Classical liberals tend to favour low barriers to cross-border migration, but not all do. Let’s consider the disagreements.
Over the weekend, as today’s day of protest against illegal immigrants approached, the epithet “Marxist” was spat at me by a self-described libertarian.
“Far left loon,” they added, attributing opinions to me that I have never held or always argued against, and setting fire to a row of straw men.
The reason for this frustrating little contretemps? Besides the fact that unlike my interlocutor I do not worship at the feet of alt-right neo-fascism and white nationalism, I also do not agree that it is good policy to close national borders to all or most immigrants.
Merely expressing tolerance for people who happen to have been born outside my country, and arguing that they typically are a net benefit to the economy, turned out to be enough to raise their ire and denounce me as an enemy of freedom.
“You’re all a bunch of socialists!”
This isn’t unusual among libertarian-minded people. Wherever two libertarians gather, you’ll find three conflicting opinions, and the firm belief of each that the other is a degenerate socialist.
At an early meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, Milton Friedman recalls that when he and Friedrich Hayek declared themselves willing to contemplate progressive taxation, Ludwig von Mises stormed out in a huff, yelling, “You’re all a bunch of socialists!”
It is, of course, absurd to consider either of these giants of the libertarian tradition a socialist, or to declare me, a mere student at their feet, to be a Marxist.
I said this is an issue about which reasonable people can disagree (“No! Marxist!”) and responded by providing several links to libertarian arguments for open borders. I added a paper that argues only libertarianism can provide a robust justification for open borders,to demonstrate that such an opinion was not at all unlibertarian.
Yet it is an issue about which those who favour individual freedom disagree. There are excellent arguments for the free movement of people, but there are also reasonable liberal arguments for maintaining more restrictive immigration policies.
So let’s consider the liberal or libertarian arguments against open borders, and then explain why I still land on the “easier immigration” side of the issue.
A hard problem
While classically liberal principles lend themselves to deriving sound policy choices on many issues, some questions are simply hard.
Regular readers will know where I stand. I have argued that the West needs more immigration, not less, that anti-immigrationism is a toxic lure, and that politicians who whip up xenophobia for votes – as too many in South Africa now do, with Ramaphosa speaking out of both sides of his mouth – belong in the same disreputable company as every other peddler of collectivist identity politics.
More recently, Terence Corrigan wrote a cogent article in this journal on why the appeal to the better angels of our nature so often fails, and why exclusionary nationalism has had such a tragic allure throughout South Africa’s history.
So let me concede the other side its due. Not the xenophobic side – there is nothing to concede to people who march on spaza shops demanding papers they have no authority to demand. I mean the serious side.
Because there is a serious classical liberal argument against fully open borders, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. I’ll get to why I still lean in favour of free immigration later. But the conversation is real, and reasonable people – by which I mean classical liberals and libertarians, not the demagogues – land on different sides of it.
Clearing the weeds
Before we get to the good arguments, we have to bin the bad ones, because the debate is choked with them.
My colleague Martin van Staden made a critical point last year: the endless hand-wringing about “legal versus illegal” immigration is sophistry. Everyone prefers legal conduct to illegal conduct. The illegal immigrants themselves would have preferred to arrive legally.
To say you oppose illegal immigration but welcome legal immigration is, as Van Staden put it, to say nothing at all. The real question is not about legality, but about ease: should immigration be easy or difficult?
Those who hide behind “I only oppose the illegal kind” invariably want a more burdensome legal system too. Legality is the façade; difficulty is the goal.
Bryan Caplan, in a neat little piece for Econlib, takes a flamethrower to some of the really bad arguments. The pro-freedom immigration sceptic, he writes, suddenly reaches for arguments he would never tolerate anywhere else.
The first is that of collective ownership. Anti-immigration libertarians argue that the country belongs to its citizens, who may therefore regulate who enters.
But if the nation collectively owns the land, it may regulate everything else on it, too: your shop, your wages, your tenants, your religion, your moral choices, your political choices. If you need your nation’s consent for your actions, then you are ipso facto not free.
Collectivism
The second is that of collective guilt. Some Muslims are terrorists, or are intent on converting the non-Islamic world, or demand compliance with their religious laws. Therefore, they should be kept out.
The problem with this argument is that if you attribute the sins of some among a group to the entire group, then we must concede that the same principle can be applied to us, too. Then we may all be billed for the sins of our ancestors, and be made to pay for the sins of slavery or apartheid. Suddenly, reparations and race quotas are back on the menu.
The third is about shocking anecdotes. Yes, there are examples of foreigners behaving badly. But if you generalise from these anecdotes, then you must also accept that it is appropriate to generalise about the bad behaviour of members of any other group, including your own.
Activist journalism often uses this technique: if anecdotes justify major policy responses, then you must concede that shocking photographs or cherry-picked sensationalism about poverty, climate change, drugs, health care, speeding, working conditions, or any other problem are representative of the general case, and therefore justify major policy responses.
The fourth is about popular support. The claim people are entitled to policies that a majority want is the fastest road to the tyranny of the majority. Protectionism is popular. Price controls are popular. Banning things that are claimed to be sinful, harmful or unhealthy is popular. Redistribution is popular. Denying minorities rights and freedoms is popular.
Writes Caplan: “Unless you’re going to abandon the whole classical liberal framework, basic intellectual hygiene requires you to excise any argument along these lines. What remains? Only arguments claiming that the consequences of immigration are awful enough to overcome the standard classical liberal presumption against government action.”
That is the argument worth having. And it is not frivolous.
The serious case against
Here are the strongest arguments against open borders, assembled from writers who claim to share my first principles about individual liberty.
First, there’s the welfare-state objection. In a libertarian night-watchman state, immigration is close to an unalloyed good: people move to where their labour is most valued, and everyone is richer for it.
But we do not live in night-watchman states. We live in welfare states, where the newcomer can draw on schools, clinics, social grants and housing funded by other people’s taxes.
The classical liberal who opposes the welfare state on principle can hardly celebrate when it is expanded by importing new claimants.
Several of Caplan’s own commenters press the point: if you open the borders and keep the welfare state, you have simply built a magnet that bankrupts the thing.
This essay from 1828, a British group that champions freedom and makes the case for free markets and limited government, puts it bluntly: a free society cannot survive collapsing into welfare dependency. If you want a small state, the argument runs, you must first reduce dependency – not pour fuel on it.
Hayek’s caution
Then, there is the objection based on Hayek’s caution. It is fashionable to invoke Hayek to argue for open borders. Inconveniently, in Law, Legislation and Liberty he conceded that he has no answer to the question of whether a stranger has a right to settle down in a community in which he is not welcome, since such a right implies the obligation on someone to offer the stranger a job or sell him a house.
Hayek, the great theorist of spontaneous order, understood that order is a fragile, evolved thing. The institutions that make a free society possible – the rule of law, generalised trust, the habit of treating strangers fairly – are cultivated over generations.
Change the population fast enough, this argument goes, and you may erode the very social capital that made the place worth migrating to in the first place.
One commenter framed it in game-theoretic terms: cooperation depends on repeated interaction and reputation; crank up the turnover and you weaken the conventions that hold a society together.
The small country problem
Third, there is the “small country” problem. Although it is rather absurdly used by exclusionary nationalists in large countries like the UK and the US (most infamously in the form of the Great Replacement Theory), it carries more weight in smaller countries.
A writer for a Lithuanian liberal party, republished by the Mises Institute, spells it out starkly. Lithuania has 2.8 million people. Russia has 144 million.
A migration of just 1.5 percent of Russians would make Lithuanians a minority in their own country – and, as Crimea demonstrated, demographic change can become a vehicle for political annexation.
Israel faces a very similar calculus over the claimed “right to return” of Palestinians who are hostile to its very existence.
Mises himself, no enemy of liberty, wrote at length about how large national minorities, bound by laws made in a language and political culture not their own, come to feel like second-class citizens – and how that friction breeds exactly the illiberal nationalism we should fear.
For a small nation beside a large and hostile one, “open the borders” is not obviously the liberal answer. There, it really may be the suicide note that nationalists in large countries falsely claim open borders to be.
The democratic dilemma
Fourth, consider the democratic dilemma. In a democracy, today’s immigrant is tomorrow’s voter. If a free society depends on a broadly liberal electorate, then who you admit determines what laws you will live under.
Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance gets a run here: unlimited tolerance, including of the intolerant, can extinguish tolerance itself. Import enough people hostile to free speech, private property and political or religious pluralism, and you may vote liberty away by entirely democratic means.
This is the argument’s sharpest edge, and also its most dangerous, because it slides so easily into the bigot’s claim that these particular people are unfit for freedom.
But in its disciplined form it is a real worry, and not just the fig leaf for racism that it too often is.
I do not find these arguments decisive, but I will not insult them. They are often made in bad faith by racists, nationalists, conservatives and other collectivists. But that isn’t always so. In some formulations, they are made by people whose individualist beliefs I share and who reasoned carefully about consequences.
That is what makes this a genuine disagreement among liberals rather than a brawl between liberals and xenophobes.
Why I still come down where I do
Having given the other side its fairest hearing, here is why I remain, stubbornly, on the open side of the argument.
First, the economics. The empirical record is lopsided to the point of embarrassment.
Wherever its impact has actually been measured – the Congressional Budget Office, the Penn Wharton Budget Model, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development across 25 countries – immigration turns out to be a net fiscal and economic contributor, not a drain, even in welfare states.
Limiting ourselves only to South Africa, the go-to study is this 2018 report by the OECD and the International Labour Organisation.
It concludes that the impact of immigrants on native-born employment varies across the country, but on average, its analysis shows no significant effects. Immigration has a positive effect on economic growth and raises income per capita by an estimated 5%. Immigrants also have a positive net impact on the government’s fiscal balance, by paying both income tax and value-added tax.
This 2018 study by the World Bank concludes that immigrants on balance create jobs for locals.
A 2021 case study on the socioeconomic contributions of migrant business owners in informal settlements and inner-city areas in Johannesburg, conducted by the UN International Organisation for Migration, reached similar conclusions. Immigrants, both legal and illegal, contribute to economic value chains that benefit not only the economy in general, but native-born South Africans in particular, through paying rents, hiring transport services and buying stock.
Conversely, GroundUp has found that South Africans are now losing income as immigrants flee ahead of today’s protests.
Research also suggests that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the native-born, everywhere this has been measured. In South Africa, it has not been measured, but there is no reason to believe that people with enough gumption to travel internationally for better prospects would act any differently in South Africa than they would elsewhere in the world.
Free movement of labour
The free movement of people is simply the free movement of goods and capital applied to labour. I have never met a classical liberal who wanted permission from a bureaucrat before relocating from Limpopo to Johannesburg, from Johannesburg to Cape Town, or either to a small village on the coast.
The case for stopping someone at a national line, rather than a provincial or municipal boundary, has always struck me as arbitrary.
The welfare-state objection actually doesn’t hold up in practice, but even if it did, the remedy would be to reform the welfare state. Insist on means-tested, contribution-based models, instead of caging human beings in the country of their birth.
The moral case
Second, and more fundamentally, there’s the moral point. I believe people have rights by virtue of being human. They do not have to earn those rights (although violating the rights of others can lead to their suspension, such as in the case of criminals).
In particular, people’s rights should not depend on their identity, their skin colour, their religion, their language, their ethnic origin, or any other immutable trait, and that includes where they happened to be born.
Place of birth is, as Van Staden observes, the last great inborn characteristic we still permit ourselves to use as grounds for political discrimination, after we have rightly abandoned sex and race.
A border is a coercive instrument: it is the state pointing a gun at a peaceful person and forbidding them to cross a line – to work, to trade, to build a life – for no crime other than the accident of their birth.
The presumption of liberty runs against that gun. The consequentialist must clear a very high bar to justify it – and most of the time, it turns out that the consequences point the other way upon closer examination.
Stress-tested
So I land where I began, only now with my reasons stress-tested rather than merely asserted: barriers to immigration should be low. Vet for criminals, gang or terrorist affiliations and genuine security threats – I have never objected to a background check.
Beyond that, let people move. The burden of proof sits squarely on those who would wield state coercion against peaceful seekers of greener pastures, and they have not discharged it.
But notice what kind of claim that is. It is a judgement about consequences and a weighting of moral presumptions. A thoughtful liberal in Vilnius, Lithuania, or Tel Aviv, Israel – staring across a border at a far more populous enemy – might weigh the same principles and reach a more cautious conclusion than I have, living in South Africa.
They would not thereby cease to be a liberal, and I might, in their case, concede their point.
Wisdom
That is a distinction worth defending. The xenophobe and the liberal restrictionist may arrive at similar policies, but they get there by utterly different reasoning.
The xenophobe begins with nationalistic fervour, a feeling of superiority, and contempt for the foreigner, and reasons backwards from there.
The liberal restrictionist begins with the same love of freedom I do, and worries – sincerely – that freedom, in their exceptional case, needs walls to survive.
The first deserves to be denounced as a dangerous enemy of peace and freedom. The second deserves a courteous and considerate argument.
I think the liberal restrictionist is mostly wrong, but they are not unreasonable. They are not illiberal. In a debate this consequential, knowing the difference is the whole of wisdom.
[Image: March And March protesters against illegal immigration make a bold political claim during a recent protest. Photo: March And March]
The views of the writers are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend