Do Immigrant Cultures Threaten Liberty?

A guest post by Vincent Cook

When I was an undergraduate, I met Vincent Cook at the UC Berkeley Objectivism club. He recently sent me this short essay, reprinted with his permission. Enjoy!

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Pro-migration libertarian Bryan Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University, recently wrote a book (summarized in an article appearing in The New Yorker) claiming that if all restrictions on migration were lifted world-wide, Gross World Product would soar by 50% to 150%. According to Caplan, not doing so is like leaving “trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk.”

The Mises Institute’s Ryan McMaken challenged Caplan’s defense of “open borders” with a quote from Ralph Raico’s criticism of another advocate of free migration, namely Ludwig von Mises. Raico, responding to Mises’s hypothetical example where Australia is inundated by Asian immigrants, wrote:

Since Mises has no theory of what forces tend to create and maintain a liberal society — aside from incessant rational economic argumentation — he has no reason to suppose that an Australia governed at a certain point according to liberal principles would continue to be so governed. But if Australia should, by some chance, slip back into interventionism, then the “national minority [now Australians of European descent] must expect the worst” from the majority of Japanese, Malayans, etc.

Free immigration would appear to be in a different category from other policy decisions, in that its consequences permanently and radically alter the very composition of the democratic political body that makes those decisions. In fact, the liberal order, where and to the degree that it exists, is the product of a highly complex cultural development. One wonders, for instance, what would become of the liberal society of Switzerland under a regime of “open borders.”

Mises’s embrace of the economic benefits offered by free migration (albeit without the quasi-empirical statistical dross that clutters up Caplan’s version of the argument) is offset according to Raico by the political threat that migrants supposedly pose due to the illiberal cultures of their countries of origin. While Mises and Caplan might support targeted restrictions aiming at specifically excluding rights-violators or those engaged in on-going rights-violations, Raico articulated a broader and much more dubious exclusionary principle that tars entire nations as being irrefragable enemies of liberty, and one that chides Mises as offering nothing more than “incessant rational economic argumentation” for the defense of liberty against this alleged foreign peril.

Mises in fact anticipated the cultural argument and offered a rejoinder in the chapter discussing the freedom of movement in his book Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition, first bringing up the example of America:

In the absence of any migration barriers whatsoever, vast hordes of immigrants from the comparatively overpopulated areas of Europe would, it is maintained [by advocates of immigration restrictions], inundate Australia and America. They would come in such great numbers that it would no longer be possible to count on their assimilation. If in the past immigrants to America soon adopted the English language and American ways and customs, this was in part due to the fact that they did not come over all at once in great numbers. The small groups of immigrants who distributed themselves over a wide land quickly integrated themselves into the great body of the American people. The individual immigrant was already half assimilated when the next immigrants landed on American soil. This, it is believed, would now changed, and there is a real danger that the ascendancy—or more correctly, exclusive dominion—of the Anglo-Saxons in the United States would be destroyed. This is especially feared on the part of the Mongolian peoples of Asia.

These fears may perhaps be exaggerated in regard to the United States.

Here Mises makes a crucially important point that Raico failed to acknowledge, namely that immigrants are not mindless puppets of the culture of their country of origin. Many migrants want to become Americans precisely because they, unlike many of their countrymen, prefer the sort of liberty and culture that America offers, as well as because they can enjoy superior economic opportunities in America. Once they get to America, immigrants are then strongly incentivized to learn the language and customs of their new homeland well enough precisely so that they can profit from their new circumstances.

In refuting the myth that libertarians are “market fundamentalists” who neglect cultural and moral concerns, I explained how a libertarian order in fact promotes a healthier evolution of a culture towards a common language and towards shared norms that are truly necessitated by the requirements of human nature and of social cooperation, while also permitting the peaceful co-existence of divergent subcultures that serve the more particularized needs of different subsets of society. It scarcely needs to be added that both the native-born community and various immigrant communities count among the different subcultures that can peacefully co-exist in a pluralistic libertarian society while also converging on the common essentials of a national language and basic norms.

So what is a libertarian to do if the tide of immigration is so strong that peaceful assimilation of native and immigrant nationalities doesn’t appear to be possible, a scenario that Mises concedes would be the case for Australia if it permitted unrestricted immigration by Asians? Mises admits that an inundation scenario would likely result in the native-born nationality becoming a minority in its own homeland, and thus likely subject to the horrors of national persecution. On the other hand, Mises wrote at length in works like Nation, State, and Economy, and Omnipotent Government warning that the fragmentation of the world via trade and migration barriers strongly incentivizes comparatively overpopulated “have not” powers to resort to war to gain access to territories and natural resources denied to them by the comparatively underpopulated powers. Destructive global wars sparked by national autarky are not such a great option for libertarians either. But Mises did offer a liberal solution for Anglo-Saxons in Australia facing an inundation scenario:

It is clear that no solution of the problem of immigration is possible if one adheres to the ideal of an interventionist state, which meddles in every field of human activity, or to that of the socialist state. Only the adoption of a liberal program could make the problem of immigration, which today seems insoluble, completely disappear. In an Australia governed according to liberal principles, what difficulties could arise from the fact that in some parts of the continent Japanese and in other parts Englishmen were in the majority?

Mises is referring here to a right of self-determination that enables peaceful changes of the borders of democratic nation-states, so that borders can stay aligned to the changing national character of the territories they enclose. In Mises’s view, it is state territories that need to adjust to changing demographic realities on the ground and popular desires arising therefrom, not demography being coercively adjusted to fit the territorial pretensions of states.

Another point that needs to be made here is that Raico’s cultural determinism ignores not only the role that human rationality plays in shaping cultures (hence the incessant appeals to reason that Mises thought were essential to promoting liberty), but also the role that human emotionality plays in shaping cultures. As I mentioned in connection with Mises’s case for separating morality and state, man’s innate desire for happiness can be a crucial factor in eroding loyalty to illiberal values.

The primary alternative to the use of one’s reason in forming one’s values is the unthinking acceptance of values acquired from others. While it is fair to assume that real-world cultures will always be a complex mix of rationality and irrationality, in a libertarian society one’s values are continually being altered under the influence of one’s personal responsibility for bearing the consequences of one’s actions. Dysfunctional values, whether derived from irrational traditions or from faulty reasoning, must be discarded under the pressure of cognitive dissonance when no one offers you a welfare state “safety net” to rescue you from the consequences of your own foolishness. Personal responsibility for one’s actions compels one to modify one’s values to better conform to one’s innate desires, even if one can’t fully understand or correctly explain how such modifications work or logically integrate them into a more coherent system of ethics.

Even without the aid of incessant rational ethical argumentation, humans are naturally compelled by their own innate psychological nature to revise their values away from the extremes of illiberalism when they have the freedom to do so. This explains why illiberal cultures often must find ways to overtly deprive people of such chances, usually maintaining themselves by inflicting terrible punishments against heretics, apostates, blasphemers, infidels, etc., and why ironclad protections of individual liberty in matters of speech, assembly, worship, etc. are just as important to sustaining a liberal order as protections of private ownership rights are. Raico’s thesis fails to appreciate that immigrants are no less human than the native-born are, and are psychologically just as responsive to the profound culture-altering effects of liberation from cultural repression when they are finally able to breathe free in a liberty-loving land.