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.

Speaking of Michele Bachmann, she’s released a comprehensive immigration plan that would incrementally deport the estimated 11 million illegal aliens currently living in the United States. In addition to implementing a policy of enforcement through attrition, she would construct a border fence along the Mexican-American border, mandate that English be this nation’s official language, and do away with birthright citizenship. In a must-listen interview with Laura Ingraham, she also takes Newt Gingrich to task for his amnesty lite plan, which couldn’t differ more starkly from the Bachmann platform.

 In disturbing news, the House of of Representatives has rubber stamped a bill that would exacerbate one of the most damaging aspects of our current immigration policy, i.e. chain migration. While the useful idiots in the mainstream media have attempted to portray this bill as benefitting high-skilled immigrants from China and India who want to remain in the United States, the true beneficiaries of this-should it be enacted into law-will be thousands of distant relatives from countries like Mexico sponsored by newly minted American citizens. Any time you hear the word “bipartisanship” your attenae as American citizens should go up, and this is no different. When the leader of the National Immigration Forum-one of the legal and political spearheads of the open borders movement-and Chuck Schumer support something, it’s usually a good idea to oppose it. Unfortunately, that’s not what the Republican-led Congress did, and we’re so much the worse for it.

In a shameful example of the depths to which the fifth estate will stoop in order to promote their open borders agenda, the tragic suicide of a young man named Joaquin Luna is being manipulated by the mainstream media in order to promote the DREAM Act, which has been repeatedly and emphatically rejected by Congress since it was first introduced over a decade ago. The good folks at Newsbusters have an astute analysis of the despicable manner in which just one media outlet-in this case, CNN-has attempted to politicize this personal tragedy.

One of the real tragedies of the immigration debate-such as it is-that we’re having in this country is the distortive effect the media has when it comes to prioritizing issues. Instead of focusing on the potential illegal alien recipients of taxpayer largesse, why aren’t we discussing the amount of carnage illegals are cumulatively inflicting upon our society? Jim Kouri has a must-read piece highlighting a buried government report that examines the damage they have caused by creating some of the most destrutive forest fires in our country’s southwest, particularly Arizona. It’s rare that I compliment John McCain, but I agree with The Blaze’s assessment that the GAO report vindicates previous public statements he’s made on this matter.

In news closer to home, a New Jersey judge has ordered the deportation of a woman who is allegedly being targeted by a Guatemalan gang called Valle del Sol while allowing her sister to remain the United States indefinitely. The extent of gang influence in Latin America is staggering, demonstrated once again by the open declaration of war on American and Mexican authorities recently issued by Los Zetas, perhaps the most feared narco-cartel in the country of Mexico.

In a case eerily similar to Operation Fast and Furious, the United States government is now facing calls for investigation into a money laundering operation undertaken by the Drug Enforcement Administration in an attempt to find patterns among Mexican drug trafficking criminal syndicates.

Staying in Mexico, we find a claim by Mexican authorities that they’ve foiled an international conspiracy by one of the late dictator Mouammar Kadhafi’s fugitive sons to escape Libya through illegal passage into Mexico. This story would be worthy of mockery if the impact of Mexican illegal immigration-facilitated by the Mexican government itself-weren’t such a grave matter.

In yet more news of immigration fraud that endangers our nation, a woman living in Rancho Cucamonga  has been arrested for bringing in unauthorized foreign students to train at her flight school under fraudulent visas. For those of you who are regular followers of American Rattlesnake, this story will sound very familiar. Apparently, our government has learned very little from September 11th.

In contrast, the government of Israel seems to be learning very rapidly how much damage an open door policy can inflict upon a nation’s sovereignty. That’s why Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai has come out publicly and stated that African economic migrants-from predominately Muslim nations like Eritrea and Sudan-will no longer be welcomed with open arms by the Jewish state. The national identity of Israel may very well be imperiled by overly generous asylum policies, a lesson that we in North America  have yet to absorb.

Last but not least, we’re pleased to bring you another incisive, amusing take on the skewed priorities of our federal government, courtesy of Anthony Bialy. Even as this administration waves the white flag on illegal alien border jumpers, it continues its war against hippie drug paraphernalia. Only in America, and only under the Obama administration.

One way to get in touch with Mr. Diaz is to write to him directly at this address:

BPA Jesus Diaz 

PO Box 2317, Del Rio Texas

78841

You can also find updates on this case at a great website established for the expressed purpose of freeing Agent Diaz, which contains a plethora of information about the miscarriage of justice that led to his conviction and imprisonment. There you can also, if you so choose, decide to contribute to his legal defense fund. It should be noted that Jesus Diaz’s wife Diana is herself a Border Patrol agent, and therefore hard-pressed to fight the legal battle ahead of them relying solely upon her own resources. 

The fact that Agent Diaz was prosecuted in the first place is outrageous, but not at all surprising considering the war that the federal government is waging upon its own front-line immigration and law enforcement officers. At the very least, become informed about what the Department of Justice is doing on your behalf, and remind the Diaz family that there are still Americans who appreciate their service defending this country.

It’s been brought to my attention by one of our esteemed contributors, Marion (D.S.) Dreyfus, that federal funding for the National Council of La Raza, i.e. “The Race,” a group that some would deem blatantly racist, has increased almost threefold since Cecilia Munoz, a former NCLR official, was appointed by President Obama.  Tom Fitton, the head of Judicial Watch and the man who has uncovered the connections between La Raza and the White house, has the entire story on Big Government. 

You should also read the Judicial Watch document exploring the links between La Raza and important congressional and administration figures. Even though the increased funding for this distasteful, divisive organization came about as a result of congressional action, Munoz’s position inside of the administration is pivotal to this discussion. She serves as the liaison between the White House and local authorities, a post from which she’s able to coordinate campaigns to enact the open borders lobby’s wish list, including amnesty and the DREAM Act.  

The investigation by Judicial Watch is important because it exposes the continued theft of our tax dollars for the purpose of bankrolling an organization whose goals are antithetical to those of American citizens. Although I’m sure the White House would rather we ignore this transfer of wealth to the nation’s enemies, the efforts of determined citizens has made that desire irrelevant. Kudos to Tom Fitton & Co. for ensuring that this outrageous state of affairs doesn’t go unnoticed. 

Those of you who have been following the deteriorating situation on our southern border for the past few years-and I think most of this site’s readers can be included in that category-probably remember the harrowing trials faced by Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compeon. These two courageous law enforcement officers were unjustly prosecuted by a federal government intent on placating the Mexican government rather than ensuring the security of its own citizens.

You can find all of the details relating to their prosecution, incarceration and the eventual commutation of their sentence, on the Internet. I myself remember attending a screening at the Helen Mills Theater of the remarkable documentary Border, which also served as a fund raiser for these men’s legal defense fund.

Little did I know that only a few short years later, I would be recounting the tale of another Border Patrol agent who faces an equally unjust prison sentence for merely doing his job effectively. As former San Diego Mayor and current talk radio host Rodger Hedgecock explains in his column for Human Events, Jesus Diaz is now facing down a potential prison sentence of 35 years for apprehending  violent drug smugglers who were entering this country illegally.

His sentence dovetails with a long pattern of administration indifference to policing the border, including efforts to deter agents from making any arrests of illegal aliens. It also reflects the misplaced priorities of the federal government, which has made of fetish of appeasing Mexico-a nation that violates our sovereignty with impunity-while hanging our nation’s ICE and Border Patrol agents out to dry. The case of Jesus Diaz needs to be broadcast around the nation in order to ensure that the injustice done to agents Compeon and Ramos is not repeated.

• Former Virginia congressman Virgil Goode pens a fantastic piece for Human Events, which explores the underreported attempt by amnesty advocates such as Senator Robert Menendez to force the issue, yet again, during a lame duck session of this Congress. He also focuses upon the steps Republicans need to take in the next Congress to not only thwart bad legislation-such as the DREAM Act-but to enact positive, immigration enforcement and limitation laws. A must-read for anyone interested in the battle ahead!
• The race for governor of the state of Colorado, which we’ve covered extensively on this site, is heating up as we head into the home stretch of this election cycle. While some polls put former congressman and immigration reformer Tom Tancredo behind Denver mayor Tom Hickenlooper, others are showing the two candidates in a virtual dead-heat. Either way, the fact that Congressman Tancredo has managed to wage such an effective third party campaign should put to rest the myth of a Pete Wilson Effect. 
• An interesting piece in Politics Daily about one of our favorite politicians, Hazleton mayor Lou Barletta, who is looking to unseat Democratic Congressman Paul Kanjorski this November after running two previously unsuccessful races against the well-entrenched incumbent. Even though he’s expanded his platform significantly, Barletta is not backing down from his courageous stand against illegal immigration.
• And finally, in a slightly sillier  vein, it appears that Canada’s absurdly liberal refugee system-whose failings we’ve documented extensively on this site-will redound to the benefit of sporadically employed, frequently medicated actor Randy Quaid, as this analysis of his bizarre asylum claim in Maclean’s explores. Let’s hope Mr. Quaid is shown the courtesy regularly extended to suspected Tamil terrorist and TB-afflicted stowaways.