A LIBERTARIAN SOLUTION TO THE IMMIGRATION CRISIS
Speech at Porcfest
June 23, 2023
By James Ostrowski1
@JimOstrowski
[email protected]
LibertyMovement.org
Creative Commons License
Today I will present a libertarian solution to the problem of immigration.
The solution I will propose is consistent with libertarian principles, practical,
humanitarian, politically marketable and presents a stark contrast with the
competing programs of the major parties and it moves I hope beyond the sterile
debate between so-called “open borders” and “closed borders” libertarians that
has gotten us nowhere for twenty years.
My approach differs sharply from the perceived but illusory and feined
humanitarian “open borders” approach of the Democratic Party. One of the
key concepts of marketing is product differentiation. It would be strange
indeed if libertarians agreed with Democrats on immigration policy since it was
1 James Ostrowski is a trial and appellate lawyer and author from Buffalo, New
York. He is the CEO of LibertyMovement.org, which promotes direct action
strategies to achieve liberty.
He graduated from St. Joseph's Collegiate Institute in 1975 and obtained a
degree in philosophy from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1980. He
graduated from Brooklyn Law School in 1983. He was a member of the Moot Court
Honor Society and the International Law Moot Court Team. In 1984, he attended
Professor Murray Rothbard’s private seminar on the History of Economic Thought in
New York City.
He is the author of 11 books, several peer-reviewed scholarly articles and several
bar association reports. He has published well over 100 columns and op-ed pieces.
His books include: Government Schools Are Bad for Your Kids (2009), Direct
Citizen Action (2010), Progressivism: A Primer (2014) and The Second Amendment
Works (2020).
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the Democrats who first imposed a statutory passport requirement and it is
Democrats who never repealed that requirement when they had the chance.2
Lack of a coherent and politically palatable immigration policy has hurt
the liberty movement. Since its high water mark with the Ron Paul campaigns
in 2008 and 2012, the liberty movement has sharply declined, liberty itself has
sharply declined and the libertarian populism of Ron Paul has been replaced by
the nationalist populism of Donald Trump. Ron Paul himself did not oppose
border restrictions and building a wall was Trump’s main campaign plank in
2016. Part of the reason we lost momentum was the widespread perception
that libertarians were for quote, “open borders,” whatever that means.
Libertarians do not really believes in borders at all so the idea of defining our
positions by reference to closed or open borders is silly.
Leaving all theory aside, and just being practical for a moment, as long as
people who might otherwise be inclined to join our movement believe that we
believe that all eight billion people on the planet should be able to show up in
Texas, Ohio or Florida tomorrow, claim asylum, become citizens, start voting in
our elections, sign up for Socialism Security and a 100 other welfare programs,
the chances of the modern liberty movement, already, lacking in noticeable
accomplishments in its 54 years of existence, increasing its political influence,
are absolutely zero!
So let’s begin at the beginning. Libertarians believe there is a natural right
to freedom of movement on the planet. We could also call this freedom of
travel. Of course libertarians support this right. It was the libertarians John
Locke and Thomas Jefferson who first propounded this right.3
In the 19th century, there was vast freedom to move around as you please
without papers or passports. The first passport law was put into effect by the
odious Woodrow Wilson during World War as a war measure. The passport
laws were periodically amended, almost always by the progressive Democrats.4
This is ironic since modern Democrats constantly complain about the treatment
2Source: Wikipedia (Statute passed on May 22, 1918; proclamation issued on August
18, 1918).
3J. McAdam, “An Intellectual History of Freedom of Movement in International
Law: The Right to Leave as a Personal Liberty,” Melbourne J. International L. (2011), pp.
11-13.
4Source: Wikipedia (Statutes passed on Nov. 29, 1941, June 27, 1952 and in 1978 with
all-Democratic governments).
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of people entering the country without passports, when it was their own party
that caused the migrants’ misery in the first place. Worse yet, they could have
repealed these laws many times and never did so. Not only did they never do
so; they never even proposed eliminating the passports laws and if you asked
them to do so right now, they would be horrified at the prospect of giving up so
much useful government power over all of us.
So, when libertarians had the maximum influence, freedom of movement
reigned. Progressives started limiting freedom of movement during World War
I, have continued if not expanded those restrictions ever since and the useless
Republican Party has never objected.
The Democrats are not for open borders or freedom of movement in
general. They are merely for temporary open borders for people they expect to
vote Democratic as soon they become citizens. As soon as they achieve the
permanent one-party state they desire, they will shut the borders down faster
than you can say, “build the wall!” They will do so on many different grounds.
Global warming—people who move to the US from the Third World consume
seven times as much carbon-based energy as current residents.5 They will
complain about all the things they complained about for years until deciding to
keep and retain power through immigration: overpopulation, smog, water
shortages, vanishing farmland and forests, pollution and urban sprawl. They will
complain that many new immigrants have primitive cultural beliefs and oppose
their social agenda of feminism and gay rights.
Libertarians should do every thing we can to differentiate ourselves from
such cynical, manipulative, power-hungry politicians. They are not
humanitarians. They did not care about the migrants before they crossed the
border. Why did they come here? What kind of lives will they have in a
country where liberty is declining and the economy is stagnating and the
government is essentially bankrupt? They don’t care. They just want power.
Why are so power-hungry? This is really important since Democratic
politicians pretend to be humanitarians, deeply concerned about the poor souls
trudging over the border, in thrall to the smugglers and drug gangs. They don’t
care about these people at all. They are merely using them as pawns to grab and
keep power. Democrats don’t even care about the people in their own districts.
Have you ever strolled through any of the dozens of solidly Democratic inner-
city neighborhoods they have controlled for fifty years? What really bothers me
when I walk those neighborhoods is the kids. How can people tolerate such
5 Source: WorldPopulationReview.com.
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horrible conditions that children must endure, even though they bear zero
responsibility for the entire mess.
So what is their true motive? I know. I have been watching these people
at very close range for over 50 years. They want power because they are
absolutely terrified of having to make a living in the market economy they
themselves have helped to destroy. They want to continue to live the life of
Riley of the political class, making five times as much as they would make
pounding pavement in the free market, with essentially no risk of ever losing
their “jobs” and having no actual job duties other than opening up the mail,
chatting with the secretary, heading out for a three martini lunch before
checking back at the office briefly, then heading to the golf course. That’s what
this is all about: fear, insecurity and greed, not concern for the poor or
downtrodden. The entire motive underlying their manipulation of immigration
so they continue all their monstrous policies, naked self-interest, is so tawdry
and so trivial that it makes you want to vomit. It reminds me of the old line,
“Why is academic politics so bitter?”—Because so little is at stake.
Here is more evidence that Democrats are not for open borders. They
express no interest in the open borders’ rights of existing citizens. We need to
have passports to travel, return to the country and get into other countries. You
can be strip-searched on the way back in to the US and perhaps have your cell
and laptop downloaded. Democrats have never expressed any concern about
the freedom of American citizens. In fact, they have passed laws preventing
people who owe a certain level of back taxes from getting a passport. They
gleefully imposed idiotic travel restrictions during Covid and will do so again at
the drop of a hat.
If Democrats favored freedom of movement, how do you explain their
hostility to the greatest boon to human movement in human history, the
automobile. They ultimately want to ban cars and force us to use various forms
of odious public transportation. Every Democrat will repeat the fallacious legal
cliche, driving is a privilege, not a right. Wrong! Since freedom of movement is
a natural right, driving is a right, not a privilege.
Democrats use mass immigration from the Third World, not to improve
the lives of those people, about whom they could not care less, but rather to
cling to power. Why do they need to elect this new electorate? Because their
policies suck, have failed repeatedly ever since the Democratic Party shifted
from being a relatively libertarian party in the Grover Cleveland era to a
progressive big government party from 1913 through around 2014, when it
became the left-progressive big government party we know and love today.
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The problem for the Democrats is that their policies suck and all of them
have failed so they face a continual existential question? How do we continue to con
Americans into voting for us? When FDR’s idiotic economic policies failed, he
started working on how to get involved in the war in Europe. He eventually
succeeded through dogged determination and persistence and this degenerate
scoundrel was able to win two more elections. Truman won in 48 because he
had a brilliant campaign strategist, super-lawyer Clark Clifford and a typically
pathetic progressive GOP opponent, Thomas E. Dewey.
Kennedy won because he looked like a movie star in the debates against the
notoriously uncharismatic Nixon. LBJ won because JFK was shot. Carter won
because of Watergate. Clinton won because Bush lied about raising taxes.
Democrats win by accident and because of weak and pathetic GOP
opposition, not because their policies are good because their policies are
absolutely horrendous. The US was a center right country when Reagan won
two landslide victories, the second by winning 49 states. The only reason the
Democrats are in charge right now is that they elected a new electorate through
immigration. This has allowed them to continue the age-old failed progressive
policies of big government, endless hot war, cold war, drug war, inflation and
regulation that reached its peak during the Covid lockdown.
Libertarians who unwittingly support the very same so-called open
borders immigration policies as the Democratic Party, who are using them to
destroy the country right before our eyes, are what we call in politics “useful
idiots.” We must not risk being confused with bad people trying to cling to
power so they can perpetuate obviously bad policies that are destroying the
country. And there is no reason to do so when libertarian principles allow us to
formulate an entirely different and far better approach.
So that is where we stand. But what we do to restore the freedom of
movement that our ideological ancestors fought for and won in the 19th
century? And how do we use those principles to formulate a moral, practical,
humanitarian and politically marketable immigration policy that can be sharply
contrasted to the Democrats’ cynical and power-hungry approach?
We begin at the beginning with first principles. Human beings have the
natural right to freely move around the planet. Freedom of movement.
Freedom of travel.
Now, liberty is the right to do what you wish with what you own so, there can be
no right of freedom of movement on justly owned private property. Freedom
of movement also cannot include any sort of aggression so it is obvious that
armies bent on invasion of another country have no natural right of freedom of
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movement. Nor do terrorists have a natural right to travel so they can blow
people up.
Further, since you have no natural right to other people’s stuff,
immigrants or migrants or refugees have no right to welfare, free medical care or
free anything else. Of course, without public assistance, they will no doubt be
taken care of by all the people who post “hate has no home here” signs on their
homes.
[Note: I first set forth this proposal in my 2019 Kindle book, How We Can
Revive the Liberty Movement and Defeat the Progressive State of America, and called it
the International Easy Pass. Conceptually, this may sound like yet another
passport, it is not. It could be issued by a private company that would urge
governments to accept it in place of a passport. Basically, when you apply for
an easy pass, you would sign a statement agreeing that you will be traveling only
for peaceful purposes, will not interfere with local politics, vote, seek citizenship
or seek or accept welfare. Applicant would also certify that they have adequate
resources or insurance for any health care needs that may arise. The private
firm would then do an extensive background and criminal records check and
issue the IEP. The pass holder would then submit the IEP to any country they
wish to visit which would of course then do their own security check before
allowing entrance. This is the most libertarian approach we can muster in a
world of states.]
Think about it, when a tourist from Paris gets off the plane at LaGuardia
Airport to stay here for a few weeks, does anyone care? Does anyone talk about
building a wall? Nope. Remember this principle. People get along in the marketplace
but not in the government-place. No on cares about the French tourist because he
will be engaging in a series of voluntary, mutually beneficial market transactions.
He will not be applying for welfare or free health care.
What else will the French tourist not be doing? He won’t be voting or
otherwise interfering with local politics in any way and thus his presence is not a
threat to dilute the vote of existing citizens or affect elections or politics in any
way. So we begin to see the solution to our problem.
The distinction between natural rights and positive law rights is critical.
The French tourist does have a natural right to move around the earth on his
own dime so long as he is peaceful, pays his own way, doesn’t engage in war,
terrorism or other violence and doesn’t intervene or interfere with the local
political process that is the exclusive concern of American citizens, not tourists.
That is why no one cares about him coming here, indeed, we are happy to have
him because he is boosting our economy. Finally, he is not being used or
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exploited as a tool of an evil left-progressive political party bent on its mission
to continue to destroy the greatest country that ever existed for ordinary
citizens.
So, our French tourist, like all humans, does have a natural right to move
around the world as he so chooses, but he does not have a natural right to
become a citizen, vote, get welfare, or engage in any form of violence.
By separating the natural libertarian right of free movement from all the
positive law or government law rights such as citizenship, welfare and voting, we
immediately solve the entire immigration problem or crisis, end the Democrats’
exploitation of migrants for nefarious political purposes, stay true to libertarian
principles, and finally propound an immigration platform that doesn’t guarantee
we will never win a national election.
If that wasn’t enough of an accomplishment for one speech, let me go a
lot a lot further and, since libertarians, unlike Democratic politicians, are
humanitarians and do care about Third World immigrants and refugees, let’s do
something the Democrats never do. Let’s figure out why there are so many people
fleeing from their hellhole countries to the United States. To paraphrase The Godfather,
today, we will settle all family business.
The first thing that is striking about where immigrants are leaving and
where they going, if we pay close attention, is that they leaving the least well-
armed countries and literally dying to get into the country that has the most
heavily armed civilian population by far, the United States. The US has ten
times more guns per capita than the average country. Refugees vote with their
feet and flee poorly-armed, violent countries for the heavily-armed, more
peaceful United States. Don’t believe gun-grabber propaganda. On average,
refugees choose to live in a country with 19 times as many guns per capita as the
country they fled.6
As I explain in my book The Second Amendment Works (2020), a well-armed
civilian population deters government tyranny, creates political stability and
deters war, civil war and coups d’etat, the very problems that force people to
leave their ancient homelands and travel thousands of dangerous miles to get to
the US. This is a completely avoidable tragedy. The Second Amendment has
worked for the US. We have the leading economy on earth, we are third in
tourism7, a leader in foreign investment, have one of the world’s oldest written
6 Sources: Wikipedia; WorldPopulationReview.com.
7 Source: WorldPopulationReview.com.
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constitutions, political stability and we have avoided the democide of our own
citizens that has plagued many other countries. The Second Amendment works.
And we are, as I proved in my speech on Tuesday, one of the least violent large
and diverse countries on the planet.
The right to bear arms works so why we do we continue to hoard this
remarkable right? It is time to share this great invention with oppressed Third
World peoples whose disarmed status allows their tyrants to make their lives
miserable. It is time to fight for a Global Right to Bear Arms as one prong of a
complete libertarian program to solve the immigration problem worldwide.
Libertarians can easily solve yet another main driver of immigration: the
drug war that the progressives invented right here in 1914 with the Harrison
Narcotics Tax Act. It is beyond dispute that a main driver of immigration from
Latin America is the violence and political instability caused by the Democrats’
drug war. Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala are three of the leading sources
for migrants. If you ask them whey they come here, many will tell you it is
because they feared violent drug gangs. The violence and corruption
engendered by the drug war also creates political instability which makes economic
development more difficult and encourages people to flee for economic reasons
as well.
So, libertarians can once again distinguish our policies from the Uniparty
and show our humanitarian concern for immigrants before they cross the border
by advocating for an immediate end to the progressives’ idiotic global drug war.
Let’s talk about yet another main driver of refugees for which
progressives bear much responsibility, their pointless and endless foreign wars.
Since Vietnam, LBJ’s baby, America’s wars in Third World counties have driven
millions from their ancient homelands. In more recent years, this has been true
of American wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and now Ukraine.
Here is the irony. The progressives, applying their—force solves all
human problems approach to foreign policy—created an immigration crisis they
then exploit to hang on to power at home so they can continue to impose their
failed policies on Americans and around the world. Libertarians need to fly as
fast as they can from any connection with the Democrats’ so-called open
borders policy.
There is one more big step we can propose that may be harder to
accomplish since it far more extensive and will require some difficult ideological
deprogramming. Put simply, we need to urge countries around the world to
increase liberty generally, especially economic liberty. Most immigrants are not true
refugees or asylum seekers but rather economic refugees seeking a better life. But
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why? That’s easy. Because they live in countries where they have little economic
liberty and the correlation between liberty and wealth is almost perfect. This is
a tall task to be sure but at least we can be the first political movement to
actually state the source of the immigration problem in America: tyranny abroad,
often propped up by our failed foreign policy. For example, since FDR cut a
deal with the Saudis during World War I, the US has helped prop up that evil
regime, which truly competes with North Korea for the worst on earth.
To start to sum up, today I have deconstructed the alleged open borders
policy of the Democrats and reconstructed the alleged open borders policy of
the libertarians; I have developed a platform that is consistent with libertarian
principles, practical, politically marketable and sharply distinguished from the
competition. But I have gone far beyond that to identify the leading drivers of
illegal immigration and asylum seekers into US as various failed policies, almost
all of which are the fault of failed progressive policies: the drug war, gun control
and endless foreign wars.
This complete, compact and airtight program promotes a wide variety of
values libertarians should embrace, including:
• Liberty
• Freedom of travel and movement
• Peace
• Humanitarianism
• An end to the mass movement of peoples as a political
weapon
• Protecting nations from outside political interference
• Protecting the rights of Americans to their own freedom
of movement.
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