In Defense of National Borders

In his essay on “Right Wing Populism” Murray Rothbard proposed to build a political coalition to overcome one of the main obstacles faced by liberty movements at election time, namely, the problem that “the numbers simply weren’t there.” Building a popular coalition would address the numbers problem by uniting those who share political goals in common, even though they have different philosophical and ideological beliefs. If the goal of “individual liberty, private property, and minimal government” is important, then building coalitions with those who also pursue that goal also becomes paramount.

To that end, Rothbard “sought to fuse libertarian principles with a conservative social outlook” through the paleo-libertarian movement. This movement appealed to the “average American,” whom he described as everyone who is not part of the ruling elite—“the rest of us: the middle and working classes.” His goal was “to build a broader political coalition against state overreach.”

One theme around which right wing populism has coalesced, in recent years, is the defense of national borders. Many liberals believe that the defense of national borders is incompatible with individual liberties such as freedom of movement. However, as Lew Rockwell explains, open borders cannot be justified by reference to “freedom of movement”:

As with “freedom of speech,” private property is the relevant factor here. I can move onto any property I myself own or whose owner wishes to have me. I cannot simply go wherever I like.

In the case of nation-states, where the state controls territorial borders, Rothbard argued in “Nations by Consent” that a state inviting the world’s poor to migrate to their wealthier country “does not genuinely reflect the wishes of the proprietors.” It would be akin to the guards of an ancient citadel opening the city gates against the wishes of the citizens. He argued:

The question of open borders, or free immigration, has become an accelerating problem for classical liberals. This is first, because the welfare state increasingly subsidizes immigrants to enter and receive permanent assistance, and second, because cultural boundaries have become increasingly swamped.

To understand why many people are against such culture-swamping, it is necessary to consider the reality of human nature. As Rothbard observed, “everyone is necessarily born into a family, a language, and a culture. Every person is born into one or several overlapping communities, usually including an ethnic group, with specific values, cultures, religious beliefs, and traditions.” 

Ludwig von Mises also observed that man “lives not simply as man in abstracto; he lives as a son of his family, his race, his people, and his age; as a citizen of his country; as a member of a definite social group; as a practitioner of a certain vocation; as a follower of definite religious, metaphysical, philosophical, and political ideas; as a partisan in many feuds and controversies.” This is the reality of human nature.

Belonging to a community is important to many people, and liberalism does not tell them what importance to attach to that sense of belonging. Mises observed that liberalism is a doctrine of peaceful coexistence and prosperity, “a doctrine directed entirely towards the conduct of men in this world. In the last analysis, it has nothing else in view than the advancement of their outward, material welfare and does not concern itself directly with their inner, spiritual and metaphysical needs.”

Among such metaphysical needs is the sense of belonging to a people, a place, and a culture. 

This sense of belonging cannot be derived from the doctrine of liberalism. The converse is also true—liberalism cannot be used as a justification to denigrate people’s sense of belonging. To blame liberalism because “it has nothing to offer man’s deeper and nobler aspirations” is to gravely misunderstand the nature of liberalism, which “concerns itself exclusively with man’s material well-being.”

This does not, of course, mean that in order to be a “true liberal” one must be concerned purely with his own material well-being and should not be troubled by cultural destructionism. That may well be the worldview of many liberals, but it cannot be blamed on the doctrine of liberalism. Materialism, and a disdain for national culture, simply happens to be their personal political ideology.

Similarly, the policy of open borders, when it goes against the express wishes of a nation’s people, cannot be justified by reference to the promotion of free markets—as Rockwell explains, “the result [of open borders] is artificial demographic shifts that would not occur in a free market.”

Free markets do not require the destruction of national culture and the subjugation of people against their will. On the contrary, as Rockwell argues, “a transaction between two people should not occur unless both of those people want it to. This is the very core of libertarian principle.” The “true owners” of territory encompassed within the borders of a nation state are the taxpayers, so the opinion of taxpayers on the destruction of their own culture becomes relevant. He asks:

Should we also have to pay for the privilege of cultural destructionism, an outcome the vast majority of the state’s taxpaying subjects do not want and would actively prevent if they lived in a free society and were allowed to do so?

He also cites Ralph Raico’s argument that “free immigration would appear to be in a different category from other policy decisions, in that its consequences permanently and radically alter the very composition of the democratic political body that makes those decisions.”

It must always be remembered that economics is a science of means, and not ends, and does not dictate the ends to which man should devote his life or the values which he should uphold. As Mises puts it, “To live is for man the outcome of a choice, of a judgment of value.” He chooses how to live, and what values are important to his own life. This is not dictated by economic science.

Defenders of free markets are sometimes seen on social media preaching that people should not attach any value to their own nations because open borders would help to advance free market capitalism. To override the value placed by many people on their own culture, by insisting that they must sacrifice their culture in order to promote “the free market,” is to misunderstand the relationship between individual liberty and economic science. That is a form of scientism, in that it claims for experts in the science of economics the right to dictate people’s values and choices.