Libertarian proponents of immigration controls inevitably run into four obstacles in their support of this particular statist program:
1. The non-aggression principle. This is the core principle of the libertarian philosophy. It holds that it is morally wrong to initiate force against another person. Another way of stating the non-aggression principle is this: People have the right to live their lives any way they want, so long as their conduct is peaceful — that is, so long as they are not initiating force or fraud against others.
A political border is simply an artificial line that delineates different governmental jurisdictions. Most of the time, one cannot even see a border. For example, when people drive from Virginia to North Carolina and cross the border and enter North Carolina, there is not some great big red line that is the border. The only way that people know that they have crossed the border is that they see a sign that says “Welcome to North Carolina.”
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
It is obvious that crossing the border into North Carolina does not involve the initiation of force or fraud against someone else. It is an entirely peaceful act. And notice something important: The border between Virginia and North Carolina does not disappear simply because people are free to cross it (in both directions). The border remains. Once people cross it and enter North Carolina, they are subject to the laws of North Carolina. Thus, North Carolina does not lose its sovereignty simply because people are free to enter North Carolina.
If someone stops a person crossing the border into North Carolina, it is the person who is doing the stopping who is initiating force. That person is the wrongdoer. Thus, if North Carolina were to erect a border station at the Virginia-North Carolina border, where border guards could stop a person traveling from Virginia to North Carolina, it would be the state of North Carolina violating the rights of travelers.
The same principles apply to an international border. A person who crosses from Mexico and enters the United States is engaged in a purely peaceful act. It is the U.S. border guards who are the ones initiating force when they stop, arrest, and incarcerate the traveler.
2. An immigration police state. Border controls come with enforcement. If there is no enforcement, then the controls are worthless, given that people will simply ignore them. The enforcement measures along the U.S.-Mexico border have converted the borderlands into an immigration police state. Warrantless searches of ranches and farms within 100 miles of the border. Highway checkpoints. Boarding of Greyhound buses to check people’s papers. Criminalization of hiring, transporting, harboring, and caring for illegal immigrants. A Berlin Wall. Concertina wire. And much more.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, a police state and a free society are opposites. That’s another way that we know for certain that border controls cannot possibly be reconciled with libertarianism.
3. America’s system of immigration controls and the immigration police state that enforces it have come with massive death, suffering, rapes, kidnapping, detention centers, separation of children from parents, misery, suffering, humiliation, and abuse.
There is no possibility that libertarianism comes with these types of things. Libertarianism is a glorious political and economic philosophy that comes with life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and harmony among people.
4. America’s immigration-control system is based on the core socialist principle of central planning. Government officials centrally plan the movements of millions of people in what is one of the most complex markets in history. Socialist central planning produces what Ludwig von Mises called “planned chaos,” which is what we have had on the border for around 100 years. Socialism and libertarianism are opposite philosophies.
These are the four obstacles that libertarian proponents of immigration controls face in seeking to have other libertarians adopt their system. Of course, all four obstacles are insurmountable, unlike their Berlin Wall along the border.