Months of strenuous campaigning, millions of dollars in political advertising, and countless days of retail politicking will culminate in just a few hours, when a select few will decide who will be awarded the first presidential delegates of the 2012 Republican race for President of the United States. Although not always an accurate gauge of who is ultimately nominated by the Republican Party-a fact pointed out rather inelegantly by Jon Huntsman-the Iowa caucuses do have a significant impact upon the results of future contests, particularly the New Hampshire primary.

That’s why it’s important that we scrutinize the words and deeds-and in some cases, rather extensive voting records-of those who seek the GOP nod to face President Obama this November. Specifically, from the perspective of the immigration enforcement and reform  movement. There are a number of recent polls, from Insider Advantage to Rasmussen Reports, which all show more or less the same dynamics at play. Namely, a battle for the top spot between Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, a surging Rick Santorum, a rejuvenated Rick Perry campaign, and a large percentage of undecided voters who’ve yet to make up their minds. While Fox News has provided a helpful primer on the state of play in Iowa on the eve of the caucuses, it’s important that we take some time to ponder the implications of today’s vote, vis-a-vis sensible immigration policy. 

We start with a candidate  American Rattlesnake has neglected to cover this primary season, mostly because his support among Republican voters amounted to a rounding error, notwithstanding some noteworthy endorsements by conservative political organizations and evangelical Christian activists. However, times have changed for Rick Santorum, who now finds himself third among Republican presidential candidates in most Iowa polls. This rise allows us to examine Santorum’s record on immigration and border security issues, which is a mixed bag, at best. While his overall record is absolutely atrocious, if we’re going to judge him by his Numbers USA scorecard-which is as good a barometer of fitness as any in this regard-then the former senator from Pennsylvania is near the bottom of the pack in terms of potential GOP nominees. Roy Beck gives a harsh, but fair, analysis of Santorum in an overview for Numbers USA that I suggest you all read. 

His record in the U.S. Senate and Congress was respectable, as Beck readily acknowledges, and got significantly better the longer he served-he was a strong “no” vote against the DREAM Act during the lame duck session of Congress convened by Senator Harry Reid. What’s more, he has tried to woo us during this primary-going so far as to condemn the sanctimonious scroungers at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops who have turned societal pardon of illegal aliens into an official sacrament. That said, his record on E-Verify, probably the most effective immigration enforcement tool we currently have at our disposal-and a perfect wedge issue, as Mickey Kaus points out-has been positively abysmal, with his past votes and statements regarding legal immigration being a greater disappointment, although not an anomaly in this field, regretfully. 

Santorum’s presidential candidacy reflects the essential dichotomy of the Republican field’s relationship to the subject of immigration. While almost every one of the candidates abjures the term “amnesty,” sometimes comically so, and is in a sense an improvement upon the the Republican Party’s previous presidential nominees, and certainly the previous occupant of the White House, almost all of them have serious limitations and flaws with respect to national identity, sovereignty, and the impediments to progress that our current policy of unfettered, mass immigration represents. The reflexive paeans both Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney heap upon the disastrous H1-B visa program is but one example of the weakness of the top tier of Republican presidential candidates. Even Ron Paul, who has made admirable strides to highlight pivotal issues such as the insanity of extending birthright citizenship to the children of illegals and subsidizing those in this country who are trespassing, has regressed during this campaign. 

Ironically, the wholly antagonistic nature of the Obama administration, which has effectively declared war on large swathes of the American population, presumably comprising  a portion of the electorate he can safely discard, has actually served to enhance the profile of a crop of candidates that has a conspicuously dovish position on the subject of immigration. For even the disingenuousness of a Rick Perry or harebrained, semantic sophistry by a Newt Gingrich doesn’t approach the unremitting hostility this administration has displayed towards enforcing immigration law. From executive edicts that flagrantly defy the law, to implicit sanction given to localities that flout federal directives on immigration enforcement, to politically-driven witch hunts undertaken against those who have the temerity to enforce the law, President Obama has been an unmitigated disaster for  American citizens who don’t profit personally from the illegal alien industry. 

So in that sense, any Republican candidate-now that open borders libertarian Gary Johnson has officially abandoned the GOP-would be better than the current resident of the Oval Office. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that every Republican candidate would promote good immigration policy once elected to the presidency. Particularly disappointing has been the flagging campaign of Michele Bachmann, who at one point seemed poised not only to become a prime challenger to Mitt Romney, but also to put the issue of illegal immigration at the forefront of this presidential election. Unfortunately, like the presidential campaign of intrepid congressman Tom Tancredo, Bachmann’s candidacy does not look like it will garner much traction beyond the Iowa caucuses. The fact that Sarah Palin has consigned her to the realm of the Huntsmans of this race certainly does not bode well for her candidacy. 

However, that doesn’t mean that the attention she -and even the abortive campaign launched by Herman Cain-gave to the subject of our misguided immigration policy-and the intentional recklessness of this administration in disregarding its duty to protect and defend our borders-did not have an impact on the dimensions of the Republican race. Nor does it mean that this issue will be forgotten any time soon, as the Supreme Court hearing regarding the appeal of an injunction against SB 1070 during the height of the 2012 presidential race ensures. Our porous borders and the devastating consequences of illegal immigration during a prolonged recession will be election issues, regardless of the attractiveness of the eventual GOP nominee. It is our job, as citizens and activists, to push whoever that candidate is in the right direction, and to demand that he make the contrast with President Obama on these issues explicitly clear. Our country can’t afford a return to the days of Obama v. McCain, or Bush v. Kerry…and neither can we. 

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 more interesting portions of Manhattan’s geography is Union Square Park, which serves as a farmer’s market, transit hub, and rallying point for political activists of varying political stripes. One of the groups that has used Union Square to showcase its views, both today and in the past, is the Communist Party.

However, this past friday saw a protest sponsored by the New York Libertarian Party that was entitled Ban the Scan, and intended to speak out against what it perceives as misguided policies initiated by the Transportation Security Administration, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security ostensibly designed to secure American airways and air travelers from terrorist threats. 

To demonstrate the weirdness of the City on certain days, one of the first groups of people I encountered was a band of Hare Krishnas. Presumably, they weren’t concerned with being screened by TSA agents, although I can’t help but think they would be some of the first ones pulled out for extra screening. 

I encountered a significantly more disturbing sight as I walked towards the subway terminal where I spotted a group of posters that I assumed were related to the upcoming protest. It turns out-and an organizer of the anti-TSA rally assured me this was the case-that the group in question wasn’t associated with the rally at all, but was rather a conglomeration of Truthers, whose continued stupidity can only be properly satirized through a Cox & Forkum cartoon. 

Although the fact that this group of paranoid, borderline schizophrenic gadflies has diminished in the decade since the September 11th massacres committed by Al Qaeda is heartening, it still irritates me whenever I see members crawl out from underneath their highway overpasses and caves in order to berate people who have endured more terrorist attacks and attempted terrorist attacks than anyone else in this country.

There were more conventional political activists who showed up for the TSA rally, including several fervent Ron Paul supporters:

Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the sponsors of this rally was Rep. Ron Paul’s political organization, Campaign for Liberty. 

Many of the signs focused on the intrusiveness of TSA screenings, which were analogized to sexual harassment. 

Other avenues of attack focused on the perceived abrogation of the right to travel by the TSA and urged airline passengers to opt out of both full body scans and pat-downs, or highlighted the alleged health dangers posed by scanners. 

This was probably the least persuasive line of argument used by TSA opponents during the event. As has been pointed out by people much more well-versed in this subject than me, the levels of radiation these scanners expose you to is not nearly enough to put your health or life at risk. The first LP activist to speak made a much more persuasive case that these methods of screening passengers are not cost-effective either from an economic or national security standpoint.

In a compelling, if overlong, speech decrying  our current Homeland Security initiatives, he explored how we could have a much more efficacious method of passenger screening by implementing the model used by El-Al. Israel’s national airline relies upon extensive behavioral profiling that focuses on obvious risks, and not benign grandmothers, six year-old children, or anyone else sure to provoke a TSA horror story.

My own view is that while there are undoubtedly some very capable, very hard-working TSA agents, the current system does not work for anyone. And the definitive proof that this is the case is that while you can cite Customs and Border Patrol agents, members of the Armed Forces,  CIA agents, and even electronics store clerks who have broken up potential terrorist plots, the TSA has yet to thwart a significant terrorist plot on American soil. I doubt rallies like the one shown in this photo-essay will do anything to prod the federal government to adopt any sensible reforms, but the fact that some people are not satisfied with the current, ad hoc approach to combating terror in the skies is inescapable.