It is the most open of borders; it is a too heavily-guarded border. It is an ineffectively guarded problem; it is overly guarded harmlessness. It is lax chaos; it is tyrannical semi-order. It is an uncharted, profound passivity; it is traditional, aggressive, prosaic authoritarianism. It is the new welfare state; it is the old welfare state.
I am not only alluding to a piece of literature but also contrasting the southern and northern borders of the United States in 2024.
Immigration is a fairly simple issue in a free country; in an unfree one, it is more complicated.
Almost none of today’s commentators has a consistent, reasonable view of immigration (two partial exceptions are noted below). The two mainstream, popular approaches to the problem (and it is now at least something of a problem) are superficially opposed variations of the same false dichotomy tearing the country, and the world, apart.
The leftist and left-leaning (it is not liberal) approach of the current presidential administration can be seen at the southern border. The conservative modus operandi, closer to that of the previous president and most popular rival to the current administration, can be seen at the northern border.
On Friday, Mark Steyn, in one of his better recent posts, started his “Friday Notebook” piece, titled “Live As It Happens: The Death of Your Nation”, with a New York Post video/headline: “Migrants break barriers and rush border patrol in El Paso”. Steyn, in his usual sardonic style of excoriation and ridicule, contrasts the lack of force at the southern border with overbearing authoritarianism at the northern border and just about everywhere else in between (reading the entire piece is highly recommended). Steyn, a more integrative thinker than almost anyone with an audience today, elucidates the connection between lack of a strong national defense (which he considers U.S. southern border policy to be) and increasing violations of Americans’ rights by their own government.
“The above happened in a country where law enforcement is not shy about using lethal force if you're pulled over for a busted tail-light and reach too suddenly for the insurance card in your glove-box. If you're a frail septuagenarian with a cane who likes mouthing off on Facebook, the FBI will come round to ‘serve a warrant’ and you'll be carried out by the handles.
“And, even when it's non-lethal force, the state enjoys using it on you, good and hard. If you're a New Hampshire teenager returning from a bagpipe competition in Quebec, the hilariously misnamed ‘Customs & Border Protection’ will confiscate your pipes and tell you you're "never going to see them again".
“Likewise, you'll never see your Kinder Eggs again, not if they contain a ‘non-nutritive embed’. Instead of delicious chocolate and a fun toy, you'll be spending the Easter weekend playing with your official Department of Homeland Security ‘Custody Receipt for Seized Property and Evidence’ (‘Est. Dom. Value $7.50’).
“But that's the northern border. At the southern border, thousands of non-nutritive types are embedded in America's body politic every day of the week. And, unlike the Canadian frontier, the MS-13 Pipes and Drum Corps and the Ramadan Kinder Egg Collectibles sales team can just stroll in through the express check-in. And, if it's insufficiently express, they'll just overrun your so-called National Guard.
“‘National Guard’... ‘Homeland Security’... ‘Border Protection’... Don't you think these big butch names are too risible to utter with a straight face in Joe Biden's America?”
Steyn is a Canadian citizen living in New Hampshire, close to the Canadian border, and his writings and personal experience on this issue ensure he is worth reading. Ironically, despite the fact that he is an immigrant, he comes across as anti-immigration in general, not just during times of crisis (real or imagined), to a degree I could never support.
Objectivist philosopher Harry Binswanger, the author of How We Know: Epistemology on an Objectivist Foundation, is dismissive of the idea that there is any kind of serious problem, much less crisis, at the southern border. While I cannot agree with him about that, his views on immigration in general are much better than Steyn’s. There is a split in the dwindling Objectivist movement about current immigration policy. Ayn Rand’s heir and successor Leonard Peikoff has stated that the better agents of a welfare state can properly restrict immigration as long as it is a welfare state and significant numbers of immigrants are collecting taxpayer funds, are indifferent (or hostile) to the country’s founding principles, etc. Binswanger and others, including former Ayn Rand Institute Executive Director Yaron Brook, disagree.
I lean towards Peikoff’s view.
One of the reasons that I did not and do not support the most recent ex-president is that I don’t think I would exist if anything like his immigration policies were implemented in the early and middle parts of the twentieth century. My ancestors immigrated from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (Ukraine) at that time. While they were leaving their homes because they detested what those nations had become, I don’t see the counterparts of today’s enforcement agents being convinced about that (or even concerned about it). My grandmother was born in the Weimar Republic in 1926, and my great-grandparents had the foresight to settle in New Jersey as soon as Hitler became Chancellor, while that was still possible. Interestingly, Russian-born Ayn Rand was arguably an illegal immigrant. She lied to authorities in both countries, saying she did not intend to stay permanently but only planned to live here while she studied cinema. She married Frank O’Connor, vacationed in Mexico on their honeymoon, and reentered the country as the wife of a U.S. citizen, strengthening her resident status. She tried, and heartbreakingly failed, to obtain permission from the Soviet government to bring her family and childhood governess (tutor) to the United States. Even the more lenient immigration policy of the time (compared to Trump’s and the current policy on the northern U.S. border, at least) was a bane of Rand’s existence and, while the U.S. authorities were evidently amenable to her family immigrating, their counterparts today likely would not be considering the nature of the Soviet Union.
In a free or even a semi-free nation to the degree the U.S. was until the end of the last century, I would support minimal restrictions on immigration. Every nation should screen for outlaws, criminal suspects, easily communicable disease carriers, and hostile enemies, but everyone else would have as much right to visit or relocate to a free country as its own citizens would have to sell or rent (or even give away) property to those immigrants or to hire them. (They would not have the right to taxpayer funds, but natural born citizens are not entitled to them, either, contrary to decades of U.S. policy.) Individual rights (including property rights) are not contingent on an individual’s nation of birth or citizenship status. Rights are universal, whether they are recognized or not.
Years ago, I corresponded with a Canadian writer who became a U.S. citizen when she married one. She lived with her family near the U.S. border. She told me the most infuriating stories of intrusive, aggressive, nebnosing, hostile, rude, and intolerable behavior by U.S. border patrol guards (more or less corroborated by Steyn’s accounts). According to her accounts, they very much treated her like a suspect invader planning to squat in the country and live off the U.S. welfare state (despite zero evidence of that). During repeated visits to the country, agents would ask her questions about why she didn’t own property at her age (approximately thirty) while searching her car and luggage without permission. Once, they almost denied her entry to the country. (She lived so close to the border she would frequently receive “Welcome to the United States” text messages while at home; the irony is overwhelming.) Later, she had to undergo grueling interviews with immigration enforcement agents, even after she married and became a citizen. Her husband had to prove he could support her, and she had to give up her Canadian citizenship. She never intended to collect a dime from U.S. taxpayers. In my experience, the immigrants I’ve encountered, including the Hispanic immigrants and children of immigrants I worked with in my years in Southern California, are industrious, dedicated, even patriotic Americans—more so than the majority of natural born citizens (many of whom have no appreciation for what made America exceptional and wouldn’t hesitate to live off of welfare). Whatever their personal interests and cultural preferences, they had no desire to “return California to Mexico”. One coworker even watched American entertainment programs in English to maintain her mastery of English; she evinced rare understanding of economic freedom and the damage to poor people of coercive, statist economic policy than all but a minuscule moiety of “white native-born Americans”. There is no question that many people coming to the U.S. from the south are like her and my other coworkers who were immigrants or children of immigrants.
But reports like those shared by Steyn and many others indicate there are more exceptions than ever—that more and more immigrants are not coming here, as the inestimable Billy Beck writes, “to be Americans” (which my ancestors, co-workers, etc., were and are). And they are doing so during an administration that is either weak and inept or is deliberately creating crises to undermine the nation’s strength, including but not limited to its unprecedented spending and money printing—and their only significant rival is a feckless opposition party doing much of the same but just less consistently (which is one reason for the rise of Donald Trump). Billy likes to paraphrase Milton Friedman on this issue: “You can have free immigration or a welfare state, but you cannot have both.” (Billy, like Friedman, is in favor of free immigration without a welfare state.)
Overbearing domination of well-to-do white “Western” Canadians and passive, permissive cosseting of “non-Western” hispanic Middle and South Americans is obviously consistent with today’s multiculturalism, racist affirmative action and “diversity equity inclusion” policies, but there is surely more to the paradox of the weak southern border contrasted with the strong northern border and the risible farce of the idea of an invasion of Canadian welfare recipients. And if overbearing retaliatory force must be used everywhere else, the border (either one) should be one of the last places to be lax in enforcement during crisis times.
One of Binswanger’s better blog posts is “Why Objectivists disagree on immigration”. He has a four-fold solution to immigration. His first solution is to militarily crush Islamic fundamentalist enemies. “That, coupled with a proper foreign policy, would end the rise of Islam and worry about Muslim immigration.” His second is to require immigrants to sign away their “right” to welfare. “That would end the worry about poorer immigrants coming to get welfare.” His third solution is to make it impossible for immigrants to vote. “That would end the worry about immigrants from statist cultures voting in more statists”. His fourth solution is to replace multiculturalism with a proud philosophy of American moral superiority and exceptionalism. “Standing up for our values would end the worry about immigrants diluting (the fast-fading remnants of) American individualism.”
While Binswanger’s dismissal of any kind of immigration problem is unfortunate, his general immigration views are good. But he also articulates the problem: “But not one of these things is going to happen in the foreseeable future. So what are we to do in regard to immigration?
“Look at what this means: given that our government is not going to do the right things, what should it do? But there’s no way to answer that question. If it’s not going to do the right thing, then, by definition, whatever it does will be the wrong thing. Can we pick the best, or least bad, among the wrong things? Yes, to a certain extent, but not in a principled way.
“It is a contradiction in terms to ask: ‘On what principle should we act if we are not going to act on the principle by which we should act?’
“But philosophy deals in principles. That’s why there are continuing arguments about immigration among those who accept the Objectivist philosophy.
“Deprived of the guidance of principles, the issue then becomes one of concrete facts. Do immigrants, in the aggregate, take more out of the economy than they contribute? Some of us think ‘yes,’ others think ‘no.’ Will the immigrants assimilate and become Americans in spirit as well as in legal status, given our multiculturalist intellectual establishment? It’s a factual question, on which views differ. If immigrants are going to be given citizenship, will they vote leftist or could a better Republican strategy (and other ideological work by us) prevent this? Is there a really dangerous threat to our safety from massive Muslim immigration, or is this a very minor issue compared to what’s going to happen to us from Islamic regimes abroad, with or without that immigration?
“People can certainly differ on these factual issues, and raw, statistical (!) facts are all we have left when we can’t appeal to principles, because the principled path is not ‘politically realistic.’”
In a free country, this would be a no-brainer. In the early stages of a welfare state and weak foreign policy, this would be a manageable problem. Binswanger is certainly correct that Kantian and post-Kantian irrationalist college professors in (what’s left of) America are doing more damage than all of the worst immigrants combined, and Brook is correct that only the United States government can destroy this country. But, in the later states of this country’s deterioration, immigrant Steyn is right that there is a serious immigration problem, and that being openhanded and passive when the nation is broke and citizens are subjugated is risible and unjust.
This may be an intractable problem, and the only way out is politically impossible now: a nation in which individual rights (of citizens and others) are absolute, not a nation with reasonless searches and questions on the northern border and politically correct passivity on the southern border. Since that solution is impossible, the only possibility for the foreseeable future is more immigration problems.
And, consequently, exactly how those problems will end up is anyone’s guess.