One of the most persistent divides between traditional conservatives and their libertarian/anarcho-capitalist counterparts involves a fundamental philosophical disagreement about immigration. While most conservatives view immigration primarily through the lens of preserving American culture by only accepting those immigrants who are assimilable and will tangibly benefit our society in the future, a view expressed repeatedly during debates over illegal immigration in this country, many libertarians view the subject in an altogether different light. For them, the question is not so much whether a particular cohort of immigrants will be an asset to the United States but whether we have any right to prevent them from settling in this country in the first place, which many answer in the negative.

Libertarians extol the primacy of individual rights, which in this case entails the right to emigrate from your country of birth whenever you so desire-something that I don’t think any conservative would take issue with-and to immigrate to whatever country you want to live and/or work in for an extended period of time, which is where the divide between the two camps emerges. Libertarians view the issue as one of freedom of association-and by extension, contract-wherein willing employers, such as large agribusinesses and meatpacking plants, seek out willing employees coming from nations with under-performing economies that can’t meet the personal and financial needs of their citizens. They believe that the nexus between trade and unfettered migration is inextricable, if not completely self-evident, and that the two can not be severed if a nation hopes to grow its economy. While this may well be true as a matter of law, there are numerous holes in this thesis intellectually, which opponents of open borders-even anarcho-capitalists such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe-have exposed through well-researched arguments of their own.

However, underlying the debate over whether immigration and settlement is a natural right is the assumption that all libertarians/anarcho-capitalists agree on the immigration issue, which is not as much of  a given as it would seem on the surface of things. One of the things that I’ve attempted to do with American Rattlesnake is debunk commonly held assumptions about immigration issues, and the assumption that libertarians all subscribe to Gary Johnson’s point of view is one that needs to be reexamined. There are many libertarians and  anarcho-capitalists who recognize both the practical difficulties and existential problems inherent in society based upon unfettered immigration, especially one with the vast social welfare apparatus of the United States. One of the chief exponents of the view that welfare programs need to be curtailed in order to solve the immigration problem is Gary Johnson’s opponent in the Republican presidential race, Congressman Ron Paul. Paul has repeatedly emphasized the need to do away with the generous, taxpayer subsidized social welfare programs that-while not serving as the initial magnet-provide incentives for illegal aliens to extend their stay in this country indefinitely. The population density of legal immigrants is also heavily correlated with the availability of welfare benefits. Even acclaimed economist Milton Friedman, who held a rather benign view of immigration in general, emphasized the incompatibility of a welfare state with unfettered immigration.

The same opinion is held by many libertarians today, including self-professed constitutionalist Andrew Napolitano, who views Arizona’s landmark immigration law primarily through the prism of the Constitution’s supremacy clause and potential violations of the 4th Amendment via racial or ethnic profiling by law enforcement officers. I’m not sure that the Constitutional objection to statewide laws is dispositive, because-as Andrew McCarthy has pointed out repeatedly in National Review-there is no precedent for prohibiting states from enforcing laws that are consistent with federal statutes. Furthermore, if we look to the broader issue of legal immigration, there’s nothing to suggest that the men who drafted the United States Constitution supported the sort of unfettered immigration we have endured since passage of the Hart-Celler Act fundamentally altered this nation’s demographic destiny. This is a concept that is seldom grasped by arm-chair commentators on immigration these days, whose default option is to repeat the platitudinous-not to mention, factually incorrect-bromide that we are a “nation of immigrants.” What they neglect to mention is that most this nation’s founding fathers would have been implacably opposed to the present lassez-faire system of immigration, a fact that Thomas Woods-as anti-statist an individual as you’ll find among academics-expertly limns in this Human Events column published during the height of the amnesty debate in Washington D.C.

Yet, even if we were to concede that there’s no firm historical or Constitutional foundation for this nation’s current open borders policies, can it not be argued that there is a compelling moral case for the views espoused by those at the Wall Street Journal editorial board, Cato Institute, Reasonoids, and other trendy, beltway cosmotarians? You would definitely think so if you took their arguments at face value. The notion that we have no moral basis for barring certain immigrants from entry into the United States is certainly widespread in certain libertarian circles, but I don’t believe that makes the idea, ipso facto, libertarian. Julian Simon, in a 1998 essay published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, articulated the perspective felt by many that individual autonomy takes precedence over other “public” goods, including our national borders. In an anarcho-capitalist reality, nation-states would not exist, therefore deciding who should or should not be admitted to your nation would be a moot point.

But while it might seem logical that freedom of movement, freedom of association, and freedom of contract-and at its most essential level, the individual him or herself-are all prioritized over the wishes and feelings of citizens who have a vested interested in preserving the character of their nation, there are those that don’t think these competing values are necessarily mutually exclusive. In a persuasive essay written for Lew Rockwell several years ago, N. Stephan Kinsella made a very compelling argument that while the disposition of property in our society is unjust-insofar as the state has no right to expropriate land that rightfully belongs to individuals-so long as that property is entrusted to the state it has a responsibility to act as caretaker for the rightful owners. In this case, it has the responsibility to prevent the ingress of people that citizens do not want to welcome into their country. While those who are opposed to communitarianism in even its most minimal form might reject Kinsella’s public pool analogy, I think he makes a convincing case that some prophylactic measures need to be enforced to prevent the exploitation of your property-even if it’s already been subjected to theft by the state.

There are many cogent arguments against the current trendy libertarian support for open borders, several of them outlined by the first presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party, John Hospers, in paper published by the Journal of Libertarian Studies over a decade ago entitled A Libertarian Argument Against Open Borders. The concluding paragraph of the essay is especially perceptive in its analysis of the problem:

Occasionally, we hear the phrase “limousine liberals” used to describe the members of the liberal establishment who send their children to expensive private schools while consigning all the others to the public school system, which educates these children so little that by the time they finish the eighth grade they can barely read and write or do simple arithmetic, or make correct change in a drug store. It would be equally appropriate, however, to describe some other people as ”limousine libertarians” —those who pontificate about open borders while remaining detached from the scenes that their “idealism” generates. They would do well to reflect, in their ivory towers, on whether the freedom they profess for those who are immigrants, if it occurs at all, is to be brought about at the expense of the freedom of those who are not.

This passage describes, in a nut shell, the quintessence of cosmotarianism, and why most Americans-and even some in the libertarian movement-continue to reject it. I could post the most meticulously researched George Borjas journal article, the most statistically devastating backgrounder from the Center for Immigration Studies, or the most irrefutable essay by Mahattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald. And although all of these sources are invaluable in the fight to define the terms of this debate, they wouldn’t hold a candle to the self-evident fact that none of the greatest exponents and defenders of open borders, be it Tamar Jacoby, or Jason Riley, or Nick Gillespie, abide by their own exhortations. None of these individuals partake of the glorious mosaic which their unyielding ideology has done so much to create.

You won’t find many Reason Magazine editors or Cato Institute scholars living in Bergenfield, New Jersey, Maywood, California, or Eagle Pass, Texas. Why, you might ask? Because they would rather pass off the tremendous costs of their bankrupt philosophy onto ordinary Americans than to admit that they might just be wrong. These people are insulated from unfettered immigration’s worst effects, including chronic unemployment, violent crime, and environmentally devasting pollution from Arizona to California and throughout the country. They have the luxury of ignoring the impact of this country’s changing demographic profile while promoting the patently absurd notion that our open borders are a boon to all but the small percentage of high school dropouts.

What’s more, they make the equally ludicrous assertion-outlined in the Caplan speech above-that importing millions of unskilled, uneducated immigrants, who will be dependent upon costly government services, from quasi-socialist nations will expand this nation’s economic liberty. Forget the fact that we now enjoy less economic freedom than our northern neighbors, a development concurrent with the greatest expansion of immigration in this country’s history, the entire premise underlying this concept is flawed. You do not build a prosperous, 21st century, post-industrial society around foreigners from countries with low human capital. And the amount of time, energy and economic resources that need to be shifted in order to improve the educational prospects and earning potential of these immigrants, e.g. the billions funneled into ESL programs each year, is so cost prohibitive that it outweighs whatever benefits can be gleaned from such an arrangement.

Another seeming inconsistency in the archetypal libertarian solution to our immigration problem is the reluctance of most libertarians to support any sort of relief for American taxpayers who are tasked with paying for millions of illegal aliens and immigrants who are dependent upon costly social services. Particularly, public schooling and emergency health care. Invoking Friedman’s argument once again, we find that while many libertarians will concede that dependency upon welfare programs is a bad thing they will do nothing to limit access to these programs by illegal aliens or permanent residents. To the contrary, if any such bill-which is immigration neutral-is proffered, they will stalwartly oppose it. Just ask new Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson, who supports the DREAM Act, despite the fact that taxpayers would be subsidizing the in-state tuition discounts of its recipients. Paleolibertarian writer Ilana Mercer deftly skewers  purported libertarians who routinely call for the abolition of the welfare state while adding a proviso that excludes immigrants and illegal aliens from the fiscal demands of their libertopia.

True believers in liberty, like Mercer and the late Murray N. Rothbard, recognize the inherent contradiction in persuading your fellow Americans to reject the embrace of the state while simultaneously welcoming millions of non-Americans into the country who prefer a larger and more intrusive government in almost every respect into our society. They realize that the banal platitudes used to support unfettered immigration are grossly inaccurate, if not transparent lies. They also realize that the interests of the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce, the Farm Bureau, and the hospitality industry do not necessarily coincide with the interests of the free market, and that to a large extent our current immigration policy is another form of corporate welfare, which putative libertarians would be quick to denounce in any other context. The time-saving, productivity-increasing technological innovations that would normally be welcomed by these same individuals are rejected by those who apparently think pre-industrial stoop labor is the best method of improving  our agricultural production. Finally, they recognize that the  utopian, globalist conception of freedom-where people living in Gabon or the Hadhramaut have just as much say in how we are governed as American citizens living in New York-contravenes the distinctively American, Constitutional, federalist, representative republic designed by this nation’s founding fathers.

In short, the issue before the house is not whether it is an abandonment of principle for libertarians to embrace sensible immigration restrictions, it’s why institutional libertarians representing organizations like the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation have stifled an honest, open intellectual debate about this subject. Even as the negative repercussions of our government’s devotion to open borders become harder to ignore for all but the most oblivious, the gatekeepers of respectable opinion on this subject continue to narrow the parameters of discussion to their own narrow, ahistorical perspective. I don’t expect that to change any time in the near future, but those of us who want an intellectually honest debate about the most important issue of our time can at least begin to clarify its terms, if for no other reason than to educate those novices interested in how mass immigration has impacted our society who are asking themselves how they should view these changes from a liberty-oriented perspective.

In my previous post, I described two presentations by post-graduate students invited to (New) Debates On Belonging, a workshop by the CUNY Graduate Center-seen above-devoted to exploring original research into the subjects of illegal immigration and the lives of illegal aliens within the United States. There were three other presentations that day, beginning with a discussion of the legal status and health of immigrants by Julia Gelatt of the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. 

 Ms. Gelatt’s research focused on immigrant-headed households in Los Angeles, as well as families led by parents who are illegal aliens. She divided her subjects into three distinct groups: legal immigrants, those families with mixed citizenship, i.e. where one family member was illegal while others were legal, and “undocumented,” which I will hereafter refer to as illegal. This research was grounded in the Los Angeles Family Neighborhood Study, which was a bilingual study undertaken from 2001-2002 and in 2005. She began with a clinical recitation of the numbers, e.g. 5.3 million children who have parents that are illegal aliens, 1 million children themselves who are not legal, the decline, from 1.5 to 1 million, in the number of illegal children,  and the one-third of Latinos who allegedly know someone who was deported from the country.

She then proceeded to describe how she believes assimilation theory plays into the health outcomes of these individuals. This theory purports to demonstrate a link between a parent’s immigration status and the well being of his or her child. She cited a previous study by Hirokazu Yoshikawa that found lower cognitive skills among children of illegal aliens, which is an observation that she hopes to extrapolate to other areas of  child development such as “externalizing” and behavioral problems among the children of illegals. Her focus relies upon studies of access to health insurance and medical care in Los Angeles County. She found access to the former limited among illegal aliens-who also had less access to welfare programs such as food stamps-but access to the former widespread, indicating that illegal status was not an obstacle to obtaining health care, as the many public hospitals in Los Angeles that have closed because of costs incurred treating illegal patients can attest to. 

My primary objection is to the underlying assumption of Ms. Gelatt’s presentation that it is the illegal status of these individuals that has resulted in health and behavioral problems among them and their family members, which even she undermined when she conceded that legal immigrant families also exhibited similar problems, albeit to a lesser degree. Left unaddressed is the ineluctable fact that many of these families-both legal and illegal-come from rural, undeveloped parts of Mexico and do not have the education and/or language skills necessary to adapt to life in a post-industrial, 21st century American metropolis. Although this subject is rarely touched upon in mainstream media outlets eager to portray California as a multicultural paradise, it has suffused life to such an extent that even reporters are reluctantly acknowledging the divide between traditional, American residents of California and newcomers who are both literally and figuratively aliens to the dominant culture and its mores. Although I’m certain that attributing these epidemiological problems to the immigrants themselves-rather than to what set of “documents” they do or do not have-would not endear Ms. Gelatt to her academic advisors, or to the institutions she’s seeking academic grants from, it would be a more open-minded, intellectually rigorous approach to the sociological problems she hopes to address. 

A presentation that I found much more compelling, both stylistically and substantively, was delivered by Bilesha Weeraratne, a PhD candidate in Economics at CUNY who has used a micro data-based approach to identify the population of unauthorized immigrants inside of the United States. In order to ascertain an accurate estimate of the number of illegal aliens living in the United States-and I should note that unlike all of the other speakers at this event she described them as illegal immigrants  rather than using the misleading euphemism undocumented-she used several important surveys as a frame of reference. 

One of these happened to be the Legalized Population Survey of 1989, which was a sample of over 6,000 illegal aliens who applied for legal permanent residence under the terms specified by the Immigration Control and Reform Act of 1986, known more widely by its shorthand, the Simpson-Mazzoli Act. The chief shortcomings of using the LPS, obviously, are that it does not include statistics from non-naturalized aliens who did not meet the criteria set forth by ICRA, and overlooks the estimated 10 to 11 million illegal aliens who have entered the country since Simpson-Mazzoli was enacted into law. In order to compensate for these shortcomings, Weeraratne used another data set culled from the American Community Survey (2009), which determines the number of estimated illegal aliens by subtracting the population of legal residents from the total foreign-born population. Again, this method is not  perfect, since it does not take into account those who have left the country but are not properly tracked. Perhaps this explains why-as the speaker pointed out during her presentation-existing DHS figures mischaracterize nearly 1 in 4 legal immigrants as illegal. Even researchers who are well-immersed in the minutiae of this issue-such as the Pew Hispanic Center-often come up with imprecise numbers because of dubious assumptions, e.g. the unsubstantiated belief that the occupational structure of the illegal community remains constant, notwithstanding our incredibly dynamic economy. That’s why Bilesha Weeraratne believes that her micro data based methodology-which doesn’t rely upon static assumptions or merely one data set-is the best way of arriving at a precise figure for the number of illegal aliens living in the United States. After listenning to her incredibly well-researched presentation, it’s hard to disagree with that belief. 

The final paper of the afternoon-and by far, one of the least persuasive in my eyes-was a joint presentation by Brian Levin and Paul Lagunes, both doctoral candidates in Political Science from Yale, which was entitled “Documenting The Undocumented.” Along with Ruth Dittelman, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychology at the same university, they attempted to analyze the success of a New Haven program which gave illegal aliens a muncipal ID card called the Elm City Residence Card. After giving us a brief of overview of the political history behind Mayor John DeStefano’s decision to issue these ID cards-beginning with his unsuccessful run for the governorship of Connecticut-the presenters outlined the contours of their experiment, which entailed sending six males to different merchandisers in the state of Connecticut using both the Elm City ID Card and the Ameracard. The former being the “official” identity card issued as a means of documenting illegals-although, as pointed out during the presentation, it was available to legal residents-while the latter is a “fake”  card issued by a profit-seeking document mill. 

The point of the experiment was ostensibly to answer the question, “Are Latinos trustworthy?” In order to answer this question, the students picked both Latino and what they described as white males, all controlled for age, height, education, and other factors that might otherwise influence a retailer’s decision to discriminate-by asking for identification-against customers of Latino extraction. The findings were that the Latino subjects were 10 percent more likely to be asked for identification prior to making a transaction. The actual purchase comprised the second phase of this experiment, which was used as a barometer to compare the rates of acceptance for the “real” ID card issued by New Haven with that of the “fake” ID card. Lagunes and Levin found that the two cards were accepted at equal rates, leading them to conclude that the poor quality of the Elm City ID, and perhaps an insufficient public education campaign among local merchants, accounted for what they viewed as ignorance on the part of  those merchants. 

Leaving aside the pre-existing biases of these researchers, there are a number of problems with the both the methodology and conclusions of this study. First of all, “Latino” is a notoriously imprecise term, especially when it’s used to describe one’s race or ethnicity. The word Latino might describe the region in which one was born, or the language a person speaks, but it has no significance when it comes to finding examples of “racial profiling,” which was the intention of Lagunes and the co-authors of this paper. The fact that we couldn’t see photographs or video of the subjects they used for this experiment only further undermined their original hypothesis, in my opinion. 

Secondly, they didn’t seriously consider the possibility that the reason the Elm City Resident Card might not have been given any more credence than the Ameracard is because neither one is a truly legitimate, valid form of identification, regardless of what a city bureaucrat intent on undermining federal immigration law believes. This is illustrated by the fact that the person responsible in large measure for the New Haven card was working with the Mexican government to proliferate the notoriously fraudulent matricula consular. Although someone raised that very issue during the question and answer session that followed the final presentation, she was not given a satisfactory response. In fact, the question of this card becoming an invitation for New Haven to become a haven for breeder documents used by criminal aliens-and perhaps terrorists-which I posed was even more befuddling to Lagunes and Levin. The two had begun their presentation by asserting that there was such an overwhelming need for illegal aliens to be given “documents” in order to function in society that policies like that pursued by New Haven’s mayor were necessary. But when I asked them how New Haven could avoid becoming a beacon for illegal aliens seeking breeder documents-as is the case in states like New Mexico-they replied that the people seeking cards were living in New Haven, and that even this demand quickly dissipated. So which is it? They never seemed to resolve the contradiction.

Finally, and I found this to be supremely ironic given the context, the authors applauded the denial of a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request filed by opponents of the Elm City Resident Card that would have required the names, photographs and addresses of its recipients within New Haven. The same people agitating for a way to “document the undocumented” want to keep these poor, undocumented individuals stuck “in the shadows.” I have no doubt that if an open borders advocacy organization had filed suit to obtain similar information from a group of pro-enforcement, patriotic Arizonans opposing the recall of State Senator Russell Pearce their viewpoint on this particular “privacy” issue would have been worlds apart from the one they espoused during the Q&A session. 

 So the final part of this fascinating multi-hour workshop was disappointing. That said, I do think that the trip to Manhattan was a worthwhile endeavor, especially since it allowed me to learn more about the current state of social science research regarding the issue of immigrants living in America. To conclude, I’d have to say that while there are some very thoughtful researchers and academicians of this subject-such as the brilliant Bilesha Weeraratne-there is also much tendentious research pursued under the rubric of sociology, which was certainly on display at the CUNY Graduate Center this past week.