Full Text RSS
Email UpdatesIs immigration the ticket to a new age of peace and prosperity like so many free market libertarians tout?
Is immigration the answer to our falling birth rates? Is it the best way to keep our youth competitive in the global marketplace? Is it the path to economic growth and continued freedom?
Or like many paleoconservatives claim, is it the road to national and cultural ruin? The end of liberty as we know it?
Or as many environmentalists say, is population reduction part of the answer to our environmental problems? To energy scarcity? To suburbanization of the hinterlands? Are too many people the problem?
Or will these arguments be proven to be an alarmist fraud, like the 1968 book “The Population Bomb” where Paul Erlichman wrote, “the United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 years by 1980 because of pesticide usage, and the nation’s population would drop to 22.6 million by 1999 [1].
For some reason people love to believe everything is going to hell, but I am skeptical about predictions of cultural collapse and massive eco-disasters, because there have been so many chicken little warnings in the last century, and not one has come to pass. I am even more skeptical of these catastrophic predictions when the only solutions are higher taxes, protectionism, increased police power, and more government regulations.
However, I don’t claim to have a crystal ball, and I will make no predictions in this post. But in our lifetime (the next 40-60 years) we will find out who was right, the warnings of alarmists or the optimism of libertarians.
Japan’s population is declining and they refuse all immigration for protectionist reasons. We will clearly see what happens to their economy and society. To a lesser extent, we will see the same in Russia and most of Europe. And for the first time, without war or natural disaster, we will see the rapid depopulation of major economic powers.
On the flip side, the U.S., Australia, U.K., Ireland, and Canada have liberal immigration policies which are unlikely to change soon. So we will see the populations of these countries explode. Some predictions show the US having over a billion people in less than 100 years.
I tend to favor liberal immigration policies, if the folks seeking our way of life embrace the idea of individual liberty and freedom and if they are here to build a better life and not to get a handout. Most of the complaints I hear about immigration in America are really complaints about our social welfare system. People complain that immigrants are draining our school system and our social services. Which leaves me asking the complainers…
Have you considered the possibility that immigrants aren’t the problem, but instead, that our school system and our social services are? It isn’t just immigrants who drain these systems. Have you considered the possibility that large swaths of humanity do not value things which are ‘free?’ If people had to pay for education and it was voluntary not compulsory, don’t you think they would value it more? There is little we could or should do about people desiring the freedom our nation provides, but there is much we can do about giving away ‘freebies.’
But I digress.
We live in fascinating times, and I am optimistic about our future. And I can’t wait to see our world evolve.
What do you think about these topics?
Sound off.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you say that immigration per se isn’t the real issue, it just exacerbates existing problems in our social system.
Hans Hermann Hoppe addresses this in his book, “Democracy: The God that Failed” (highly recommended). If people are truly free to do as they wish with their own property and to self-organize their own communities on a private basis, national immigration becomes a non-issue. The question isn’t whether anyone has permission to cross a border, but whether they can find a community or business that will welcome them, or employ them, or sell to them.
Hoppe goes on to argue that under the present system, in which we lack freedom of association and wealth is forcibly redistributed, the best we can hope for is that the state implements some kind of immigration control that approximates the decisions that would have been made by individuals in the free scenario. This is clearly problematic, but his arguments made my own thinking on this topic more nuanced.
Comment by Ed April 8th, 2008 @ 9:11 am
@Ed,
Just to play ‘devils advocate’ for the sake of discussion. While Mr. Hoppe says, “people are truly free to do as they wish with their own property and to self-organize their own communities” others would say…
When people were allowed to organize their own societies based on freedom of association, we got “Jim Crow” laws and apartheid.
I am curious how you or Mr. Hoppe would reply. Who would insure the private local organizations do not violate one’s personal freedom?
Comment by The Savage April 8th, 2008 @ 11:50 am
Borders have become much less real. In spite of immigration policies, electronic communication and increased travel have made contact with people in other countries more and more common. In 1992, when I lived in Germany, a call “home” to the U.S. cost more than a dollar a minute and happened only a few times a year. Now I can call a friend in England for a few cents a minute on a phone card or for free using VOIP.
I think eventually immigration policy will catch up to reflect this new reality and there will be unrestricted movement amongst most countries in the world. Immigration controls like we have today aren’t sustainable.
Comment by Working Rachel April 8th, 2008 @ 12:06 pm
I cannot speak for Hoppe, only recommend his writings. But let me take a crack at an answer for myself.
First I would point out that Jim Crow and (South African) apartheid are both poor examples for your argument, because both were highly dependent on government-enforced discrimination. Why were laws passed codifying racism? Because some people were not racist, and would have otherwise chose to integrate, and the racists didn’t like that, so they wielded government power to stop it. What other possible explanation could there be for creating such laws?
Free competition actually punishes racism, because it necessarily decreases the size of your potential market. The benefits of free trade have long driven disparate groups to cooperate economically who otherwise wouldn’t want anything to do with each other. This is why racists must resort to laws to stop it from happening.
Second I ask you to examine the basic premise of your question. To what do you compare my proposal? Has government-enforced integration been successful? Do we have racial equality and harmony?
I would argue that government-enforced attempts at racial equality have actually perpetuated racism by giving various groups new reasons to resent each other. And we still unfortunately have a black underclass. By many measures black communities are worse off today than they were 50 years ago, particularly if you consider the destruction of families and the incarceration rate.
Racism is a problem of hearts and minds and culture. You cannot make it go away by government fiat. You can only drive it to take new forms. It’s illegal to discriminate in hiring. Yet my high-tech employer, like everyone else in the industry, has few minority employees. Housing discrimination is illegal, yet there are very clearly white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods right here in Boston, ground-zero of the abolitionist movement. Segregation lives on in new forms.
Culture trumps law. It always has and always will. Attempts to solve cultural problems with laws always fail unless they’re accompanied by genuine cultural shifts (in which case the law is superfluous anyway). Many of the things we’ve been taught to consider victories of law (like the end of child labor) were actually cultural and economic shifts, and the law eventually caught up with the culture. Or for another example, slavery in America was steadily losing economic ground and would have withered on its own with or without a terrible war. That’s why every other major slave-owning power managed to end slavery peaceably: cultural and economic shifts made it happen. The laws followed.
I also ask you to consider human nature. The very idea of human nature was long out of fashion, but it’s finally getting attention again. Humans do have a nature, and it is not infinitely malleable. One aspect of human nature is a desire to associate with people similar to ourselves. This isn’t a moral statement, it’s simply a fact that must be considered. If you look at historical examples (Hoppe describes a few), you’ll see that racial integration has long been a feature of the more cosmopolitan merchant classes, but almost completely absent among the majority of people.
This observation doesn’t contract my earlier assertion that economics drives people to cooperate with others. Indeed, this is why the merchant classes have long been the ones who are most comfortable integrating with other cultures. Given free trade, most people are quite content to buy and sell to very different people, but they’re still likely to choose to live among their own kind. Thus you get economic integration, which encourages peace, despite the continuation of distinct cultures.
Finally, I ask you to consider the hazards of giving any government enough power to try to combat discrimination. Why should we believe that the people in government are any less greedy or racist than the population at large (especially in a democracy where it is the population at large choosing the rulers)? If we empower government agents to examine and approve every private transaction for its effects on diversity, do we not give them control over the very heart of economic and social life? How can they, mere humans themselves, be trusted with that power?
Comment by Ed April 8th, 2008 @ 1:12 pm
@Ed,
Well said. And I agree on almost every point.
I asked the question about Jim Crow because it is the most common retort to libertarianism and limited government. People will argue that in the absence of a powerful central government - systems like Jim Crow and apartheid would have continued unchecked and the only remedy is large central organizations like the UN or the US Federal Government. It is the single best “trump” card in the big government arsenal.
However…
What they fail to address is the possibility of an equally evil and destructive large central government coming to power without an even larger government to offset its abuses. They assume that large central governments are superior to small local ones because of the historical issues like Jim Crow and apartheid. They fail to mention the powerful central governments like Maoist China who murdered over 50 million people. Which leads me to the following question…
What if the U.S. had not been a republic of separate state governments and it was instead centralized and run by the men who brought us Jim Crow? What would the remedy have been then?
The idea of large central government revolves around the belief that large powerful governments will always be run by morally superior people. What if they aren’t moral? What happens if they are corrupt and they have unlimited power? Then what?
Comment by The Savage April 8th, 2008 @ 7:18 pm