is, “There should be no public property or Welfare State.” Well there is. From this nether world they inhabit, the best they can propose is a kind of chaos theory. The Welfare State, they agree, must go. It is wrong. However, let the multitudes come, the Welfare State will buckle under and collapse. Out of the chaos, a free order will emerge.

The State is vested in emasculating Americans. Remove their guns, their right to defend their property, force multiculturalism and cultural relativism down their gullets, control their property so that it is not their own, then import millions of new constituents who lay claim to their property. Open-border libertarians are on board with the State for this leg of the journey.