A Strange Liberty: Politics Drops Its Pretenses

Immigration remains a contentious issue in the US and across the West. Libertarians have not been immune. While the reflexive tendency favors freedom of movement, this reflex is not dispositive wherever private property exists. The right to leave a place—the right not to be imprisoned or enslaved—is different than the right to enter a place, at least in a society with any degree of private-property norms.

The Mises Institute offers more intellectual diversity on the topic than most organizations, although our writers and scholars generally do not favor “open borders” in the current sense of the term. Their views range from complete elimination of borders and open homesteading of unowned land (Block) to fully private property societies permitting access only according to covenants (Hoppe). Others focus on reducing welfare state inducements, decentralizing immigration policy and border controls, exploring market-based sponsorship programs and alternatives to current lottery systems, and decoupling immigration from naturalization, citizenship, and voting.

Any discussion of immigration benefits from the following caveats:

• No truly libertarian approach to immigration is possible when governments at all levels own (i.e., control) vast amounts of “public” land, including coastlines and ports, highways, airports, roads, military installations, parks, and common spaces.
• Thus, the debate, at present, centers around the question of what government should do under current conditions with regard to immigration.
• There are no easy answers to how government agents should control government property such as roads and other “public” commons. Real economic calculation is impossible when the state controls resources, and “non-economic” considerations are impossibly subjective.
• “Welfare,” in the form of various taxpayer-provided goods and services, makes the issue more complex.
• Democratic voting, coupled with high-time-preference politicians, makes the issue more complex.

Our goal is to present each thinker’s views on immigration by excerpting his or her writing on the subject.

Ludwig von Mises

We begin with Ludwig von Mises. Mises first addressed the topic of human migration at length in Liberalism, published in 1927 during the interwar period and influenced by the death and destruction he witnessed a decade earlier as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army.

In a section from Liberalism titled Freedom of Movement, Mises approaches immigration from both economic and social perspectives: “First, as a policy of trade unions, and then as a policy of national protectionism”:

Attempts to justify on economic grounds the policy of restricting immigration are therefore doomed from the outset. There cannot be the slightest doubt that migration barriers diminish the productivity of human labor. When the trade unions of the United States or Australia hinder immigration, they are fighting not only against the interests of the workers of the rest of the countries of the world, but also against the interests of everyone else in order to secure a special privilege for themselves. For all that, it still remains quite uncertain whether the increase in the general productivity of human labor which could be brought about by the establishment of complete freedom of migration would not be so great as to compensate entirely the members of the American and Australian trade unions for the losses that they could suffer from the immigration of foreign workers.

Immigration restrictions, then, are un-economic impediments on labor in the same manner as restrictions on goods. They operate to keep wages artificially high, just like protective tariffs.

But Mises was not blind to the cultural concerns surrounding mass immigration:

The workers of the United States and Australia could not succeed in having restrictions imposed on immigration if they did not have still another argument to fall back upon in support of their policy. After all, even today the power of certain liberal principles and ideas is so great that one cannot combat them if one does not place allegedly higher and more important considerations above the interest in the attainment of maximum productivity. We have already seen how “national interests” are cited in justification of protective tariffs. The same considerations are also invoked in favor of restrictions on immigration.

In the absence of any migration barriers whatsoever, vast hordes of immigrants from the comparatively overpopulated areas of Europe would, it is maintained, inundate Australia and America. They would come in such great numbers that it would no longer be possible to count on their assimilation. If in the past immigrants to America soon adopted the English language and American ways and customs, this was in part due to the fact that they did not come over all at once in such great numbers. The small groups of immigrants who distributed themselves over a wide land quickly integrated themselves into the great body of the American people. The individual immigrant was already half assimilated when the next immigrants landed on American soil. One of the most important reasons for this rapid national assimilation was the fact that the immigrants from foreign countries did not come in too great numbers. This, it is believed, would now change, and there is real danger that the ascendancy, or more correctly, the exclusive dominion of the Anglo-Saxons in the United States would be destroyed. This is especially to be feared in the case of heavy immigration on the part of the Mongolian peoples of Asia.

These fears may perhaps be exaggerated in regard to the United States. As regards Australia, they certainly are not. Australia has approximately the same number of inhabitants as Austria; its area, however, is a hundred times greater than Austria’s, and its natural resources are certainly incomparably richer. If Australia were thrown open to immigration, it can be assumed with great probability that its population would in a few years consist mostly of Japanese, Chinese, and Malayans.

Despite being a strong anti-nationalist and anti-colonialist, Mises understood the natural fears of those who worried about “inundation” while also acknowledging a Lockean settlement argument:

The aversion that most people feel today towards the members of foreign nationalities and especially towards those of other races is evidently too great to admit of any peaceful settlement of such antagonisms. It is scarcely to be expected that the Australians will voluntarily permit the immigration of Europeans not of English nationality, and it is completely out of the question that they should permit Asiatics too to seek work and a permanent home in their continent. The Australians of English descent insist that the fact that it was the English who first opened up this land for settlement has given the English people a special right to the exclusive possession of the entire continent for all time to come.

But Mises, a son of the former patchwork Austro-Hungarian Empire, also clearly understood the value of self-determination as something very different from jingoist or insular nativism. The concerns of ethnic or linguistic minorities could not be dismissed:

The present inhabitants of these favored lands fear that some day they could be reduced to a minority in their own country and that they would then have to suffer all the horrors of national persecution to which, for instance, the Germans are today exposed in Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Poland.

It cannot be denied that these fears are justified. Because of the enormous power that today stands at the command of the state, a national minority must expect the worst from a majority of a different nationality. As long as the state is granted the vast powers which it has today and which public opinion considers to be its right, the thought of having to live in a state whose government is in the hands of members of a foreign nationality is positively terrifying. It is frightful to live in a state in which at every turn one is exposed to persecution—masquerading under the guise of justice—by a ruling majority. It is dreadful to be handicapped even as a child in school on account of one’s nationality and to be in the wrong before every judicial and administrative authority because one belongs to a national minority.

As Dr. Joe Salerno points out in his seminal article “Mises on Nationalism, the Right of Self-Determination, and the Problem of Immigration,” Mises was exceedingly careful to distinguish between “militant” or “aggressive” nationalism and a peaceful, liberal nationalism that did not seek to subjugate at home or expand abroad:

Thus for Mises, the choice was never between nationalism and a bland, atomistic “globalism”; the real choice was either nationalism that was cosmopolitan and embraced universal individual rights and free trade or militant nationalism intent on subjugating and oppressing other nations. He attributed the rise of anti-liberal nationalism to the failure to apply the right of self-determination and the nationality principle consistently and to the utmost degree possible in the formation of new political entities in the wake of the overthrow of royal despotism by war or revolution. The consequence was peoples differentiated by language, heritage, religion, etc. artificially and involuntarily bound together by arbitrary political ties. The inevitable outcome of these polyglot, mixed-nation-states was the suppression of minorities by the majority nationality, a bitter struggle for control of the state apparatus, and the creation of mutual and deep-seated distrust and hatred.

Salerno also points out Mises’s strong view that only liberal, laissez-faire governments could accept the notion of completely free immigration:

Thus, Mises views immigration as always and everywhere a “problem” to which there is “no solution,” as long as interventionist political regimes are the norm. Only when the crossing of state borders by members of a different nation portend no political dangers for the indigenous nationality will the “problem of immigration” disappear and be replaced by the benign migration of labor that creates unalloyed and mutual economic advantages for all individuals and peoples. From Mises’s perspective, then, the solution to the immigration problem is not to legislate some vague, ad hoc right to the “freedom of movement” between existing fixed-boundary states. Rather, it is to complete the laissez-faire liberal revolution and secure private property rights by providing for the continual redrawing of state boundaries in accordance with the right of self-determination and the nationality principle. Then—and only then—can the continual and wealth-creating reallocation of labor throughout the world required by a dynamic capitalist economy be peacefully accommodated without precipitating political conflict.

As Lew Rockwell states, in these important senses Mises cannot be claimed by advocates for “open borders” today. He believed in a form of liberal nationhood, but nationhood nonetheless—and advocated for political subdivisions along cultural, linguistic, and historical lines. He was a democrat, a utilitarian, and a realist; his cosmopolitanism did not extend to a vision of a borderless and stateless world. But it’s safe to assume his experiences in the Great War, and the freedom he enjoyed taking trains from Vienna to London without showing a passport, strongly affected his views on immigration.

For further reading from Mises on immigration, see Nation, State, and Economy from 1919 and “Mises on Protectionism and Immigration” by Matt McCaffrey, highlighting selected readings. Surprisingly, his magnum opus Human Action contains few direct references to the immigration issue, save for his observations that migration barriers could not be removed for aggressors during wartime.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard, despite having written millions of words on economics, philosophy, ethics, history, politics, and culture, wrote relatively little directly addressing immigration per se.

His1962 economic treatise Man, Economy, and State, specifically the Power and Market chapters he intended to publish with the original work, deals at length with various government interventions. In chapter 3 of Power and Market Rothbard discusses “triangular interventions,” defined as government interference with actions between two or more private actors—i.e., the state compels or prohibits certain transactions between private parties. 

Section 3, subsection;E of that chapter deals with immigration restrictions, and represents Rothbard’s longest and most specific writing on the topic. Rothbard, much like Mises, views state interference with immigration in the context of supply and demand for labor—and the effects restrictionism had on wages and prices:

Laborers may also ask for geographical grants of oligopoly in the form of immigration restrictions. In the free market the inexorable trend is to equalize wage rates for the same value-productive work all over the earth. This trend is dependent on two modes of adjustment: businesses flocking from high-wage to low-wage areas, and workers flowing from low-wage to high-wage areas. Immigration restrictions are an attempt to gain restrictionist wage rates for the inhabitants of an area. They constitute a restriction rather than monopoly because (a) in the labor force, each worker owns himself, and therefore the restrictionists have no control over the whole of the supply of labor; and (b) the supply of labor is large in relation to the possible variability in the hours of an individual worker, i.e., a worker cannot, like a monopolist, take advantage of the restriction by increasing his output to take up the slack, and hence obtaining a higher price is not determined by the elasticity of the demand curve. A higher price is obtained in any case by the restriction of the supply of labor. There is a connexity throughout the entire labor market; labor markets are linked with each other in different occupations, and the general wage rate (in contrast to the rate in specific industries) is determined by the total supply of all labor, as compared with the various demand curves for different types of labor in different industries. A reduced total supply of labor in an area will thus tend to shift all the various supply curves for individual labor factors to the left, thus increasing wage rates all around.

Immigration restrictions, therefore, may earn restrictionist wage rates for all people in the restricted area, although clearly the greatest relative gainers will be those who would have directly competed in the labor market with the potential immigrants. They gain at the expense of the excluded people, who are forced to accept lower-paying jobs at home. (italics original)

For Rothbard, immigration restrictions represented pure protectionism—favoring domestic workers over foreign in what ought to be an international division of labor, while creating inefficiencies and harming consumers in the process:

Immigration barriers confer gains at the expense of foreign workers. Few residents of the area trouble themselves about that. They raise other problems, however. The process of equalizing wage rates, though hobbled, will continue in the form of an export of capital investment to foreign, low-wage countries. Insistence on high wage rates at home creates more and more incentive for domestic capitalists to invest abroad. In the end, the equalization process will be effected anyway, except that the location of resources will be completely distorted. Too many workers and too much capital will be stationed abroad, and too little at home, in relation to the satisfaction of the world’s consumers. Secondly, the domestic citizens may very well lose more from immigration barriers as consumers than they gain as workers. For immigration barriers (a) impose shackles on the international division of labor, the most efficient location of production and population, etc., and (b) the population in the home country may well be below the “optimum” population for the home area. An inflow of population might well stimulate greater mass production and specialization and thereby raise the real income per capita. In the long run, of course, the equalization would still take place, but perhaps at a higher level, especially if the poorer countries were “overpopulated” in comparison with their optimum. In other words, the high-wage country may have a population below the optimum real income per head, and the low-wage country may have excessive population over the optimum. In that case, both countries would enjoy increased real wage rates from the migration, although the low-wage country would Rothbard also attacks the cranky but faddish 1960s concerns about world overpopulation, but he does so applying economics: d gain more. (italics original)

Rothbard also attacks the cranky but faddish 1960s concerns about world overpopulation, but he does so applying economics:

It is fashionable to speak of the “overpopulation” of some countries, such as China and India, and to assert that the Malthusian terrors of population pressing on the food supply are coming true in these areas. This is fallacious thinking, derived from focusing on “countries” instead of the world market as a whole. It is fallacious to say that there is overpopulation in some parts of the market and not in others. The theory of “over-” or “under-population” (in relation to an arbitrary maximum of real income per person) applies properly to the market as a whole. If parts of the market are “under-” and parts “over” populated, the problem stems, not from human reproduction or human industry, but from artificial governmental barriers to migration. India is “overpopulated” only because its citizens will not move abroad or because other governments will not admit them. If the former, then, the Indians are making a voluntary choice: to accept lower money wages in return for the great psychic gain of living in India. Wages are equalized internationally only if we incorporate such psychic factors into the wage rate. Moreover, if other governments forbid their entry, the problem is not absolute “overpopulation,” but coercive barriers thrown up against personal migration.

The advocate of immigration laws who fears a reduction in his standard of living is actually misdirecting his fire. Implicitly, he believes that his geographic area now exceeds its optimum population point. What he really fears, therefore, is not so much immigration as any population growth. To be consistent, therefore, he would have to advocate compulsory birth control, to slow down the rate of population growth desired by individual parents.

It’s interesting to note that Rothbard sticks strictly to economics throughout this five-page subsection. Rothbard wanted Man, Economy, and State to serve as an overarching Austro-Misesian treatise that would stand the test of time. Thus he avoids the kind of political polemics frequently delivered later in his career, and offers no examination of vested interests or cronyism behind immigration policy. But his full-fledged political anarchism, already developed when writing the book, placed him squarely in the “no borders” camp.

In the 1970s and 1980s Rothbard dived into libertarian ethics with gusto, producing For a New Liberty and The Ethics of Liberty. The former contains scant reference to the immigration issue, either in the context of labor policy, foreign policy, or personal liberty. The latter, however, briefly addresses the issue over two short pages in the context of property rights:

In the libertarian society, however, where the streets would all be privately owned, the entire conflict could be resolved without violating anyone’s property rights: for then the owners of the streets would have the right to decide who shall have access to those streets, and they could then keep out “undesirables” if they so wished.

 Of course, those street-owners who decided to keep out “undesirables” would have to pay the price—both the actual costs of policing as well as the loss of business to the merchants on their street and the diminished flow of visitors to their homes. Undoubtedly, in the free society there would result a diverse pattern of access, with some streets (and therefore neighborhoods) open to all, and others with varying degrees of restricted access. 

Here we see a shift: his analysis of immigration moves away from the supply and demand for labor discussed in Man, Economy, and State toward questions of private property and freedom of association:

Similarly, the private ownership of all streets would resolve the problem of the “human right” to freedom of immigration. There is no question about the fact that current immigration barriers restrict not so much a “human right” to immigrate, but the right of property owners to rent or sell property to immigrants. There can be no human right to immigrate, for on whose property does someone else have the right to trample? In short, if “Primus” wishes to migrate now from some other country to the United States, we cannot say that he has the absolute right to immigrate to this land area; for what of those property owners who don’t want him on their property? On the other hand, there may be, and undoubtedly are, other property owners who would jump at the chance to rent or sell property to Primus, and the current laws now invade their property rights by preventing them from doing so.

The libertarian society would resolve the entire “immigration question” within the matrix of absolute property rights. For people only have the right to move to those properties and lands where the owners desire to rent or sell to them. In the free society, they would, in first instance, have the right to travel only on those streets whose owners agree to have them there, and then to rent or buy housing from willing owners. Again, just as in the case of daily movement on streets, a diverse and varying pattern of access of migration would undoubtedly arise.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Rothbard developed a more populist political outlook that caused critics to claim he had made an “about-face on immigration.” Still, in a 1992 Rothbard-Rockwell Report article laying out a strategy for effective “rightwing populism,” restricting immigration doesn’t make it into Rothbard’s list of tactics for dismantling state power and rule by elites. Nor does immigration play much role at all in Rothbard’s articles during his “paleo” period, so-called because he called for a return to pre-Cold War noninterventionism on the Right.

Yet in this period he became more vocal about political self-determination, the distinctions between nation and state, the practical and strategic case for supporting secession movements, and especially about the relationship between various groups and the state (in contrast to a rigid either/or analysis of single individual vs. leviathan state).

The most often cited evidence for Rothbard’s shift on immigration is his article “Nations by Consent,” written in the fall of 1994 only shortly before his death. Here he begins to consider the reemergence of “nation” as opposed to “nation-state” in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse:

Libertarians tend to focus on two important units of analysis: the individual and the state. And yet, one of the most dramatic and significant events of our time has been the reemergence—with a bang—in the last five years of a third and much neglected aspect of the real world, the “nation.” When the “nation” has been thought of at all, it usually comes attached to the state, as in the common word, “the nation-state,” but this concept takes a particular development of recent centuries and elaborates it into a universal maxim. In the last five years, however, we have seen, as a corollary of the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, a vivid and startlingly swift decomposition of the centralized State or alleged nation-State into its constituent nationalities. The genuine nation, or nationality, has made a dramatic reappearance on the world stage.

Rothbard senses an opportunity to use the breakup of the USSR as a teaching moment, one that encourages further breakups of sclerotic governments laying claim to set geographic regions:

The crucial flaw is the implicit assumption of the entire analysis: that every nation-state “owns” its entire geographical area in the same just and proper way that every individual property owner owns his person and the property that he has inherited, worked for, or gained in voluntary exchange. Is the boundary of the typical nation-state really as just or as beyond cavil as your or my house, estate, or factory!

It seems to me that not only the classical liberal or the libertarian, but anyone of good sense who thinks about this problem, must answer a resounding “No.” It is absurd to designate every nation-state, with its self-proclaimed boundary as it exists at any one time, as somehow right and sacrosanct, each with its “territorial integrity” to remain as spotless and unbreached as your or my bodily person or private property. Invariably, of course, these boundaries have been acquired by force and violence, or by interstate agreement above and beyond the heads of the inhabitants on the spot, and invariably these boundaries shift a great deal over time in ways that make proclamations of “territorial integrity” truly ludicrous.

Again, he bases his argument against large and powerful states on an aspirational society of pure private property:

I raise the pure anarcho-capitalist model in this paper, not so much to advocate the model per se as to propose it as a guide for settling vexed current disputes about nationality. The pure model, simply, is that no land areas, no square footage in the world, shall remain “public”; every square foot of land area, be they streets, squares, or neighborhoods, is privatized. Total privatization would help solve nationality problems, often in surprising ways, and I suggest that existing states, or classical liberal states, try to approach such a system even while some land areas remain in the governmental sphere. 

Finally, he extends the fully privatized real property approach to the immigration issue:

the question of open borders, or free immigration, has become an accelerating problem for classical liberals. This is first, because the welfare state increasingly subsidizes immigrants to enter and receive permanent assistance, and second, because cultural boundaries have become increasingly swamped. I began to rethink my views on immigration when, as the Soviet Union collapsed, it became clear that ethnic Russians had been encouraged to flood into Estonia and Latvia in order to destroy the cultures and languages of these peoples. Previously, it had been easy to dismiss as unrealistic Jean Raspail’s anti-immigration novel The Camp of the Saints, in which virtually the entire population of India decides to move, in small boats, into France, and the French, infected by liberal ideology, cannot summon the will to prevent economic and cultural national destruction. As cultural and welfare-state problems have intensified, it became impossible to dismiss Raspail’s concerns any longer.

However, on rethinking immigration on the basis of the anarcho-capitalist model, it became clear to me that a totally privatized country would not have “open borders” at all. If every piece of land in a country were owned by some person, group, or corporation, this would mean that no immigrant could enter there unless invited to enter and allowed to rent, or purchase, property. A totally privatized country would be as “closed” as the particular inhabitants and property owners desire. It seems clear, then, that the regime of open borders that exists de facto in the US really amounts to a compulsory opening by the central state, the state in charge of all streets and public land areas, and does not genuinely reflect the wishes of the proprietors.

Under total privatization, many local conflicts and “externality” problems—not merely the immigration problem—would be neatly settled. With every locale and neighborhood owned by private firms, corporations, or contractual communities, true diversity would reign, in accordance with the preferences of each community. Some neighborhoods would be ethnically or economically diverse, while others would be ethnically or economically homogeneous. Some localities would permit pornography or prostitution or drugs or abortions, others would prohibit any or all of them. The prohibitions would not be state imposed, but would simply be requirements for residence or use of some person’s or community’s land area. While statists who have the itch to impose their values on everyone else would be disappointed, every group or interest would at least have the satisfaction of living in neighborhoods of people who share its values and preferences. While neighborhood ownership would not provide Utopia or a panacea for all conflict, it would at least provide a “second-best” solution that most people might be willing to live with.

Ultimately, Rothbard was consistent in viewing property rights as the best yet imperfect way to deal with thorny questions of nationhood, self-determination, and immigration. Ironically, both his fans and detractors alternatively claim he favored open borders or statist restrictions on immigration. In fact, his thoughts on immigration evolved over the years, as one might expect from any scholar with a long career. And he always favored peaceful, private solutions to the problems created by governments in the first place.

Walter Block

Professor Block has written several substantial academic and popular articles on the topic of immigration, beginning in the 1980s and extending into the 2010s. Dr. Block is probably the best-known pure “open borders” advocate among Senior Fellows at the Mises Institute; and while his primary arguments are robustly deontological he does not shy away from addressing pragmatic questions raised by critics. And unlike Mises and Rothbard in the main, Block from the outset extends the doctrine of laissez-faire movement of workers and goods from the context of economics into normative libertarian philosophy.

His 1998 article in the Journal of Libertarian Studies titled “A Libertarian Case for Free Immigration” begins with characteristic Blockean bluntness:

I shall contend that emigration, migration, and immigration all fall under the rubric of “victimless crime.” That is, not a one of these three per se violates the non-aggression axiom. Therefore, at least for the libertarian, no restrictions or prohibitions whatsoever should be placed in the path of these essentially peaceful activities.

Immigration across national boundaries should be analyzed in an identical manner to that migration which takes place within a country. If it is non-invasive for Jones to change his locale from one place in Misesania to another in that country, then it cannot be invasive for him to move from Rothbardania to Misesania. Alternatively, if migration across international borders is somehow illegitimate, this should apply to the domestic variety as well. As long as the immigrant moves to a piece of private property whose owner is willing to take him in (maybe for a fee), there can be nothing untoward about such a transaction. This, along with all other capitalist acts between consenting adults, must be considered valid in the libertarian world. Note that there is no freedom of movement of the person per se. This is always subject to the willingness of property owners in the host nation to accept the immigrant onto their land.

Block continues this approach in making perhaps his best-known argument for free immigration: homesteading of previously unowned land: 

The case is equally clear for allowing immigrants to settle on unowned land. When there is virgin territory, there is no legitimate reason for immigrants (or domestic citizens) to be prevented from bringing it into fruitful production. States Rothbard: “Everyone should have the right to appropriate as his property previously unowned land or other resources.” “Everyone,” presumably, includes immigrants as well as citizens or residents of the home country.

And here Block addresses the “paleo” argument regarding public or common real property and buildings, property ostensibly owned and definitely controlled by government:

Take the case of the bum in the library. What, if anything, should be done about him? If this is a private library, then the plumb-line or pure libertarian would agree fully with his paleo cousin: throw the bum out! More specifically, the law should allow the owner of the library to forcibly evict such a person, if need be, at his own discretion. Cognizance would be taken of the fact that if the proprietor allowed this smelly person to occupy his premises, he would soon be forced into bankruptcy, as normal paying customers would avoid his establishment like the plague.

But what if it is a public library? Here, the paleos and their libertarian colleagues part company. The latter would argue that the public libraries are per se illegitimate. As such, they are akin to an unowned good. Any occupant has as much right to them as any other. If we are in a revolutionary state of war, then the first homesteader may seize control. But if not, as at present, then, given “just war” considerations, any reasonable interference with public property would be legitimate. The paleos or postponement libertarians take a sharply divergent view: one should treat these libraries in as close an approximation as possible to how they would be used in the fully free society. Since, on that happy day, the overwhelmingly likely scenario is that they will be owned by a profit maximizer who will have a “no bums” policy, this is exactly how the public library should be treated right now. Namely, what we should do to the bum in the public library today is exactly what would be done to him by the private owner: kick him out. 

Block alludes to arguments made by Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe and others that proper ownership (and thus decisions about access) of taxpayer-funded property resides with taxpayers, who presumably would treat “their” property like any private owner. But he does not agree that imperfect present conditions, i.e., government ownership of land and buildings, warrant restrictions on immigration any more than imperfect conditions with respect to welfare or public schools warrant illibertarian approaches:

​There are difficulties with this stance. First, as we have already seen, it is extremely likely that in the fully free society, virtually all immigrants would be taken in by a landowner in the host country. Therefore, if the paleos are to remain consistent with their own position, they should eschew all legislated immigration barriers. Secondly, and even apart from this consideration, the postponement libertarian perspective is vulnerable to rebuttal by reductio ad absurdum. If we should not allow unrestricted immigration until we have achieved the free society, but instead should curtail immigration in an effort to approximate what would take place under a fully libertarian society, let us apply this insight to other realms of controversy.

Public schooling is a disaster. Certainly, in the present journal, there is no need to document such a claim. That being the case, the libertarian position is clear: get rid of public education, forthwith, even if we have not attained complete liberty in other sectors of society.

The US welfare policy is a disaster. The libertarian position is once again crystal clear: abolish welfare forthwith, no matter what the status of the remainder of the economy. But the paleo or postponement libertarians are once again precluded from embracing so clear, just, and simple a solution. 

Dr. Block is equally adamant on the question of immigrants voting for more government or more welfare, insisting the core issue of voting should be the focus:

The real difficulty here concerns promiscuous voting, not immigrants who might vote “incorrectly.” The problem, even apart from new entrants to our country, is that those who are already citizens now have the “right” to vote on, not whether or not, but how much of other people’s property they can legally steal through the ballot box. This is the real threat to liberty. In a free society, all the wrong-thinking immigrants in the world would be powerless to overturn (what is left of) our free institutions, for there would be no possibility of voting to seize other people’s property. 

Block concludes his paper with a rhetorical flourish about the anti-immigration policies of Left and Right—but note the Blockean proviso regarding property and sponsorship of migrants:

Are libertarians moderates or extremists on the issues of emigration, migration, and immigration? The libertarian position on migration does not constitute a compromise in that it is indubitably an all-or-none proposition: either migration is totally legitimate, in which case there should be no interferences with it whatsoever, or it is a violation of the non-aggression axiom, in which case it should be banned, fully. I have argued in this paper that the former position is the only correct one. But libertarianism constitutes a compromise position on this issue in two other senses. First, immigration is allowed if and only if there are property owners willing to sponsor (presumably for a fee, but not necessarily so) the new entrants, and not otherwise. Second, there are people on both Right and Left who oppose borders totally open to peaceful settlement (Chavez, Buckley), and libertarians find themselves safely on the other side of this unholy alliance. 

Fast forward to 2011, and Dr. Block continues to advocate “free movement of goods, capital” in another seminal Journal of Libertarian Studies article titled “Hoppe, Kinsella, and Rothbard II on Immigration: A Critique.” Here he attempts to rebut certain arguments made by the aforementioned Dr. Hoppe, libertarian legal theorist Stephan Kinsella, and the late Dr. Rothbard—in particular the argument that the free movement of goods and capital requires a different analysis than the free movement of people. In some cases he responds to rebuttals put forth by Hoppe and Kinsella regarding his JLS article quoted at length above. “Rothbard II” as used by Dr. Block refers to Rothbard’s later writings, especially the article “Nations by Consent.”

Block starts by questioning Rothbard’s claim that full privatization of real property would entirely resolve the question of immigration:

It is tempting to think that the private ownership of all streets, (plus every other single solitary square inch of land) would resolve the immigration issue, at least among libertarians. Alas, not even this is so. Worse, there is also the question of whether or not, given circumstances as they presently are with regard to land ownership, the government is justified in interfering with the free movement of people. That is, it cannot be denied that at present, such a salutary state of affairs (complete private ownership of all property) simply does not exist. To wit, there are vast land holdings on the part of the government (streets, parks, forests, etc.), and, further, there are other vast tracts that have need been so much as trod on by a human foot (mainly in Alaska, Nevada, and other western states).

He also dismisses Rothbard’s concern, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, that artificial languages and cultures might be imposed by mass and sudden immigration:

There is simply nothing incompatible with libertarianism and destroying “cultures and languages,” provided only that the latter is done without the initiation of violence. And this goes not only for Latvia and Estonia, but for the US as well.   

The point is, there is no such thing as anyone’s “own country.” This is a notion incompatible with libertarianism. What happened to the doctrine of allowing free competition in all matters? Certainly, this should apply to languages and cultures.

He then goes on to quote Hoppe’s argument that long-suffering taxpayers in a country, not recent immigrant arrivals, have the highest and most just claim to control government property or “unowned” common areas:

Given Block’s undeniable credentials as a leading contemporary theoretician of libertarianism, it is worthwhile explaining where his argument goes astray and why libertarianism requires no such thing as an open-door policy. Block’s pro-immigration stand is based on an analogy. “Take the case of the bum in the library,” he states.

What, if anything, should be done about him? If this is a private library, . . . the law should allow the owner of the library to forcibly evict such a person, if need be, at his own discretion. . . . But what if it is a public library? . . . As such [libraries] are akin to an unowned good. Any occupant has a much right to them as any other. If we are in a revolutionary state of war, then the first homesteader may seize control. But if not, as at present, then, given “just war” considerations, any reasonable interference with public property would be legitimate. . . . One could “stink up” the library with unwashed body odor, or leave litter around in it, or “liberate” some books, but one could not plant land mines on the premises to blow up innocent library users.

The fundamental error in this argument, according to which everyone, foreign immigrants no less than domestic bums, has an equal right to domestic public property, is Block’s claim that public property “is akin to an unowned good.” In fact, there exists a fundamental difference between unowned goods and public property. The latter is de facto owned by the taxpaying members of the domestic public. They have financed this property; hence, they, in accordance with the amount of taxes paid by individual members, must be regarded as its legitimate owners. Neither the bum, who has presumably paid no taxes, nor any foreigner, who has most definitely not paid any domestic taxes, can thus be assumed to have any rights regarding public property whatsoever. 

Block responds with reference to Rothbard, and an expansion of the “unowned” public library example into the idea of homesteading vast tracts of open land: 

First, the position I took is not really all that remarkable. Indeed, this was roughly Murray Rothbard’s position for many years.

Second, while Hoppe is undoubtedly correct in mentioning that I do indeed rely on the bum in the library analogy, this by no means exhausts my arguments. Let me briefly mention a few of them before returning to the analogy, as none of these others have been so far addressed by Hoppe. To wit: what about the vast open spaces in the Rocky Mountains and Alaska that no one has ever settled. What aspect of libertarianism could an immigrant possibly violate if he somehow catapulted himself to any of this terrain and began subsistence farming? Or, trading with other such immigrants, among themselves. Or, trading with the rest of us, on a totally voluntary basis? 

What rights would pre-existing inhabitants, say Robinson Crusoe, have to bar newcomers in such a scenario? Block answers:

The analogy is a pretty airtight one. Crusoe, and extant Americans, were here first. Friday, and the would-be immigrant who Hoppe wants to bar from this country, are attempting to come here second. If Crusoe (present occupants) bars Friday (would-be immigrants are not allowed to settle in unused desert and mountainous regions of the US), then he is in Rothbard’s analysis, claiming more than homesteading would justifiably entitle him to. Crusoe is the illegitimate aggressor against Friday. No less is true of the present occupants of the US; by adopting the Hoppe analysis, they are preventing entirely innocent people from going about their lawful business of homesteading empty territory.

Now, Hoppe could reply that the only reason these mountainous and desert areas are not presently occupied is due to the fact that the US government forbids its citizens to do so, and/or illegitimately occupies these lands itself through its agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management. There are two responses to any such defense. One, Hoppe must then acknowledge that the courageous immigrants, and not the docile citizens, had the ability to ignore these unjust governmental institutions. Two, land, happily, is a superfluous factor of production, compared to labor. Thus, at any given time, there will be sub-marginal land, precisely the territory that looks so attractive to the hypothetical immigrants we are now considering. But, with the advent of these people, the margin shifts. Terrain that was previously sub-marginal, before their arrival, becomes supra-marginal with their arrival. This means that before these new people came on the scene, there is a reason in addition to governmental proscriptions why the mountains of Wyoming and the tundra of Alaska was not homesteaded and settled; it was previously sub-marginal, even though it is no longer so under our assumptions.

And what about the children of current inhabitants, who burst on the scene much like immigrants? Should we worry about their propensity to grow up and consume welfare or engage in criminal activity?

What about immigrants from the “country” of Storkovia? That is, how does the Hoppe theory handle newborns? My claim here is that anything this author can say about an immigrant I can say concerning a brand new baby, with a lag of some 18 years, perhaps. If the one will commit crimes, so will the other, in a decade or so. Ditto for welfare. And it is the same for being allowed onto the roads of the nation. If illegal immigrants should not be allowed onto the highways, why should it be licit for a citizen of, say, Texas, to enter a road in Louisiana? Hoppe might reply that parents are responsible for their children in a way that does not apply to employers of immigrants. But this only gets him so far. Remember that time lag! After 15–18 years or so, parents are no longer liable for the evil doings of their children. Given the analogy, there is no justification for treating employers any differently. Hoppe says that anyone, such as an employer who invites an immigrant to this country must obligate himself to financially support them. But this is erroneous, since it would be unjustified to impose any such obligation on parents, for their newborn children. 

And Block disagrees that taxpayers, in Hoppe’s view the rightful owners of government property, should be accorded more say in the control of such property than immigrants:

Let us return, for a moment to an illegal immigrant seizing a bit of Yellowstone Park, which Hoppe and I agree has been stolen from the taxpayers of America. This act, in splendid isolation from everything else, must necessarily be justified. It is a necessary precondition to returning it to its rightful owners. But Hoppe would object. What reason does he offer? That I confuse de facto and de jure? That since this land is in justice really owned by the long-suffering taxpayers, it is illegitimate for anyone else, a third party, to even so much as touch it? This will not do.

To return to the illegal immigrant who is now perched on a part of Yellowstone Park and refuses to give it back to a taxpayer, the rightful owner. In like manner we may say of him that he really should return this property to its proper owner. However, we may also say that of the two options, one the status quo where the evil state retains this property, and the other where the robber is relieved of his illicit gains, the latter is certainly a better second-best scenario. Thus, illegal immigration, Hoppe to the contrary notwithstanding, is justified on libertarian grounds not only for unowned property, but also for that stolen from the taxpayers of the country.

My response is that I do not at all claim that property such as government roads or libraries is “unowned.” Rather, I claim these holdings were stolen. I agree that the state now possesses them; I argue, only, that this is unjustified. And, yes, I insist, the same libertarian analysis can be applied, in this context, to virgin and stolen land. Why? This is because for the libertarian, at least as I construe him, stolen land is de jure virgin land, ready for the next homesteader to seize it (on the assumption that the rightful original owner cannot be located, or he acquiesces in the state’s seizure, or that, arguendo, we can ignore this rightful owner.)

Dr. Block also responds to arguments made by Kinsella regarding the complexity of free immigration in a situation where government owns and controls so much land and infrastructure. Quoting Kinsella:

Coming back to immigration, let’s take the case of the federal government as owner-caretaker of an extensive network of public roads and other facilities. If the feds adopted a rule that only citizens and certain invited outsiders are permitted to use these resources, this would in effect radically restrict immigration. Even if private property owners were not prohibited from inviting whomever they wish onto their own property, the guest would have a hard time getting there, or leaving, without using, say, the public roads. So merely prohibiting non-citizens from using public property would be one means of establishing de facto immigration restrictions. It need not literally prohibit private property owners from having illegal immigrants on their property. It need only prevent them from using the roads or ports—which it owns.  

Given this reality, what sort of rules for access and use should libertarians support? Quoting Kinsella:

It seems to me establishing rules as to how public roads are to be used is not inherently unlibertarian. Even libertarians who say the state has no right to make any rules at all regarding property it possesses—even speed limits, etc.—really advocate the following rule: allow anyone to use it, and/or return it to the people. This is a way of using a piece of property. But most libertarians don’t seem to have a principled opposition to the very idea of rule-setting itself. 

What rules, then, are defendable? It’s an impossible question to answer, according to Block:

Kinsella is saying, if I may paraphrase him, that government is our caretaker. As such, it must perforce set up reasonable rules. The state should act as if it were a (perhaps bumbling) private owner. In this way the people from whom the money to finance the swimming pool was stolen may at least get some services in return. But this is a fatally conservative outlook. The radical alternative is that the “rules” of the pool should be fashioned so as to eliminate these enterprises from governmental control. For example, everyone, anyone, should be “allowed” to walk off with the water in the pool, even the very bricks of which it is composed. 

And Block goes further in opposing the “caretaker” or rightful owner argument:

It seems to me decidedly unlibertarian to advocate these sorts of “reasonable” rules. A more libertarian stance would be to welcome actual chaos on all property statists steal from victims. The likelihood is that pure bedlam and pandemonium on all such terrain would deter the thieves from their evil deeds.

All I can say is that majority vote is no litmus test of libertarianism. Most Americans also favor minimum wage laws, taxes, government, affirmative action, yet no one would assert that these policies are therefore libertarian. I certainly support Kinsella’s contention that “99 percent of my fellow taxpayers would . . . prefer some immigration restrictions.” This might well enhance restitution, as he contends, but, as I have argued, restitution is a far less important libertarian concern than stopping the violence that lead to the need for the restitution in the first place.

Ultimately, Dr. Walter Block is a vociferous and prolific defender of the stateless society—and thus brooks no restrictionist immigration arguments regarding state-owned property, voting, or the welfare state. His open borders position, however, is built on an unstinting foundation of private property rights, Lockean homesteading, and the full privatization of everything government does or owns.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Hans-Hermann Hoppe is well-known in Austro-libertarian circles as a critic of “open borders” and an advocate for purely private communities. In his earlier works (1980s and 1990s) on socialism, private property, and argumentation ethics, Hoppe demonstrates his unyielding support for absolute property rights. This perspective informs his later work on trade, immigration, and borders, in well-known publications like Democracy: The God that Failed. 

We start with his seminal 1998 article from the Journal of Libertarian Studies titled “The Cases for Free Trade and Restricted Immigration,” where Hoppe first challenges the analogy between trade restrictions on goods and immigration restrictions:

I will argue that this thesis and its implicit claim are fundamentally mistaken. In particular, I will demonstrate that free trade and restricted immigration are not only perfectly consistent but even mutually reinforcing policies. That is, it is not the advocates of free trade and restricted immigration who are wrong, but rather the proponents of free trade and free immigration. In thus taking the “intellectual guilt” out of the free-trade-and-restricted-immigration position and putting it where it actually belongs, I hope to promote a change in the present state of public opinion and facilitate substantial political realignment.

Because goods and people are not the same thing, Hoppe argues, even a provable overall increase in national income does not address the subjective nature of “wealth”:

From the outset, it must be emphasized that not even the most restrictive immigration policy or the most exclusive form of segregationism has anything to do with a rejection of free trade and the adoption of protectionism. From the fact that one does not want to associate with or live in the neighborhood composed of Mexicans, Haitians, Chinese, Koreans, Germans, Catholics, Moslems, Hindus, etc., it does not follow that one does not want to trade with them from a distance. Moreover, even if it were the case that one’s real income would rise as a result of immigration, it does not follow that immigration must be considered “good,” for material wealth is not the only thing that counts. Rather, what constitutes “welfare” and “wealth” is subjective, and one might prefer lower material living standards and a greater distance from certain other people over higher material living standards and a smaller distance. It is precisely the absolute voluntariness of human association and separation—the absence of any form of forced integration—which makes peaceful relationships—free trade—between racially, ethnically, linguistically, religiously, or culturally distinct people possible. 

Furthermore, the incentive to emigrate from low-wage countries to higher-wage countries is reduced by free trade policies:

The relationship between trade and migration is one of elastic substitutability (rather than rigid exclusivity): the more (or less) you have of one, the less (or more) you need of the other. Other things being equal, businesses move to low wage areas, and labor moves to high wage areas, thus effecting a tendency toward the equalization of wage rates (for the same kind of labor) as well as the optimal localization of capital. With political borders separating high- from low-wage areas, and with national (nation-wide) trade and immigration policies in effect, these normal tendencies—of immigration and capital export—are weakened with free trade and strengthened with protectionism. As long as Mexican products—the products of a low-wage area—can freely enter a high-wage area such as the US, the incentive for Mexican people to move to the US is reduced. In contrast, if Mexican products are prevented from entering the American market, the attraction for Mexican workers to move to the US is increased. Similarly, when US producers are free to buy from and sell to Mexican producers and consumers, capital exports from the US to Mexico will be reduced; however, when US producers are prevented from doing so, the attraction of moving production from the US to Mexico is increased.

Hoppe then makes his critical distinction between “invited” goods imported by a willing buyer and an individual’s desire to move at will. Uninvited mass migration, he argues, frequently makes one party or parties (current inhabitants of the recipient nation) subjectively worse off in their view. Thus immigration is not always analogous to “win-win” trade exchanges. 

The phenomena of trade and immigration are different in a fundamental respect, and the meaning of “free” and “restricted” in conjunction with both terms is categorically different. People can move and migrate; goods and services, of themselves, cannot.

Put differently, while someone can migrate from one place to another without anyone else wanting him to do so, goods and services cannot be shipped from place to place unless both sender and receiver agree. Trivial as this distinction may appear, it has momentous consequences. For free in conjunction with trade then means trade by invitation of private households and firms only; and restricted trade does not mean protection of households and firms from uninvited goods or services, but invasion and abrogation of the right of private households and firms to extend or deny invitations to their own property. In contrast, free in conjunction with immigration does not mean immigration by invitation of individual households and firms, but unwanted invasion or forced integration; and restricted immigration actually means, or at least can mean, the protection of private households and firms from unwanted invasion and forced integration. Hence, in advocating free trade and restricted immigration, one follows the same principle: requiring an invitation for people as for goods and services.

However, with respect to the movement of people, the same government will have to do more in order to fulfill its protective function than merely permit events to take their own course, because people, unlike products, possess a will and can migrate. Accordingly, population movements, unlike product shipments, are not per se mutually beneficial events because they are not always—necessarily and invariably—the result of an agreement between a specific receiver and sender. 

Furthermore, the reality of modern welfare states means that an influx of people (unlike an influx of goods) can be disastrous:

According to proponents of unconditional free immigration, the US qua high-wage area would invariably benefit from free immigration; hence, it should enact a policy of open borders, regardless of any existing conditions, i.e., even if the US were ensnarled in protectionism and domestic welfare. Yet surely, such a proposal strikes a reasonable person as fantastic. Assume that the US, or better still Switzerland, declared that there would no longer be any border controls, that anyone who could pay the fare might enter the country, and, as a resident then be entitled to every “normal” domestic welfare provision. Can there be any doubt how disastrous such an experiment would turn out in the present world? The US, and Switzerland even faster, would be overrun by millions of third-world immigrants, because life on and off American and Swiss public streets is comfortable compared to life in many areas of the third world. Welfare costs would skyrocket, and the strangled economy disintegrate and collapse, as the subsistence fund—the stock of capital accumulated in and inherited from the past—was plundered. Civilization in the US and Switzerland would vanish, just as it once did from Rome and Greece. 

What then, is Hoppe’s answer to the essential conflict posed by immigration rules—i.e., the desires of some residents of a country to permit immigration, and the desire of others to prohibit it? Not open borders, he says, which are inconsistent and contradictory. Some immigration restrictions must exist, but what restrictions? The only consistent and workable answer to that question is nothing less than a full anarcho-capitalist model for property, where private owners invite immigrants onto their property after assessing the benefits and costs. Neither forced integration nor forced exclusion should be permissible:

The guiding principle of a high-wage-area country’s immigration policy follows from the insight that immigration, to be free in the same sense as trade is free, must be invited immigration. The details follow from the further elucidation and exemplification of the concept of invitation vs. invasion and forced integration.

For this purpose, it is necessary to assume first, as a conceptual benchmark, the existence of what political philosophers have described as a private property anarchy, anarcho-capitalism, or ordered anarchy: all land is privately owned, including all streets, rivers, airports, harbors, etc. With respect to some pieces of land, the property title may be unrestricted, that is, the owner is permitted to do with his property whatever he pleases as long as he does not physically damage the property of others. With respect to other territories, the property title may be more or less restricted. As is currently the case in some developments, the owner may be bound by contractual limitations on what he can do with his property (restrictive covenants, voluntary zoning), which might include residential rather than commercial use, no buildings more than four stories high, no sale or rent to unmarried couples, smokers, or Germans, for instance.

Clearly, in this kind of society, there is no such thing as freedom of immigration, or an immigrant’s right of way. What does exist is the freedom of independent private property owners to admit or exclude others from their own property in accordance with their own restricted or unrestricted property titles. Admission to some territories might be easy, while to others it might be nearly impossible. Moreover, admission to one party’s property does not imply the “freedom to move around,” unless other property owners have agreed to such movements. There will be as much immigration or non-immigration, inclusivity or exclusivity, desegregation or segregation, non-discrimination or discrimination as individual owners or owners associations desire.

When government intrudes, however—with its arbitrary borders and sanctioned passports—bureaucrats rather than invested property owners make the immigration rules. Thus what ought to be a private system becomes political:

In order to realize what this involves, it is necessary to explain how an anarcho-capitalist society is altered by the introduction of a government, and how this affects the immigration problem. Since in an anarcho-capitalist society there is no government, there is no clear-cut distinction between inlanders (domestic citizens) and foreigners. This distinction appears only with the establishment of a government. The territory which a government’s power extends over then becomes inland, and everyone residing outside of this territory becomes a foreigner. State borders (and passports), as distinct from private property borders (and titles to property), come into existence, and immigration takes on a new meaning. Immigration becomes immigration by foreigners across state borders, and the decision as to whether or not a person should be admitted no longer rests exclusively with private property owners or associations of such owners but with the government qua domestic security producer. Now, if the government excludes a person while there exists a domestic resident who wants to admit this very person onto his property, the result is forced exclusion; and if the government admits a person while there exists no domestic resident who wants to have this person on his property, the result is forced integration.

How would a process of “invited” immigrants work, per Hoppe? Through contractual admission, which in effect makes the inviting party the sponsor of such immigrants:

Qua contractual admission, the inviting party can dispose only of his own private property. Hence, the admission implies negatively—similarly to the scenario of conditional free immigration—that the immigrant is excluded from all publicly funded welfare. Positively, it implies that the receiving party assumes legal responsibility for the actions of his invitee for the duration of his stay. The inviter is held liable to the full extent of his property for any crimes the invitee commits against the person or property of any third party (as parents are held accountable for the crimes of their offspring as long as they are members of the parental household). This obligation, which implies practically speaking that invitors will have to carry liability insurance for all of their guests, ends once the invitee has left the country, or once another domestic property owner has assumed liability for the person in question (by admitting him onto his property).

The invitation may be private (personal) or commercial, temporally limited or unlimited, concerning only housing (accommodation, residency) or housing and employment (but there cannot be a valid contract involving only employment and no housing). In any case, however, as a contractual relationship, every invitation may be revoked or terminated by the invitor; and upon termination, the invitee—whether tourist, visiting businessman, or resident alien—will be required to leave the country (unless another resident citizen enters an invitation-contract with him).

Dr. Hoppe closes the article with an admonition against the automatic grant of voting and citizenship rights to immigrants:

Becoming a citizen means acquiring the right to stay in a country permanently, and a permanent invitation cannot be secured other than by purchasing residential property from a citizen resident. Only by selling real estate to a foreigner does a citizen indicate that he agrees to a guest’s permanent stay (and only if the immigrant has purchased and paid for real estate and residential housing in the host country will he assume a permanent interest in his new country’s well-being and prosperity). Moreover, finding a citizen willing to sell residential property and being prepared and able to pay for it, although a necessary requirement for the acquisition of citizenship, may not also be sufficient. If and insofar as the domestic property in question is subject to restrictive covenants, the hurdles to be taken by a prospective citizen may be significantly higher. In Switzerland, for instance, citizenship may require that the sale of residential property to foreigners be ratified by a majority of or even all directly affected local property owners.  

We move forward to 2001, when Dr. Hoppe releases his famous political polemic Democracy: The God that Failed. Here he presents his full exposition of how and why democratic processes are incompatible with property and laissez-faire. He builds on his central arguments: trade protectionism and migration restrictions are not the same, neither forced integration nor forced exclusion are defendable, and only a system of fully private property can justifiably and practically resolve conflicts over immigration.

He opens chapter 7 of the book, titled “On Free Immigration and Forced Integration,” with a synopsis of the classical liberal argument for free immigration as increasing overall standards of living:

The classical argument in favor of free immigration runs as follows: Other things being equal, businesses go to low-wage areas, and labor moves to high-wage areas, thus affecting a tendency toward the equalization of wage rates (for the same kind of labor) as well as the optimal localization of capital. An influx of migrants into a given-sized high-wage area will lower nominal wage rates. However, it will not lower real wage rates if the population is below its optimum size. To the contrary, if this is the case, the produced output will increase over-proportionally, and real incomes will actually rise. Thus, restrictions on immigration will harm the protected domestic workers qua consumers more than they gain qua producers. Moreover, immigration restrictions will increase the “flight” of capital abroad (the export of capital which otherwise might have stayed), still causing an equalization of wage rates (although somewhat more slowly), but leading to a less than optimal allocation of capital, thereby harming world living standards all-around.

But again, the Austrian perspective requires us to understand value subjectively:

The problem with the above argument is that it suffers from two interrelated shortcomings which invalidate its unconditional pro-immigration conclusion and/or which render the argument applicable only to a highly unrealistic—long bygone—situation in human history. The first shortcoming will only be touched upon. To libertarians of the Austrian School, it should be clear that what constitutes “wealth” and “well-being” is subjective. Material wealth is not the only thing that has value. Thus, even if real incomes rise due to immigration, it does not follow that immigration must be considered “good,” for one might prefer lower living standards and a greater distance to other people over higher living standards and a smaller distance to others. Instead, a second, related shortcoming will be the focus here. With regard to a given territory into which people immigrate, it is left unanalyzed who, if anyone, owns (controls) this territory. In fact, in order to render the above argument applicable, it is implicitly assumed that the territory in question is unowned, and that the immigrants enter virgin territory (open frontier). Obviously, today this can no longer be assumed. If this assumption is dropped, however, the problem of immigration takes on an entirely new meaning and requires fundamental rethinking.  

Hoppe expands the analysis to consider the likely differences in immigration policies under two scenarios, namely monarchy and democracy. First he considers a monarchical ruler:

It is time to enrich the analysis through the introduction of a few “realistic” empirical assumptions. Let us assume that the government is privately owned. The ruler owns the entire country within state borders. He owns part of the territory outright (his property title is unrestricted), and he is partial owner of the rest (as landlord or residual claimant of all of his citizen-tenants’ real estate holdings, albeit restricted by some preexisting rental contracts). He can sell and bequeath his property, and he can calculate and capture the monetary value of his capital (his country). Traditional monarchies—and kings—are the closest historical examples of this form of government. What will a king’s typical immigration and emigration policy be? Because he owns the entire country’s capital value, he will tend to choose migration policies that preserve or enhance rather than diminish the value of his kingdom, assuming no more than his self-interest. 

He contrasts this with democratic leaders, whose time preferences reflect only their tenure in office:

Migration policies become predictably different once the government is publicly owned. The ruler no longer owns the country’s capital value but only has current use of it. He cannot sell or bequeath his position as ruler; he is merely a temporary caretaker. Moreover, “free entry” into the position of a caretaker government exists. In principle, anyone can become the ruler of the country. As they came into existence on a worldwide scale after World War I, democracies offer historical examples of public government. What are a democracy’s migration policies? Once again assuming no more than self-interest (maximizing monetary and psychic income: money and power), democratic rulers tend to maximize current income, which they can appropriate privately, at the expense of capital values, which they can not appropriate privately. Hence, in accordance with democracy’s inherent egalitarianism of one-man-one-vote, they tend to pursue a distinctly egalitarian-nondiscriminatory-emigration and immigration policy.  

As far as immigration policies are concerned, the incentives and disincentives are likewise distorted, and the results are equally perverse. For a democratic ruler, it also matters little whether bums or geniuses, below or above-average civilized and productive people immigrate into the country. Nor is he much concerned about the distinction between temporary workers (owners of work permits) and permanent, property owning immigrants (naturalized citizens). In fact, bums and unproductive people may well be preferred as residents and citizens, because they create more so-called “social problems,” and democratic rulers thrive on the existence of such problems. Moreover, bums and inferior people will likely support his egalitarian policies.

He concludes the chapter with a robust call for radical decentralization of immigration policy as the least-bad approach in democratic systems:

The current situation in the United States and in Western Europe has nothing whatsoever to do with “free” immigration. It is forced integration, plain and simple, and forced integration is the predictable outcome of democratic one-man-one-vote rule. Abolishing forced integration requires the de-democratization of society and ultimately the abolition of democracy. More specifically, the power to admit or exclude should be stripped from the hands of the central government and reassigned to the states, provinces, cities, towns, villages, residential districts, and ultimately to private property owners and their voluntary associations. The means to achieve this goal are decentralization and secession (both inherently undemocratic, and anti-majoritarian). One would be well on the way toward a restoration of the freedom of association and exclusion as is implied in the idea and institution of private property, and much of the social strife currently caused by forced integration would disappear, if only towns and villages could and would do what they did as a matter of course until well into the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States: to post signs regarding entrance requirements to the town, and once in town for entering specific pieces of property (no beggars, bums, or homeless, but also no Moslems, Hindus, Jews, Catholics, etc.); to expel as trespassers those who do not fulfill these requirements; and to solve the “naturalization” question somewhat along the Swiss model, where local assemblies, not the central government, determine who can and who cannot become a Swiss citizen.  

Finally, in articles like “A Realistic Libertarianism,” Hoppe makes the case for treating the net taxpayers of any political jurisdiction as the rightful owners of “common” or government property—with political officials acting as trustees of that property. Those trustees should ensure that property owners who invite immigrants bear the full cost of their impact on taxpayer-funded commons:

In a world where all places are privately owned, the immigration problem vanishes. There exists no right to immigration. There only exists the right to trade, buy or rent various places. Yet what about immigration in the real world with public property administered by local, regional or central State-governments?

First off: What would immigration policies be like if the State would, as it is supposed to do, act as a trustee of the taxpayer-owners’ public property? What about immigration if the State acted like the manager of the community property jointly owned and funded by the members of a housing association or gated community?

At least in principle, the answer is clear. A trustee’s guideline regarding immigration would be the “full cost” principle. That is, the immigrant or his inviting resident should pay the full cost of the immigrant’s use made of all public goods or facilities during his presence. The cost of the community property funded by resident taxpayers should not rise or its quality fall on account of the presence of immigrants. On the contrary, if possible the presence of an immigrant should yield the resident-owners a profit, either in the form of lower taxes or community-fees or a higher quality of community property (and hence all-around higher property values).

What the application of the full cost principle involves in detail depends on the historical circumstances, i.e., in particular on the immigration pressure. If the pressure is low, the initial entry on public roads may be entirely unrestricted to ‘foreigners’ and all costs insofar associated with immigrants are fully absorbed by domestic residents in the expectation of domestic profits. All further-going discrimination would be left to the individual resident-owners (this, incidentally, is pretty much the state of affairs, as it existed in the Western world until WWI). But even then, the same generosity would most likely not be extended to the use made by immigrants of public hospitals, schools, universities, housing, pools, parks, etc. Entry to such facilities would not be “free” for immigrants. To the contrary, immigrants would be charged a higher price for their use than the domestic resident-owners who have funded these facilities, so as to lower the domestic tax-burden. And if a temporary visitor-immigrant wanted to become a permanent resident, he might be expected to pay an admission price, to be remitted to the current owners as compensation for the extra-use made of their community property.

He also rejects the “accelerationist” view of some libertarians, namely that free immigration rules would overwhelm modern Western welfare systems and thus hasten the demise of their respective governments:

Absent any other, internal or local entry restrictions concerning the use of domestic public properties and services and increasingly absent also all entry restrictions regarding the use of domestic private property (owing to countless anti-discrimination laws), the predictable result would be a massive inflow of immigrants from the third and second world into the US and Western Europe and the quick collapse of the current domestic “public welfare” system. Taxes would have to be sharply increased (further shrinking the productive economy) and public property and services would dramatically deteriorate. A financial crisis of unparalleled magnitude would result.

Yet why would this be a desirable goal for anyone calling himself a libertarian? True enough, the tax-funded public welfare system should be eliminated, root and branch. But the inevitable crisis that a “free” immigration policy would bring about does not produce this result. To the contrary: Crises, as everyone vaguely familiar with history would know, are typically used and often purposefully fabricated by States in order to further increase their own power. And surely the crisis produced by a “free” immigration policy would be an extraordinary one.

He concludes with another admonition regarding the incompatibility of mass immigration and democracy, where political leaders bear no cost when they subsidize immigrants rather than act as trustees for property owners:

The immigration policies of the States that are confronted with the highest immigration pressure, of the US and Western Europe, have little resemblance with the actions of a trustee. They do not follow the full cost principle. They do not tell the immigrant essentially to “pay up or leave.” To the contrary, they tell him “once in, you can stay and use not just all roads but all sorts of public facilities and services for free or at discounted prices even if you do not pay up.” That is, they subsidize immigrants—or rather: they force domestic taxpayers to subsidize them. In particular, they also subsidize domestic employers who import cheaper foreign workers, because such employers can externalize part of the total costs associated with their employment—the free use to be made by his foreign employees of all resident public property and facilities—onto other domestic taxpayers. And they still further subsidize immigration (internal migration) at the expense of resident-taxpayers in prohibiting—by means of non-discrimination laws—not only all internal, local entry restrictions, but also and increasingly all restrictions concerning the entry and use of all domestic private property. 

Ultimately, Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s positions on immigration and borders are logically consistent with a private property order—one where owners of said property bear the benefits and burdens of immigration. Government ownership of real estate, particularly in democratic welfare states, clouds the immigration issue and forces us to analyze the “least bad” policies.  

This roundtable by the editors of the Mises Wire originally appeared August 30, 2018, on mises.org.