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.

One of the most  eloquent advocates for immigration control and enforcement that I know of is Professor Carol M. Swain. For those of you who aren’t familiar with her work, Professor Swain is an acclaimed scholar in the fields of race relations, immigration, and American politics. She also happens to be the author of a powerful new book that tackles these subjects, among others, entitled Be The People: A Call To Reclaim America’s Faith and Promise. You can find this work, along with a fantastic anthology of essays dealing with the subject of immigration which she’s edited, on her website. You can also listen to her testimony before Lamar Smith’s House Judiciary Committee earlier this year, which addressed the problems posed to youth, African-Americans, Hispanic Americans and other underserved communities by our government’s policy of unfettered immigration. Too often these groups are overlooked by elected officials searching for an immigration “solution,” despite the fact that they bear the brunt of the short-sighted solutions that are devised on Capitol Hill and in the White House.

Carol Swain is what the immigration reform movement should be about, i.e. repairing the ethnic divisions and racial animosities that have riven this country over the past century while at the same time recognizing the interests of both native-born Americans and new immigrants to our nation. I heartily recommend looking into her work, which has added immeasurably to the public dialogue about these pivotal national issues.

A very disturbing article was published in the Houston Chronicle yesterday revealing the sharp increase in apprehensions of illegal border-crossers from terrorist-designated nations over the past 17 months. Although the tone of the article would lead you to believe that Islamic terrorists aren’t attempting to exploit our porous southern border, nothing could be further from the truth.

Despite the protestations of a predictably dreary open borders professor, and the ostensible lack of followup charges in most of these cases, there is in fact a determined effort by Muslim jihadists of various stripes to infiltrate this nation from Mexico. A case in point is the Tunisian Muslim cleric whose brief detention the article alludes to in passing. 

Said Jaziri was picked up by Border Patrol agents close to San Diego at the same time as the uprising in his native country was occurring. And despite the fact that he wasn’t charged with any criminal acts, it has been irrefutably proven that he shares many of the same beliefs as Al Qaeda agents that have gone on to maim and murder American citizens. Furthermore, the assertion that there aren’t Islamic terrorist groups who are seeking to exploit our sieve-like border with Mexico is demonstrably false. Although Al Qaeda might not have penetrated our southern neighbor, the presence of Hezbollah-an equal, if not greater, threat to our nation’s security-has been revealed in case after case. 

Kudos to Professor Carol Swain, a tireless champion of American citizens and foe of illegal immigration, for highlighting the danger presented by the gaps in our country’s border security and immigration enforcement regime. We can longer afford to look at this situation as merely a problem of “undocumented workers” from Mexico  striving to improve their forlorn lives. The longer we continue to dwell upon this delusion, the less time we’ll have to prevent the next Millennium Bombing plot from being carried out.

One of the biggest misconceptions in the debate over our nation’s immigration policy is the notion that in order to be a good Christian or a decent Jew you need to support a policy of open borders in perpetuity. Although the link between a partisan political agenda and belief in the scriptural teachings of a given religion might be hard to discern for most neutral observers, the vast majority of the religious establishment in this country has nevertheless made this connection a focal point of their vocations.

Whether it’s a United Methodist Church in Chicago sheltering the noxious illegal alien Elvira Arellano,  the Roman Catholic Church’s seemingly implacable quest to foist amnesty upon a resistant American public, despite its utterly discredited leadership, or the Progress by Pesach campaign launched by liberal rabbinical leaders in this country, there would appear to be unanimity among America’s clerical and rabbinical hierarchy on the topic of immigration. 

I broach this subject now because of a fascinating discussion I recently had on Facebook with Professor Carol M. Swain, the brilliant conservative immigration enforcement activist and political science professor from Vanderbilt University. She obliquely alluded to some comments made by Richard D. Land, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission-whose logo is reproduced above-with which she vehemently disagreed. I could only assume that these comments were related to Mr. Land’s vocal support for amnesty legislation. 

Although the discrepancy between the views of religious leaders and their congregants, re: immigration, has been empirically demonstrated by respected pollsters, there is still a tendency among the public to defer to men and women of the cloth when they begin to expound upon our obligation to the “pilgrim” or “refugee.” This is an egregious error in judgment, in my opinion.

Despite the fact that the Lutheran Church is now often associated with liberal causes-such as the sanctuary movement revived by open borders advocates masquerading as pastors-this reverend makes one of the more compelling, persuasive Christian arguments in opposition to the movement aiding illegal aliens living in this country. And as hard as it may be to conceive of, there are other voices that dissent from the current orthodoxy, as this essay by Mark Tooley, President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, demonstrates.

The notion that Judaism or Christianity are synonymous with a specific immigration policy advocated by liberal political figures with religious facades is simply false. The more people expose the fallacies in this way of thinking the closer we’ll be to having a real examination of the problems that porous borders and weak interior immigration enforcement pose to our country. The leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops are on the wrong track, and they need to be told so by their flock. Unfettered immigration and indifference to criminal behavior are not Christian values, and no one should be deceived into believing they are.

From our good friends at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, we finally have a rough estimate of how much, cumulatively speaking, the continued presence of illegal aliens in this country costs the American taxpayer.

Hat tip: Dr. Carol M. Swain