Transcript: Toward a Libertarian Immigration Policy

Controversies in Libertarianism, Podcast 4

Date of recording: June 15, 2025, The Savvy Street Show

Host: Vinay Kolhatkar. Guests: Walter Block, Roger Bissell

 

For those who prefer to watch the video, it is here.

Editor’s Note: The Savvy Street Show’s AI-generated transcripts are edited for removal of repetitions and pause terms, and for grammar and clarity. Explanatory references are added in parentheses. Material edits are advised to the reader as edits [in square brackets].

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Good evening, everyone. We’re back again on The Savvy Street podcast series, “Controversies in Libertarianism.” Once again, we are joined by eminent economist and libertarian theorist, Walter Block. Welcome to the show, Walter.

 

Walter Block

Thanks for having me again.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

We are also joined by my co-author and co-host—today, more of a panelist—Roger Bissell, musician and philosopher. Welcome to the show, Roger.

 

Roger Bissell

Good to be here.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Today’s topic is a very complex one. It’s about trying to derive an immigration policy based on libertarian principles, [which] is by no means easy. So, I’m going to jump onto one of the models that has become popular. It used to be that the open borders [model] was popular, but now it is the Hoppean multicultural immigration critique, which, in my opinion, extends a private property argument to a national one. I think we all agree if there was a private community of Amish people living in the mountains, that they have every right to say we don’t want any non-Amish living within us, they can only visit. [Hans Herman] Hoppe extends that [argument] to a Scandinavian nation excluding non-Scandinavians [from their country]. I also think that in large multicultural countries, you can get businesspeople like Elon Musk, Lakshmi Mittal, billionaires, who can start new townships and invite whoever they like. So first, I’ll turn to Walter. What is your reaction to the Hoppean argument?

 

Walter Block

I’m not a fan of his on that. I’m a big fan of his on Austrian economics and on most libertarian issues, but not that one. The way I see it, the proper libertarian response is open borders. Why open borders? Well, I have in mind a Martian who comes down to the earth and starts homesteading in the middle of Alaska or in the middle of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, and he’s cutting down a tree. This is totally unowned land that has never been touched by human beings. Along comes ICE, the government people who are in charge of immigration, and they say to the Martian, who speaks perfect English, “What are you doing here?” And he says, “I’m homesteading.” And ICE says, “Well, you can’t come here. This is US territory.” And he says, “Yes, but what libertarian precept am I violating? I’m not violating any libertarian precept. So go away.” I think that the clear libertarian answer is open borders.

My criticism of Hoppe is that he is willing to jettison libertarian theory in order to adhere to utilitarianism or pragmatism.

Now, Hans [Hoppe] doesn’t much like this, and he and every other critic of open borders says, “But wait, this Martian is a nice guy, but there are some immigrants who are not such nice guys. They’re rapists, they’re murderers, they’re evil people. We just can’t let anyone in here.” I think that’s a very powerful argument against open borders, but the answer to that is: privatize every square inch of the country—every square inch, including the water, parks, rivers, lakes, highways, whatever it is, privatize it. Also, we have this rule that if you invite somebody in and he starts murdering and raping people, you’re responsible for him. So, we now can have our cake and eat it too. We can have the adherence to pure libertarian theory, and we can also safeguard ourselves from maniac immigrants who might ruin everything for us.

My criticism of Hans is that he is willing to jettison libertarian theory in order to adhere to utilitarianism or pragmatism, while I want to have our cake and eat it too. I don’t want to jettison libertarian theory. I want to dig deeper into libertarian theory, and I want to say that if everything were private, then we wouldn’t have that problem. So, I respectfully disagree with my ex-friend. I still admire him as an intellectual, but he and I parted on Israel, and I think he’s wrong on this issue as well.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Thank you, Walter. Roger, any thoughts?

 

Roger Bissell

Well, I’m going to take a page out of Walter’s book. He sometimes puts on the pure libertarian or anarcho-capitalist hat, and he explained quite well how it would apply in this case. You just privatize everything. I’m going to put on the classical liberal hat for a couple of minutes here. Alexis de Tocqueville made a grand tour of the United States a couple hundred years ago, and he talked about [what Justice Louis Brandeis later called] “the laboratory of democracy.” He liked what was growing and unfolding in the United States. Now, I would suggest applying it internationally as well. Think of it as “the laboratory of liberty.” My interpretation is, we’ll take an issue and—here on the state and local level or in different countries—try different approaches, which is kind of what happens now. The whole anarchy question—a lot of people seem freaked out to think about anarchy taking place in communities or states. My gosh, that would be horrible. But that’s what we have internationally. Canada has their own laws, and maybe they jive with ours, maybe they don’t. And there’s Europe and there’s Russia and China. So, you have all these countries that are not exactly obeying the same set of laws. They’re all going their own way and sometimes they conflict. Well, they seem to work it out. The human race is still here.

So, on the local level or state level, if you like low taxes and are willing to put up with restrictive abortion, you move to a red state. If you prefer easy abortion and you would put up with high taxes, you move to a blue state. Multiply that by however many issues matter to you, by ten, by a hundred. If there’s a truly libertarian community or state or country now that you would like to go to, well, you’re way ahead of the game. Otherwise, you have to make your best solution with what there is to choose from. Pick your poison and let everybody vote with their feet. Let the laboratory of liberty play out. Similarly with national policies: if a country wants to offer a really generous safety net, they probably won’t survive long-term or be very pleasant [only] short-term if they have a sustained policy, like we had under Biden, of almost unlimited open immigration. You probably wouldn’t want to live there, or maybe you would. On the other hand, countries that have too restrictive a policy would probably have higher consumer prices, business costs, all kinds of issues on the other side of the economic spectrum, so you might not want to do business there or live there, or you might. So, you pick your poison, and you hope for the best. There isn’t really a utopia until we get everything privatized, like Walter’s suggesting.

But I want to say something about Hoppe’s idea of protecting not rights, but [it’s] a kind of a protectionism for cultural values. I’ve never heard anybody apply the term “protectionism” to cultural values, but that’s what he’s trying to do. [By contrast,] I’m in favor of total separation of cultural values and state, for the same reason as [the separation of] church and state. There’s someone named George Will who, 40 years ago, wrote a book called Statecraft as Soulcraft, and he wanted to use the law to make people be moral and virtuous. Bad idea. Just protect people’s rights and punish those who violate them. That’s it! Use the immigration law to keep out criminals and terrorists and the like, and let everyone else come in.

Sure, if we have a regime where it’s entirely private property, then get yourself some good sponsor’s insurance so that if somebody you unwisely chose to take under your wing when they come into the country starts murdering and raping and pillaging, then you’ll be able to pay out the liability to people [who got harmed and] who say you shouldn’t have done that. But that would be a whole different situation. That would be utopia. That would be the libertarian ideal, but we don’t have that, so that’s why I’m putting on my classical liberal hat.

We’ve got a lot of public property, and the people through their governments, in the best systems, indirectly set the rules for who gets in and how they travel around, just like we now have speed limits and all that. It’s almost like a gigantic homeowners association. If that isn’t enough to make some people lose their dinner, I don’t know what is! It’s too collectivist for my taste, and I lived under one for twelve years, and that was twelve too many. But that’s kind of the system that a lot of the earth lives in, kind of a big homeowners’ association. The most that we can do in the present situation, other than to preach the good news about how things would be if all territory was totally privatized, is free it up around the edges, keep pushing and trying to get rid of the worst violations of people’s rights, year after year. I think we’re further from utopia than we were 200 years ago, and we’re not going to get there anytime soon unless everything falls apart. I don’t really want that to happen, but if it does, then maybe we could rebuild from scratch.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Thank you, Roger. I’m actually going to come back to Walter again, because a while ago I wrote a paper on limited open borders. It was open borders [with] the right to exclude certain people. Now we’re back in the real world. There’s no libertarian utopia. So, if Israel were to do an open borders policy today, as it stands, I imagine lots of jihadist Arabs, maybe not all Arabs, would infiltrate Israel, and Israel would be no more within a few years. If you wait for the people to do the jihad once they are inside, you’re in trouble. So, in this real world, taking Israel as an example and extending it to the US and other countries, how would you frame an immigration policy, Walter, that is libertarian?

 

Walter Block

Well, I think you make an excellent point, that if Israel had open borders and they didn’t privatize everything, they would be inundated. But I forgot to mention one thing. One problem with the open borders is murderers and rapists. But there’s another problem. I said that the Martian was a good guy. But suppose there were a trillion or a quadrillion or a quintillion Martians, and they all wanted to come in. Even the United States isn’t big enough for a quintillion Martians. So, you have to have some limits. If there were total private property, the owners would say, “Enough! We’re like sardines in a can. There’s no room for anyone else.” So, I think from the pure libertarian point of view, anarcho-capitalist point of view, you have to privatize and keep out murderers and rapists—and also keep out many good people because there is such a thing as too many good people. If you get swamped with people, that’s no good either.

But I wanted to talk a little bit about this homeowner’s association. Now, what Hans Hoppe says in his book is that we have to exclude not from the homeowner’s association but from society a whole bunch of people: Democrats, Communists…and one of the groups that he mentions is homosexuals. I keep thinking, are there any homosexuals who are libertarians, and I have a short list here: Roy Childs, Ralph Raico, Ron Hamowy, and Justin Raimondo. I think you would have a difficult time coming up with any four people who have contributed more to libertarianism than those four. I mean, it’s a horse race. Maybe you could come up with four other people who were not gay, who were great contributors; but nobody could deny that these four were magnificent contributors to libertarianism. Hans also forgets about the fact that a homeowner’s association of gay people might say, “Look, you straights, you can’t come in here.” But he doesn’t say that. He doesn’t say a homeowners’ association or club or something. He says society, and this is horrific. He’s lost his mind on this. When I first read it, I wrote to him, and I said, “Look, this is a typographical error. You didn’t mean this. You couldn’t mean this. Please change it.” This is when we were friends, and I was trying to help him, and he refused. So, I guess he really believes that somehow we should keep out the communists and gays and Democrats. He had a whole list. I forget who else there was, but the gay people just stuck out at me.

Now, I agree with Roger and you, Vinay, that we should look at it in both ways. Not just pure anarcho-capitalist, that’s easy: we just say, “open borders,” and that’s it, and privatize everything, and now we’re safe, and we have no problems. But it also behooves us to say, well, what about classical liberalism or minarchism, where we have a government? Now I think we just have to resort to democracy: we elect the congressmen, we elect the president, and they make rules. Now the question is: what kind of rules should we have?

Obviously, the rule would be: not too many people. We don’t want to be inundated, but we’re nowhere near there. If you take a plane from Boston to LA, yes, you’ll see a few lights at night, east of the Mississippi. West of the Mississippi, you don’t see any lights except maybe Denver and Las Vegas until you get to the coast. So, we’ve got plenty of room.

We have to make sure that the murderers and the rapists don’t come in en masse. Biden just let in so many people who were uninvestigated. Now, poor Donald is trying to obey the law. He’s saying, look, you’re here illegally. We don’t care that you’ve been here 20 years. You’re here illegally, and we’re supposed to be a lawful society, and the law says that you have to obey the law, and the punishment for trespassing or violating the immigration law is to get you out. So, he’s not putting them in jail. He’s just trying to get them out. And the lefties are saying, my God, you can’t do this, you’re a fascist, whatever.

Now, getting back to Israel, you’re absolutely right. I mean, if they had anything remotely like open borders, they would be inundated, and there’d be no more Jewish state. From an anarchist point of view, fine, they have no problem. Just privatize everything and keep out the people that they don’t want in there. But from a classical liberal point of view, they have to be a lawful country, and they have to elect a Knesset, and the Knesset has to decide, and they pretty much decided: any Jew [is fine]. I am Jewish. I was born in Pittsburgh. I’m an atheist, but I would be accepted there, whereas the non-Jews would not be accepted. Under special circumstances, they might take a few immigrants in there. I’m not sure. But their rule is that certainly we’re not going to have a right of return for people who left in 1948. Why did they leave in 1948? Because the five Arab armies came in there and told the Palestinians, “Get out. If you stay, we won’t be able to slaughter all the Jews as easily. We’ll have to protect you. We’ll have to distinguish you from them. So get out, and in two weeks we’ll wipe them up, and then in two weeks you come back.” It didn’t work out that way. In two weeks, the wrong side lost and they couldn’t come back. Now they want to come back, and Israel is saying, forget it.

It’s interesting that at the same time, 1947, 1948, also about a million people, Jews, came from Egypt and Lebanon and Syria and these five other countries, but they didn’t commit treason. The Arabs who left [Israel] could be accused of committing treason, cooperating with an invading army. But the Jews who left Egypt, who were afraid of being killed, didn’t commit any crimes. You think what might have happened is a little swap. You had about a million people, or just under a million people, going each way. Why not each one take the other’s property? But it didn’t work out that way. What happened was that the Israelis integrated all the Jews from the Arab countries, but the Arabs would not allow the [Arab] people [in Israel] to go to Egypt or to Lebanon. They put them in refugee camps to show the cruelty of Israel. So, you’ve got a lot of complications going here.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay. Roger, you made a fantastic statement that Hoppe is trying to enforce cultural homogeneity by using the police state or state powers, which is tremendously un-libertarian. Now we’re back into the real-world, Israel or, where you live, the United States. If you were the director of immigration under Trump, what is your recommendation to him?

 

Roger Bissell

If I’m the director of immigration under Trump for the United States, if I can get a little colloquial about it, I think of it like along the lines of: what kind of neighborhood do you live in? And do you get along with your neighbors? That would determine what kind of people you let into your house. If your neighbors hate you and want to do you harm, you don’t let them come into your house willy-nilly, because like Walter has said, libertarianism is not a suicide pact, and good neighborliness is not really a suicide pact, either. People have to deserve being treated as good neighbors. You give them initial goodwill and respect, but they have to earn it going forward. If someone in your family wants to let criminals or terrorists or hoodlums run around in your house, maybe you ought to think about your family. So, I’m not just talking about immigrant subversives and criminals like the director of Trump’s immigration service would, but also domestic ones. If somebody in your household is scheming about how to overthrow and destroy your home and your values, I mean, there are people who have bad family problems, and their spouse or their children are not exactly pulling the plow in the same direction, and you shouldn’t have to wait until they actually start breaking things. If they’ve said, I’m going to do X, and they’re not just having a bad mood, but they really are scheming and planning to smash things, you’ve got troubles, and maybe you need to stand back and reevaluate where you’re at, like zero-based budgeting.

If you’re letting people in from a certain country and their country falls apart, like Somalia or wherever—Trump got a lot of flak six, eight years ago because he was saying, we don’t want people coming in from these failed states because we don’t know who they are. We have no idea. There’s no records for them. We may be importing a whole bunch of terrorists. So, we just close the door until they get things straightened out. That would be one thing that I would do or continue to do as the director of immigration in a country that was trying to think in terms of its own self-preservation, rather than just trying to be a nice guy and let anybody come in who wanted to. Again, this is more the classical liberal, this-is-where-we-are-now kind of thing.

What if it were 200 million people, though, or 200 million Martians? I don’t know where the dividing line is between our current generous policy of one or two million people a year—I don’t remember the current figure of legally permitted immigration through the ports of entry—and 200 million. I don’t think that 200 million would ever happen, but there’s got to be some point where just the sheer mass of people would overwhelm and flood the economy. There’d be severe growing pains at the very best, and I don’t know about that. Walter commented on it, and I don’t know the resolution. I really don’t think it would happen. But when you have a welfare state that’s handing out benefits, that’s an attractive nuisance. If you have a wide-open border with no restriction, a lot of people aren’t going to come in order to be good, upstanding, productive citizens. They’re going to come in order to put out their hand and ask for the free benefits. That is a real problem. So, as Trump’s director of immigration, I would really want to lean heavily toward people who are intending to be self-supporting people that want to assimilate rather than just simply wander around taking stuff.

 

Walter Block

Donald Trump said, why can’t we get immigrants from Norway?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

I heard in fact that Trump is still well behind Barack Obama’s deportation record. It just doesn’t get mentioned in the press. But the number of deportations under Obama’s eight years is still way in excess of anybody else. Maybe Trump will overtake it, but there is [also some] population growth [to take into account].

 

Walter Block

Well, the reason for that is that the media is mainly in the hands of the Left and the Left doesn’t like Donald much. But you’re making an excellent point, that Obama de-immigrated or kicked more people out of the country than did Donald, so you’re quite right there.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Recently on this podcast, The Savvy Street Show, we interviewed Daniel Pipes from the Middle East Forum (MEF); you both know him. The MEF had a questionnaire of some 60 questions [See: Smoking Out Islamists via Extreme Vetting, it’s actually 93 questions] trying to vet people from a security standpoint. It is relevant more to Israel, but it is also extremely relevant to the West, the US, the UK, Australia, everyone. He’s trying to determine who is a jihadist or Islamist or a normal peaceful person.

He didn’t say this, but I’m going to put in that list that every would-be immigrant is actually recorded on video [as saying], “Yes, I understand, I’m going into a country where the law permits people to burn the flag, to say that Jesus was a pedophile, or that Prophet Muhammad is a piece of shit. I don’t agree with any of it, but I will not produce a knife or a gun to knife them or shoot them just because they say it.” And that has to be recorded. So, are there any vetting procedures, I’ll start with Roger on this one, that you can think of which would exclude those people—rather than they are sponsored and you wait till they have a bomb and 100 people die? How would you do that? How would you vet the wrong people off?

 

Roger Bissell

That’s a tough one, because there are some cultures and some religions that, unless the people are very moderate and sincerely moderate, and they come into your country, they’re going to first of all collect probably in communities of like-minded people, and eventually you will see, as already is happening in Europe, communities or neighborhoods where they are basically de facto enforcing Sharia law, for instance. [So, the challenge is:] how to screen people to make sure that you don’t get radical fanatics coming in who are just wearing a smiley face and trying to be calm and not sweat a lot while they’re coming in through immigration. And then as soon as they get in, they start figuring out, “What are we going to do? We will just have more babies, and finally, we have 50 to 60% of the population like they do in The Hague or Amsterdam or London. I saw figures just earlier today. A lady was talking about how Caucasian Europeans are no longer a majority in a lot of those Western European cities. I really don’t have a problem with the racial mixture or any of that. The melting pot is great.

What I have a problem with is how to figure out if somebody is bringing a toxic ideology into your country.

What I have a problem with is how to figure out if somebody is bringing a toxic ideology into your country, whatever the color of their skin or their gender or whatever. Like you said, if you raise your right hand and say, I solemnly swear to live and let live, and whatever people want to say, on their own property, is fine with me. I might not like what they say, but they have the right to say it. How long of a list do you make them swear to? How detailed a list do you make them swear to? Or do you just give them the general principle of live-and-let-live, explain it a little bit, and then kind of hope it goes well? And if it doesn’t, well, they were warned, and then haul them into court and say, “We told you, you agreed, but now you’re breaking that agreement, and so you’ll just have to go, or you’ll have to make atonement somehow.” So, I don’t have a simple solution to your question. I’d be probably a bad immigration designer from that standpoint.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Walter, are you familiar with that screening process Daniel Pipes would have? If my memory is right, he had more than 60 questions. How would you vet people? Firstly, say, coming into Israel, it’s a much smaller country, therefore much bigger error rate, if you will, a much more influential error rate. Secondly, if you were the director of immigration in the States, how would you do it?

 

Walter Block

I’d like to bring economics into this a little bit. Milton Friedman said that you can’t have open immigration if you have welfare, and this echoes what Roger was saying. I’m just putting it in different words, and that’s eminently reasonable. Another way to bring economics into this is to say, look, to become a US-landed immigrant or citizen is a very valuable thing. We’ll have a little auction. If you want to come here, a million bucks. Or if we don’t get enough people at a million, we’ll lower it to $100,000 or $500,000. People who can afford, say, $500,000 for each immigrant are not likely to have philosophies that undermine freedom and free enterprise and capitalism, so that would be a way.

Milton Friedman said that you can’t have open immigration if you have welfare.

I think Roger’s point was very well taken. We don’t want communists here. We don’t want fascists here. We don’t want people with ideas that will just undermine civilization to the degree we have it. We don’t have it perfectly, but we’ve got some sort of civilization, and we don’t want them to undermine it. One way is to make them sign some sort of agreement, and if they violate the agreement, kick them out. Another way is a bidding war. I don’t know what the bidding is, but we could say we’re open to a million immigrants this year, whatever the number is, and now let’s have a little bidding war. Who is offering the most money? You’re willing to pay a million dollars? You’re in. You’re willing to pay $750,000? You’re in. You’re willing to pay $12,000? We’ll wait and see; you might get in, but we’re going to have to bid more.

Another economic issue, something that concerns economists to a great degree, is a little bit off the libertarian issue. Will an immigrant help or hurt the GDP of the local country? This is an empirical issue. It’s very similar to the Arthur Laffer optimal tax rate. We know that if the tax rate is zero, the government will get zero. We know that if the tax rate is 100%, the government will get zero. So, the question is, where is the point where the government will get the most money? Not that that’s the optimal point, but that’s an interesting point. Where will the government maximize? And it’s somewhere around, I don’t know, 30% taxes or a flat-tax of 20%, something like that. Well, you have the same thing with the optimal population per acre, whatever it is, population per square mile. If you have no people or five people in your country, you’re not going to have enough specialization and division of labor. If you have a trillion people in the country, too many cooks spoil the broth. So, what’s the optimal population per square mile that’ll maximize GDP? I don’t know what it is, but there is some level, and I don’t think we’ve reached it, yet. I think there’s room for more people.

So, if I wear the limited government, classical liberal, minarchist hat, I would allow, I don’t know how many, but 100,000 people a year or a million people, whatever, some reasonable number, not like Biden where it was a free-for-all, but some limited number of people who would come in and pay to come in. Then the question is, who gets hurt? If you have low-skilled people coming in, well, then the low-skilled people will be competed with more, whereas if you have nerds from Norway coming in, and they’re all super-duper doctors, lawyers, whatever, then those people’s salaries will go down a little bit on the one hand, but on the other hand, we’ll have more economic efficiency. So, it’s very hard to say what the proper number is for maximizing GDP, and it’s also not necessarily our goal to maximize GDP. There are other things beside that as well, but I just thought I’d screw up the conversation by bringing in a little economics.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

That’s fine. Do you mean GDP per capita? Not GDP per se, because the more people you bring in, say, bring in 2 million Chinese, and the GDP is going to fly out the door.

 

Walter Block

No, GDP per capita. Sure.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

But the vetting point is still slightly unresolved, so let me turn to you again, Walter. The economic argument is that we will have an auction of 50,000 immigrant places per month. Each month, the final [money] figure will not be the same. One month, $13,000 wins it, another month, $35,000 wins it, or whatever, right? But within those who win, there could be some jihadists, some people who are hell-bent on, as Roger said, collecting with other people inside your country. Those are the people [about whom] you say, “I don’t care if they’re ready to pay a million dollars, I really don’t want them.” What about the vetting procedures? They’re not fail-proof, but what about having some vetting procedures to exclude such people from participating in the auction at all?

 

Walter Block

I agree with you. We don’t want jihadists who have a million dollars to come here. Some of them do, and we don’t want them. So, what do they say in boxing, a one-two punch? One, make them pay to get in here because it’s a valuable service that we’re selling them, the service of being a US citizen or a US-landed immigrant. Then secondly, employ what Roger was saying, some sort of contract where you promise to behave in various ways, and if you don’t behave in that way, you get kicked out.

Now, it’s interesting [that] what’s happening with Europe was a massive influx of Arabs and a massive exodus of Jews. Why were the Jews leaving? Because when the Arabs come, they start pogroming it up. Also, some of those people have—I forget what the title is—some sort of thing where you cannot rape a member of the Arab community (that would be bad), but you can rape non-Arabs because they are enemies or something like that. I’m not explaining this right, and I forget the word for this.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Infidels, or whatever. Yes, that happened in the UK, unfortunately.

 

Walter Block

Yes, the UK is one of the places where they’ll tell young girls that unless you obey us and provide sexual services, we’ll kill your parents, or something like that, and it’s perfectly compatible with their views. Now, do we want people like that who can afford to pay a million dollars to come into the country? Certainly not. That’s a no-brainer. So, I think a one-two punch as we get from boxing is one, make them pay to come in here because we are selling a service, and two, let’s have a little contract that you don’t do this, you don’t do that, and you obey, and you become civilized. To the extent that you’re not civilized, we’re not putting you in jail. We’re kicking you out of the country.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Let me turn to Roger now. Including Europe, are you aware of any immigration policies that meet your classical liberal needs? For example, [the president of] Poland is saying to the EU, “I don’t care what you say, we’re part of the EU, but we’re going to dissociate our immigration policy from that of the EU completely.” Their president has been on record of excluding a certain religion. Is there anywhere an example in the world that is close to ideal or correct or is justifiable?

 

Roger Bissell

Well, no, not any more than I see that there’s a political, economic system that’s close to ideal. There may be one I don’t know about, but you mentioned Poland, and I have seen some material about Poland and the questions they’ve had about refugees versus illegal immigrants and so on. They’re even getting kind of edgy about the Ukrainians. They were very generous letting them come over to get away from the war, and now they’re thinking that Zelensky’s acting arrogant and he’s ungrateful, and so they don’t know how much more of this they’re going to do. They may have even cut it off by now as far as I know. But [Ukraine is] carrying on this war with the Russians, and it’s tearing up their country and killing the young people, and [Poland] is saying no illegal immigrants, period, and [now] they have a wall.

If we had had a wall like that and a similar policy during the past four years, then our illegal immigrant situation would not have been what it is now. They said this past month that there wasn’t a single illegal immigrant that came in [and was released into the US], or it was some extremely low trickle. The people who want asylum, as I understand international law, are supposed to stay in the first safe country that they pass through rather than coming all the way to the United States. So, for instance, take Honduras or Nicaragua. If those people have a terrible situation where there’s fear of their lives, and so they say, “I have to get out of here,” and if they come up several hundred miles or a thousand miles through Mexico, and they say, “No, we’re not going to stay here, we want to go to the US,” why do you suppose they want to come here? What is facilitating them? What’s drawing them to come here? Is it because we’re so close and convenient? No, they’re coming a long way to get here, and international law says we really don’t have to take them, because they have Mexico. Or like the people who make it from Africa or Asia or someplace, and they make it to Canada, and they say, “Well, I just think I’ll just keep going and come down into the US [for my asylum].”

I don’t think that we’ve been looking after our own interests for the past four years, and Canada and Mexico have been bad neighbors.

I don’t think that we’ve been looking after our own interests for the past four years, and Canada and Mexico have been bad neighbors. I like that neighbor concept, and they haven’t been helping out. [Yes,] it’s primarily our responsibility, and now that we’ve got a different guy in the White House, but now we’ve got all the costs of the ICE deportation efforts, and there’s a lot of conflict out there in the sanctuary cities—the leftists are throwing paving stones at the vehicles and all this kind of stuff. We are headed in the right direction, but it is a real mess, and it’s not better yet. It’s a work in progress, and it’s very messy. But that’s what happens when you let things slide catastrophically off in the wrong direction, and you have to turn the ship around, and it’s just a big ship, and it doesn’t happen overnight.

 

Walter Block

I wanted to mention a few things before we get to the next question. One is, there are certain no-go areas in Europe where the police are afraid to go, and this is not civilization. Not that the police are perfect. They uphold victimless crime laws. So, I’m not a big fan of them. But to have the police in a no-go area is not kosher.

The point I wanted to make is, during the Nazi era in the late 30s and the early 40s, the Jews were trying to get out. One of the places they tried to get into was Canada, and there was a prime minister or a minister of Canada who was asked, how many Jews will you allow in the country? And the answer was, “None is too many.” A very famous quote, “none is too many.” Very poetic and very nasty. You talk about the US being an empty country. There’s nobody in Canada. Canada really is sort of like Chile on its side. 95% of the Canadians live within 100 miles of the US. North of that, there’s nobody there. And for him to say that Jews who were talking about escaping, being killed, that certainly applies to the Nazis and the Jews.

Another point I wanted to make about Hans Hoppe again. You see, when Hans Hoppe said that we should kick out the Martian because he is incompatible with our laws, he was not acting as a classical liberal. He was not acting as a minarchist. He was still thinking that he was an anarchist. In other words, he wasn’t saying, “Look, now I’m wearing my anarchist hat, let him stay. Now I’m wearing my classical liberal hat, [he’s] gotta go.” No, he was trying to act as an anarchist. My opposition to him is, I said, look, this area in either Alaska or in the middle of the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming or Colorado has never been touched by human beings. Hans’s answer was, “The government owns it.” But to say that the government owns anything is to not speak as an anarchist. In other words, he’s making a mistake. He’s speaking as an anarchist, and he’s saying something incompatible with anarchism. Now, if he’s speaking as a limited-government libertarian, okay, I see the point, but not as an anarchist. So, think about no-go areas and the Nazis and the Jews in Canada. This is a very important issue. and I’m glad you guys brought this up. The immigration issue touches a lot more than just limited immigration.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Do you, Walter, have any illustration about a country that has done it right in the last five years, whether it be Poland or the UK or Israel, anyone that is like a model citizen of immigration?

 

Walter Block

I think as a limited-government libertarian, we can say that immigration law is just.

I think the Vatican—no illegal immigrants to the Vatican—Monaco, some of these small countries in Europe, Switzerland, Israel. I think the key is, we don’t want any illegal immigrants because we don’t want anything illegal, given that the law is just. Look, if you’re going to engage in pornography or prostitution or something like that, and they put you in jail, that’s not a just law. But if it’s a just law, and I think as a limited-government libertarian, we can say that immigration law is just, we don’t want murderers and rapists. We don’t want zillions of people. So, it is a just law, and if you’re violating the law… here again I come to Donald. The New York Times and The Atlantic and NBC and CBS, all these leftist media are saying he’s a new Hitler, he’s a new fascist because he’s kicking people out. But he’s kicking people out who violated the law. And they say, we should be a community of law-abiding people. Well, he is law abiding. It’s they who are not law abiding, by trying to protect people [who have broken the just immigration law].

And then you get this thing about, if you’re born here, you can become a citizen. There was only one exception or two exceptions, like if you were a minister from another country and your wife gave birth here, then you’re not subject to the law. But what Donald is trying to say, and this is a constitutional issue, if you’re an illegal immigrant and you have a baby here—is that baby automatically a citizen? He’s saying no, whereas the Left is going apoplectic, because we’ve always had that. Now, I’m not constitutional scholar enough to know what the interstices of the Constitution say. But in terms of libertarianism, which I know a little bit better than the Constitution, it’s up to what the law is. And if Donald has a law, the Congress passes a law that, yes, if you’re born here by an illegal immigrant, you’re a citizen? Fine. Although I think that I would not, if I were the minister, and I wanted to uphold the wellbeing of the country, I would not allow that.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Yes, I think they’re called “Dreamers,” (see:  https://www.migrationpolicy.org/topics/dream-actdeferred-action and https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2012/06/15/remarks-president-immigration) where specifically illegals came in. Sometimes maybe the mother was already two months pregnant, not showing at the airport, [they] came in, had the baby here, then the baby becomes a citizen. [Later,] he or she sponsors their parents. So, that was a sort of a backdoor entry for many people.

OK, last question of the day. We have declining birth rates throughout the West and in a lot of Asian countries as well. In a brief answer, would that factor into your immigration policy, Roger, if you were director of immigration?

 

Roger Bissell

It doesn’t seem to me that having no or low immigration is nearly the problem for filling these needed jobs.

Well, from recent experience, it doesn’t seem to me that having no or low immigration is nearly the problem for filling these needed jobs, as some of the other things that have recently been government policy, like the anti-police campaigns that the blue city and state officials were supporting and Black Lives Matter and Antifa supported; the DEI policies; the COVID policies and public health problems; even, I would say, bad dietary recommendations from the health agencies—all kinds of things which make people either shy away from working for the first responders, the police, the firefighters, the armed forces and so on. If you don’t feel that the public officials who are directing you have your back or respect you or are supporting you, if you feel that you’re being shoveled in with a whole bunch of coworkers who are incompetent but they’re desirable to be in there because they tick a box in a questionnaire, and you feel that what you’re doing is not respectable and it’s being degraded, you’re less likely to apply for that job and you look for something else. But I think that that’s turned around. Even under low or no immigration, I don’t think we’re looking at a problem in those areas.

Now, maybe in farm labor, maybe in the entertainment industries, that would be a concern. I don’t know whether we need to fill those positions with immigrants, but I think a migrant worker program, temporary seasonal permits to work here or there [on farms] as needed, could also apply to the hospitality and entertainment work, things that are seasonal. I like to think more in terms of principles and broad policies, but I think that we’re gradually trending more toward an information economy, anyway. I don’t know how many jobs are going to be left after artificial intelligence takes over. Maybe we’ll all sit around and shine the chrome on the artificial intelligence machines.

But I would say one thing: I’m totally opposed to child trafficking to fill those needs, and I think that ICE going in and getting those kids out of there…I don’t know, maybe they were 16 or 18 years old, in which case calling them “little children” is kind of a misnomer. But a lot of times back in the old days when they used to talk about “exploitation” by capitalists, it was kids that were eight or ten years old maybe, and they aren’t old enough. They don’t have free will in the sense that we attribute to making adult decisions about your career and your marriage and having children and driving and being in the armed forces. I regard that as kidnapping and slave labor. I remember Murray Rothbard wrote an article called “Kid Lib” or something like that, and he was talking about the rights of children and when should they be emancipated and be able to do things adults do. I don’t have a good, clear, firm answer on that, but I think having little grade school kids being farmed out to do that sort of stuff…a lot of them probably aren’t even with their parents. I don’t know where they’re staying or anything. That’s the kind of thing I’m glad that ICE is moving in on and trying to clean it up.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay, Walter, you’ve got the closing comment. Would you let a declining birth rate affect your immigration policy?

 

Walter Block

Well, they say that 2.1 or 2.2 children per woman, something like that, will keep the population flat, because of deaths and illnesses and infant mortality, etc. My understanding is that Japan is 1.3 or something like that—a very serious precipitous decline. So, if I were the immigration minister of Japan, and I was selling permits to come to Japan, I might lower the requirement because I want to get a few more in. On the other hand, if a country has 2.5 or 3.1 [children per woman], then I would raise the price. So again, economics raises its ugly head.

Speaking of economics, I don’t think that we’ll ever have any involuntary unemployment as long as we don’t have minimum wage laws or anything like that. And I wanted to mention another thing about population in Israel. What’s happening in Israel is that the Hasidic, the Haredi, the people that wear yarmulkes and have peyas, are very religious…their birth rate is phenomenal. A friend of mine just passed away; he had 10 children, and his wife now has 93 grandchildren. What’s happening in Israel is that the Hasids are having a much higher [birth rate] percentage. They used to have something like 4% of the population in 1948, and I just did a paper on this and now they have something like 15 or 16% of the population. A problem is that they don’t want to go into the military, and they’re an increasing proportion of the society. So, this is a problem. I was putting words in Netanyahu’s mouth, and I was saying he should tell the Hasids, look, you don’t want to be in the military? Fine. We’re libertarians. We don’t believe in the draft, anyway. However, if a criminal comes and robs you, we’re not going to protect you; and if Hamas attacks you and nobody else, we won’t protect you. This might be a way of dealing with this different proportion of the population. So again, you’re letting loose another entire issue of population size, which is not just related to immigration.

But as I said, the immigration thing is a very important issue because it leads to so many other things. The issue about when is a child a child? This is a classical continuum problem. There is no answer to it. What is the statutory rape age? What’s the proper statute? And we know we need a statutory rape age, because if you go to bed with a five-year-old girl, I don’t care if she agrees, you’re a statutory rapist because we don’t think five-year-old girls have any sense, enough upstairs, to know what they’re doing. On the other hand, if you go to be with a 25-year-old woman, whatever you are, you’re not a statutory rapist. So, where’s the right age? Is it 17, 18, 16? The problem is, you might get a 16-year-old girl who’s more mature than a 17-year-old girl.

So, this is an intractable problem. It’s similar to: I’m now going to punch you guys. Do you have a right to shoot back at me? And how close does my fist have to be to your nose before you can? There’s no right answer. You have to have some sort of sensible jury that would decide that. The context is very important. Right now, see, I’m not going to punch you. I mean, we’re friends. It’s silly. Or in a movie or a play where somebody punches somebody. So, you get continuum problems, and not only can’t libertarianism solve them, nobody can solve them. It has to be arbitrary. You have to say, “OK, it’s 18. Why 18? Don’t ask. Because we think 18 is reasonable.” Or you can’t do it with this because the context is so important, and then you can always say, “There’s a 17-year-old girl who’s more mature than the 19-year-old girl, so it shouldn’t be 18.” No, there is no real answer as to when a child is a child and when not. It’s a continuum problem.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Thank you. That was excellent from both of you. We got a tremendous amount of insight. We are now ready, as they say, to draft an immigration policy for Israel, for the United States, for Iran, and for many other countries that is going to be nearly perfect. And thank you to the listeners and viewers for tuning in. Keep tuning into The Savvy Street Show in order to become savvy. Thank you and good night and good luck.