NOTE: Our upcoming online Zoom conference “End Inflation and the Fed” kicks off on next Monday, October 3, at 7 p.m. Eastern Time with Richard Ebeling. Richard teaches economics at the Citadel and is co-host of FFF’s weekly Internet show, the Libertarian Angle. He is former president of The Foundation for Economic Education and former Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics at Hillsdale College. He is also the author of FFF’s book Monetary Central Planning and the State. I hope you will join us for a great talk on a critically important issue facing our country as well as a lively discussion. FREE! Register here.
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One of the arguments that advocates of America’s immigration-control system use is that America is a national home, one in which U.S. officials have the authority to close the door and keep immigrants out. They compare this national home to a private homeowner’s right to keep people from entering his home.
But America is not a national home. Immigration-control advocates who make this argument to justify their immigration scheme are thinking of countries like Cuba and North Korea. In those countries, the government owns everything and considers the entire country to be its property. Thus, the national-home argument is a better fit for nations that are based on collective state ownership of everything.
But the United States has always been based on the concept of private property. Sure, the federal and state governments own a lot of land. Nonetheless, the nation is still based on the concept of private ownership of property.
A private owner has the right to decide who enters his house or business. And it doesn’t matter what his reasoning happens to be. His authority to prevent others from entering onto his property is complete, even if it is based on the most prejudicial of reasons. Thus, if a private owner decides, for whatever reason, that he doesn’t want immigrants to come into his house or his business, that is his moral right, even if everyone else disagrees with it. As the old saying goes, a man’s home is his castle. And so is his business.
By the same token, a private owner has the right to permit anyone he wants to enter his house or his business. That includes immigrants. If I wish to invite immigrants into my house or my business, that is my right. No one else has the right to prevent me from doing so.
Thus, private-property rights are inextricably woven together with such rights as freedom of association, liberty of contact, freedom of trade, economic liberty, freedom of movement, and freedom of travel.
This same principle, however, does not apply to government. We don’t want government discriminating on the basis of race, color, creed, national origin, or sexual preference. We want everyone to receive equal treatment under law.
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The state governments’ property includes highways, roads, and bridges. These properties are simply the means by which people go from private property to private property. Thus, the state cannot legitimately engage in arbitrary and capricious discrimination against anyone who wishes to use its highways and roads.
That means that immigrants should be free to travel to the United States like regular human beings. That means crossing the international border, using a state-owned road or bridge, and traveling to some private business that is willing to hire them or to some private dwelling that some private owner is willing to sell or rent to them. It’s really no different from what countless Americans do every day — that is, use highways, roads, and bridges to go from one privately owned property to another (except for government employees who go to work in a government-owned facility).
The beauty of open borders is that it preserves America’s concept of private-ownership of property as well as America’s heritage of individual liberty while, at the same time, maintaining a system that is consistent with moral, religious, and economic principles. To move further in the direction of Cuba and North Korea by converting America into a “national home” and, in the process, fortifying the immigration police state that exists along the border, would be disastrous and destructive.