Me: “So where does the government get the right to demand that I pay them protection money to keep their goons off of my family’s doorstep?”

Frank: “The same place the government (ostensibly) gets all of its powers, from the governed.”

Do you, as an individual citizen, have the rightful authority to take a shotgun and point it at non-citizens and demand that they pay you protection money in order to keep you from kidnapping them and leaving them back in Mexico?

No?

Then how did you manage to delegate that authority to the government?

Frank: “My point was that there are more parties concerned than just immigrant and employer.”

Indeed. The immigrant needs a place to stay. But that’s provided by his family, in the hypothetical. (Or the immigrant might make a deal with a willing hotel owner, or landlord, or buy a plot, or…). The immigrant needs roads to drive on. But in the present system those roads are paid for primarily by gasoline taxes which the immigrant pays as much as you do. And so on. So what? Where does your right to demand protection money to keep the government from invading the property of the immigrant’s family and kidnapping him and sending him back home against his will come in?

“The concept of sovereignty seems to have escaped you”

As a libertarian, the only form of sovereignty I recognize is individual sovereignty, which can be delegated but can never be alienated or destroyed. You do know that that (classical liberal, Lockean, Jeffersonian) notion of individual rights and legal authority is where phrases like “consent of the governed” comes from, don’t you?

Frank argues: “The point is that the overwhelming majority wants (restrictionist) immigration reform, but their representatives still won’t enact it.”

Who cares what the overwhelming majority wants? The question was whether or not “open borders” constitutes a form of social engineering. The answer is that it doesn’t. Even if the overwhelming majority of people wants force to be used against immigrants regardless of whether or not those immigrants have violated anyone’s rights, failing to do so is not using government force against anyone.

(Incidentally, those who are familiar with Hans Hermann-Hoppe’s work may find it amusing to watch as both paleolibertarian arguments and arguments from majoritarian democracy are thrown out in order to attack the position.)

And: “The ranchers who have finally reached their limits and started trying to police their own properties against illegal aliens certainly know a bit about the government force brought to bear in favor of open borders.”

The issue here isn’t open borders, it’s proportionality and the right to self-defense. If you think ranchers are acting appropriately to curtail trespassing and being punished by the government for it, that hasn’t got anything in particular to do with immigration.

Frank goes on: “The fact that you can even frame a question like that with a (presumably) straight face argues against any reasonable person wasting his time formulating an answer.”

My comment was in response to a blogger who has repeatedly identified himself as a libertarian, on a blog read by many people who express libertarian sentiments. Libertarians typically consider private property rights important and government expropriation of wealth problematic at best. They also typically aren’t swayed by majoritarian arguments for using violence to achieve some set of cultural goals. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to pose the question, given what Razib and others have stated in the past in this space. If you think no reasonable person could possibly consider libertarian objections to immigration controls, then what do you think about people who claim to take libertarian claims seriously in general?

“What gives the Piggly Wiggly the right to invite a Mexican immigrant to America, at the American taxpayer’s expense?”

Piggly-Wiggly didn’t invite me in the hypothetical. My family invited me to stay with them, at their expense, or mine if I could pay them back for it.

Piggly-Wiggly offered me a job. I work there in order to pay back my family for graciously putting me up.

So where does the government get the right to demand that I pay them protection money to keep their goons off of my family’s doorstep?

“Yes. At some point, these medievals need to brought into the 21st century, or at least the 20th.”

Medieval Islam was far advanced beyond both medieval and early modern Europe in wealth, individual freedom, and religious tolerance. “Medievalism” should be a term of praise, not abuse, with regard to Muslim societies; the problem with folks like the Taliban and the Wahabis of Saudi Arabia is that they hearken back to a past that (fortunately for the Muslims of the 14th century) never existed.

It also seems a bit odd to me to portray either the Saudi monarchy or politicized Islam — both of them fabrications of the 20th century and its worldwide wars — as needing to be brought into the 20th century. Better that we urged them to get out of it as quickly as possible.

Razib offers: “i would also like to note that i am open to the idea of people paying a non-trivial fee to come to the united states.”

If I am from Guadalajara and the local Piggly-Wiggly offers me a job in stocking, and my family in the United States invites me to come live with them and the local Piggly-Wiggly offers me a job in stocking, what gives the government the right to demand a lump-sum tax from me in order to “let” me stay where I have been willingly invited? What gives them the right to point a gun at me and force me to go back home if I’m not interested in paying their protection money?

Rikurzhen is confused about current immigration policy: “I would suggest that open borders, which closely approximates the current situation” (empahsis added). When every single person in the United States is legally required to prove citizenship in order to get a job, and several billion dollars are being spent every year on La Migra and the Border Patrol, and people are dying of exposure in the Arizona desert in order to evade the tender ministrations of border guards, you do not have a situation which “closely approximates” open borders.

Frank is confused about what “government force” means: “Except…open borders require government force (judicial activism, non-representative government, etc.,) to exist.”

Force is a simple notion and it has little to do with constitutional procedure. “Government force” happens when a law makes it so that someone from the government comes up to you with a gun or a club or a pair of cuffs, tells you to do something whether you want to do it or not, and threatens you with physical harm if you don’t comply.

It hasn’t got anything to do with checks and balances or how judges ought to read the law or how responsive legislators ought to the majority’s opinion on matters of policy. Those are all procedural issues worth talking about, but they are all about the best way to decide how force is used. They are not uses of force in themselves.

tc is confused about paleolibertarian claims: “Not quite. As some paleo-libertarians have pointed out, if every bit of land were private property and it was up to property owners to determine who can immigrate in, we’d probably see a lot less immigration. No doubt some people in Arizona would be willing to put up a privately funded fence along the border if they were allowed to.”

The Hans-Hermann Hoppe line on immigration is a lot of claptrap, but it’s neither here nor there. “Open borders” just means that no government force is used at all in a particular area (movement of people across borders and short-term or long-term settlement of immigrants). HHH doesn’t deny this: his case is based on the claim that forceful restrictions on property obtained through government force (such as tax-funded roads, seized “public” land, etc.) isn’t an objectionable use of government force–since it only approximates what he imagines a private owner of the land would do–not that open borders is government force somehow.

“Open borders” just means a free market in human movement. Nothing more and nothing less.

Rikurzhen objects: “social engineering? any immigration policy could be called social engineering, even open borders.”

Only if you twist the word “social engineering” beyond any meaning whatsoever. “Social engineering” is usually meant to suggest the use of government intervention (that is, legally authorized force) to make the society in question achieve some set of desiderata they wouldn’t otherwise achieve. Since open borders means no use of government intervention whatsoever in the field of immigration, they do not qualify as social engineering any more than a free market in alcohol or tennis shoes does.

If you insist on adding situations where no government force is being applied to make society turn out in some way or another, then open borders will be included, but so will any human action or decision whatsoever. But that would just be to make “social engineering” useless as a term of analysis. A term which encompasses everything, means nothing.

Think what you will about the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party, but Sailer’s claim that “Instead, it has morphed into an alliance between the elite and the underclass” is statistical hogwash based on nothing more than an ecological fallacy. Exit polls consistently show that the higher income you make, the more likely you were to vote for Bush, and the less income you make, the more likely you were to vote for Kerry. This is true in California, and it’s true in Alabama. In fact, the only state I’ve seen where it turns out not to be true (the highest income level turns out to be as likely to vote for Kerry as the lowest, which is not very likely, but more than those in the middle) is “egalitarian” Utah.

The only places where Sailer has data that doesn’t commit the ecological fallacy is in the relationship between education and likelihood to vote Democratic. It’s true that a little education inclineth a man toward Republicans, but depth in education bringeth men’s minds about to Democrats. But advanced educational degrees are rarely the royal road towards great wealth in this country. In most states, there is usually a bump of a few percentage points in likelihood to vote for Kerry at either $75-$100,000 a year or $100-$150,000 a year; I assume that this bump indicates whatever the usual salary for advanced degree holders in that state is. But the bump always gives way more or less immediately, and the Bush-voting trend resumes among the clearly rich. At most what the data supports is a claim that the Democratic Party is an alliance between the underclass and the somewhat comfortable. But given that these bumps wash out, at the national level, to a whopping 2% bump for Kerry in the $75-$100,000 a year vote, it would be more accurate to just say that poor people elect Democrats and rich people elect Republicans.

For more data, see: http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html

“Bush’s first-term policies benefited the rich and yet he remains most popular in the poorest states”

Let’s be careful not to jump to conclusions based on the ecological fallacy. According to exit polls, Bush lost the South among voters making $50,000 / year and less; if only voters making $50,000 / year and less had voted, Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Arkansas, and Virginia would all be blue states, and South Carolina and Louisiana would have been too close to call.

Certainly there are lots of reasons to worry about the degree to which white working-class men in the South participate in the rise and maintenance of hard Right politics. But we should be worrying much more about the ongoing political and cultural stranglehold of the white economic elite in Southern states; they are far more reliably and far more lopsidedly skewed to the Right, and they are the ones who are usually responsible for this mess.

james mentioned: “Oh yeah, the US leaving Somolia really did wonders for those peasants who stayed (and probably were praying for an end to warlord rule).”

Actually, it did; the best thing that the U.S. ever did for Somalia was to get the hell out and leave them alone.

There are many, many problems in Somalia; the country is poor and life is hard. But the civil war has long since evaporated, things are much better than they were in the mid-1990s, and in fact Somalia is doing considerably better by many measures (such as availability of food or percentage of the population living in extreme poverty) than neighboring countries. Better, in fact, than many richer African countries.

Once the prospects of looting foreign aid dried up, the warlords gave up and the civil war petered out. Somalia has been without any effective central government for 13 years, and things seem to be going well precisely because they haven’t got any government. This should not, actually, be very surprising, if you keep in mind the sort of governments that most countries in the area have.

For more, see Andrew Cockburn’s feature on Somalia in the National Geographic @ http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0207/feature3/ and the recent report “Anarchy and Invention: How does Somalia’s private sector cope without government?” from the World Bank @ http://rru.worldbank.org/Documents/280-nenova-harford.pdf

Hope this helps.