With his nationwide immigration crackdown, President Trump is unwittingly providing a tremendous service to the libertarian movement. He is demonstrating perfectly a point that I have been making for the past 35 years here at The Future of Freedom Foundation: that America’s system of immigration controls is incompatible with libertarianism.
For all too long, libertarians who support immigration controls have thought about their immigration-control system in terms of a “Do Not Enter” sign. The idea was that posting a series of “Do Not Enter” signs at the border did not violate the libertarian non-aggression principle because such signs did not involve the initiation of force against innocent, law-abiding people.
But America’s decades-old series of immigration controls has never only been about posting “Do Not Enter” signs along the border. Instead, the immigration-control system has always been about immigration enforcement measures, all of which necessarily involve the initiation of force against innocent, law-abiding people.
For 35 years, I have been pointing out how people who live in the borderlands along the U.S.-Mexico border live in a police state. I lived in those borderlands for more than 30 years. I saw that police state up close.
I lived on a farm on the Rio Grande. The Border Patrol would trespass onto our land whenever it wanted and conduct searches for illegal immigrants, without search warrants. It is still the same today.
People who travel on the highway are stopped at highway checkpoints manned by immigration officials who search their vehicles, again without search warrants.
Immigration officials board Greyhound buses and demand to see people’s papers. If they don’t have their papers, they are forcibly removed from the bus and returned to Laredo for investigation.
Roving Border Patrol checkpoints stop vehicles and search them without probable cause or even reasonable suspicion that they have committed a crime.
The feds charge, prosecute, convict, and punish Americans for simply hiring or caring for illegal immigrants.
People have their private lands stolen through eminent domain in order to construct a Berlin Wall along the border.
Drones and surveillance cameras mounted on giant towers monitor people’s daily activities.
Immigration agents, along with DEA agents, Homeland Security, FBI, and other federal officials are everywhere in Laredo. Like I say, people who live in the borderlands live in a police state, especially when one considers the thousands of military troops that now populate the borderlands.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, this border police state has never worked to achieve its goal of sealing the border, which is why Trump is expanding the border police state nationwide. But what has worked is the ongoing destruction of American liberty and privacy over the past several decades, especially for people living along the border.
What’s important to keep in mind is that as Trump “succeeds” in sealing the border with his harsh enforcement measures, all of these police-state measures must now become a permanent feature of American life. In other words, America’s immigration police state cannot ever be lifted. Otherwise, immigrants will once again start returning illegally to the United States. That’s assuming, of course, that people will still want to come to a country in which liberty and privacy have been permanently destroyed.
Because the police state along the border has never worked, Trump has taken the immigration police state nationwide with measures that clearly constitute grave attacks on such fundamental rights as due process of law, freedom of speech, and freedom of association. The temptation is to think that these attacks apply only to foreigners, who are a popular scapegoat, but as many commentators are correctly pointing out, these attacks on liberty also apply to American citizens.
I will guarantee you that a society in which government officials can whisk away any person, citizen or foreigner, in the dead of night and deposit him into a torture chamber in El Salvador, where he is disappeared forever, is most definitely not a free society. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, such power is also inconsistent with libertarian principles.
To their credit, some libertarian advocates of immigration controls have been fiercely opposing Trump’s violations of civil liberties in the name of enforcing America’s system of immigration controls. Other libertarian advocates of immigration controls, however, have remained silent or even supportive of Trump. That’s because they want so desperately to win the decades-old war on illegal immigration that they are willing to support whatever Trump deems is necessary to do so, even if it involves the destruction of liberty and privacy nationwide.
President Trump has now placed every libertarian advocate of immigration controls in a very interesting quandary, one that necessarily involves some serious soul-searching. In the immigration debate within the libertarian movement, it’s now clearly a question of freedom versus immigration controls. Which will it be?
If one chooses freedom, one necessarily must abandon support for immigration controls. That’s because immigration enforcement measures necessarily violate the principles of freedom.
If one instead chooses immigration controls, one necessarily abandons his commitment to achieving a free society. That’s because the enforcement measures that come with immigration controls destroy freedom. Supporting immigration controls while still ostensibly striving to achieve a free society is the same as supporting the war on drugs while ostensibly striving to achieve a free society.
There is one final point about immigration that should be made insofar as libertarians are concerned. It is another point that libertarian proponents of immigration controls have long ignored. America’s immigration-control system is based on the core socialist principle of central planning, which, as Ludwig von Mises correctly pointed out, produces “planned chaos.” What better term to describe the decades-old, ongoing, never-ending, perpetual immigration chaos along the border? Given that socialism is the antithesis of economic freedom, how can any libertarian reconcile his support for libertarianism with his support of America’s socialist system of immigration controls — and the police-state measures that come with it?
