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 wonder how you know what immigrants think of American culture? Source?
Would it be incorrect to teach all students, immigrant and native, that the US seized control of the Philippines, and then when it double-crossed the Filipinos proceeded to slaughter them as they defended their country against American colonialism? Would it be wrong to teach about slavery? The subjugation of the Hawaiians and the theft of their island? About the internment of Japanese Americans? About the US policies that not only killed 2 million Vietnamese but opened the door to Pol Pot? That military leaders of the time opposed using atomic bombs against civilians in Japan? That millions of people have died as a result of alcohol and drug prohibitions? Do these events represent the "culture" to be proud of, or simply history worth knowing?
I'm inclined to agree with Mencken, whom people like you held in contempt a century ago:
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."
You are sure making a lot of assumptions about me. I'm a huge fan of Mencken (and of Mark Twain, who had a lot to say abut US misbehavior in the Philippines). And I don't think I said a single word about what _immigrants_ think of US culture.
Here's something I posted a few days ago elsewhere: "For sure; agreed. The US is a global bully and has been since at least the 1970s. The US is constantly embargoing, locking down the international financial system, telling other countries what internal laws they should pass (human rights, drugs, financial crime, bribery, feminism, etc., etc....). Other countries don't like it, not even US allies. (I remember voting for Bush II because he promised a "humbler and less arrogant foreign policy"; look what happened)."
Yes, the US has done a lot of bad stuff. IMHO that's mostly misbehavior of leadership, not the culture. (But yes there is surely some relationship there.) But it's hard to find a major country in history that hasn't done far worse when they had the power to do so. _Human beings_ are not nice in groups. But *relatively speaking* - and despite all that, the US has been pretty benign up until 1970 or so.
Still, the culture of a people is not the same as the behavior of a government. People all over the world want to come to the US and live here - it can't be all that bad. And there is indeed a lot to be said for "high-trust" culture.
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.
Immigrants have lower crime rates than the general population. Unlike you I will provide a source.
"Contrary to this anti-immigrant rhetoric, we document that, as a group, immigrant men have had a lower incarceration rate than US-born men for the last 150 years of American history. We combine newly assembled full-count Census data (1870–1940) with Census/ACS samples (1950– 2020) to construct the first nationally representative series of incarceration rates for immigrants and the US-born between 1870 and the present day. From 1870 to 1950, immigrants’ incarceration rate was only slightly lower than that of US-born men. However, starting in 1960, immigrants have become significantly less likely to be incarcerated than the US-born, even though as a group immigrants now are relatively younger, more likely to be non-white, have lower incomes, and are less educated – characteristics often associated with involvement in the criminal justice system."
Bryan does address the point of differing cultures directly in his graphic novel "open borders: the science and ethics of immigration".
It's fun to read and it addresses the point you think he fails to address.
He cites statistics on cultural beliefs of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generation migrants compared to current US citizens, and he also mentions "key-hole" migration policies that only allow immigrants with cultural beliefs we value as a solution to culturally opposed migration.
Where do you get this information? As Thomas Sowell noted in some book I read years ago (probably Ethnic America), Jewish immigrants were considered to be of subnormal intellect. Few were rich or educated They were from merchant subcultures, not intellectual ones. You declare one thing after another without referring to a source. I'm curious where you got the idea that those immigrants were "Europeans of high culture." In fact, they so offended the American elites and populist dregs alike that stringent anti-immigrant laws were passed in response to their immigration.
Whatever some Americans might have thought or not thought, objectively Irish, Italians and Jews were Europeans and not inferior to Americans in any way , particularly culture.
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.
What is it that causes you to think it hard to imagine that a scapegoated group could not be interned today? That is exactly what has been done to "illegal immigrants" (mostly Latin Americans) for many years. My ex-brother-in-law came to the US with his family when he was 10. He worked constantly and had no criminal record. At 35 he was working at a home improvement store. On a Sunday morning (2010) he was headed out the door to Starbucks, leaving his partner and child at home, and was grabbed by immigration agents. He was incarcerated for 6 months (for a civil offense) and then deported. That, you think, is less odious than what was done to the Japanese?
I guess I wasn't clear. I meant to say it's hard to imagine something like the 442nd Infantry Regiment happening today. Wasn't talking about the internment. See the "Views on America" and "Change Over Time" sections here https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/increasing-skilled-immigration-is
Suppose a guy goes to jail for smoking pot. Is that less odious than what was done to the Japanese?
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.
I doubt you believe that the government owns the US. Most people, including defenders of government, also wouldn't say so. It also doesn't follow that because the government is a monopoly on violence, the entire US is its property.
But isn't the question to ask whether they 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥? Self-identified libertarians don't throw up their hands, say "but it's popular," or shrug their shoulders at any other government horror.
"If third world parasites..."
Finally, a claim that isn't a complete distraction. Have you read Bryan Caplan's work on the empirics of open borders?
I know some socialist/environmental fanatics who think getting rid of energy regulations would turn the US into an ashy, radioactive hellhole, or that privatizing the FDA would cause patients to start dropping like flies. They contrive so much hysteria because a piece of their core philosophy is fundamentally rotten. Much is the same with anti-immigration advocates.
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.
"Libertarian government" is a painful oxymoron. (Surely you meant to say "a "legal" monopoly on violence.) I don't know what a "third world" country is, and I certainly don't know what makes a person from another country more of a "parasite" than an American citizen who has received food stamps, agriwelfare, or an unearned sum of money from the federal government during the covid terror. But the fingers on the government triggers now are those who share your views of poorer immigrants, and those people in power are the ones who inflict misery on Americans today. Parenthetically, I'll say that any person who refers to huge groups of people as parasites is more morally akin to Nazis than to libertarians. It's impossible to dehumanize people while respecting their rights.
I suppose that using an expression like "admitting people" is simply stating the fact of what happens, not a value judgement. It's always a good idea to question enabling terminology, but not to deny reality.
True, but at a certain point, you get a sneaking suspicion they just like using that language (or they actually believe it). It was the reality that people were "owning other people," but if someone said "owning people is just gonna be how our country continues on," you're gonna raise an eyebrow.
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.
If you have a property, who do you think is making your property secure from foreign invasions and domestic criminals? If you make a will, who is ensuring that your will get honored?
Those that secure and defend your property, physically and legally, have a say in whom you rent.
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?
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.
Then yeah, go ahead and prevent the US from becoming a fascist country. Bryan Caplan concedes that there are hypothetically conceivable situations where you should not have open borders. Your hypothetical doesn't just doesn't match reality in every way. To me, "what ifs" are completely uninteresting. What if the god of immigrants gets so offended by the closed borders of the US that by 2030, he decides to smite everyone on Earth? Would you still support closed borders then?
See also this response I gave to a previous comment of yours:
"Have you read Bryan Caplan's work on the empirics of open borders?
I know some socialist/environmental fanatics who think getting rid of energy regulations would turn the US into an ashy, radioactive hellhole, or that privatizing the FDA would cause patients to start dropping like flies. They contrive so much hysteria because a piece of their core philosophy is fundamentally rotten."
A libertarian who has never heard of the FDA issue would naturally side with privatization if he heard of it. An anti-immigration "libertarian" reaches absurd conclusions because they harbor statist beliefs.
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".
"Libertarians think some laws are simply unjust regardless of their legal status."
The concept of "justice" is pretty beside the point. Without the ability to enforce justice, you get no justice. Libertarians often ignore the tradeoffs inherent in the enforcement of justice, they just kind of assume it all away as an abstraction.
For instance, I think inviting clannish low IQ people into the country it likely to make it less libertarian, because the behavior and voting patterns of such people are not libertarian. Hence, I don't care about "freedom of movement" as some abstract concept if it leads to turning the first world into the third world. No adequate answer (yes, Byrans answers are inadequate) has been provided to this dilemma.
I care about actual justice achieved in the real world, not theoretical justice in some abstract world.
In general I'm skeptical of people "taking the law into their own hands." Everyone's got an idea of what would be best for society, most of them are wrong, and violence is a negative externality in and of itself. Even when people are in the right, violence often makes things worse for their own cause.
In the case of the FSA, I think benign neglect is a good stance. But I also don't think going John Brown was a good idea.
I think an even better solution would have been not to have agreed to things like the fugitive slave act in the first place. It was a bad decision on the part of northern legislators. It would not have taken many people switching their votes to prevent its passage. Better statesmanship would have been a superior outcome to general lawlessness.
“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 to 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.
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.
“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.
“There was no ‘time period’ limiting the legal status of Venezuelans in the US.”
Temporary Protected Status is not “migrants who managed to get this elusive permission…” in terms of legal immigration the way most folks understand that term.
And in any case, even if you don’t like my above argument, do you *really* not grok that the “T” in TPS stands for temporary?!?
And further that the status is at the discretion of the current President?!?
You are either being Orwellian, leftist, or both to claim that a program labeled Temporary has no time period and cannot be changed by the current Executive when it was instigated by a previous Executive.
You made no argument, you asked for evidence. I supplied you with evidence and you have disintegrated into Trumpish gibberish, There was no time limit on the residency of Venezuelans, they could have remained legal for the rest of their lives. Trump vacated their legal status. Both facts and reason are against you, so you naturally resort of some version of "commie." Alas, you are for a powerful centralized government and I'm against it, so that places you closer to Fidel.
You supplied evidence that a program designated as temporary was terminated.
That it was… temporary!
Not that someone who had received permanent right to be here had that permanent status revoked.
Under your definition, people who had a temporary visa fit the same description. Yet shockingly, you did NOT use them as your evidence in support of Bryan’s position.
“There was no time limit on the residency of Venezuelans, they could have remained legal for the rest of their lives.”
This second claim is false. Or at best, massively misleading. Yes, politicians could have chosen to extend it indefinitely. But there was no right of the people in question to remain permanently and no obligation to do so.
And yet it is MY argument that is “Trump gibberish, and not yours, which ends in an ad hominem claim that I am a communist authoritarian?!? 🙄🙄🙄
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.
“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.
And his answers vary between weak and impractical and absurd.
Which is why I think Bryan is very wrong on this issue, even though I agree with him on far more than 90% of his other views.
To be very clear, I support lots and lots of legal immigration, including essentially unlimited high-skill immigration (where Bryan’s arguments are 100% correct).
I just don’t support literally unlimited immigration. Both because of welfare state and because of the culture changes and risks to our governance and institutions that would entail, given birthright citizenship.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd agree that the more distinct the policy, the easier it is to classify under an ideological label. I don't think I'd quibble with calling antisemitic laws fascist, but I also don't think it fits perfectly.
The same thing with nationalizing an industry, but I also think socialist has also taken on a broader meaning than fascist.
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.)
The mirror of "communist" is used by rightists to discredit leftists, although "liberal" is usually considered sufficiently evil by today's right, and tantamount to "communist." Most ideologues engage in terminological character assassination as their capacities to formulate logical arguments are rarely strong. There are very few conservatives now; there are many right-wing populists. By no stretch are Trump and his supporters conservatives; they are radicals. They are not preserving anything. Some imagine that they are trying to return to the country to founding values, but it's child's play to debunk that fantasy.
Maybe our answers hinge in part on this question: Is a nation an infinite resource, or is it, among other things, a social compact (culture and law) between a certain group of people who have the right to admit, or not admit, other people, on grounds that may include their fitness and willingness to join that compact?
the US had virtually no federal control of immigration until the Page Act of 1875 (the limited prior exceptions such the alien enemies act produced less than a few dozen deportees, mainly British during the war of 1812). Is that the year is which the nation became a finite resource? It is one thing to limit naturalization (i.e entry into the social compact of citizenship) but restricting immigration violates the free-association rights of Americans to house or employ immigrants on their property.
It would be a lot easier if we disassociated the idea of nation and some specific geography. If I could "immigrate" to a new nation without moving, that would be the best. The land I own goes with me. Then, a nation could be culture and law and restrict membership in the way that many support.
Bear in mind that we are not starting de novo. We have admitted a large number of people who are putting our high-trust society at risk (and have also, by domestic policy, home-grown many such people). We need to clean up the mess before we can resume a more ideal policy.
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 wonder how you know what immigrants think of American culture? Source?
Would it be incorrect to teach all students, immigrant and native, that the US seized control of the Philippines, and then when it double-crossed the Filipinos proceeded to slaughter them as they defended their country against American colonialism? Would it be wrong to teach about slavery? The subjugation of the Hawaiians and the theft of their island? About the internment of Japanese Americans? About the US policies that not only killed 2 million Vietnamese but opened the door to Pol Pot? That military leaders of the time opposed using atomic bombs against civilians in Japan? That millions of people have died as a result of alcohol and drug prohibitions? Do these events represent the "culture" to be proud of, or simply history worth knowing?
I'm inclined to agree with Mencken, whom people like you held in contempt a century ago:
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."
You are sure making a lot of assumptions about me. I'm a huge fan of Mencken (and of Mark Twain, who had a lot to say abut US misbehavior in the Philippines). And I don't think I said a single word about what _immigrants_ think of US culture.
Here's something I posted a few days ago elsewhere: "For sure; agreed. The US is a global bully and has been since at least the 1970s. The US is constantly embargoing, locking down the international financial system, telling other countries what internal laws they should pass (human rights, drugs, financial crime, bribery, feminism, etc., etc....). Other countries don't like it, not even US allies. (I remember voting for Bush II because he promised a "humbler and less arrogant foreign policy"; look what happened)."
Yes, the US has done a lot of bad stuff. IMHO that's mostly misbehavior of leadership, not the culture. (But yes there is surely some relationship there.) But it's hard to find a major country in history that hasn't done far worse when they had the power to do so. _Human beings_ are not nice in groups. But *relatively speaking* - and despite all that, the US has been pretty benign up until 1970 or so.
Still, the culture of a people is not the same as the behavior of a government. People all over the world want to come to the US and live here - it can't be all that bad. And there is indeed a lot to be said for "high-trust" culture.
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.
Immigrants have lower crime rates than the general population. Unlike you I will provide a source.
"Contrary to this anti-immigrant rhetoric, we document that, as a group, immigrant men have had a lower incarceration rate than US-born men for the last 150 years of American history. We combine newly assembled full-count Census data (1870–1940) with Census/ACS samples (1950– 2020) to construct the first nationally representative series of incarceration rates for immigrants and the US-born between 1870 and the present day. From 1870 to 1950, immigrants’ incarceration rate was only slightly lower than that of US-born men. However, starting in 1960, immigrants have become significantly less likely to be incarcerated than the US-born, even though as a group immigrants now are relatively younger, more likely to be non-white, have lower incomes, and are less educated – characteristics often associated with involvement in the criminal justice system."
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31440/w31440.pdf
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.
Would that be worse than banning drugs? Do adults not have the right to chose which things they ingest and to accept the consequences?
Bryan does address the point of differing cultures directly in his graphic novel "open borders: the science and ethics of immigration".
It's fun to read and it addresses the point you think he fails to address.
He cites statistics on cultural beliefs of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generation migrants compared to current US citizens, and he also mentions "key-hole" migration policies that only allow immigrants with cultural beliefs we value as a solution to culturally opposed migration.
The Italians, Irish, and Jews were Europeans of high culture themselves, not inferior to the English.
Where do you get this information? As Thomas Sowell noted in some book I read years ago (probably Ethnic America), Jewish immigrants were considered to be of subnormal intellect. Few were rich or educated They were from merchant subcultures, not intellectual ones. You declare one thing after another without referring to a source. I'm curious where you got the idea that those immigrants were "Europeans of high culture." In fact, they so offended the American elites and populist dregs alike that stringent anti-immigrant laws were passed in response to their immigration.
Whatever some Americans might have thought or not thought, objectively Irish, Italians and Jews were Europeans and not inferior to Americans in any way , particularly culture.
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.
What is it that causes you to think it hard to imagine that a scapegoated group could not be interned today? That is exactly what has been done to "illegal immigrants" (mostly Latin Americans) for many years. My ex-brother-in-law came to the US with his family when he was 10. He worked constantly and had no criminal record. At 35 he was working at a home improvement store. On a Sunday morning (2010) he was headed out the door to Starbucks, leaving his partner and child at home, and was grabbed by immigration agents. He was incarcerated for 6 months (for a civil offense) and then deported. That, you think, is less odious than what was done to the Japanese?
I guess I wasn't clear. I meant to say it's hard to imagine something like the 442nd Infantry Regiment happening today. Wasn't talking about the internment. See the "Views on America" and "Change Over Time" sections here https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/increasing-skilled-immigration-is
Suppose a guy goes to jail for smoking pot. Is that less odious than what was done to the Japanese?
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.
I doubt you believe that the government owns the US. Most people, including defenders of government, also wouldn't say so. It also doesn't follow that because the government is a monopoly on violence, the entire US is its property.
But isn't the question to ask whether they 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥? Self-identified libertarians don't throw up their hands, say "but it's popular," or shrug their shoulders at any other government horror.
"If third world parasites..."
Finally, a claim that isn't a complete distraction. Have you read Bryan Caplan's work on the empirics of open borders?
I know some socialist/environmental fanatics who think getting rid of energy regulations would turn the US into an ashy, radioactive hellhole, or that privatizing the FDA would cause patients to start dropping like flies. They contrive so much hysteria because a piece of their core philosophy is fundamentally rotten. Much is the same with anti-immigration advocates.
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.
"Libertarian government" is a painful oxymoron. (Surely you meant to say "a "legal" monopoly on violence.) I don't know what a "third world" country is, and I certainly don't know what makes a person from another country more of a "parasite" than an American citizen who has received food stamps, agriwelfare, or an unearned sum of money from the federal government during the covid terror. But the fingers on the government triggers now are those who share your views of poorer immigrants, and those people in power are the ones who inflict misery on Americans today. Parenthetically, I'll say that any person who refers to huge groups of people as parasites is more morally akin to Nazis than to libertarians. It's impossible to dehumanize people while respecting their rights.
I suppose that using an expression like "admitting people" is simply stating the fact of what happens, not a value judgement. It's always a good idea to question enabling terminology, but not to deny reality.
True, but at a certain point, you get a sneaking suspicion they just like using that language (or they actually believe it). It was the reality that people were "owning other people," but if someone said "owning people is just gonna be how our country continues on," you're gonna raise an eyebrow.
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.
If you have a property, who do you think is making your property secure from foreign invasions and domestic criminals? If you make a will, who is ensuring that your will get honored?
Those that secure and defend your property, physically and legally, have a say in whom you rent.
onto property you own, but not onto property owned by others.
All property is necessarily embedded in a national territory, secured by national might, and collectively governed.
You can not eliminate commons.
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.
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?
Then yeah, go ahead and prevent the US from becoming a fascist country. Bryan Caplan concedes that there are hypothetically conceivable situations where you should not have open borders. Your hypothetical doesn't just doesn't match reality in every way. To me, "what ifs" are completely uninteresting. What if the god of immigrants gets so offended by the closed borders of the US that by 2030, he decides to smite everyone on Earth? Would you still support closed borders then?
See also this response I gave to a previous comment of yours:
"Have you read Bryan Caplan's work on the empirics of open borders?
I know some socialist/environmental fanatics who think getting rid of energy regulations would turn the US into an ashy, radioactive hellhole, or that privatizing the FDA would cause patients to start dropping like flies. They contrive so much hysteria because a piece of their core philosophy is fundamentally rotten."
A libertarian who has never heard of the FDA issue would naturally side with privatization if he heard of it. An anti-immigration "libertarian" reaches absurd conclusions because they harbor statist beliefs.
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".
"Libertarians think some laws are simply unjust regardless of their legal status."
The concept of "justice" is pretty beside the point. Without the ability to enforce justice, you get no justice. Libertarians often ignore the tradeoffs inherent in the enforcement of justice, they just kind of assume it all away as an abstraction.
For instance, I think inviting clannish low IQ people into the country it likely to make it less libertarian, because the behavior and voting patterns of such people are not libertarian. Hence, I don't care about "freedom of movement" as some abstract concept if it leads to turning the first world into the third world. No adequate answer (yes, Byrans answers are inadequate) has been provided to this dilemma.
I care about actual justice achieved in the real world, not theoretical justice in some abstract world.
In general I'm skeptical of people "taking the law into their own hands." Everyone's got an idea of what would be best for society, most of them are wrong, and violence is a negative externality in and of itself. Even when people are in the right, violence often makes things worse for their own cause.
In the case of the FSA, I think benign neglect is a good stance. But I also don't think going John Brown was a good idea.
I think an even better solution would have been not to have agreed to things like the fugitive slave act in the first place. It was a bad decision on the part of northern legislators. It would not have taken many people switching their votes to prevent its passage. Better statesmanship would have been a superior outcome to general lawlessness.
“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 to 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?
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.
"Fascism is when it's really really mean to enforce the law! My understanding of fascism comes from a comic book."
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.
“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.
“Supreme Court allows Trump to remove protected status from Venezuelan nationals”
There was no “time period” limiting the legal status of Venezuelans in the US.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/10/supreme-court-allows-trump-to-remove-protected-status-from-venezuelan-nationals/
“There was no ‘time period’ limiting the legal status of Venezuelans in the US.”
Temporary Protected Status is not “migrants who managed to get this elusive permission…” in terms of legal immigration the way most folks understand that term.
And in any case, even if you don’t like my above argument, do you *really* not grok that the “T” in TPS stands for temporary?!?
And further that the status is at the discretion of the current President?!?
You are either being Orwellian, leftist, or both to claim that a program labeled Temporary has no time period and cannot be changed by the current Executive when it was instigated by a previous Executive.
You made no argument, you asked for evidence. I supplied you with evidence and you have disintegrated into Trumpish gibberish, There was no time limit on the residency of Venezuelans, they could have remained legal for the rest of their lives. Trump vacated their legal status. Both facts and reason are against you, so you naturally resort of some version of "commie." Alas, you are for a powerful centralized government and I'm against it, so that places you closer to Fidel.
You supplied evidence that a program designated as temporary was terminated.
That it was… temporary!
Not that someone who had received permanent right to be here had that permanent status revoked.
Under your definition, people who had a temporary visa fit the same description. Yet shockingly, you did NOT use them as your evidence in support of Bryan’s position.
“There was no time limit on the residency of Venezuelans, they could have remained legal for the rest of their lives.”
This second claim is false. Or at best, massively misleading. Yes, politicians could have chosen to extend it indefinitely. But there was no right of the people in question to remain permanently and no obligation to do so.
And yet it is MY argument that is “Trump gibberish, and not yours, which ends in an ad hominem claim that I am a communist authoritarian?!? 🙄🙄🙄
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.
“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 am aware.
And his answers vary between weak and impractical and absurd.
Which is why I think Bryan is very wrong on this issue, even though I agree with him on far more than 90% of his other views.
To be very clear, I support lots and lots of legal immigration, including essentially unlimited high-skill immigration (where Bryan’s arguments are 100% correct).
I just don’t support literally unlimited immigration. Both because of welfare state and because of the culture changes and risks to our governance and institutions that would entail, given birthright citizenship.
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.
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.
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.
H1-B is very different. We should of course allow essentially unlimited high-skill immigration.
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.
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.
I'd agree that the more distinct the policy, the easier it is to classify under an ideological label. I don't think I'd quibble with calling antisemitic laws fascist, but I also don't think it fits perfectly.
The same thing with nationalizing an industry, but I also think socialist has also taken on a broader meaning than fascist.
Most of your long writings on this topic (including your comic book, which I bought and read) are bad, but this is really a new low. Congratulations.
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.
The mirror of "communist" is used by rightists to discredit leftists, although "liberal" is usually considered sufficiently evil by today's right, and tantamount to "communist." Most ideologues engage in terminological character assassination as their capacities to formulate logical arguments are rarely strong. There are very few conservatives now; there are many right-wing populists. By no stretch are Trump and his supporters conservatives; they are radicals. They are not preserving anything. Some imagine that they are trying to return to the country to founding values, but it's child's play to debunk that fantasy.
Maybe our answers hinge in part on this question: Is a nation an infinite resource, or is it, among other things, a social compact (culture and law) between a certain group of people who have the right to admit, or not admit, other people, on grounds that may include their fitness and willingness to join that compact?
the US had virtually no federal control of immigration until the Page Act of 1875 (the limited prior exceptions such the alien enemies act produced less than a few dozen deportees, mainly British during the war of 1812). Is that the year is which the nation became a finite resource? It is one thing to limit naturalization (i.e entry into the social compact of citizenship) but restricting immigration violates the free-association rights of Americans to house or employ immigrants on their property.
It would be a lot easier if we disassociated the idea of nation and some specific geography. If I could "immigrate" to a new nation without moving, that would be the best. The land I own goes with me. Then, a nation could be culture and law and restrict membership in the way that many support.
Bear in mind that we are not starting de novo. We have admitted a large number of people who are putting our high-trust society at risk (and have also, by domestic policy, home-grown many such people). We need to clean up the mess before we can resume a more ideal policy.