Bryan is right that libertarians can't really oppose open borders consistently, but vaguely libertarian conservatives can. The right-of-center view is Jeffersonian: in practice, a high degree of personal freedom is only stable in a republic of virtue where citizens freely forge bonds of trust and cooperation with each other in families, churches, organizations etc. For instance, a decent society can only get by without a welfare state if there is a privately-provided safety net by these mediating institutions. High rates of immigration cause anomie and destroy the mediating institutions.
That's the argument anyway. I think of it as the reason libertarianism doesn't work well in cities: when everyone lives cheek-by-jowl you just can't get along without specific rules for noise, bans on burning leaves, speed limits, bans on sleeping in libraries and parks, etc. unless people are sufficiently pro-social. If everyone does whatever they want and feels no duty to basic decorum, society becomes grubby and unpleasant.
The mass immigration of low IQ clannish individuals who tend to support redistribution has ended poorly in every single place its been tried. It causes fiscal and economic strain, low trust outcomes across the board in the society, and make politics shift leftward and become more clannish and corrupt. Any honest account of this driven by data shows this.
Libertarians need to realize that demographics drive outcomes. Productive high IQ pro social demographics are the only ones that have ever been friendly to successful libertarian outcomes.
"Libertarians advocate for legalizing heroin with a welfare state in place."
This has been an utter disaster in every way and is being rejected across the country even in previously gung ho progressive areas.
This is a wierd hill to die on. Galt's Gulch is a bunch of high IQ prosocial white dudes making the best of themselves. Not a bunch of heroin addicted lumpenproletariat voting Democrat because they want to shit in the street.
P.S. Many libertarians support the right to life for unborn children. You extend maximum rights to one group and zero rights to another based on your mood affiliation and nothing more.
You're using 'libertarian' in a very autocratic way. To the extent that libertarians can form and maintain a libertarian society wouldn't they have to restrain admission to like minded people for fear of potential autocrats? I think you're eliding over a fundamental issue -- a society which tolerates libertarians need not be libertarian, and its tolerance of libertarians may be fragile. And, in particular, the US is becoming less tolerant of libertarians.
The article talks about the case of someone in this country (a citizen) wanting to hire an immigrant, but it skirts the actual case people are concerned about, which is random people wandering across the border with no particular plan or prospects. Speaking for myself, I'm in favor of guest worker programs and the like (details matter of course) but still favor robust border control.
I honestly can't think any intelligent and sane adult can actually support "open borders" in real life, outside of academic discussion only. Flooding us with poor, low skilled people who will cluster up in their own enclaves can not possibly end well. And what about foreign powers purposely sending agents, confederates, criminals, dregs, or entire clandestine armies into our country?
Regarding the heroine comment, I consider myself strongly libertarian but don't support simple legalization. The argument is nuanced, but you might consider the case of selling a lethal poison to someone who is going through a life crisis and is openly suicidal. The idea is that people sometimes are not in their right mind and exploiting this to profit while _knowingly_ harming them is "not okay". Nobody has a problem with this idea when it comes to children or the obviously mentally ill. When it comes to something like heroin, the argument could be made that almost nobody is in their right mind who takes it. Or looking at it another way, is there ever a situation where a community has no source of heroin and the introduction of a dealer makes them, on balance, better off? Ideally, a legal system should make it unprofitable to make others worse off. I think making it legal to deal cocaine or heroin will make people worse off. Those few individuals who would actually be better of with a legal source of heroin are probably not that much worse off without it.
These are weak and sophist arguments for unregulated/open borders, with such convoluted wording it is hard to understand what is being argued.
"Libertarians advocate for legalizing heroin with a welfare state in place."
No they don't, they advocate for legalizing heroin.
"They don’t defend state restrictions on reproductive rights even when the children will attend public schools."
What does this try to say? That libertarians promote reproductive rights, when children go to public schools?
I don't even see the connection, or the argument being made.
"If you think no one is entitled to these benefits, then it’s hard to see why you’d have a problem with a policy doesn’t provide these benefits in full."
What again. More double/triple negatives? I cannot decipher what is being said here.
"Do taxpayers have the right to prohibit people from driving on public roads if they have copies of Anarchy, State, and Utopia in the car? Surely not."
Ok. So what does that have to do with open borders?
"The third objection is that more immigration will lessen the likelihood of achieving libertarian policy goals"
No, that is not the third objection. From a libertarian POV, that is no objection at all. You would not base the libertarian legality of something by administrative convenience goals.
There are far better libertarian arguments for open borders, but this screed is not any of them. It is barely comprehensible.
Taxpayers have a right to restrict the access of non-taxpayers (and non-citizens in particular) to their infrastructure. This caveat does away with the strawman of 'someone with a book in their car'.
Once infrastructure is fully privatized, its private owners would *also* be excluding plenty of people. Right now the people paying for the infrastructure are the closest analogue to its rightful owners.
Enjoying the article and comments as a classical liberal (some immigration restrictions are maybe sometimes justified under exception). 2 thoughts:
1. I think there is a difference between having the right to restrict immigration / use of 'common property' more generally and it being a good idea. I don't think it all immigration restrictions are inherently illegitimate even if the vast majority or even all make people net worse off (including those imposing them).
2. If liberarians must support open borders, with implied support for illegal immigration, drug use etc ("no libertarian supports legal drug use only" - Bryan Caplan (paraphrased)), do you also pay your taxes?
As a self proclaimed libertarian, I reject open borders simply because we don’t live in a libertarian society. I cannot apply my values to a society (Canada, in my case) that is essentially, and ever increasingly, socialist.
The moment we libertarians are victorious, and we will be, let er rip.
I think the libertarian position on immigration should be that we sell the right to live here. It's valuable, why would I give it away for free. If you want a worker from another country to work at your company you can hire them remotely or pay their fee and have them move here. We should also set a yearly fee, for temporary workers. If you pay their fee for 5 years, they can stay permanently. In this world there is freedom of contract, and association, but the people creating the value of a functioning country can extract some rent for the value they've created or maintained. If you want refugees to be able to emigrate you can raise money to bring in as many as you like, in that instance we can use the fees to help them settle. We should set a number of people who come in democratically, and then auction off the spots. The country is just a club created by the members, and their descendants. They have a legitimate interest in the value created.
Maybe other countries could also charge, and the prices can rise and fall based on demand. Let's create a market for immigration. Maybe even secondary markets that finance immigration. OMG markets, property rights. now that sounds libertarian.
Amazing how Brian and almost all other "principled" libertarians just skate over the most powerful and straightforward argument for SOME immigration restrictions. The primary duty of a liberal state is to remain liberal. If truly open borders would cause the state to lose this attribute, migration should be limited TO THAT EXTENT. For a much more involved and rigorous defense of this position, see my article cowritten with Danny Frederick: https://www.academia.edu/38936607/The_Liberal_Defence_of_Immigration_Control?fbclid=IwAR14uhMBhwdb0ZS_LZm4RQhaplOTBHvyn_3s5SfVFzl-BPxWRAZKIUzaGB4
While closing borders does indeed infringe on the freedoms you list, open borders can ALSO infringe on freedoms (migrants voting to appropriate wealth of people in a country currently; committing crimes against natives at higher rates, or bringing other negative non-libertarian externalities.)
These are tough empirical questions. It's totally possible that positive externalities of migration often outweigh the costs of it (and almost certain that the calculation will vary by type of migration.)
But what we can say with confidence is that it's unhelpful and wrong to claim that "There Are No Libertarian Objections to Open Borders." It makes just as much logical (non)sense to claim the opposite.
In a strict sense, Chris is correct, for the reasons he states.
In a similarly strict sense, can Libertarians oppose pedophilia, when it's a voluntary association between (say) a 30-year old and a 9-year old? Can strict Libertarians support turning your right to turn the lights on in your house without first seeking explicit consent from all your neighbors for all of the photons that will end up on their sovereign property?
In each of these examples, hopefully the vast majority of self-described "Libertarians" are likely to say "rights of free association, self-ownership, self-determination, and private property are pretty fundamental and important, but that doesn't mean they are categorically without exception. The cost/benefit analysis of allowing pedophilia or prohibiting lightbulbs is so dramatically one-sided that it justifies abridging them in these cases"
It's important to remember that "Libertarian people" and "Libertarian principles" are not coterminous. Many Libertarian people I've met oppose open borders for reasons like these - they agree in principle but think that the cost/benefit analysis is at least worthy of significant concern and attention before opening the floodgates. This view seems pretty common among the commenters here, as well.
This isn't a counterargument to Chris' narrow and correct point was that there's no consistent objection from Libertarian principles, but an observation that Libertarian people generally do not (and should not) hold those (or perhaps any principles) principles to be entirely exception-less.
[I made this same comment at EconLog on David Henderson's post about this article - but since it dealt more with the subject matter of the essay itself, I'm commenting here as well]
***
I think there are a good many people (myself included) who are really conservatives, but who believe that the venn diagram between conservatism and libertarianism has a strong overlap. I often describe myself as a libertarian just for the sake of clarity - if I'm talking with someone who understands these things, I'd say that classical liberalism had a strong libertarian streak.
The problem that I often have with the big L libertarians is that they seem to take consistency to the point of ridiculousness (or, at least, to a point that is simply unfeasible - as with your example of the commenter who says "No, they advocate for legalizing heroin."
David, I believe I've even had these arguments with you in other contexts - in real life, my job is the legal representation of youth in dependency cases - it's pretty difficult to take a hard libertarian line on issues while accepting the world as it really exists. Where the big L libertarian finds himself is in the position of someone essentially making arguments as if his idealistic world actually exists, without recognizing that they make much less sense in the world as it is.
So, with respect to open borders, that is perhaps one area where I would simply acknowledge that I am not a pure libertarian. Immigration necessarily involves changes in the culture - it is not the only source of crime by any stretch, but it does have an impact on crime. I acknowledge that these are not "libertarian" arguments, but my response to that article would simply be to say that it's ok to fail the purity test... maybe even preferable at times.
The other side-issue that caught my eye was the comment that "libertarians don't support restrictions on reproductive rights..." What an interesting way to frame that issue. Libertarians generally do not advocate for pure anarchy, and they certainly do support restrictions against assault and murder. There are some examples of a situation where either choice violates some sort of "libertarian" value - the interrelation between drugs and child abuse is one of these examples of a situation that is far more nuanced and complicated than most big-L libertarians are prepared to acknowledge. LGBT "rights," when said rights are often used as an ideological cudgel to punish those who disagree or to stifle religious liberty, are yet another example. Most recently, libertarians were largely silent in the face of state mandates involving shutdowns, masks, vaccines, badly abusing their own "harm principle" in the process.
Point being - there is no Libertarian argument against Open Borders because there is no truly Libertarian argument for or against anything. It is an ideology that takes a very gray, very complex world full of complex and self-contradicting problems, and attempts to distill everything down to a simple black and white.
This guy hasn't had a job outside of academia (and is currently employed by a *public* university, no less) and yet is happy to advocate for screwing over American workers and importing misery.
Bryan is right that libertarians can't really oppose open borders consistently, but vaguely libertarian conservatives can. The right-of-center view is Jeffersonian: in practice, a high degree of personal freedom is only stable in a republic of virtue where citizens freely forge bonds of trust and cooperation with each other in families, churches, organizations etc. For instance, a decent society can only get by without a welfare state if there is a privately-provided safety net by these mediating institutions. High rates of immigration cause anomie and destroy the mediating institutions.
That's the argument anyway. I think of it as the reason libertarianism doesn't work well in cities: when everyone lives cheek-by-jowl you just can't get along without specific rules for noise, bans on burning leaves, speed limits, bans on sleeping in libraries and parks, etc. unless people are sufficiently pro-social. If everyone does whatever they want and feels no duty to basic decorum, society becomes grubby and unpleasant.
The mass immigration of low IQ clannish individuals who tend to support redistribution has ended poorly in every single place its been tried. It causes fiscal and economic strain, low trust outcomes across the board in the society, and make politics shift leftward and become more clannish and corrupt. Any honest account of this driven by data shows this.
Libertarians need to realize that demographics drive outcomes. Productive high IQ pro social demographics are the only ones that have ever been friendly to successful libertarian outcomes.
"Libertarians advocate for legalizing heroin with a welfare state in place."
This has been an utter disaster in every way and is being rejected across the country even in previously gung ho progressive areas.
This is a wierd hill to die on. Galt's Gulch is a bunch of high IQ prosocial white dudes making the best of themselves. Not a bunch of heroin addicted lumpenproletariat voting Democrat because they want to shit in the street.
P.S. Many libertarians support the right to life for unborn children. You extend maximum rights to one group and zero rights to another based on your mood affiliation and nothing more.
You're using 'libertarian' in a very autocratic way. To the extent that libertarians can form and maintain a libertarian society wouldn't they have to restrain admission to like minded people for fear of potential autocrats? I think you're eliding over a fundamental issue -- a society which tolerates libertarians need not be libertarian, and its tolerance of libertarians may be fragile. And, in particular, the US is becoming less tolerant of libertarians.
The article talks about the case of someone in this country (a citizen) wanting to hire an immigrant, but it skirts the actual case people are concerned about, which is random people wandering across the border with no particular plan or prospects. Speaking for myself, I'm in favor of guest worker programs and the like (details matter of course) but still favor robust border control.
I honestly can't think any intelligent and sane adult can actually support "open borders" in real life, outside of academic discussion only. Flooding us with poor, low skilled people who will cluster up in their own enclaves can not possibly end well. And what about foreign powers purposely sending agents, confederates, criminals, dregs, or entire clandestine armies into our country?
Regarding the heroine comment, I consider myself strongly libertarian but don't support simple legalization. The argument is nuanced, but you might consider the case of selling a lethal poison to someone who is going through a life crisis and is openly suicidal. The idea is that people sometimes are not in their right mind and exploiting this to profit while _knowingly_ harming them is "not okay". Nobody has a problem with this idea when it comes to children or the obviously mentally ill. When it comes to something like heroin, the argument could be made that almost nobody is in their right mind who takes it. Or looking at it another way, is there ever a situation where a community has no source of heroin and the introduction of a dealer makes them, on balance, better off? Ideally, a legal system should make it unprofitable to make others worse off. I think making it legal to deal cocaine or heroin will make people worse off. Those few individuals who would actually be better of with a legal source of heroin are probably not that much worse off without it.
These are weak and sophist arguments for unregulated/open borders, with such convoluted wording it is hard to understand what is being argued.
"Libertarians advocate for legalizing heroin with a welfare state in place."
No they don't, they advocate for legalizing heroin.
"They don’t defend state restrictions on reproductive rights even when the children will attend public schools."
What does this try to say? That libertarians promote reproductive rights, when children go to public schools?
I don't even see the connection, or the argument being made.
"If you think no one is entitled to these benefits, then it’s hard to see why you’d have a problem with a policy doesn’t provide these benefits in full."
What again. More double/triple negatives? I cannot decipher what is being said here.
"Do taxpayers have the right to prohibit people from driving on public roads if they have copies of Anarchy, State, and Utopia in the car? Surely not."
Ok. So what does that have to do with open borders?
"The third objection is that more immigration will lessen the likelihood of achieving libertarian policy goals"
No, that is not the third objection. From a libertarian POV, that is no objection at all. You would not base the libertarian legality of something by administrative convenience goals.
There are far better libertarian arguments for open borders, but this screed is not any of them. It is barely comprehensible.
Taxpayers have a right to restrict the access of non-taxpayers (and non-citizens in particular) to their infrastructure. This caveat does away with the strawman of 'someone with a book in their car'.
Once infrastructure is fully privatized, its private owners would *also* be excluding plenty of people. Right now the people paying for the infrastructure are the closest analogue to its rightful owners.
Enjoying the article and comments as a classical liberal (some immigration restrictions are maybe sometimes justified under exception). 2 thoughts:
1. I think there is a difference between having the right to restrict immigration / use of 'common property' more generally and it being a good idea. I don't think it all immigration restrictions are inherently illegitimate even if the vast majority or even all make people net worse off (including those imposing them).
2. If liberarians must support open borders, with implied support for illegal immigration, drug use etc ("no libertarian supports legal drug use only" - Bryan Caplan (paraphrased)), do you also pay your taxes?
As a self proclaimed libertarian, I reject open borders simply because we don’t live in a libertarian society. I cannot apply my values to a society (Canada, in my case) that is essentially, and ever increasingly, socialist.
The moment we libertarians are victorious, and we will be, let er rip.
I think the libertarian position on immigration should be that we sell the right to live here. It's valuable, why would I give it away for free. If you want a worker from another country to work at your company you can hire them remotely or pay their fee and have them move here. We should also set a yearly fee, for temporary workers. If you pay their fee for 5 years, they can stay permanently. In this world there is freedom of contract, and association, but the people creating the value of a functioning country can extract some rent for the value they've created or maintained. If you want refugees to be able to emigrate you can raise money to bring in as many as you like, in that instance we can use the fees to help them settle. We should set a number of people who come in democratically, and then auction off the spots. The country is just a club created by the members, and their descendants. They have a legitimate interest in the value created.
Maybe other countries could also charge, and the prices can rise and fall based on demand. Let's create a market for immigration. Maybe even secondary markets that finance immigration. OMG markets, property rights. now that sounds libertarian.
Amazing how Brian and almost all other "principled" libertarians just skate over the most powerful and straightforward argument for SOME immigration restrictions. The primary duty of a liberal state is to remain liberal. If truly open borders would cause the state to lose this attribute, migration should be limited TO THAT EXTENT. For a much more involved and rigorous defense of this position, see my article cowritten with Danny Frederick: https://www.academia.edu/38936607/The_Liberal_Defence_of_Immigration_Control?fbclid=IwAR14uhMBhwdb0ZS_LZm4RQhaplOTBHvyn_3s5SfVFzl-BPxWRAZKIUzaGB4
This is a simplistic analysis.
While closing borders does indeed infringe on the freedoms you list, open borders can ALSO infringe on freedoms (migrants voting to appropriate wealth of people in a country currently; committing crimes against natives at higher rates, or bringing other negative non-libertarian externalities.)
These are tough empirical questions. It's totally possible that positive externalities of migration often outweigh the costs of it (and almost certain that the calculation will vary by type of migration.)
But what we can say with confidence is that it's unhelpful and wrong to claim that "There Are No Libertarian Objections to Open Borders." It makes just as much logical (non)sense to claim the opposite.
In a strict sense, Chris is correct, for the reasons he states.
In a similarly strict sense, can Libertarians oppose pedophilia, when it's a voluntary association between (say) a 30-year old and a 9-year old? Can strict Libertarians support turning your right to turn the lights on in your house without first seeking explicit consent from all your neighbors for all of the photons that will end up on their sovereign property?
In each of these examples, hopefully the vast majority of self-described "Libertarians" are likely to say "rights of free association, self-ownership, self-determination, and private property are pretty fundamental and important, but that doesn't mean they are categorically without exception. The cost/benefit analysis of allowing pedophilia or prohibiting lightbulbs is so dramatically one-sided that it justifies abridging them in these cases"
It's important to remember that "Libertarian people" and "Libertarian principles" are not coterminous. Many Libertarian people I've met oppose open borders for reasons like these - they agree in principle but think that the cost/benefit analysis is at least worthy of significant concern and attention before opening the floodgates. This view seems pretty common among the commenters here, as well.
This isn't a counterargument to Chris' narrow and correct point was that there's no consistent objection from Libertarian principles, but an observation that Libertarian people generally do not (and should not) hold those (or perhaps any principles) principles to be entirely exception-less.
[I made this same comment at EconLog on David Henderson's post about this article - but since it dealt more with the subject matter of the essay itself, I'm commenting here as well]
***
I think there are a good many people (myself included) who are really conservatives, but who believe that the venn diagram between conservatism and libertarianism has a strong overlap. I often describe myself as a libertarian just for the sake of clarity - if I'm talking with someone who understands these things, I'd say that classical liberalism had a strong libertarian streak.
The problem that I often have with the big L libertarians is that they seem to take consistency to the point of ridiculousness (or, at least, to a point that is simply unfeasible - as with your example of the commenter who says "No, they advocate for legalizing heroin."
David, I believe I've even had these arguments with you in other contexts - in real life, my job is the legal representation of youth in dependency cases - it's pretty difficult to take a hard libertarian line on issues while accepting the world as it really exists. Where the big L libertarian finds himself is in the position of someone essentially making arguments as if his idealistic world actually exists, without recognizing that they make much less sense in the world as it is.
So, with respect to open borders, that is perhaps one area where I would simply acknowledge that I am not a pure libertarian. Immigration necessarily involves changes in the culture - it is not the only source of crime by any stretch, but it does have an impact on crime. I acknowledge that these are not "libertarian" arguments, but my response to that article would simply be to say that it's ok to fail the purity test... maybe even preferable at times.
The other side-issue that caught my eye was the comment that "libertarians don't support restrictions on reproductive rights..." What an interesting way to frame that issue. Libertarians generally do not advocate for pure anarchy, and they certainly do support restrictions against assault and murder. There are some examples of a situation where either choice violates some sort of "libertarian" value - the interrelation between drugs and child abuse is one of these examples of a situation that is far more nuanced and complicated than most big-L libertarians are prepared to acknowledge. LGBT "rights," when said rights are often used as an ideological cudgel to punish those who disagree or to stifle religious liberty, are yet another example. Most recently, libertarians were largely silent in the face of state mandates involving shutdowns, masks, vaccines, badly abusing their own "harm principle" in the process.
Point being - there is no Libertarian argument against Open Borders because there is no truly Libertarian argument for or against anything. It is an ideology that takes a very gray, very complex world full of complex and self-contradicting problems, and attempts to distill everything down to a simple black and white.
Black
Future.
This guy hasn't had a job outside of academia (and is currently employed by a *public* university, no less) and yet is happy to advocate for screwing over American workers and importing misery.
This mirrors my own criticisms of the closed border position made by libertarians: https://everything-voluntary.com/destruction-libertarian-ideology