There Are No Libertarian Objections to Open Borders
Some people claim to uphold libertarian principles but reject open borders. I’m going to explain why this isn’t a consistent position.
To begin, try to imagine a self-professed libertarian who asserts that the state should prohibit people from congregating at their church on Easter. It’s obvious that this claim isn’t consistent with libertarian principles—the prohibition would violate private property rights and freedom of association. And if you reject either of those rights, you’re not a libertarian because they’re definitional features of libertarianism.
Similarly, prohibiting someone from immigrating to the United States (for instance) violates private property rights and freedom of association. An American’s freedom to hire an immigrant to work in the business she owns is protected by her private property rights as well as her freedom to associate with the immigrant and the immigrant’s freedom to associate with her. The same goes for decisions to reside or congregate with people from other countries.
While I don’t have the space to go into much detail, I’ll run down my replies to the most common arguments against open borders that I’ve heard from libertarians. All of these arguments share a core problem: not only do they undermine freedom of immigration, they undermine many other libertarian freedoms as well.
The most popular objection alleges that “we can’t have open borders and a welfare state.” (This position is sometimes affiliated with Milton Friedman, but his view was actually more nuanced than it seems.) Even if we set aside the finding that estimates of the fiscal impact of immigration “are clustered around zero,” this argument is easy enough to refute. Libertarians advocate for legalizing heroin with a welfare state in place. They don’t defend state restrictions on reproductive rights even when the children will attend public schools. In short, if we took the “welfare state objection” seriously, it wouldn’t stop at the freedom to immigrate.
I’ll also note that libertarians who press the welfare state objection should, at the very least, accept open borders paired with the keyhole solution of restricting eligibility for welfare benefits. If you think no one is entitled to these benefits, then it’s hard to see why you’d have a problem with a policy doesn’t provide these benefits in full.
The second objection claims that taxpayers have the right to determine how public infrastructure is used and thus the right to restrict immigrants’ access if they choose. But this argument also proves too much. Do taxpayers have the right to prohibit people from driving on public roads if they have copies of Anarchy, State, and Utopia in the car? Surely not.
The third objection is that more immigration will lessen the likelihood of achieving libertarian policy goals. But the empirical evidence rebuts the claim that more immigration produces less economic freedom. Moreover, even if things were otherwise, this would remain an unconvincing argument for immigration restriction. Consider that libertarians wouldn’t call for the state to ban the sale of books by Tucker Carlson or to break up the Democratic Socialists of America even if this could make libertarian outcomes more likely. Why not? Because these policies would violate private property rights and freedom of association—just like immigration restrictions.
Bryan is right that libertarians can't really oppose open borders consistently, but vaguely libertarian conservatives can. The right-of-center view is Jeffersonian: in practice, a high degree of personal freedom is only stable in a republic of virtue where citizens freely forge bonds of trust and cooperation with each other in families, churches, organizations etc. For instance, a decent society can only get by without a welfare state if there is a privately-provided safety net by these mediating institutions. High rates of immigration cause anomie and destroy the mediating institutions.
That's the argument anyway. I think of it as the reason libertarianism doesn't work well in cities: when everyone lives cheek-by-jowl you just can't get along without specific rules for noise, bans on burning leaves, speed limits, bans on sleeping in libraries and parks, etc. unless people are sufficiently pro-social. If everyone does whatever they want and feels no duty to basic decorum, society becomes grubby and unpleasant.
The mass immigration of low IQ clannish individuals who tend to support redistribution has ended poorly in every single place its been tried. It causes fiscal and economic strain, low trust outcomes across the board in the society, and make politics shift leftward and become more clannish and corrupt. Any honest account of this driven by data shows this.
Libertarians need to realize that demographics drive outcomes. Productive high IQ pro social demographics are the only ones that have ever been friendly to successful libertarian outcomes.
"Libertarians advocate for legalizing heroin with a welfare state in place."
This has been an utter disaster in every way and is being rejected across the country even in previously gung ho progressive areas.
This is a wierd hill to die on. Galt's Gulch is a bunch of high IQ prosocial white dudes making the best of themselves. Not a bunch of heroin addicted lumpenproletariat voting Democrat because they want to shit in the street.
P.S. Many libertarians support the right to life for unborn children. You extend maximum rights to one group and zero rights to another based on your mood affiliation and nothing more.