On Immigration and Outlawry
September 8, 2017
By any objective measure, the immigration system in the United States is a joke. Current estimates find at least 11 million illegal aliens living in and working in the United States. There is a possibility that the real figure is significantly higher, given the fact that criminals do not normally volunteer to tell census takers about their criminal exploits.
If one needs any more proof that American immigration policy is a logical mess built on wobbly legs of moralism, then one need look no further than the current controversy over DACA. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which produces so-called DREAMers, is nothing more than warmed-over pablum about each new arrival making America more “American.” The Left fights for illegal immigrants and their children because Hispanics and Asians, who make up the majority of America’s immigrant population, are among the most solidly Democratic voters in the country. Mainstream Republicans tend to favor “amnesty” or “immigration reform” because their corporate overlords have an unending appetite for cheap labor. The mushy middle either keeps silent or pretends to support DREAMers and other illegal aliens simply because they do not want to look like the “bad guy.”
Curtailing illegal immigration is a public safety issue. Contrary to establishment media propaganda, illegal and legal immigrants are overrepresented in American crime statistics. They are nine percent of the U.S. population overall, but make up about 27 percent of the federal prison population. It is also a cultural issue that directly weakens the original American promise of liberty. Freshly arrived immigrants and well-established immigrants both use welfare at higher rates than the native-born. 48 percent of all immigrant households are on some kind of welfare. Hispanic immigrants alone use 73 percent of this 48 percent share. Such welfare dependency expands the vampiric state, and in turn promotes the continuance of anarcho-tyranny (more on that shortly). Such a state will never voluntarily shrink itself; therefore, the more immigrants America has, the more the American Leviathan will expand and consume.
Illegal immigration has helped wages for working-class Americans to either stay the same or decrease since the 1970s. These Americans, many of whom have failed to get the stamp of approval of the neoliberal world order that is known as a college diploma, the opportunities for ascending the economic ladder have virtually become null and void. This is a direct suppression of economic liberty via the coercive force of the state and its unwillingness to enforce its own laws.
Finally, curtailing illegal immigration means protecting the unique heritage of the United States. America is not a “proposition nation,” nor can such a thing really exist, despite all of the starry-eyed propaganda to the contrary. America and its culture can be traced back to the English Reformation of the 16th century. New England received the rebellious Puritans, who dissented from the Stuart’s practice of the divine right of kings and the supposedly godless idolatry of the “popish” Anglican Church. Virginia on the other hand became the home of Englishmen from the Vale of Berkeley, a part of old, Anglo-Saxon England with a strong tradition of slavery and hierarchical social relations. Subsequent waves of Scots-Irish, French Huguenot, and German Protestants added to this English culture, thus creating a firmly Anglo-Celtic and Protestant nation by the 18th century. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution did not make America; these failed pieces of paper merely tried to document a culture and a people that already existed. This culture is precious and should not be beholden to the whims of transnational corporations or academic aristocrats who control the moral economy.
A true libertarian alternative to America’s broken immigration system would emphasize the concept of outlawry. This pre-modern designation, along with attendant penalties, would not only help to decentralize border enforcement, but it would also prioritize punishments for those individual aliens who enter the United States illegally and who commit crimes against people and/or property. By branding illegal aliens who also attack Americans as outlaws, enforcement would fall to local jurisdictions, not to the monolithic federal government.
Anarcho-Tyranny
The term anarcho-tyranny was first coined by paleolibertarian writer Samuel T. Francis. According to Francis, this is a state of affairs in which real crimes are not policed, while innocents are tyrannically controlled. Francis’s concept echoed the wisdom of 18th century conservative Edmund Burke, who noted that “Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more of it there must be without.”
When it comes to state-enforced multiculturalism, freedom of association is curtailed under the auspices of keeping the peace. Ingrained tribal prejudices must either be shamed out of existence or injected with happy drugs. Christian bakers must create wedding cakes for gay couples so that the neoliberal state maintains the consent of homosexual voters. Americans who exercise the right of self-defense in some states have to deal with the prospect of police officers invading their homes and confiscating their guns because someone claimed that they were crazy. All of these are examples of anarcho-tyranny in practice.
Anarcho-tyranny can be seen when Antifa and Black Lives Matter agitators are allowed to riot while the Unite the Right demonstrators faced down riot police after suffering the slings and arrows of the control-left. Every violent protest in recent memory could have been put down with extreme prejudice against radical leftists, but the police almost invariably hang back either because they do not want to be called “racist” or because their superiors told them to give the rioters room to blow off steam. (When they do not hang back and instead form and hold a protective line, events tend to remain nonviolent.) These decisions not only cost private businesses and business owners millions of dollars (when was the last time that violent protestors in America seriously attacked state buildings?), but they also directly oppress law-abiding citizens. After all, what does the state do better; capture real criminals or harass individuals exercising their liberty?
When it comes to illegal immigration, the state has the money and resources to enforce existing immigration laws. It simply refuses to do so because it is in its rational self-interest to behave in this manner. A multicultural society with low trust levels between citizens is the ideal state for those who seek to create statism. When neighbors do not trust each other or do not even interact with each other, each threat, real or perceived, becomes the job of outside forces, namely the police. What this does is remove the responsibility of personal and communal defense from individuals, thus further legitimizing the idea that the state is the only entity that has a right to use violence.
The Concept and Practice of Outlawry
In pre-modern societies, outlaws were those individuals or families who directly threatened the security or private properties of the community. Since these communities managed their own security and made their own laws, they had a very visceral idea of why branded outlaws were dangerous.
In ancient Greece, organized thievery was considered a somewhat legitimate way of earning money. Later Balkan cultures (for instance Serbia) relied on bandit warriors named hajduks in order to resist Ottoman Turkish control. British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm would later characterize the hajduk figure as an “invented tradition”—a masculine folk hero that lived outside the cloying strictures of both Turkish and official Serbian rule.
The ancient Romans did not take the Greek view of banditry. The Roman Republic considered outlawry to be the antithesis of Roman virtues like Industria (industriousness) and Severitas (self-control). The later Roman Empire similarly took a dim view of outlaws. The punishment for banditry was fierce—all outlaws became “non-persons” and were barred from maintaining or earning Roman citizenship. Furthermore, outlaws, which were known in Latin as latrones, faced the threat of losing all property rights, crucifixion, or being used as animal bait during gladiatorial games.
Several famous outlaws struck against Rome, thus showing why the Senate and the Caesars took outlawry so seriously. Between 147 and 139 BC, Viriatus, a Lusitanian sphered led a rebellion against the Roman government. After surviving praetor Servius Sulpicius Galba’s massacre of the Lusitani, Viriatus swore revenge and created a peasant army in what is today Portugal and Spain. Viriatus’ army initially had the upper hand during the Lusitanian War, especially when Celtiberian tribes decided to join his cause. Ultimately, Rome crushed the insurrection by renewing the war after Viritaus agreed to a peace with Fabius Maximus Servilianus. Servilius Caepio bribed war-weary Lusitani emissaries with a money and peace if they assassinated Viriatus, which they did. Rome would rule Hispania until the 5th century AD.
In the medieval world, outlaws continued to plague private citizens as well as the state. In medieval England, outlaws were those individuals who were considered “outside of the law” (hence “outlaw”). These individuals had been accused of crimes in court, and if they failed to appear before a local judge, the sheriff was sent to get them. Robin Hood is the most famous outlaw of this period. In the late medieval courts, outlaws were those who committed treason, rebellion, or murder. A special writ of capias utlagatum could be issued by the Crown or Common Pleas. In these instances, sheriffs could seize the property of outlaws, which was then forfeited to the Crown.
As recounted in the work of Michel Foucault, pre-Enlightenment Europe disciplined all outlaws and criminals very publicly. For instance, in 1757, Robert-Francois Damiens, a domestic servant who tried to kill King Louis XV, was drawn and quartered by the command of the king. Such punishments seem ghastly to us today, but that is only because the Enlightenment took a completely radical approach to the entire concept of criminality.
Thanks to social reformers like Jeremy Bentham and others, crime became something that could be cured, or, at the very least, hidden away from society. This idea of criminality as something “antisocial”—as something against the mass of individuals that make up so-called society—led directly to the growth of the impersonal penal state. Rather than be punished and made to perform restitution by the Crown or the process of common law, modern-day outlaws are institutionalized by prisons that operate very much like schools and hospitals. In essence, outlaws are still those who go against the wishes of the state, but the modern state sees it as its duty to try and rehabilitate these criminals. Of course, the government seizes money from private citizens in the form of taxes in order to carry out these hare-brained designs.
For A New Outlawry
Officials in the modern state have no real conception of interpersonal violence because the state is not controlled by a small set of private individuals. The state is a monstrosity that moves forward with its own internal logic, regardless of which political party is in power. In order to reclaim any sense of liberty in the modern world, America must embrace the pre-modern sense of security and responsibility as primarily the province of local communities.
Rather than rely on labyrinthine state and federal laws that only seem to allow repeat offenders to constantly cross back and forth between borders, a more sane alternative would simply brand those illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes as outlaws, seize their property (if they have any), deny them the possibility of ever obtaining American citizenship, and force them to pay restitution to their victims.
Furthermore, like the “civil death” doctrine of medieval Europe, immigrant outlaws should face the wrath of the civilian population. Rather than promote further statism through the use of federal agents or local law enforcement, private individuals should be able to take the reins of enforcing immigration laws. In preparation for a stateless society (or at least a society that does not fit the current definition of the neoliberal state), free associations of individuals should be tasked with not only securing their properties and the border, but should be authorized to apprehend outlaws and bring them to court.
As dangerous as these laws may sound, they at least would show that this country and its people take immigration laws seriously. Similarly, so long as illegal immigrants only fear deportation, they will consistently break American laws in order to get on American welfare or to work for better wages in this country than elsewhere.
Physical Removal
Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues that culturally destructive forces like Marxism, both economic and cultural, should be physically removed from libertarian societies in order to guarantee the survival of liberty, free association, and voluntary transactions. Continued illegal immigration is clearly a threat to America’s precarious liberty, and as such should be met with a form of physical removal. This removal should be accomplished by private citizens or groups of private citizens.
First and foremost, the police, in the words of Robert Taylor, “do not exist to protect you, defend private property, or maintain the peaceful order of a free society.” Taylor further notes that the primary function “is to make sure that the state’s exploitation of the public runs as smoothly as possible.”[1] Therefore, security should become a private affair. This includes enforcing the law against illegal immigrants who directly threaten communities.
Criminal illegal aliens should answer for their crimes in front of the communities that they have injured. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe writes:
“Families, authority, communities, and social ranks are the empirical-sociological concretization of the abstract philosophical-praxeological categories and concepts of property, production, exchange, and contract. Property and property relations do not exist apart from families and kinship relations.”[2]
There is no need for a government corrective here. Immigrant criminals, many of whom come from countries where socialism is the norm, not only carry the possibility of political warfare (in the form of voting for or giving a raison d’etre for anti-liberty statists), but they expressly threaten the organic unity of American families through violence. As ever, the democratic state can grow from the chaos of illegal immigration, and as such, stopping criminal aliens without the overview of the state is one way of circumventing state power.
Objections
Such a draconian proposal is certain to meet with objections from both the political mainstream and from left-libertarians, so let us attempt to address some of the most likely criticisms. First, left-libertarians consistently make the argument that open borders are the only truly libertarian solution to the problem of state power and statism. However, as has already been noted in this publication, “maintaining a distinctive culture is a good reason to restrict immigration.” Of course, immigration has economic benefits, but all libertarians should ask themselves whether immediate economic benefits are worth the cost of potentially dissolving any chance for a libertarian social order. After all, Taylor correctly notes that the left-libertarian case for open borders often conflates state with nation. He notes that “the state is artificial, arbitrary, and coercive,” but calls a nation “a national identity, protected by borders.”[3] This is healthy and natural so long as private property rights on the border are respected.
Another possible libertarian criticism of the entire concept of national borders is the problem of state coercion, namely the fact that immigration laws are fundamentally about states using force to welcome or remove private individuals based on sloppy thinking or criteria that seems highly flexible and dependent on the whims of Washington bureaucrats. An answer to this criticism can be found in the words of Murray Rothbard, who summarized why libertarians should never overlook the fact that “nation” is a category separate from both “state” and “individual.” Rothbard writes:
“Contemporary libertarians often assume, mistakenly, that individuals are bound to each other only by the nexus of market exchange. They forget that everyone is born into a family, a language, and a culture. Every person is born into one or several overlapping communities, usually including an ethnic group, with specific values, cultures, religious beliefs, and traditions. He is generally born into a country; he is always born into a specific time and place, meaning neighborhood and land area.”[4]
To ignore this is the height of political autism.
A third criticism is that implementing outlawry encourages murder. The plan described above only labels unrepentant, determined aggressors as outlaws, and killing aggressors is defense, not murder. Furthermore, anyone who tries to kill an outlaw but instead ends the life of a non-outlaw would be guilty of premeditated murder and thus subject to life imprisonment or capital punishment, thus providing a strong deterrence against overzealous outlaw hunters.
Finally, the most likely objection to this plan is that it would lead to vigilante justice, but in a sense, that is precisely the point. And is not vigilante justice preferable to anarcho-tyranny? A world wherein outlaws are chased down is better than a world wherein immigrant criminals rape and murder, get deported, then rape and murder some more before being thrown into a money-making machine run by the state.
Conclusion
The outlaw solution would encourage communities, towns, and counties to mobilize their independent resources to protect their own people from the threat of criminal illegal aliens. If a serious crime is committed, then these localities could extract just punishment from the criminals without feeding into the state’s prison system. Outlawry not only takes away the state’s monopoly on violence; it is also preferable to any open or quasi-open borders situation wherein wanted and unwanted immigrants used public roads and public property that once belonged to private individuals.
The concept of outlawry as a way to combat illegal immigration may only be feasible in a truly libertarian state. However, certain measures could be put in place at present that could dramatically change the on-the-ground reality. Namely, the rise of border militias like the Minutemen is a positive development. America should go further by abolishing the Border Patrol and replacing it with private security agencies that have to answer to those citizens who own the land on the American border. Unlike federal employees, these private agents could be fired for doing a poor job and/or for colluding with Mexican drug cartels.
Illegal immigration has not only helped the cause of “Brazilification” in America, but attendant criminality is a direct threat to all private citizens, their properties, and their freedom of association. Given this reality, criminal illegal aliens who return to the United States after being arrested, convicted, imprisoned, released, and deported should be treated as outlaws and should face the possibility of death for impinging upon American liberty. This proposal has the added benefit of legitimizing decentralized power structures in the face of anarcho-tyrant state.
References:
- Taylor, Robert (2016). Reactionary Liberty. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. p. 125.
- Hoppe, Hans-Hermann (2001). Democracy – The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order. Transaction Publishers p. 203.
- Taylor, p. 221.
- Rothbard, Murray. Nations by Consent: Decomposing The Nation-State. Journal of Libertarian Studies 11:1 (Fall 1984). https://mises.org/library/nations-consent-decomposing-nation-state-0
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