A nation such as the US is not blood and soil. It is culture--the high-trust world bequethed by western and British culture. Admitting people who are not willing to participate in and preserve that high-trust culture will destroy it, at long-term loss (not gain) to everyone involved.
Liked. Not because I agree but because you're making the argument that Bryan fails to address, the argument that non-economically-illiterate opponents of immigration make.
The (quite real) problem you identify is about culture, not about immigration per se. Italians, Irish, and Jews immigrated to the US in huge numbers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But, unlike modern immigrants, they assimilated into American culture and adopted the high-trust attitudes. Not entirely immediately, but in the next generation.
I think that's because of American cultural self-confidence at the time. Americans believed in their own culture and were eager to propagate it. In schools we taught civics, democratic principles, the bill of rights, the American Revolution, a bit of British history, etc. We had (voluntary) classes for immigrants to learn English, and insisted on teaching their children in English. Visit a historical schoolhouse from that era and you'll see portraits of Ben Franklin and the founding fathers.
Americans were proud of their culture - thought it was better than Old Europe's. And were unafraid to teach that to immigrants.
Today we teach children how terrible our culture is - it's exploitative, destroys the environment, represses women and minorities, Christopher Columbus was a villain, WW2 internment camps for Japanese were comparable to Hitler's death camps. Most of that is simply false and the part that is true is much milder than what happened in other cultures.
Perhaps worse, we teach that good parts of US culture are bad - the 19th century capitalists who industrialized the US were robber barons, suppression of violent union thugs was criminal, etc.
American history is not blameless but the emphasis has changed from eliding the mistakes to emphasizing them. I don't advocate whitewashing history but I think the focus needs to be on what we've done right (lots - look at the results) and the lessons from the mistakes (slavery, violation of treaties with natives, west-coast denial of rights to Chinese...).
(continued...seems to be a length limit) We used to tell children that American culture was great and that they should have pride in that history; now we teach the opposite.
The problem is not immigration. The problem is lack of pride in our own culture and unwillingness to teach it to immigrants.
I still believe in education. I believe that if our citizens are given freedom, safety, proper and honorable income and wealth, then how can there be crime? There won't be.
Responsible, mature, educated and hardworking people RESPECT. They have enough. We need to develop humanity before it ends itself.
It's not true that "modern immigrants" don't assimilate. I don't even know of evidence that they assimilate at a slower rate or in lower percentages than did the European or Chinese immigrants. Some of the ways in which some refuse to assimilate now — embracing gangster culture, sending their kids to awful public schools — are ways in which they are improving America, which is more like Donald Trump and Tupac than Grover Cleveland and Duke Ellington. The more economically successful immigrants see America's flaws and assimilate selectively.
Most low end immigrants do assimilate to gangster culture, Hispanic crime and divorce rates rise in the second generation.
Asians like public schools more than whites and attend private schools less. They generally assimilate to upper middle class coastal liberal norms with an even higher degree of conformity and trust in institutions. Which includes an opposition to school vouchers.
Yes, I think you are onto something. One concrete example: The most decorated unit in American history, the 442nd Infantry Regiment during WW2, was a unit of Japanese-Americans whose families were in some cases being held in internment camps.
Hard to imagine that happening today in modern American culture.
I just recently was censored and permabanned from a subreddit on reddit with no warning, after I linked to NY Times reporting on a Somali "fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness": https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/us/fraud-minnesota-somali.html
Imagine a true open borders scenario where these Somali fraudsters were being prosecuted by a Somali public prosecutor and tried by a Somali jury, all of whom value their ethnic community above abstract considerations like "fairness to American taxpayers". (In the words of Ilhan Omar: "We must confront that our nation was founded by the genocide of indigenous people and on the backs of slaves, that we maintain global power with the tenor of neocolonialism." Maybe stealing from taxpayers is actually a form of reparations!) How do you even recover from such a scenario?
There's a big chunk of modern US culture that wants to cover their ears and scream "lalalala" if there's any indication that immigrants aren't assimilating. We're basically flying blind with these people. We don't know if immigrants are misbehaving, and if they are, we aren't allowed to scold them and tell them to shape up. If it were up to the open borders folks, we would import and naturalize so many immigrants that we would reach a "point of no return" where any resulting dysfunction would be irreversible.
It's the very rhetoric of progressives which makes their preferred "progressive" immigration policies infeasible.
Bryan Caplan's immigration comic book makes arguments based on historical US immigration data, but I don't think we can look at that data and reach conclusions about immigration to the US in the modern regime, at the huge scale Caplan advocates.
I actually am open to significantly expanding immigration to the US, but first we need a strong cultural consensus on requiring assimilation, knowing what we are asking immigrants to assimilate to, speaking plainly if things aren't working. We are nowhere close to that.
In what category do you place FDR and our Supreme Court following the decision to restrict Japanese Americans and the Supreme's endorsement in Korematsu? https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/323us214
Why weren't Americans of German and Italian descent also "relocated"?
The US is "culture"? What does that even mean? I prefer elucidation with data, not mysticism.
I also find that anti-immigration libertarians incessantly sneak in statist language when the topic of immigration gets brought up. No consistent libertarian should be saying stuff like "Admitting people." That insinuates the government owns the US and controls the admission process onto a property they own. In reality, no one should be "admitting" anybody. The immigrant is exercising their freedom to move wherever they please.
Of course the government owns the USA. It’s called a monopoly on violence. Have you ever tried not paying your taxes, see how that goes for you.
The purpose of a libertarian government is to have the people with those guns leave you alone as much as possible. If third world parasites are a majority and tell the people with guns what to do, they sure as hell aren’t going to leave you alone.
if you consistently believed that the government "owned" the entire US (in the familiar sense of ownership, i.e property rights) you would have no objections to even the most despotic policies. On property I own I can rightfully prevent people form opening churches I don't like, restrict freedom to speech, stop people from getting married or having children, prevent all commercial activity, so surely the US could rightfully do these things to the whole country?
But my objections mean nothing unless I have the force to back them up.
We are lucky that the monopoly on violence (that's what a government is) is controlled by elected representative we can lobby. I can vote rather than try to start an armed rebellion.
There is no "rights" that exist outside of force. Your property is only what you can physically defend. If you live in an advanced society then people have norms upon which they aren't trying to take property by force and agree to come to each others aid in defense of property from aggressors. But these things only exist if the people agree and act on them in an effective manner. If they don't then your "rights" are worthless.
sure, but I think you are blurring the is-ought distinction here. If I have a gun and my neighbor doesn't I *can* take his house. I *should* not, because that is a violation of his rights. Similarly, the government's monopoly on violence allows it to do many horrible things but that does not mean it should. If someone like Bryan thinks immigration restriction is a violation of rights, saying "but the government has a monopoly on violence" is not a very convincing reply
When the migrant finds an apartment to rent and an employer, are you either the landlord or the employer? If not, then you don't have the right to stop them. If so, and if you wanted to discriminate against immigrants, I would advocate your right to do so.
Also, it's not true that others have the right to prevent people from moving. For example, you have no right to bar anyone from Costco. However, you could bar someone from your property. Far clearer to say you have a right to property than a right to control people's movements.
So if you were in a communist, fascist, or theocratic world, you would speak communist, fascist, or theocratic language?
I find this to be another common whataboutism/grift (whatever you wanna call it) by anti-immigration libertarians.
Similar to "aw shucks, the majority are for it, so I guess let's go with them," these "arguments" don't actually address the epistemological foundations of Caplan's claims about open borders.
Anti-immigration libertarians also don't act like this when other libertarian positions get brought up. Open borders is just the exception, for some reason.
Sadly, two wrongs don't make a right, and discriminating against asylum seekers, legal immigrants or even registered citizens based on race or culture is wrong. We are seeing that prejudice be perpetrated as we speak.
When preparing to slay the beast, we cannot, ourselves, become monstrous. Enraged citizens may want to murder the murderer or r**e the r**ist, but that's not justice; it's inhuman. You become the monster.
We must take the uphill battle and remain humane. That means taking a stand against ANY immorality.
We can't be spineless either: our own safety and welfare come first; of course they do. I'm perplexed as to why people in power could ever want to pander so deeply... could it be in order to protect their own immoralities?
I think it's a very good idea in terms of economics, but impossible in terms of tribalism, and the latter usually prevails. Open borders is Utopian, and that makes it impossible and dangerous.
Exactly. We don't know much about how to design societies which run well, unless the humans in those societies have properties like "civic virtue" and "doing the right thing even when no one is looking" at a certain critical mass. We don't know much about how to filter for those properties, or how create those properties.
The sort of studies that Bryan cites in his open borders comic book (studying comparatively low levels of historical US immigration and claiming it is benign) can't be extrapolated to an actual open borders scenario.
I have always seen “open borders” as a rhetorical device for getting people to face up to the arguments they’re making about immigration. It’s like saying “All drugs should be legal, in all cases. Change my mind!” Maybe we could not get to that ideal, but we can do a lot better than we’re doing now.
This is not what he said, at all. He clearly says that many people and countries who support closed borders may not be fascist, but the policy is nevertheless fascist.
Explain what’s splitting hairs about it. If someone supports one extreme (though mainstream) authoritarian policy but nevertheless supports the other mainstream center-right/left policies without going full socialist/white nationalist, then how do you describe it?
Isn't a government denying people the basic right to live and work, based not on anything they've done, just where they happened to have been born, fascism?
Just because every country does it doesn't mean it's right.
So "if the policy isn't open borders, it's fascist" even though such policies are found all over the world, including the countries that fought the fascists in WW2? Was it fascist when the US passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, before the term "fascism" had even been defined?
Did Caplan not explicitly say otherwise? Anti-immigration policies themselves are fascist. A nation that adopts anti-immigration policies is not necessarily fascist. So every country has at least one policy that's fascist, but not every country is fascist. You could also say every country has at least one socialist policy, but not every country is socialist. That's an obvious distinction he made clear.
This is the sort of thing that drives me away from libertarianism in my old age and, frankly, why I let my paid subscription here lapse.
I find many things to dislike in Trump's immigration policy. But calling it fascist is juvenile.
We have immigration laws that were passed through the democratic process. You might disagree with them, but they are the law of the land. The last president ignored his oath to see that these laws are faithfully executed and threw open the doors to many millions who have no legal right to be here. Wasn't it anti-democratic to do that?
I don't agree with everything being done, but much of it is an attempt to vindicate the laws that were ignored. If you don't want those laws to be enforced, get Congress to repeal them. You can't, because a solid majority of the voting public supports them. Bernie Sanders of all people has called out Biden's failure to enforce immigration law.
Much of what you're calling fascism is a restoration of the rule of law. By the way, was Calvin Coolidge--probably our most libertarian president--a fascist? Read up on his immigration policy, including the Johnson Reed Act of 1924.
You can be an interesting, flexible thinker on many issues. On immigration, you are an ideologue.
First, congressional law does not require mandatory enforcement. A president can choose not to do what Trump is doing, and it would not be against the "law of the land."
Also, what kind of argument is this: "If you don't want those laws to be enforced, get Congress to repeal them. You can't, because a solid majority of the voting public supports them."
Substitute "those laws" with pretty much any other libertarian position besides open borders (I assume you hold at least some libertarian positions), and you'll quickly see why the argument fails.
Imagine someone responded to a libertarian publicly advocating for cutting welfare by saying:
"Oh yeah? You want to cut welfare? Why don't you get Congress to repeal it then? I bet you can't, because a solid majority of the voting public supports it."
When most people think of fascism the main thing that comes to mind is authoritarian rule.
Somebody has to control the monopoly on violence. We have chosen that it will be elected representatives operating under a constitutional framework. It is the goal of libertarians to enact libertarian laws within that framework.
You could try to enact libertarian policy in an authoritarian framework. If the dictator is a libertarian this might work. Brian appears to favor this approach and has denounced democracy on multiple occasions.
Sadly, the number of libertarian dictators is quite small. Both the nature of dictators and the methods they need to hold power generally point towards statism.
Once you accept that democracy is a lot more friendly to libertarianism then authoritarianism as a system then you have to accept that you need to convince your fellow citizens to pass the laws you want.
Libertarians think some laws are simply unjust regardless of their legal status. Most other people agree with this too; I think most of us would be happy with politicians who tried to ignore or circumvent the Fugitive Slave Act or Jim Crow laws. We are not faced with a binary choice between "every policy that is democratically chosen it ok" and "whatever our authoritarian leader wants".
“If no one pays, the content probably eventually won't be created. That's how Substack works.”
actually it’s not. There remains an ever-increasing amount of free content.
And folks like Bryan, with jobs in academia, frequently are looking to disperse their ideas widely,not just economically benefit from them.
Or use Substack as a marketing tool to help drive people to buy their books.
That said, I do wish Substack would eliminate or radically lower their minimum price controls.
There is so much good free content on the Internet, and on Substack, that I ain’t paying $8 or even $5 a month for any of it. However, there are a dozen I’d consider at $2/month, and more than a dozen I’d sign up for immediately at $1/month.
Well, I just gave you one above, even if you will only accept purely economic arguments:
People use it as a marketing mechanism to drive them to other content for which they are paid. E.g. books.
Yes, Substack itself won’t exist if no one ever pays for content on Substack (unless they change to an advertising model or to a model of selling their user’s data). But that was not your OG claim.
I started reading Bryan when he was blogging at EconLog (and I removed them from my RSS now that they have completely different contributors). I don't think he was getting paid for all those years of posts.
I must say: this is one of the silliest essays I’ve read (written by you). ‘Fascist’ has been made worthless as a descriptor, unless Obama and Clinton were also fascist in their immigration policies (they all removed hundreds of thousands of people who weren’t accused of serious crimes). If they are perhaps the term is so diluted as to be unusable.
Most of the people saying ‘fascist’ are actively or passively supporting policies which hide murderers and rapists from ICE attention. The deportations might be fascist, but they’re also democratic, ethical, American, and legal. I’m willing to support such policies.
I become instantly suspicious of anyone using the label ‘fascist.’ In my experience they’re using language tactically and they lack any political principles.
I’m not sure you understood the article. He details the sense in which fascism is overused, nevertheless maintains that it is accurate here even if the promoters of the laws aren’t necessarily all fascist.
Well, nationalism rather tends to ideas of purity. One finds the urge to purify language itself of foreign words in nationalists. And an immigrant is emphatically a violation of the purity,
I understand that he qualified his statements but immigration enforcement is in no way fascist, even if it’s draconian. Communist states do it, Saudi Arabia, China, etc. States have been doing this before the concept of ‘fascism’ was even created. The two things have nothing to do with one other. That’s leaving aside the ludicrous and hysterical overuse happening now.
Any restriction on travel and migration is "fascist"? Completely clown world. Definition of a state is monopoly on the use of violence over a specified territory and population. Expelling people without permission to reside/work/travel there is just a core function of government, not fascism. Far more definitional to government than providing a social safety net!
The biggest critique that Bryan can never address, is the "paradox of tolerance". The freedoms and rights of Americans doesn't come from words on a paper, Liberia had the same constitution as the United States for 130+ years. They come from a culture where individuals have a Anglo-Saxon understanding of the relationship, rights, and obligations between citizens and government.
That understanding is already vastly diminished over the past 249 years, why would we rush to completely kill it by diluting/replacing the population with the Anglo-Saxon understanding?
Cool, but every single country on the face of the earth has to exercise authority to control a territory and population. That's just the definition of a state (country).
To call this most basic function "fascism" is toddler stupidity far below the rigor he would ever accept in anyone else's argument.
Perhaps you could describe for us some of the great benefits brought to Palestine by the large scale uncontrolled immigration of very intelligent well educated refugees in the first half of the 20th century? The gains from trade must have been enormous!
Certainly. Arab citizens of Israel (who are around 20% of the population) have a higher standard of living and more civil liberties than Arabs in most Arab majority countries.
“Even migrants who managed to get this elusive permission have had it revoked. Not because of anything they did, but simply because the government didn’t want them to keep breathing our air.”
Sorry, WHAT EVIDENCE do you have for this claim?
Or is it merely dishonest spin that the permission was for a specified period of time and that time period ended?
Even when I disagree with you, Bryan (which is mostly on the topic of fully open borders), rare indeed can I recall you making blatantly false claims of fact.
If you have evidence for this claim, please produce it and I will apologize.
A single policy can almost never be fascist, because "fascist" has no meaning outside of the ideology. It is a bundle of ideas that go together. This is especially true when every state on Earth has some version of the policy in question.
The worst part is that arguments like this will almost certainly push people further from Bryan's position.
I don't know, if the US, say, implemented a version of the Nuremberg Laws I would call those fascist regardless of the broader ideology involved. Similarly, if we nationalized the entire oil industry I would call that Socialist regardless of the broader ideology involved.
Your ideal nation is the UAE which is an actual fascist state.
You've said many times you don't like democracy and want to get rid of it.
If you succeed in bringing open borders it makes fascism a lot more likely, as the new immigrants are likely to be violent low IQ third worlders that have themselves produced lots of fascism in the places they live and are likely to do it here.
When the US was fighting fascist Italy in WW2, we were also enforcing immigration laws that prevented people from entering the country. It's nonsensical to claim the US was fascist that whole time. You haven't even pointed to the actual immigration policies of actually fascist countries!
There are many clubs which only allow members to enter. Enforcement of that requirement does not make them "fascists". Similarly, economists have long known that a government can provide "club goods".
The term "fascist" has metastasized beyond usefulness. There have been government policies and social movements congruent in some ways with the fascists, but others congruent with socialism, so why "fascism"? The term has been adapted to governments that never thought themselves fascist (Rome, Germany, US), but as a tactic, not an instructive description. If one focuses on economics alone, especially since FDR (once a fan of Mussolini), America shares many features of fascism, but it's not commonly described as fascist. Trump's vicious anti-immigrant policies would likely be applauded by Mussolini, but the US had even more vicious anti-immigrant movements before Mussolini had power. Was the driving out of the Chinese immigrants "fascist"? What about the grotesque American anti-immigrant movement, codified in law, of the early 20th century? (It was not unpopular with progressives.) That was accompanied by eugenics, which not even the Trumpers have yet proposed. I have no objection to comparing the present situation to Italy, Germany, earlier America, but I think it is unhelpful to use the term "fascist" to describe it. If for no other reason than that it has been overused to the point of meaninglessness; it is not much more than hyperbole. (See: Three New Deals, by Shivelbusch and Driven Out, by Pfaelzer.)
“Why can’t peaceful, productive people easily get this paperwork? Why do they need paperwork in the first place? For a canonically fascist reason: Your very presence violates our nation. Not because of anything you’ve done or failed to do. But because you aren’t one of us.”
You can claim this. And I agree there are certain people who feel that way.
But the far bigger reason, that applies to far more people, is the Milton Friedman-espoused incompatibility between a generous welfare state and fully open borders.
We give expensive free K-12 education to all children, and expensive emergency room care to all people, in the country, citizens or not.
So it’s not you, it’s us.
That is why unlimited numbers of peaceful, productive people can’t get this paperwork.
It might be suboptimal public policy according to you, but it’s not fascistic. You butcher the term as much or more than most people do to make this claim.
I would add that our government is apparently very bad at punishing/correcting/deterring those non-peaceful people. Ideally we would as a nation fix that problem and then it would matter a lot less who we let into the country, as the humans who could not behave would be removed from society. We are not anywhere near that point, however, and so limiting who comes in from societies where the average behavior is much worse than ours would seem to be a second or third best option of working around the problem. Not the lever I would choose, but if we can't punish criminals the next best option might be to exclude them as much as possible.
Now obviously, we want people to come in legally, not illegally. Allowing, let alone encouraging, mass illegal immigration is insane.
But I actually *do* accept the arguments that the pro-immigration (leftist or libertarian) folks make that on average immigrants commit less crime than do native-born citizens. And I'm more than willing to believe that this is true of legal immigrants (leaving aside wholesale importation of refugees from certain countries).
None of this should be taken as *any* defense of *unlimited* immigration, however.
Why not sub-divide the immigrants based upon their propensity to crime and allow only low-crime groups?
A Hindu or a Chinese coming via H1b is very different from a Salvadoran or a Haitian that just walked across. But the low-crime tendency of the highly selected immigrants gets spread over non-selective asylum seekers and like.
I think a more efficient variant of this is requiring immigrants to post bonds to cover any damages caused by their crime when in the country. These would usually be paid by their prospective employer and priced (by the market) according to the predicted criminality of the immigrant.
I believe that lower criminality of immigrants might have been true in the past, but I do not believe it is true now. Given how often we see illegal immigrants picked up with multiple crimes under their belts I think it is more likely that many criminals’ immigrant status is just not recorded, and the default is “native” in absence of that record. That seems much more likely than the possibility that any random 10,000 people from a low trust/high crime/high corruption society are going to be less likely to commit crime than any random 10,000 from a high trust/low crime/low corruption society. The statistics from eg Sweden seem to bear this out, with immigrants committing well over their proportion of crime relative to population.
To be clear, I find it plausible that for all immigrants - including illegal ones - prior to the Biden Administration, crime rates are lower among immigrants than among native-born citizens.
I agree with you that under Biden it is likely that did not apply for illegal immigrants.
And either way we should shut down illegal immigration (as Trump has finally done in 2025 in a way no President in more than 25 years, arguably 50, has).
I’m just saying that legal immigrants committing more crime than native-born citizens is not a good argument against more legal immigration (once illegal immigration solved). Nor is the argument that legal immigrants commit a non-zero amount of crime.
For Sweden and other EU countries the calculation may well be different, and you may be exactly right, idk. My commentary was restricted to the U.S.
I didn't say immigrants need to commit non-zero amount of crime, I said that I believed that in recent years it seems very unlikely that they commit less crime than natives. (Although if you break down natives by race, maybe some?)
I would also be wary of making the distinction between "legal" and "illegal" immigrants on that matter. If immigrants come in under a broad amnesty or refugee status I highly doubt they are selected against criminal behavior in particular. More so if they came in under legal refugee status but strangely take vacations back to their origin country.
I do not, however, see why legal immigrants committing more crime than natives is a bad argument for limiting legal immigration, however. Would you care to explain that? I agree that limiting immigration is not the first best way to deal with criminal activity, but if the first best option is off the table (which it apparently is politically, for reasons I honestly do not understand) the second or third best options seem reasonable to look into.
"If immigrants come in under a broad amnesty or refugee status I highly doubt they are selected against criminal behavior in particular."
Agreed 100%
"I do not, however, see why legal immigrants committing more crime than natives is a bad argument for limiting legal immigration, however."
It's not. What I said is that right now the evidence of crime by legal immigrants coming in by following the application rules (i.e. not ones coming as refugees or under a "broad amnesty") into the U.S. have lower crime rates.
So that is the only point where we may be disagreeing, and perhaps not even there, if you agree with me on that.
I do agree with all of your other points.
Even if only weakly with your "second or third best options" one as it pertains to legal immigrants who follow the application rules.
Bryan, you're ethnically Jewish, right? And you've written a book that argues for open borders globally, right? So, do you support the ethnostate of Israel? Is Israel fascist? I'm genuinely interested in your moral / ethical position that reconciles your points about immigration in the United States (or Europe) with the policies of Israel. Are you an anti-Zionist?
I'm asking because you're using a framing of "anti-immigration" to generalize. Words matter, like "pro-choice" vs "pro-life" does to the abortion debate. "Anti-immigration" is kind of like labeling people as "fascist", which is more a shaming tactic meant to silence (since WWII) -- not a logical argument. So, instead of framing the position as "anti-immigration", why don't you find out the motivating factors and label it as "pro-high trust society" or "pro-self sufficient individualism" or "pro-diversity by maintaining heritage" or "pro-liberty" (because socialism is slavery and importing 3rd world is de facto expansion of a welfare state that enslaves the productive citizens).
Israel isn't an ethnostate. It has open borders for all Jews and Judaism is a religion, not an ethnicity. Anyone who sincerely converts to Judaism is allowed to emigrate to Israel, regardless of what ethnicity they are. Multiple ethnic groups that historically practice Judaism, such as the Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Sephardic, and Ethiopian Jews, all live in Isrsel.
Bryan is an anarcho-capitalist, he's not committed to any state. Nor does he really identify with Judaism (he was raised Catholic, and rebelled against that to become an atheist).
Moving on from the term "Fascism", I think that the term "Open Borders" is itself a misnomer. My impression is not that you are arguing for the gates to be opened and anyone to be let in without checks. We still want to know who's coming in to a country, but just that we should let them in and let them stay unless there's a good reason not to (vs the current system where people have to try and convince the government to let them stay).
A nation such as the US is not blood and soil. It is culture--the high-trust world bequethed by western and British culture. Admitting people who are not willing to participate in and preserve that high-trust culture will destroy it, at long-term loss (not gain) to everyone involved.
Liked. Not because I agree but because you're making the argument that Bryan fails to address, the argument that non-economically-illiterate opponents of immigration make.
The (quite real) problem you identify is about culture, not about immigration per se. Italians, Irish, and Jews immigrated to the US in huge numbers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But, unlike modern immigrants, they assimilated into American culture and adopted the high-trust attitudes. Not entirely immediately, but in the next generation.
I think that's because of American cultural self-confidence at the time. Americans believed in their own culture and were eager to propagate it. In schools we taught civics, democratic principles, the bill of rights, the American Revolution, a bit of British history, etc. We had (voluntary) classes for immigrants to learn English, and insisted on teaching their children in English. Visit a historical schoolhouse from that era and you'll see portraits of Ben Franklin and the founding fathers.
Americans were proud of their culture - thought it was better than Old Europe's. And were unafraid to teach that to immigrants.
Today we teach children how terrible our culture is - it's exploitative, destroys the environment, represses women and minorities, Christopher Columbus was a villain, WW2 internment camps for Japanese were comparable to Hitler's death camps. Most of that is simply false and the part that is true is much milder than what happened in other cultures.
Perhaps worse, we teach that good parts of US culture are bad - the 19th century capitalists who industrialized the US were robber barons, suppression of violent union thugs was criminal, etc.
American history is not blameless but the emphasis has changed from eliding the mistakes to emphasizing them. I don't advocate whitewashing history but I think the focus needs to be on what we've done right (lots - look at the results) and the lessons from the mistakes (slavery, violation of treaties with natives, west-coast denial of rights to Chinese...).
(continued...seems to be a length limit) We used to tell children that American culture was great and that they should have pride in that history; now we teach the opposite.
The problem is not immigration. The problem is lack of pride in our own culture and unwillingness to teach it to immigrants.
Agreed.
I still believe in education. I believe that if our citizens are given freedom, safety, proper and honorable income and wealth, then how can there be crime? There won't be.
Responsible, mature, educated and hardworking people RESPECT. They have enough. We need to develop humanity before it ends itself.
It's not true that "modern immigrants" don't assimilate. I don't even know of evidence that they assimilate at a slower rate or in lower percentages than did the European or Chinese immigrants. Some of the ways in which some refuse to assimilate now — embracing gangster culture, sending their kids to awful public schools — are ways in which they are improving America, which is more like Donald Trump and Tupac than Grover Cleveland and Duke Ellington. The more economically successful immigrants see America's flaws and assimilate selectively.
Most low end immigrants do assimilate to gangster culture, Hispanic crime and divorce rates rise in the second generation.
Asians like public schools more than whites and attend private schools less. They generally assimilate to upper middle class coastal liberal norms with an even higher degree of conformity and trust in institutions. Which includes an opposition to school vouchers.
Like vegetarian Hindus?
Beef is banned in India and one can be sure, if these vegetarians come into power anywhere, the first thing they would do is to ban beef.
The Italians, Irish, and Jews were Europeans of high culture themselves, not inferior to the English.
Yes, I think you are onto something. One concrete example: The most decorated unit in American history, the 442nd Infantry Regiment during WW2, was a unit of Japanese-Americans whose families were in some cases being held in internment camps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/442nd_Infantry_Regiment_(United_States)
Hard to imagine that happening today in modern American culture.
I just recently was censored and permabanned from a subreddit on reddit with no warning, after I linked to NY Times reporting on a Somali "fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness": https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/us/fraud-minnesota-somali.html
Imagine a true open borders scenario where these Somali fraudsters were being prosecuted by a Somali public prosecutor and tried by a Somali jury, all of whom value their ethnic community above abstract considerations like "fairness to American taxpayers". (In the words of Ilhan Omar: "We must confront that our nation was founded by the genocide of indigenous people and on the backs of slaves, that we maintain global power with the tenor of neocolonialism." Maybe stealing from taxpayers is actually a form of reparations!) How do you even recover from such a scenario?
There's a big chunk of modern US culture that wants to cover their ears and scream "lalalala" if there's any indication that immigrants aren't assimilating. We're basically flying blind with these people. We don't know if immigrants are misbehaving, and if they are, we aren't allowed to scold them and tell them to shape up. If it were up to the open borders folks, we would import and naturalize so many immigrants that we would reach a "point of no return" where any resulting dysfunction would be irreversible.
It's the very rhetoric of progressives which makes their preferred "progressive" immigration policies infeasible.
Bryan Caplan's immigration comic book makes arguments based on historical US immigration data, but I don't think we can look at that data and reach conclusions about immigration to the US in the modern regime, at the huge scale Caplan advocates.
I actually am open to significantly expanding immigration to the US, but first we need a strong cultural consensus on requiring assimilation, knowing what we are asking immigrants to assimilate to, speaking plainly if things aren't working. We are nowhere close to that.
In what category do you place FDR and our Supreme Court following the decision to restrict Japanese Americans and the Supreme's endorsement in Korematsu? https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/323us214
Why weren't Americans of German and Italian descent also "relocated"?
I'm not defending that decision and I'm not sure how you got that impression.
The US is "culture"? What does that even mean? I prefer elucidation with data, not mysticism.
I also find that anti-immigration libertarians incessantly sneak in statist language when the topic of immigration gets brought up. No consistent libertarian should be saying stuff like "Admitting people." That insinuates the government owns the US and controls the admission process onto a property they own. In reality, no one should be "admitting" anybody. The immigrant is exercising their freedom to move wherever they please.
Of course the government owns the USA. It’s called a monopoly on violence. Have you ever tried not paying your taxes, see how that goes for you.
The purpose of a libertarian government is to have the people with those guns leave you alone as much as possible. If third world parasites are a majority and tell the people with guns what to do, they sure as hell aren’t going to leave you alone.
if you consistently believed that the government "owned" the entire US (in the familiar sense of ownership, i.e property rights) you would have no objections to even the most despotic policies. On property I own I can rightfully prevent people form opening churches I don't like, restrict freedom to speech, stop people from getting married or having children, prevent all commercial activity, so surely the US could rightfully do these things to the whole country?
Of course I can object!
But my objections mean nothing unless I have the force to back them up.
We are lucky that the monopoly on violence (that's what a government is) is controlled by elected representative we can lobby. I can vote rather than try to start an armed rebellion.
There is no "rights" that exist outside of force. Your property is only what you can physically defend. If you live in an advanced society then people have norms upon which they aren't trying to take property by force and agree to come to each others aid in defense of property from aggressors. But these things only exist if the people agree and act on them in an effective manner. If they don't then your "rights" are worthless.
sure, but I think you are blurring the is-ought distinction here. If I have a gun and my neighbor doesn't I *can* take his house. I *should* not, because that is a violation of his rights. Similarly, the government's monopoly on violence allows it to do many horrible things but that does not mean it should. If someone like Bryan thinks immigration restriction is a violation of rights, saying "but the government has a monopoly on violence" is not a very convincing reply
Migrant certainly has freedom to move but others also have equal freedom to prevent him to move.
When the migrant finds an apartment to rent and an employer, are you either the landlord or the employer? If not, then you don't have the right to stop them. If so, and if you wanted to discriminate against immigrants, I would advocate your right to do so.
Also, it's not true that others have the right to prevent people from moving. For example, you have no right to bar anyone from Costco. However, you could bar someone from your property. Far clearer to say you have a right to property than a right to control people's movements.
onto property you own, but not onto property owned by others.
Well, if you live in a statist world, you got to speak the statist language,
So if you were in a communist, fascist, or theocratic world, you would speak communist, fascist, or theocratic language?
I find this to be another common whataboutism/grift (whatever you wanna call it) by anti-immigration libertarians.
Similar to "aw shucks, the majority are for it, so I guess let's go with them," these "arguments" don't actually address the epistemological foundations of Caplan's claims about open borders.
Anti-immigration libertarians also don't act like this when other libertarian positions get brought up. Open borders is just the exception, for some reason.
Very true.
Sadly, two wrongs don't make a right, and discriminating against asylum seekers, legal immigrants or even registered citizens based on race or culture is wrong. We are seeing that prejudice be perpetrated as we speak.
When preparing to slay the beast, we cannot, ourselves, become monstrous. Enraged citizens may want to murder the murderer or r**e the r**ist, but that's not justice; it's inhuman. You become the monster.
We must take the uphill battle and remain humane. That means taking a stand against ANY immorality.
Based on Race? Where? Based on Culture? Why, what's wrong with that?
People supporting open borders support this idea because they think they have no skin in the game.
Open borders is absolutely a horrible idea.
We can't be spineless either: our own safety and welfare come first; of course they do. I'm perplexed as to why people in power could ever want to pander so deeply... could it be in order to protect their own immoralities?
I think it's a very good idea in terms of economics, but impossible in terms of tribalism, and the latter usually prevails. Open borders is Utopian, and that makes it impossible and dangerous.
They are genetically inferior and ruin everything they touch. Their shitty cultures are just standard gene/culture co-evolution.
Turning the entire world into a third world shithole is the most evil thing anything could ever do. You are irredeemably evil.
Exactly. We don't know much about how to design societies which run well, unless the humans in those societies have properties like "civic virtue" and "doing the right thing even when no one is looking" at a certain critical mass. We don't know much about how to filter for those properties, or how create those properties.
So in a scenario of true open borders (majority of humans on US soil being foreign-born), we'd be entering uncharted territory in a huge way: https://fakenous.substack.com/p/i-dont-care-about-the-issues
The sort of studies that Bryan cites in his open borders comic book (studying comparatively low levels of historical US immigration and claiming it is benign) can't be extrapolated to an actual open borders scenario.
I have always seen “open borders” as a rhetorical device for getting people to face up to the arguments they’re making about immigration. It’s like saying “All drugs should be legal, in all cases. Change my mind!” Maybe we could not get to that ideal, but we can do a lot better than we’re doing now.
If a country isn't Open Borders, it's Fascist. That is, every country. Boy, this essay is particularly embarrassing.
This is not what he said, at all. He clearly says that many people and countries who support closed borders may not be fascist, but the policy is nevertheless fascist.
Congrats on your gold medal for the Splitting Hairs event.
Explain what’s splitting hairs about it. If someone supports one extreme (though mainstream) authoritarian policy but nevertheless supports the other mainstream center-right/left policies without going full socialist/white nationalist, then how do you describe it?
Here is Bryan's definition of fascism: "The heart of fascism is declaring that peaceful presence in your country is, in itself, a crime."
If you want to defend his article, you have to defend that.
There is nothing peaceful about welfare parasites sucking the country dry and voting for more welfare.
I don't think Mussolini included that in his fascist manifestos.
Did you read the article:
"You can classify an idea in isolation, but to classify a person, you have to take an average."
Isn't a government denying people the basic right to live and work, based not on anything they've done, just where they happened to have been born, fascism?
Just because every country does it doesn't mean it's right.
Not right=fascism. Sigh.
Where does this alleged right exist?
Maybe it's using a too broad definition of the word - it's certainly a similar sort of thing to racism that's being state enforced though.
So "if the policy isn't open borders, it's fascist" even though such policies are found all over the world, including the countries that fought the fascists in WW2? Was it fascist when the US passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, before the term "fascism" had even been defined?
Did Caplan not explicitly say otherwise? Anti-immigration policies themselves are fascist. A nation that adopts anti-immigration policies is not necessarily fascist. So every country has at least one policy that's fascist, but not every country is fascist. You could also say every country has at least one socialist policy, but not every country is socialist. That's an obvious distinction he made clear.
What if keeping out third world fascist trash is the only way for your country not to become fascist? Is it still fascist to prevent fascism?
This is the sort of thing that drives me away from libertarianism in my old age and, frankly, why I let my paid subscription here lapse.
I find many things to dislike in Trump's immigration policy. But calling it fascist is juvenile.
We have immigration laws that were passed through the democratic process. You might disagree with them, but they are the law of the land. The last president ignored his oath to see that these laws are faithfully executed and threw open the doors to many millions who have no legal right to be here. Wasn't it anti-democratic to do that?
I don't agree with everything being done, but much of it is an attempt to vindicate the laws that were ignored. If you don't want those laws to be enforced, get Congress to repeal them. You can't, because a solid majority of the voting public supports them. Bernie Sanders of all people has called out Biden's failure to enforce immigration law.
Much of what you're calling fascism is a restoration of the rule of law. By the way, was Calvin Coolidge--probably our most libertarian president--a fascist? Read up on his immigration policy, including the Johnson Reed Act of 1924.
You can be an interesting, flexible thinker on many issues. On immigration, you are an ideologue.
First, congressional law does not require mandatory enforcement. A president can choose not to do what Trump is doing, and it would not be against the "law of the land."
Also, what kind of argument is this: "If you don't want those laws to be enforced, get Congress to repeal them. You can't, because a solid majority of the voting public supports them."
Substitute "those laws" with pretty much any other libertarian position besides open borders (I assume you hold at least some libertarian positions), and you'll quickly see why the argument fails.
Imagine someone responded to a libertarian publicly advocating for cutting welfare by saying:
"Oh yeah? You want to cut welfare? Why don't you get Congress to repeal it then? I bet you can't, because a solid majority of the voting public supports it."
When most people think of fascism the main thing that comes to mind is authoritarian rule.
Somebody has to control the monopoly on violence. We have chosen that it will be elected representatives operating under a constitutional framework. It is the goal of libertarians to enact libertarian laws within that framework.
You could try to enact libertarian policy in an authoritarian framework. If the dictator is a libertarian this might work. Brian appears to favor this approach and has denounced democracy on multiple occasions.
Sadly, the number of libertarian dictators is quite small. Both the nature of dictators and the methods they need to hold power generally point towards statism.
Once you accept that democracy is a lot more friendly to libertarianism then authoritarianism as a system then you have to accept that you need to convince your fellow citizens to pass the laws you want.
Libertarians think some laws are simply unjust regardless of their legal status. Most other people agree with this too; I think most of us would be happy with politicians who tried to ignore or circumvent the Fugitive Slave Act or Jim Crow laws. We are not faced with a binary choice between "every policy that is democratically chosen it ok" and "whatever our authoritarian leader wants".
“This is the sort of thing that drives me away from libertarianism in my old age and, frankly, why I let my paid subscription here lapse.”
Hmmm… you were really paying for Bryan’s Substack, despite all the content having always been free?
I was. I still pay for Glenn Reynolds' and Matt Taibbi's even though the content is available free.
If no one pays, the content probably eventually won't be created. That's how Substack works.
“If no one pays, the content probably eventually won't be created. That's how Substack works.”
actually it’s not. There remains an ever-increasing amount of free content.
And folks like Bryan, with jobs in academia, frequently are looking to disperse their ideas widely,not just economically benefit from them.
Or use Substack as a marketing tool to help drive people to buy their books.
That said, I do wish Substack would eliminate or radically lower their minimum price controls.
There is so much good free content on the Internet, and on Substack, that I ain’t paying $8 or even $5 a month for any of it. However, there are a dozen I’d consider at $2/month, and more than a dozen I’d sign up for immediately at $1/month.
"actually it’s not. There remains an ever-increasing amount of free content."
Logic. How does it work?
Well, I just gave you one above, even if you will only accept purely economic arguments:
People use it as a marketing mechanism to drive them to other content for which they are paid. E.g. books.
Yes, Substack itself won’t exist if no one ever pays for content on Substack (unless they change to an advertising model or to a model of selling their user’s data). But that was not your OG claim.
I started reading Bryan when he was blogging at EconLog (and I removed them from my RSS now that they have completely different contributors). I don't think he was getting paid for all those years of posts.
I must say: this is one of the silliest essays I’ve read (written by you). ‘Fascist’ has been made worthless as a descriptor, unless Obama and Clinton were also fascist in their immigration policies (they all removed hundreds of thousands of people who weren’t accused of serious crimes). If they are perhaps the term is so diluted as to be unusable.
Most of the people saying ‘fascist’ are actively or passively supporting policies which hide murderers and rapists from ICE attention. The deportations might be fascist, but they’re also democratic, ethical, American, and legal. I’m willing to support such policies.
I become instantly suspicious of anyone using the label ‘fascist.’ In my experience they’re using language tactically and they lack any political principles.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/tactical-morality
I’m not sure you understood the article. He details the sense in which fascism is overused, nevertheless maintains that it is accurate here even if the promoters of the laws aren’t necessarily all fascist.
Here is Bryan's definition of fascism: "The heart of fascism is declaring that peaceful presence in your country is, in itself, a crime."
Under that definition, the bipartisan immigration laws of this country are fascist and have been for a very long time.
Bryan is free to define terms any way he pleases, but this is laughable and unworthy of a thinker who can be nuanced and interesting on other issues.
Well, nationalism rather tends to ideas of purity. One finds the urge to purify language itself of foreign words in nationalists. And an immigrant is emphatically a violation of the purity,
His terms certainly don't seem to be those of Mussolini, who invented fascism.
I understand that he qualified his statements but immigration enforcement is in no way fascist, even if it’s draconian. Communist states do it, Saudi Arabia, China, etc. States have been doing this before the concept of ‘fascism’ was even created. The two things have nothing to do with one other. That’s leaving aside the ludicrous and hysterical overuse happening now.
Yes America is fascist and has always been so. But Qatar is emphatically not fascist.
This is one of your best immigration articles.
wut LMAO
This is embarrassing drivel
Any restriction on travel and migration is "fascist"? Completely clown world. Definition of a state is monopoly on the use of violence over a specified territory and population. Expelling people without permission to reside/work/travel there is just a core function of government, not fascism. Far more definitional to government than providing a social safety net!
The biggest critique that Bryan can never address, is the "paradox of tolerance". The freedoms and rights of Americans doesn't come from words on a paper, Liberia had the same constitution as the United States for 130+ years. They come from a culture where individuals have a Anglo-Saxon understanding of the relationship, rights, and obligations between citizens and government.
That understanding is already vastly diminished over the past 249 years, why would we rush to completely kill it by diluting/replacing the population with the Anglo-Saxon understanding?
Libertarianism is explicit denial of the state's authority. So Caplan is being consistent in his libertarianism.
Cool, but every single country on the face of the earth has to exercise authority to control a territory and population. That's just the definition of a state (country).
To call this most basic function "fascism" is toddler stupidity far below the rigor he would ever accept in anyone else's argument.
"Fascism is when it's really really mean to enforce the law! My understanding of fascism comes from a comic book."
Perhaps you could describe for us some of the great benefits brought to Palestine by the large scale uncontrolled immigration of very intelligent well educated refugees in the first half of the 20th century? The gains from trade must have been enormous!
Certainly. Arab citizens of Israel (who are around 20% of the population) have a higher standard of living and more civil liberties than Arabs in most Arab majority countries.
That does sound nice! They must be over the moon.
“Even migrants who managed to get this elusive permission have had it revoked. Not because of anything they did, but simply because the government didn’t want them to keep breathing our air.”
Sorry, WHAT EVIDENCE do you have for this claim?
Or is it merely dishonest spin that the permission was for a specified period of time and that time period ended?
Even when I disagree with you, Bryan (which is mostly on the topic of fully open borders), rare indeed can I recall you making blatantly false claims of fact.
If you have evidence for this claim, please produce it and I will apologize.
A single policy can almost never be fascist, because "fascist" has no meaning outside of the ideology. It is a bundle of ideas that go together. This is especially true when every state on Earth has some version of the policy in question.
The worst part is that arguments like this will almost certainly push people further from Bryan's position.
I don't know, if the US, say, implemented a version of the Nuremberg Laws I would call those fascist regardless of the broader ideology involved. Similarly, if we nationalized the entire oil industry I would call that Socialist regardless of the broader ideology involved.
Your ideal nation is the UAE which is an actual fascist state.
You've said many times you don't like democracy and want to get rid of it.
If you succeed in bringing open borders it makes fascism a lot more likely, as the new immigrants are likely to be violent low IQ third worlders that have themselves produced lots of fascism in the places they live and are likely to do it here.
I don't know of any clearly fascist regimes that existed in what would later be called “Third World” countries.
When the US was fighting fascist Italy in WW2, we were also enforcing immigration laws that prevented people from entering the country. It's nonsensical to claim the US was fascist that whole time. You haven't even pointed to the actual immigration policies of actually fascist countries!
There are many clubs which only allow members to enter. Enforcement of that requirement does not make them "fascists". Similarly, economists have long known that a government can provide "club goods".
The term "fascist" has metastasized beyond usefulness. There have been government policies and social movements congruent in some ways with the fascists, but others congruent with socialism, so why "fascism"? The term has been adapted to governments that never thought themselves fascist (Rome, Germany, US), but as a tactic, not an instructive description. If one focuses on economics alone, especially since FDR (once a fan of Mussolini), America shares many features of fascism, but it's not commonly described as fascist. Trump's vicious anti-immigrant policies would likely be applauded by Mussolini, but the US had even more vicious anti-immigrant movements before Mussolini had power. Was the driving out of the Chinese immigrants "fascist"? What about the grotesque American anti-immigrant movement, codified in law, of the early 20th century? (It was not unpopular with progressives.) That was accompanied by eugenics, which not even the Trumpers have yet proposed. I have no objection to comparing the present situation to Italy, Germany, earlier America, but I think it is unhelpful to use the term "fascist" to describe it. If for no other reason than that it has been overused to the point of meaninglessness; it is not much more than hyperbole. (See: Three New Deals, by Shivelbusch and Driven Out, by Pfaelzer.)
Fascist is merely a slur employed by liberals against conservatives.
“Why can’t peaceful, productive people easily get this paperwork? Why do they need paperwork in the first place? For a canonically fascist reason: Your very presence violates our nation. Not because of anything you’ve done or failed to do. But because you aren’t one of us.”
You can claim this. And I agree there are certain people who feel that way.
But the far bigger reason, that applies to far more people, is the Milton Friedman-espoused incompatibility between a generous welfare state and fully open borders.
We give expensive free K-12 education to all children, and expensive emergency room care to all people, in the country, citizens or not.
So it’s not you, it’s us.
That is why unlimited numbers of peaceful, productive people can’t get this paperwork.
It might be suboptimal public policy according to you, but it’s not fascistic. You butcher the term as much or more than most people do to make this claim.
Caplan has responded to the Friedman statements you are referring to to here many times, linked here: https://www.betonit.ai/p/friedman-contra-open-borders-round?utm_source=publication-search
I would add that our government is apparently very bad at punishing/correcting/deterring those non-peaceful people. Ideally we would as a nation fix that problem and then it would matter a lot less who we let into the country, as the humans who could not behave would be removed from society. We are not anywhere near that point, however, and so limiting who comes in from societies where the average behavior is much worse than ours would seem to be a second or third best option of working around the problem. Not the lever I would choose, but if we can't punish criminals the next best option might be to exclude them as much as possible.
Not sure I agree with you on this last part.
Now obviously, we want people to come in legally, not illegally. Allowing, let alone encouraging, mass illegal immigration is insane.
But I actually *do* accept the arguments that the pro-immigration (leftist or libertarian) folks make that on average immigrants commit less crime than do native-born citizens. And I'm more than willing to believe that this is true of legal immigrants (leaving aside wholesale importation of refugees from certain countries).
None of this should be taken as *any* defense of *unlimited* immigration, however.
Why not sub-divide the immigrants based upon their propensity to crime and allow only low-crime groups?
A Hindu or a Chinese coming via H1b is very different from a Salvadoran or a Haitian that just walked across. But the low-crime tendency of the highly selected immigrants gets spread over non-selective asylum seekers and like.
I think a more efficient variant of this is requiring immigrants to post bonds to cover any damages caused by their crime when in the country. These would usually be paid by their prospective employer and priced (by the market) according to the predicted criminality of the immigrant.
I believe that lower criminality of immigrants might have been true in the past, but I do not believe it is true now. Given how often we see illegal immigrants picked up with multiple crimes under their belts I think it is more likely that many criminals’ immigrant status is just not recorded, and the default is “native” in absence of that record. That seems much more likely than the possibility that any random 10,000 people from a low trust/high crime/high corruption society are going to be less likely to commit crime than any random 10,000 from a high trust/low crime/low corruption society. The statistics from eg Sweden seem to bear this out, with immigrants committing well over their proportion of crime relative to population.
To be clear, I find it plausible that for all immigrants - including illegal ones - prior to the Biden Administration, crime rates are lower among immigrants than among native-born citizens.
I agree with you that under Biden it is likely that did not apply for illegal immigrants.
And either way we should shut down illegal immigration (as Trump has finally done in 2025 in a way no President in more than 25 years, arguably 50, has).
I’m just saying that legal immigrants committing more crime than native-born citizens is not a good argument against more legal immigration (once illegal immigration solved). Nor is the argument that legal immigrants commit a non-zero amount of crime.
For Sweden and other EU countries the calculation may well be different, and you may be exactly right, idk. My commentary was restricted to the U.S.
I didn't say immigrants need to commit non-zero amount of crime, I said that I believed that in recent years it seems very unlikely that they commit less crime than natives. (Although if you break down natives by race, maybe some?)
I would also be wary of making the distinction between "legal" and "illegal" immigrants on that matter. If immigrants come in under a broad amnesty or refugee status I highly doubt they are selected against criminal behavior in particular. More so if they came in under legal refugee status but strangely take vacations back to their origin country.
I do not, however, see why legal immigrants committing more crime than natives is a bad argument for limiting legal immigration, however. Would you care to explain that? I agree that limiting immigration is not the first best way to deal with criminal activity, but if the first best option is off the table (which it apparently is politically, for reasons I honestly do not understand) the second or third best options seem reasonable to look into.
"If immigrants come in under a broad amnesty or refugee status I highly doubt they are selected against criminal behavior in particular."
Agreed 100%
"I do not, however, see why legal immigrants committing more crime than natives is a bad argument for limiting legal immigration, however."
It's not. What I said is that right now the evidence of crime by legal immigrants coming in by following the application rules (i.e. not ones coming as refugees or under a "broad amnesty") into the U.S. have lower crime rates.
So that is the only point where we may be disagreeing, and perhaps not even there, if you agree with me on that.
I do agree with all of your other points.
Even if only weakly with your "second or third best options" one as it pertains to legal immigrants who follow the application rules.
Is the low criminality of the immigrants obtained from the sub-group of highly selected immigrants, H1b or students or like.
And perhaps the result gets over-generalized to all immigrants, asylum seekers, boat people etc etc?
If some sub-groups have actually low-crime rate, then allow only those sub-groups and not any other.
It is simply mischievous to club together all sorts of immigrants.
Bryan, you're ethnically Jewish, right? And you've written a book that argues for open borders globally, right? So, do you support the ethnostate of Israel? Is Israel fascist? I'm genuinely interested in your moral / ethical position that reconciles your points about immigration in the United States (or Europe) with the policies of Israel. Are you an anti-Zionist?
I'm asking because you're using a framing of "anti-immigration" to generalize. Words matter, like "pro-choice" vs "pro-life" does to the abortion debate. "Anti-immigration" is kind of like labeling people as "fascist", which is more a shaming tactic meant to silence (since WWII) -- not a logical argument. So, instead of framing the position as "anti-immigration", why don't you find out the motivating factors and label it as "pro-high trust society" or "pro-self sufficient individualism" or "pro-diversity by maintaining heritage" or "pro-liberty" (because socialism is slavery and importing 3rd world is de facto expansion of a welfare state that enslaves the productive citizens).
Israel isn't an ethnostate. It has open borders for all Jews and Judaism is a religion, not an ethnicity. Anyone who sincerely converts to Judaism is allowed to emigrate to Israel, regardless of what ethnicity they are. Multiple ethnic groups that historically practice Judaism, such as the Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Sephardic, and Ethiopian Jews, all live in Isrsel.
But secular Jews are allowed aliyah, so it is not entirely a religion. All ethnic Jews derive their ancestry from ancient Hebrews.
Bryan is an anarcho-capitalist, he's not committed to any state. Nor does he really identify with Judaism (he was raised Catholic, and rebelled against that to become an atheist).
The idea of Open Borders came its end(thankfully) in 2024 after 4 years of the Biden Admin.
actually it came to an end in 1875: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_Act_of_1875
Moving on from the term "Fascism", I think that the term "Open Borders" is itself a misnomer. My impression is not that you are arguing for the gates to be opened and anyone to be let in without checks. We still want to know who's coming in to a country, but just that we should let them in and let them stay unless there's a good reason not to (vs the current system where people have to try and convince the government to let them stay).