More bad days for freedom in the UK

Here is a short list of the latest blows against freedom in the UK:

1) No, we don't want hard-working people. The British Prime Minister David Cameron admits that Eastern Europeans work harder and more diligently than the British - which is why he wants to stop them from coming to Britain and stop British employers from employing them! Never mind that this harms the economy, punishes hard-working people, and rewards lazy incompetents solely because they have the "right" nationality.

2) More ISP's blocked. ISP's are forced by the court to block UK access to 21 more websites. The excessive copyright rules are used to justify this new assault on individual liberties.

3) Press freedom under threat. David Cameron wants to destroy UK press freedom in order to cover up the nefarious dealings of the UK and US governments. It would be "very difficult" not to take action against newspapers that continue to publish "damaging" security leaks, David Cameron has said. This comes after the British secret service physically forced The Guardian newspaper to destroy a hard disk with "confidential" information on it. Luckily, The Guardian had the information saved elsewhere, too.

4) More petty and intrusive EU regulation. The EU now wants to regulate the flushing of lavatories in all EU countries. No, I am not joking.

5) Landlords forced to report "illegal" immigrants. UK landlords such as myself will, from 2014, be forced to check the immigration status of their tenants. In other words, I will now be forced to do the governments dirty work for them and report innocent people who happen to have the "wrong" passport.

6) Government regulation of every detail within the four walls of your home. Although this is not a recent law, I have been shocked to find out over the past week that I am not allowed to install the windows that I see fit in MY OWN house - which, incidentally, is freehold property. There are a slew of petty rules about airing slots, insulation quality, and glass breakability that apply. Until a few years ago I would even had had to apply to the Council for permission to install new windows! But it seems that the British public has been brainwashed by the insane UK planning laws and nowadays consider it a natural right to meddle with other people's property. And if the public doesn't do it themselves by objecting to requests for planning permission, they are more than happy to let the government and local councils do the meddling for them. So much for the good old English proverb "My home is my castle"!

All these calamities in less than a week. Is the destruction of personal liberty gathering pace? It certainly seems like it these days.

The Morality Of Open Borders And Unrestricted Immigration

Thanks to unrestricted immigration, the United States of America went from being an insignificant colonial backwater in the 18^th century to being the largest world economy in the early 20^th century. Other countries such as Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Argentina, Chile, and Canada were places where economic success was, in part, due to large scale immigration attracted by a relatively high degree of freedom. Conversely, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in the late 15^th century did the Spanish economy no favours at all. However, these are empirical, economic arguments in favour of open borders and free immigration. Many sound economic arguments have been made in favour of open borders, and many dubious economic arguments have been made against them. What this short article specifically seeks to examine are a few of the most important moral, non-economic arguments for and against open borders.

This article argues that only open borders and free immigration is consistent with libertarian philosophy and respect for the individual. However, I hope that even the non-libertarian reader will find reason to reconsider his or her stance on immigration after having read it.

To start with the basic premises, consider the following two assertions:

A) No person should be punished if that person has done nothing wrong, and

B) People should be free to voluntarily interact with whomever they please.

Anyone who can subscribe to these two principles must logically agree that migration across national borders must be free and unrestricted. I will seek to explain why this is so in the following.

Should a person be stopped by the state from crossing a national border, principles A) and B) will immediately be violated in the following ways:

Re. A): With immigration restrictions, people who have broken no law in the country they wish to enter are punished by being stopped at the border. Whatever their purpose of crossing the border – a business trip, a holiday, long-term settlement, or escape from persecution – being stopped at the border means that their quest to live a better and more fulfilling life is curtailed to a lesser or greater extent. The vast majority of prospective immigrants are decent individuals who have committed no crime – neither technically nor morally - and they are not the tide of subhuman, criminal scum that opponents of open borders make them out to be. Most of them have not violated any rights of others prior to entering the country of their destination and having a law forbidding their entry into the country is therefore unjust. Not only because most of them are law-abiding but also because of that.

Re. B): The rights of the people in the destination country who would like to employ, socialise with, or do business with the prospective immigrant are also violated. Employers are denied the best candidates for the positions they wish to fill. Friends or family within the country who wish to see the immigrant in question are prevented from doing so. Taxi drivers, hotel owners, and shopkeepers, etc, who would like to sell their products and services to the immigrant, are equally prevented from doing so.

So if one does not agree with the notion that national borders should be open (or, even better, abolished), it must follow that one accepts that the rights of innocent individuals wishing to enter a country are violated, and accepts that the rights of residents wishing to see the immigrants or do business with or employ them are also violated.

Now, are there any moral objections to free immigration that are so substantial that they justify the violation of the rights of the above individuals on both sides of the border? There are a few, but as I will try to show in the following these are not sufficient or even relevant seen from a libertarian point of view.

One objection that is particularly relevant in the United States where there are many illegal immigrants is that the illegal immigrants are criminals simply by virtue of having broken the immigration law. Technically, this is correct. However, obeying unjust law (such as the one forbidding entry into a country) is not a virtue in itself. Many laws throughout the ages have been unjust and have deserved to be broken. The tax law that resulted in the Boston Tea Party, and the US alcohol prohibition of 1920-33 come to mind. Therefore, in moral terms illegal immigrants are not criminals and should not be treated as such. On the contrary, in terms of morality the lawmakers who create the laws that violate the rights of the prospective immigrants are the real criminals.

The one objection to immigration that I most often hear in Europe is that the immigrants will be a drain on public funds (i.e. government or state funds) and that their presence therefore constitutes a violation of the rights of the taxpayers of the country in question. At first glance this is a valid objection. But where does the fault lie? Assuming that the immigrant will indeed be a net drain on the public funds – which is by no means certain – is the immigrant to blame for legally benefitting from the system of forced redistribution (i.e. taxation and government spending) that has been designed by the existing inhabitants? Or does the fault lie with the system itself and the people who created it and who continue to support it?

Although all the voters of the country should not be held collectively responsible for the actions of the political majority that created and continue to maintain a system of forced redistribution, the chances that any one inhabitant carries some responsibility for the existence of the system are definitely higher than the chances that the prospective immigrant has any responsibility for the existence of the system, since the latter chances are zero (as prospective immigrants have had no right to vote in the country that they have yet to enter). Therefore, it would seem less unfair (less unfair, although still not fair) to punish the inhabitants for the existence of the system of forced redistribution than it would be to punish prospective immigrants who carry no responsibility whatsoever for the creation of that system. Not punishing anyone unjustly is, unfortunately, not an option as long as a system of forced redistribution such as a welfare state is in place. But at least one should not punish those who one can be certain bear no responsibility for the creation and continued existence of the system.

The moral absurdity of banning someone from immigrating just because they may one day become a drain on the public finances can be illustrated by a few parallels: Can it be morally justified to make pre-emptive arrests of people who may sometime in the future try to evade taxes? Or to ban women from giving birth because the child may one day grow up to become a net recipient of public funds? As this shows, there is clearly no sane moral argument for stopping immigrants at the border solely on the grounds that they may at some time in the future become a financial liability to the taxpayer.

So why do we see ideological inconsistency among some people who call themselves libertarian but who show by their stance on the issue of immigration that they are not? The only obvious explanation – an explanation, not an excuse – is that many people harbour an instinctive and all-too-human aversion against foreigners and people who are different. What distinguishes academics in the social sciences and moral philosophers from ordinary people in this regard is merely that the former two try to justify their gut-feelings by using more complex and supposedly “objective” reasoning. But sorry xenophobes who have no scruples in legitimising national borders by empowering the state to keep foreigners away from them, can never and should never be described as libertarians.

Thanks are due to Prof. Ken Schoolland, Prof. Walter E. Block, Prof. David D. Friedmann, and Mr. Anthony Gregory for their crucial contributions to the libertarian debate on immigration. Thanks are definitely NOT due to Prof. Hans-Hermann Hoppe for almost single-handedly having led a large number of budding libertarians to mistakenly believe that it is possible to be against open borders and be libertarians at the same time.