CURRENT EVENTS, HISTORY/CULTURE, POLITICS/ECONOMICS
The Muslim Migrant Crisis Is a Giant Government Program
By Русский бот
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A letter written to Lew Rockwell from Stefan Lundberg:
If I were a leader interested in destroying my own country, I would be at constant war in the Middle East, empowering terrorist groups to overthrow other leaders when it served special interests. I would drone bomb and invade to cause mass casualties and suffering. Revenge is a strong impetus for terrorism when coupled with an already twisted radical ideology.
I would destabilize these countries to the point of causing a refugee crisis. And then to top it all off I would declare open borders and cause an unnatural spike in immigration from the countries I’ve intervened in which are now littered with terrorists. The clash of cultures would sow division among the people, and as terrorist attacks inevitably rise, I would hide safe behind my guarded walls while the rest of the citizenry deal with the consequences of my invade the world/invite the world foreign policy.
But don’t worry, to “fight” terrorism I’ll make sure to launch a massive surveillance state and curtail personal liberties wherever possible. I can then use each subsequent terrorist attack to justify increased intervention both abroad and domestic.
For some reason I feel like I’m plagiarizing now…
What happens in a world where real virtue has been replaced by virtue-signaling, and where destructive foreign wars of regime change are waged in the name of “humanitarianism”? A world where the consequent migrant invasions are invited by the elites while the common taxpayer bears the costs and consequences.
In other words – invading the world and inviting the world at taxpayer expense so sheltered talking-heads can feel good about how “compassionate” and “aware” they are as “global citizens.”
By now, it is clear that the migrant crisis plaguing Europe (and even America to a lesser extent) is a direct result of the interventionist foreign policy that has destabilized the Middle East and North Africa. To the establishment media and government officials, the solution to all of this is not abandoning the foreign policy that created the crisis (for that would implicate “respectable” politicians like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and George Bush who supported these policies), but rather “inviting the world” into the West. In doing so, they appear virtuous and compassionate to the gullible masses while masking the failure of their “humanitarian” wars waged in the name of that very same “virtue” and “compassion.” However, these “respectable” political elites (who themselves are net tax receivers by definition) and media pundits (many of whom are also net tax receivers) do not bear the true cost of their “virtue,” but instead foist it upon the shoulders of common men and women who are forced to live among (and subsidize) the migrants their leaders have invited into the country.
Invade the world, invite the world, and vigorously virtue-signal to avoid scrutiny. This is the agenda of the global elites.
Welfare Shoppers, Rapists, and Terrorists
So who exactly are these migrants who are entering Europe en masse? Are they peaceful, hardworking individuals who are fleeing from oppression and seeking a better life? That’s certainly the impression one would get from the mainstream media and especially from open borders advocates. But reality demonstrates that this is not the case. Notice how thus far, I have refrained from referring to these migrants as “refugees” – it’s because most of them aren’t real refugees. Rather, they are economic migrants who, taking advantage of the real refugee crisis, are drawn to wealthy European countries with generous welfare states and are typically helped along the way by NGOs. These migrants often masquerade as refugees fleeing from war or persecution, and due to the lax to nonexistent vettingof these migrants by their host European countries, are often successful at obtaining “asylum.” Most of the real refugees fleeing from war end up settling in other Middle Eastern countries, which makes sense given that the primary goal of such refugees would be immediate physical safety, not receiving freebies from generous welfare states.
A recent UN report confirms the nature of these so-called “refugees” – the majority of whom are in fact welfare-shoppers who end up becoming heavily dependent on government financial assistance and have no valuable job skills. This is especially the case regarding African migrants traveling to Europe through Libya and the Mediterranean. As this reality has become ever more clear over the past year, even some EU officials have begun to make a rightward shift on immigration, cracking down on illegal immigration as well as failed asylum seekers avoiding deportation. As it has become more clear to European citizens that these migrants are net tax receivers, angry populist backlash against the EU’s “open door” immigration policy has only increased. Indeed, this “open door” policy most disturbingly entails the active looting of net taxpayers to subsidize the mass importation of these economic migrants.
It’s true that the root of this problem is ultimately the welfare states of these European countries, not the immigration policies per se. However, is it truly the “principled” libertarian position to facilitate a Cloward-Piven collapse by means of welfare-subsidized mass immigration absent the ideal standard of having no welfare state?
Not only are the host populations of Europe being systematically looted for the benefit of Third-world migrants, they are also being terrorized with violent crime – bombings, shootings, “trucks of peace,” and sexual assaults – unimaginably barbarous in some cases. The most stark cases of the migrant crime wave may be found in Germany, Sweden, the UK, and France, all of which have seen significant increases in crime rates since the beginning of the migrant crisis, particularly in 2016. In addition to this crime wave being perpetrated by said migrants, the criminals themselves often get away with a slap on the wrist due to law enforcement officials’ fear of accusations of racism. Thus, the punishment that migrant criminals deserve – immediate deportation at the very least – is hardly ever given. The lax treatment of migrant crime in turn inevitably encourages more crime as the legal deterrent is weakened, all while the host population suffers the consequences of law enforcement’s cowardice.
Meanwhile, the talking heads in the mainstream media (MSM) and government continue to deny the obvious reality that many of the terrorist attacks in Europe over the past few years have been explicitly motivated by Islam by the very words of the attackers themselves, and also by the expressed intentions of militant Islamic preachers for jihadists to enter Europe through the waves of “refugees.”The “Islamophobia” smear is, of course, frequenly employed as a gas-lighting tool whenever anyone dares to highlight the clear connection between terrorism and Islam, along with blatantly false or misleading statistics to shield Islam from any responsibility.
If the end goal of libertarianism is a private law society wherein violent interpersonal conflict is mitigated to the highest degree, then is it the “principled” libertarian position to exacerbate social conflict by withholding the justified punishment of these migrant criminals? As I have argued in a previous article, not all actions by the State are in and of themselves acts of aggression. In the case of law enforcement (that is, the punishment of legitimate crimes such as murder, rape, theft, fraud, etc. etc., not “victimless crimes”), the only aggressive aspects regarding the State’s provision of it are its monopolization of the service and its means of funding it (taxation), but not the law enforcement itself which is a legitimate and necessary market function that would continue to be provided absent the State (albeit more efficiently).
Opposition to any law enforcement simply because it comes from the State has no place in libertarian theory. The libertarian solution to violent crime is to punish the criminals, plain and simple. When that crime is being committed by migrants whose importation is already being subsidized by the taxpayer, there is no reason why immediate deportation should be off the table. Libertarianism is about non-aggression, not non-violence (the two are often confused by lolberts and left-“libertarians”). The claim that State violence used to punish genuine criminals is itself “State aggression” is not a libertarian one.
There is an all-too-common talking point regarding migrants that ought to be addressed. Does mass immigration result in “economic growth”? To mainstream economists and political pundits, the answer is typically “yes.” They will cite various macroeconomic statistics such as the GDP which they claim rises with increasing immigration, and will likewise make the tired claim that “immigrants take jobs that natives won’t take,” and other such canards. Aside from the obvious question of how subsidizing the mass importation of welfare-dependents will result in “economic growth” (as opposed to rapid consumption of public resources), the more serious issue with these types of claims is that they fail to take into account the reality of subjective economic value.
What’s worse is that even many “libertarians” who claim to adhere to Austrian economics will throw the subjective theory of value completely out the window in their commitment to open borders as they parrot the arguments of these mainstream economists. For they are essentially claiming that some ivory tower economists and “public policy experts” have the ability to objectively determine and centrally plan what is in millions of people’s economic best interests when it comes to immigration. Specifically, they are implying that the actual concerns of many people regarding migrant crime (which many of these elites will never have to worry about as they live in safe, wealthy, gated communities), welfare dependence, and lack of cultural assimilation are negligible when compared to the higher GDP they will ostensibly enjoy thanks to these migrants.
Such an assertion is completely at odds with Austrian theory, which acknowledges that man is not “homo-economicus,” but can value many things above his own financial profit, such as the assurance of physical safety, the maintenance of his culture and lifestyle, and even the survival of his nation as a whole. Ethnic and cultural in-group preferences exist, as the migrants themselves demonstrate with the enclaves that they form within their host countries. Such in-group preferences are likewise evidenced by the right-wing populist backlash taking place in Europe, fueled by the anger of those who are realizing the social consequences of their leaders’ immigration policies. To assume the vast majority of people would place a higher priority on having a larger GDP over all else is the epitome of central planning arrogance, and is precisely the kind of “fatal conceit” that Friedrich Hayek warned about.
The very fact that a right-wing populist backlash is currently taking place across the Western world is irrefutable qualitative proof that many people are not experiencing mass migration as an economic good, but as an economic bad. No amount of statistic-citing from ivory tower residents can refute that, for economic value is determined by the subjective, ordinal preferences of individuals, not the decrees of elitist academics. What ordinary people are experiencing from these migrants is not “cultural enrichment” or “economic growth,” but terror, rape, parasitism, and demographic conquest.
Demographic Destruction
If demography is indeed destiny, then Europe’s destiny appears to be a grim one. Plummeting birth rates of native populations along with the mass importation of migrants with high birth rates will eventually result in the complete replacementof European peoples with those of the Third World. Cultural Marxists, who have been encouraging childlessness for some time now (for the purposes of “smashing the patriarchy,” fighting “climate change,” preventing “overpopulation,” etc.) have now made an about-face, recognizing demographic decline as a problem to which their convenient solution is mass immigration. Interestingly, despite the initial efforts of anti-birth ideologues to control population across the globe, we primarily see its effects in the Western world. In contrast, the Third World populations being imported in the West remain largely free of such influences. Pat Buchanan, in his book The Death of the West, observes:
In 1978, a congressional select committee on population announced that the “major biological systems that humanity depends upon… are being strained by rapid population growth… [and] in some cases, they are… losing productive capacity.’ As Jacquehne Kasun, author of The War Against Population, writes, about this time the Smithsonian Institution created a “traveling exhibit for schoolchildren called ‘Population: The Problem Is Us,’ [that] featured a picture of a dead rat on a dinner plate as an example of ‘future food sources.’ As a result of this anti-population propaganda from America’s elite institutions of politics and ideas, the public funding for population control here and abroad exploded. But though the message was taken to heart by the First World wealthy and middle class, it was largely ignored by the Third World poor, at whom it had been targeted. We can see the results today: a birth dearth among the affluent nations, and baby booms across the Third World.
While it is unclear as to whether this result was intended all along by the “benevolent” world population planners, it is absolutely clear that the results described in the final line of the above quote have taken hold, and that this demographic reality compounds the issues caused by mass immigration. As shown in this Pew study, even a complete moratorium on Muslim immigration into Europe would still result in a steady increase in the Muslim population percentage solely by virtue of their higher birth rates. From the study itself:
From mid-2010 to mid-2016 alone, the share of Muslims in Europe rose more than 1 percentage point, from 3.8% to 4.9% (from 19.5 million to 25.8 million). By 2050, the share of the continent’s population that is Muslim could more than double, rising to 11.2% or more, depending on how much migration is allowed into Europe. Even in the unlikely event that future migration is permanently halted, the Muslim population still would rise to an estimated 7.4%, due to the relative youth and high fertility rates of Europe’s current Muslim residents.
Even worse, as the associated graphic explains in the article, the 11.2% figure assumes the cessation of migrant crisis levels of asylum-seekers, with only the continuation of pre-crisis level immigration. The graphic also shows that if the pro-mass immigration Eurocrats have their way, the projected Muslim population by 2050 would become 14%, and even that assumes the continuation of current crisis-level immigration rates absent an even further increase (which, of course, would delight mass immigration advocates).
One would only recognize this kind of demographic replacement as a solution to Europe’s fertility problems if one adheres to the egalitarian belief that all cultures and all ethnicities are interchangeable. I have previously addressed this fallacious belief in my essay “Preserving Liberty Requires Common Culture.” In it, I debunk the notion of a “proposition nation” held together only by abstract ideals (e.g. “freedom,” “equality,” etc.) and reveal the historical necessity of cultural and even ethnic homogeneity for the creation and preservation of a libertarian social order. As Buchanan and many others have also demonstrated, the egalitarian advocacy for mass immigration simply has no basis in reality. Many alt-right commentators have also pointed out that there is no such thing as “magic dirt.” Simply walking onto French soil will not make one French, in the same way that Jared Taylor’s birth and youth spent in Japan could not make him Japanese.
In Buchanan’s book State of Emergency, numerous examples and statistics are discussed showcasing the glaring problem of Muslim violence in Europe (which has only worsened since the book’s publishing), often times provoked by perceived insults to their faith. We have already discussed the problem of migrant violence in some detail. However, Buchanan makes the crucial observation that such violence and social tension isn’t simply the result of two extremely dissimilar (and often conflicting) cultures coming into contact – it is also the result of a historically rooted conflict between Islam and the Christian West being ignited once more by the forced integration of these peoples, cultures, and civilizations. Buchanan explains in detail with regards to the 2005 riots that shook France:
In the heavily Arab and African suburbs of Paris, riots erupted; they spread rapidly to Rouen, Lille, Marseille, Toulouse, Dijon, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Cannes, Nice, and three hundred other cities, continuing for weeks. Ten thousand cars and buses were torched, two hundred public buildings firebombed. Hundreds of schools, offices, churches, and shopping malls were vandalized. One man was beaten to death. A French woman was doused with gasoline and set ablaze. More than two hundred police were injured and more than four thousand were arrested. Not until the twelfth night of the insurrection did President Chirac declare a state of emergency.
The criminals were the children and grandchildren of subjects once ruled by the French Empire. Severed from the countries and cultures of their parents, these deracinated youth may hold French citizenship but they have never been assimilated into the French people.
The French government estimates its Muslim population at 4-5 million. Yet, “most social scientists believe this number is too low, speaking of as many as eight million Muslims in France. . . .” Millions of the Muslims are no more French than Americans living in Paris. They are in France but not of France. Outside society, they seek out community and comradeship at mosques where imams preach that the West is not their home, but a civilization alien to their values and hostile to Islam.[…]
[N]o modern European nation has ever assimilated a huge cohort of immigrants, let alone tens of millions of Muslims. Not one. And unlike African- Americans, the Islamic people pouring into Europe — there are 20 million in the European Union alone — are strangers. Millions do not wish to give up their Arab and Islamic identities and cultures and become Europeans. They wish to remain Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian, Turk — and Muslim. Most adhere to a faith historically hostile to Christianity that is growing in militancy and recoils from a secularized, sex-saturated European culture. In the threatened war of civilizations, this vast Muslim cohort is a potential fifth column in the heart of a post-Christian Europe.
French colonial history has added even more fuel to the fire:
Like the Paris riots, the struggle over French history raises grave questions for Europe. How does the presence of 20 million Muslims who come from nations where men believe their grandfathers were exploited and persecuted by Europeans advance the unity and security of Europe? How is Europe made stronger by such “diversity”?
The clash of civilizations between Islam and the West has resurfaced, and if the current policy of forced integration continues, it will not end well for anyone. This policy is both impractical and immoral – for nearly all of history it was considered the height of treachery to one’s countrymen to willingly aid and abet hostile invaders. How are the millions of Muslims coming into Europe with nothing but enmity in their hearts for their hosts and hatred for their culture anything but invaders? And if they are invaders, what are these government officials who are subsidizing their entry with the stolen funds of their subjects but traitors of the most despicable sort? Buchanan asks:
How does Europe deal with a militant faith making converts by the millions that preaches that to do God’s will is to punish unto death insulters of that faith, be it a Van Gogh or a Rushdie?
Considering the violence, welfare parasitism, and ethnic/cultural tensions that are now threatening to unravel European civilization, Buchanan’s question is a worthwhile one to consider. Ultimately, the most pressing question regards what path the West will take at this crucial point in its history: the way of diversity and multiculturalism, or the survival and preservation of its civilization and people?
Moral Responsibility?
Leftists are fond of using emotion-based arguments, and one of the most common ones they make in support of unlimited acceptance of migrants in Europe (and the United States) is that Westerners have a moral responsibility to pay restitution to those whom their government has displaced through foreign wars. But does this argument hold water? Not in the least.
First, as has already been mentioned, the majority of migrants traveling to Europe are not fleeing war, but are welfare shoppers. Secondly, even if a burden of restitution exists, many of the countries taking the brunt of the migrant invasion (such as Sweden) had little, if anything, to do with the wars that displaced the migrants who genuinely are fleeing from war. Third, even in the case of the US (the main culprit when it comes to foreign intervention in the Middle East), it cannot be said that the voting population bears responsibility for the wars waged by their elected officials since (a) presidential candidates often campaign on a much less interventionist foreign policy than what they end up implementing once in office, (b) the real decision-making power when it comes to foreign policy doesn’t truly lie with the president anyway, but with the unelected Deep State, and (c) voters rarely have a real choice when it comes to foreign policy – the last time a truly principled anti-war presidential candidate made it into the spotlight, he was cheated by the establishment. But the biggest problem with this “moral responsibility” argument (and why it is so tragic that so many “libertarians” appeal to it) is that it is a complete butchery of libertarian property ethics.
The libertarian private property ethic makes an important distinction between ownership and possession. To conflate the two is to advocate mutualism. When one says that taxation is theft, what is implied is that the money stolen from taxpayers by the State is still the rightful property of the victims of taxation, even though the State now has possession of that property. Therefore, “public property” ought not be considered “government property,” since the State cannot legitimately own anything, but rather the jointly owned private property of the net victims of taxation. Also, any property that the state purchases or maintains through the use of these stolen funds must also be considered the rightful property of domestic taxpayers, since they would still have the strongest objective link to such property. To argue, as some libertarians do, that only the actual stolen funds are owed to taxpayers as restitution, essentially turns theft into an interest-free loan and allows thieves to get off the hook by purchasing assets with their loot.
(For a more detailed defense of taxpayer ownership of public property, see my previous article here.)
The rightful owners of public property are the net victims of taxation. But leftists argue: because foreign victims of war have been victimized more severely than domestic tax victims, they have a higher claim to restitution from the State and therefore are owed a right to enter Western countries and consume public resources at taxpayer expense. The claim that net domestic tax victims can only claim ownership of public resources if the State also pays restitution to foreign victims of war is absurd from a property ethics perspective. The only way the State could do the latter is by stealing even more resources from domestic tax victims, thus essentially punishing them for crimes the State committed with their stolen resources. Paying restitution to one group of victims by stealing from another group of people already being stolen from does not resolve, but rather generates increased conflict over scarce physical resources, and thus defeats the very purpose of restitution as a means of upholding private property norms.
The people of Europe have absolutely no moral responsibility to pay for the crimes committed with the funds stolen from them by their governments. The solution to the problems created by Western governments invading the world is not to be found in inviting the world at the expense of domestic tax victims and in clear violation of libertarian property ethics. In fact, what we see is that most of those who attempt to impose such a moral responsibility on European peoples are simply engaging in the age-old leftist practice of virtue-signaling. Justin Raimondo demonstrates this brilliantly in his response to Trevor Thrall of the Cato Institute regarding the migrant crisis and foreign interventionism:
Trevor Thrall, of the libertarian Cato Institute, argues that we should take in far more than 10,000: “An open-door resettlement policy would save thousands of lives and improve the life prospects of millions more.”
Yes, he’s talking about millions. Thrall continues:
“The declared goals of Western intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq have included the freedom and well-being of the people in those countries. Sadly, military campaigns by the United States and U.S.-led coalitions in such places have failed to provide any such thing. An open-door policy would finally provide concrete benefits to these people, and represent a morally superior alternative to forcing refugees to remain in dangerous camps or sending them back to deadly conflict zones.”
But the declared goals of the interventionists were not only unrealizable, they were inappropriate and wrong: for it isn’t the function of the U.S. government to secure the “freedom and well-being” of people throughout the world. That duty is owed only to the American people. Indeed, the very idea that enforcing global goodness is Washington’s solemn duty is what led to our disastrous military adventurism to begin with—and unleashed the refugee flood. Schemes to show the world—and reassure ourselves—that we are “morally superior” have led to nothing but endless misery and bloodshed.
In any case, libertarians who argue that we shouldn’t have a welfare state at home can hardly argue that we need to establish one on an international scale. Who, after all, is going to pay for all this?
Arguing for a massive refugee rescue effort, Thrall juxtaposes this to military intervention, as if it’s one or the other: but neither course is libertarian—or rational—in any sense of the term. Why can’t we refrain from either invading or inviting the world?
Aside from asserting our own “morally superior” status, Thrall avers that initiating a massive refugee rescue program has some concrete benefits:
“An open-door policy is likely to make Americans, and those in other Western countries, safer over the longer term by challenging the perception, so susceptible to exploitation by extremists, that the United States and its allies care very little about the people of the Middle East.”
Here in the New Rome, we direct the destiny of nations like pieces on a chessboard, even unto moving whole populations from one end of the earth to the other. From the height of our arrogance we exercise godlike power and imagine ourselves to be a virtuous people: that’s where the moralizing tone of the “let them in” crowd comes from. But arguments for a “morally superior” solution to the refugee crisis coming from an administration that has itself created that crisis fall on deaf ears as far as I’m concerned. The same president who has droned thousands of innocents the world over, and who is now supporting Islamist “rebels” intent on destroying Syrian society, is now telling us we have a moral obligation to transfer the victims of his policies to American soil.
Far from showing the world that we “care,” what we are demonstrating is our incurable narcissism. This whole issue has little to do with genuine concern for the hapless victims of the Syrian civil war: it’s really all about us, and how wonderful we are, how liberal and tolerant and “free.” The more perceptive of the refugees, when they arrive in America and recover from the horrors they’ve seen, will know it—and they won’t like what they see. They’ll begin to wonder how they wound up in a country of hypocrites, who can bomb a country with one hand and lift them up and out of their misery with the other. And then—watch out. Because no amount of “vetting” can eliminate the human factor and erase hatred from the hearts of men.
The mass importation of millions of welfare-dependent migrants, as Raimondo argues, is no more than a massive government program designed to inflate the egos of morally condescending leftists. It is no more justifiable than the absurd proposal for forced reparations from Whites to Blacks for centuries of “systematic oppression” for which no living white person today is responsible. If one truly wishes to showcase one’s moral superiority, socializing the costs of one’s “virtue” onto one’s neighbors is a poor way to go about it. For true virtue is built from personal character and is demonstrated by one’s willingness to defer one’s owngratification for the well-being of others, not by forcing others to subsidize his moral posturing through State-sanctioned theft and forced integration. The moral course of action here is not to invite the world, but to stop invading the world. In the meantime, the immoral plunder and rape of Europe by mass immigration must also be stopped.
The Praxeological Problem with Free Immigration
For all the observable social ills this migrant crisis has brought to Europe, the truth is that we didn’t actually need this crisis to see why unrestricted migration is a disastrous policy. For the problems with “free immigration” can be readily deduced a priori from the basic economic axiom of physical scarcity. Free and unrestricted movement of peoples, even without the modern welfare State, itself constitutes trespass against private property and will always result in forced integration and the maximization of social conflict regarding scarce physical resources (e.g. land, money, bodies, etc.). Hans Hermann Hoppe explains this in his essay “On Free Immigration and Forced Integration.”
In an anarcho-capitalist society there is no government and, accordingly, no clear-cut distinction between inlanders (domestic citizens) and foreigners. This distinction comes into existence only with the establishment of a government, i.e., an institution which possesses a territorial monopoly of aggression (taxation). The territory over which a government’s taxing power extends becomes “inland,” and everyone residing outside of this territory becomes a foreigner. State borders (and passports), are an “unnatural” (coercive) institution. Indeed, their existence (and that of a domestic government) implies a two-fold distortion with respect to peoples’ natural inclination to associate with others. First, inlanders cannot exclude the government (the taxman) from their own property, but are subject to what one might call “forced integration” by government agents. Second, in order to be able to intrude on its subjects’ private property so as to tax them, a government must invariably take control of existing roads, and it will employ its tax revenue to produce even more roads to gain even better access to all private property, as a potential tax source. Thus, this over-production of roads does not involve merely an innocent facilitation of interregional trade – a lowering of transaction costs – as starry-eyed economists would have us believe, but it involves forced domestic integration (artificial desegregation of separate localities).
Moreover, with the establishment of a government and state borders, immigration takes on an entirely 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 with private property owners or associations of such owners but with the government as the ultimate sovereign of all domestic residents and the ultimate super-owner of all their properties. Now, if the government excludes a person while even one domestic resident wants to admit this very person onto his property, the result is forced exclusion (a phenomenon that does not exist under private property anarchism). Furthermore, if the government admits a person while there is not even one domestic resident who wants to have this person on his property, the result is forced integration (also non-existent under private property anarchism).
Now, some open border libertarians might see an opportunity to jump on the last two sentences and claim triumphantly that we “bordertarians” are promoting forced exclusion by state borders. But aside from the fact that this ignores what we have constantly been arguing since the beginning – that our ideal scenario is a world of completely privatized borders where neither forced integration nor forced exclusion will occur, the false assumption is also made that forced association is praxeologically equivalent to forced dissociation. For the act of association between multiple parties requires the consent of all parties, while the act of dissociation only requires the consent of the party initiating the dissociation (unless, of course, the parties are bound by a voluntary legal contract). It is for this reason that one who jointly owns private property with others cannot simply invite whomever he wants onto the jointly owned property without the consent of the other owners, but would require their unanimous consent for the invitation to be valid (absent any prior agreement on how shares were to be allocated or how decisions were to be made, of course). For the right to private property ownership (i.e. the right to exercise exclusive control over justly acquired scarce physical resources) implies the inherent and absolute right to exclude, but not necessarily an absolute right to include. This is because the very purpose of private property norms is to provide a rational basis for exclusion as a means of minimizing conflict over scarce physical resources, while inclusion (whether voluntary or forced) would occur unhindered absent the establishment of private property norms. The implication, therefore, is that the prevention of exclusion (i.e. forced inclusion) is more destructive toward the ends for which private property norms are established than the prevention of inclusion (i.e. forced exclusion). Ideally, of course, neither forced exclusion or forced inclusion would take place. But in a world of state borders and public property, the prevention of forced exclusion will necessarily facilitate forced inclusion, and the prevention of forced inclusion will inevitably lead to some forced exclusion.
The question then becomes a matter of what policy is least destructive toward private property norms, to which the clear answer is neither an open border policy nor a completely closed border policy, but rather the invite-only policy suggested by Hoppe – a policy which prevents forced inclusion while minimizingforced exclusion as much as possible. Hoppe explains further:
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 a de-democratization of society, and ultimately the abolition of democracy. More specifically, the authority to admit or exclude should be stripped from the hands of the central government and re-assigned 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 un-democratic, and un-majoritarian). One would be well on the way toward a restoration of the freedom of association and exclusion as it 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 or bums or homeless, but also no Moslems, Hindus, Jews, Catholics, etc.); to kick out those who do not fulfill these requirements as trespassers; 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.
What should one hope for and advocate as the relatively correct immigration policy, however, as long as the democratic central state is still in place and successfully arrogates the power to determine a uniform national immigration policy? The best one may hope for, even if it goes against the “nature” of a democracy and thus is not very likely to happen, is that the democratic rulers act as if they were the personal owners of the country and as if they had to decide who to include and who to exclude from their own personal property (into their very own houses). This means following a policy of utmost discrimination: of strict discrimination in favor of the human qualities of skill, character, and cultural compatibility.
More specifically, it means distinguishing strictly between “citizens” (naturalized immigrants) and “resident aliens” and excluding the latter from all welfare entitlements. It means requiring as necessary, for resident alien status as well as for citizenship, the personal sponsorship by a resident citizen and his assumption of liability for all property damage caused by the immigrant. It implies requiring an existing employment contract with a resident citizen; moreover, for both categories but especially that of citizenship, it implies that all immigrants must demonstrate through tests not only (English) language proficiency, but all-around superior (above-average) intellectual performance and character structure as well as a compatible system of values – with the predictable result of a systematic pro-European immigration bias.
This is the solution to the immigration problem that best approximates what immigration would look like under an ideal anarcho-capitalist society. For in such a society, there would not exist any right to “free movement” of which left-libertarians are so fond, and the mass subsidized importation of culturally unassimilable, welfare-dependent, violence-prone migrants would most certainly not occur. All prospective migrants would require the permission of the private owners of the land to which they wish to move, and they would not be able to socialize their living costs onto unwilling individuals, but would have to provide for themselves or be sponsored by their inviting party. If, in the case that neither the prospective migrant nor any willing sponsor is able to cover those costs, the consequent exclusion of the migrant cannot be said to be “forced exclusion” any more than one can claim a violation of one’s right to bear arms if one cannot afford a firearm.
For to assert a right to “free movement” subsidized by the taxpaying public is to assert positive rights, which is contrary to libertarian property ethics and necessarily requires the provocation of conflict over scarce physical resources. It is no surprise, then, that the coercion of European peoples to fund the invasion of their homelands with their stolen tax money has resulted in the maximization of such social conflict through the proliferation of violence, the draining of public funds, and the heightening of ethnic and cultural tensions. In fact, as stated at the beginning of this section, this result is precisely what one should expect. It is precisely these sorts of problems which a true libertarian social order would prevent by the upholding of private property norms. Hoppe explains further how immigration in such a society would function:
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 owned by others. With respect to other territories, the property title may be more or less severely restricted. As is currently the case in some housing developments, the owner may be bound by contractual limitations on what he can do with his property (voluntary zoning), which might include residential vs. commercial use, no buildings more than four stories high, no sale or rent to Jews, Germans, Catholics, homosexuals, Haitians, families with or without children, or smokers, for example.
Clearly, under this scenario there exists no such thing as freedom of immigration. Rather, there exists the freedom of many independent private property owners to admit or exclude others from their own property in accordance with their own unrestricted or restricted property titles. Admission to some territories might be easy, while to others it might be nearly impossible. In any case, however, admission to the property of the admitting person does not imply a “freedom to move around,” unless other property owners consent to such movements. There will be as much immigration or non-immigration, inclusivity or exclusivity, desegregation or segregation, non-discrimination or discrimination based on racial, ethnic, linguistic, religious, cultural or whatever other grounds as individual owners or associations of individual owners allow.
“Freedom of movement” is incompatible with private property norms, whether in a pure anarcho-capitalist society or under a Statist paradigm. When it comes to the migrant crisis in Europe, the consequences of this “free movement” are becoming more and more apparent with every riot, gang rape, terrorist attack, and suppression of religious expression to appease the invaders. The vast majority of these migrants, being uninvited net beneficiaries of taxation, have absolutely no right to be in Europe and would never be admitted in a libertarian social order. As such, the immediate course of action that European governments ought to take is to enact a moratorium on non-Western immigration and begin deporting the migrants back to their countries of origin, starting with the ones who are guilty of violent crimes. In the long run, the goal should be to transition to the invite-only system that Hoppe describes so that such an economic, social, and demographic disaster as this migrant crisis never happens again.
To the open border libertarians, the questions must be asked: is there any part of the ideal anarcho-capitalist arrangement described by Hoppe that they believe conflicts with libertarian property ethics? If so, I’d be very curious to see what their particular understanding of libertarian property ethics actually is. If not, then how exactly do they intend to argue that an open border policy would approximate this arrangement better than an invite-only policy? In other words, can they seriously argue that an open borders policy prevents, and does not facilitate, the erosion of private property norms under a Statist paradigm? Or that forced integration does not occur under open borders? Or that forced integration on a mass scale is a preferable result compared to the relatively small amount of forced exclusion that would occur under an invite-only policy?
Until the open borders crowd can provide coherent answers to these questions, we “bordertarians” should continue to view them as the fake libertarians they are and not take them seriously.
The Globalist Endgame… and the Real #Resistance
One final question remains: why are the people in power doing this? If the migrant crisis is truly a government program, what is its purpose? What is the end goal for the powers that be? The answer can be found in what we know about the nature of the State, which is that it seeks to expand its power indefinitely and destroy any obstacles to this end. One of the biggest obstacles, as I have argued before, is in-group preference fostered by a common culture and ethnicity – that is, the bonds that have historically been the most consistent in making individuals coalesce into distinct people groups. (For the hyper-individualists out there who will inevitably scream “collectivist!!!”, I recommend my essay: “Libertarianism Is Not Opposed To All Forms of Collectivism“.) The institutions of civil society such as the nuclear family, the church, and the local community are tied together not by common adherence to some abstract ideals like “freedom” or “equality,” but by more concrete things such as people’s common biological ties, a common way of life, common social mores, and other commonalities that affect people’s everyday lives in very tangible ways. These institutions also produce competing loyalties that weaken people’s dependence on and allegiance to the State. It is precisely for this reason that mass immigration, especially of people groups who have had historically rooted hostilities to the host population, is encouraged by the State. Murray Rothbard, in his essay “Nations by Consent,” discusses how mass multi-ethnic immigration was employed by the Soviet Union to destroy the native local cultures of their satellite States.
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.
A similar situation is occurring in China, where ethnic Han Chinese are being actively encouraged by the Chinese government to move into regions that have historically been occupied by ethnic minorities. Given the history of China’s government, it is likely that they are doing this for the same reasons the Soviets did – to destroy local culture and erode resistance to the almighty Chinese central state.
As the European Union places increasing pressure – even including the threat of sanctions – on the countries of Eastern Europe to fulfill their “migrant quotas,” can the same not be said of the migrant crisis in Europe? Is the EU not attempting to manufacture particular demographic and social outcomes in its member states through this relentless promotion of mass migration, encouragement of multiculturalism, and punishment of “hate speech”? Has the EU not exhibited the same expansionist tendencies that all States exhibit, slowly attempting to incorporate more power into itself and erode the sovereignty of its member states?
While the initial populist uprising the the United Kingdom that led to Brexit is now floundering at the hands of spineless “conservative” leaders afraid to stand up for their country’s interests and against those of the EU, a new, more determined resistance is taking place in the East. Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia – the “Visegrad Four,” are bravely standing up to the EU’s mass migration agenda as well as the mainstream media’s anti-nationalist vitriol. They have cracked down on migrant flows and as a result have also had much more success than Western European countries in preventing terrorism. It is no coincidence that these countries are also experiencing revivals in their Christian faith and heritage, giving them the strength and motivation to resist the decrees of the EU, knowing that their ultimate allegiance lies with God, not with government.
As the “#Resistance” in America continues to whine and virtue-signal against Donald Trump while shilling for the Deep State and playing up tensions with nuclear-armed Russia, we must realize who the real Resistance is comprised of. The real Resistance is not made of Hollywood celebrities and their latte-liberal followers virtue-signaling against Trump. Instead, it consists of people like the brave men and women in Eastern Europe standing up for themselves, their countrymen, their national culture, and their Christian faith against the leftist dictates of EU bureaucrats who seek to replace them with Third World migrants.
The invasion must be stopped. Secure the borders and start the deportations.
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