Positive Liberty

The illegal immigration problem is so severe in Southern California that it is difficult for people elsewhere in the country, including even Northern Californians, to really understand what’s going on. Whole areas of Southern California are now virtually Mexico. The population of illegal immigrants is enormous, and climbing steadily, at the rates of at least hundreds per day.

The absurdity and hysteria of the situation is typified by the incidents in the past few days in which students at high schools in the Ventura and Santa Barbara areas walked out of their classes to protest a bill which would make it illegal to be in the country illegally. One teenager I saw on television holding a sign protesting indignantly, “How Can A Human Be Illegal?” (The answer to that is: by breaking the law.)

But why is illegal immigration such a bad thing? As a libertarian, I favor the free flow of people across borders just as I do the free flow of goods. Immigration is good for a free economy, right? Of course, we don’t have a free economy; we have a welfare state, and immigration is bad in a welfare state, since it increases the burden on taxpayers—and so forth. We’re familiar with those arguments, and with the claims that most illegal immigrants work hard and are essentially taxed to pay for the welfare of others, et cetera. I’ll leave that alone. Instead, I see three main reasons that illegal immigration is a serious concern, even for a libertarian.

First, it must be kept very clear that no person has a natural right to enter another country against the will of those citizens. A person has a natural right to leave his own country, no doubt. But a political society is an agreement among people for purposes of the common defense, and the people therefore have the right to decide whether or not to allow others in. So long as they do not make that decision on an arbitrary basis, they have the right to refuse to extend citizenship or entry to others if they wish. So no person has the right to force his way into the another nation and demand to be accepted.

The three reasons I see illegal immigration as a serious concern are terrorism, disease, and philosophy. It is simply unacceptable to allow a flow of individuals whose origin, identity, and intent is not known, to cross the border into the United States this way. We know that terrorists have exploited America’s lax immigration laws before, and we know that we caught a terrorist at the Canada border seeking to enter and blow things up six years ago. It is unconscionable to leave our border unprotected in this way in wartime. Disease is a slightly less serious concern, but it is a genuine one. It is legitimate for the United States to require newcomers to go through some sort of screening process to exclude diseases from the country. Obviously such a process would not be perfect, and I doubt we would want to put in the kind of effort that it would require to be perfect. But it’s a legitimate reason for restricting illegal immigration.

The most serious, to me, is philosophical. You cannot have a free society among people who do not understand the cultural and philosophical framework of freedom. Allowing people into a nation who do not identify themselves as part of that nation—who do not speak the language, who do not observe the holidays, who do not know or care about the history and ideals and cultural icons—is simply suicidal. This is unusually important in a nation such as ours which is not founded on an ethnic heritage, but on an shared ideological orientation. Since the Declaration states that our assert to certain self-evident truths is what unites us as “one people,” our nation simply cannot survive without ensuring that the people who are accepted as citizens are educated with regard to those truths. As Jefferson said,

Every species of government has its specific principles. Ours perhaps are more peculiar than those of any other in the universe. It is a composition of the freest principles of the English constitution, with others derived from natural right and natural reason. To these nothing can be more opposed than the maxims of absolute monarchies. Yet, from such, we are to expect the greatest number of emigrants. They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass. I may appeal to experience, during the present contest, for a verification of these conjectures. But, if they be not certain in event, are they not possible, are they not probable…? Suppose 20 millions of republican Americans thrown all of a sudden into France, what would be the condition of that kingdom? If it would be more turbulent, less happy, less strong, we may believe that the addition of half a million of foreigners to our present numbers would produce a similar effect here. If they come of themselves, they are entitled to all the rights of citizenship: but I doubt the expediency of inviting them by extraordinary encouragements.

American citizenship classes* teach the principles and cultural currency to those who seek to enter the nation legally. But a flood of people entering the nation illegally who do not assimilate into the culture, but instead bring with them the political and social principles of Mexico—that, I think, is a profoundly dangerous thing to allow.

Of course I believe in the American dream for all people, and I favor free immigration and integration into our culture and our economy. But we cannot lightly dismiss as racism or bigotry the complaints of those in Southern California whose political as well as social culture is being pushed out by what is, in all but name, an invasion by a foreign power.

*–some might object: but we don’t require native-born citizens to take such classes! My answer is: we ought to.

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