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Open Immigration: Courage, Fear, and Ethics

My Great Grandfather, Klaas Schoolland, immigrated to America from Holland during relatively peaceful times in 1892. Though peaceful, it was still an act of courage to leave behind everything that was familiar and to chance the hostility of an alien culture in order to find opportunity and a good life. It takes even greater courage to risk one’s life in a rickety boat facing storms, pirates, starvation, and sharks.

I cannot fault those who try. I admire them. I can only hope that I would have the same courage if I were in their shoes. If I had been a German, Polish, or Dutch refugee in the 1930s, I’m not sure if I would have had the courage to flee an increasingly hostile Nazi regime. Would I have defied the authorities and tried to sneak abroad, even though thirty nations, including the U.S., had declared at the Council at Evian that the quota for immigrants was full? Or would I have watched my family be exterminated?

It also takes courage to help those who are in trouble, yet few are willing to offer sanctuary if it is prohibited by law. In the 1850’s a few abolitionists aided runaway slaves, even though this “Underground Railroad” violated the Fugitive Slave Act that required the return of slaves to masters. Fortunately, there were some who defied the law. And some juries even asserted jury nullification to declare that the law was wrong.

Early in the 1990’s the US government fined the captain of a cruise liner, the HMS Royal Majesty, for rescuing desperate Cuban refugees off the coast of Florida. The fine was $3000 per head for the ‘crime’ of rescuing refugees at sea and bringing them to American shores. Thereafter, most every other sea captain turned a blind eye to the desperate plight of refugees perishing at sea.

Is this the courageous behavior of people who preach on Sunday morning “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”? Is this the behavior of people who proudly commemorate those who defied authority and sheltered a young Anne Frank? When law and morality are in conflict, which side do we take?

The purpose of law is to protect individual rights. When the law violates individual rights, then the law is wrong and immoral. Morality trumps the law. To return people to tyranny is to collaborate with tyrants.

FEAR

What of the many arguments against immigration? Aren’t any of these arguments valid? I say “No.”

Of course there are problems that arise when people move around the planet. I don’t deny this. But I don’t blame those problems on liberty. Liberty finds a way of solving problems. Instead I look to see if it is the repression of liberty that is the cause of those problems. It usually is.

Underlying every argument against the movement of people to freedom is fear. Such fears are sometimes openly expressed, but more often they are veiled or disguised. The fear of immigrants denotes the absence of courage.

Courage welcomes competition. Fear shuts it out. Courage embraces the newcomer. Fear expels the newcomer. Courage champions liberty. Fear denies it.

What are these fears that immigrants arouse? Some basic fears have to do with culture, change, employment, security, and crowds. Most often it is labor protectionism or racism. Ayn Rand once called racism the most primitive form of collectivism.

Why do people scorn immigrants? “They don’t speak the language. They don’t know our customs. They might take our jobs. They might be criminals. They will overpopulate the land.” The same could be said of newborn babies, but isn’t. Infants are seen for the human potential they offer, not for their helplessness at the moment.

But immigrants aren’t children, they are mostly adults—the most productive and resilient people in the world. This is the selective process of migration. The most energetic are courageous risk takers.

According to economist Julian Simon, immigrants to the US provide extraordinary benefits. Most immigrants come when they are in their most productive years. Overall, new immigrants average only one year less in education than the native population of the US, but their children are highly motivated and excel beyond the level of native Americans in school. Immigrants have a higher proportion of advanced degrees than the native population, especially in high productivity areas of science and engineering.

Immigrants to the US, even those from poor countries, says Simon, are healthier in general than natives of the same age. Family cohesion, with a tradition of hard work, is stronger than among natives. Simon also reports on 14 separate studies concluding that immigrants do not cause native unemployment, even among very sensitive categories of low-paid, minority, low-skilled or even high-skilled groups of natives.

TREASURES OF THE EARTH

Simon reported on another 12 studies revealing that immigrants do not have a negative effect on wages. There is no fixed number of jobs. Enterprising immigrants come with arms, legs and brains that create employment and wealth as entrepreneurs wherever they settle. Those who have little education have traditionally had the motivation to take on the four D’s: work that is either too difficult, too dangerous, too dirty, or when it is too dark for most American workers.

Immigrants to not “steal” jobs because jobs do not belong to native employees. Jobs are the prerogative of employers who create the paychecks. Many employers are also immigrants who are highly entrepreneurial and have increased employment for natives throughout American history—especially in Silicon Valley.

Simon concluded from a review of the research that, when they are not prohibited from working by anti-labor laws, immigrants contribute more in taxes than they draw out from government welfare services. And over the years, immigrant earnings exceed the earnings of comparable native groups. Julian Simon asserted that the continuation of welfare benefits for aging native citizens may well depend on the contributions of youthful immigrants.

If this is so, then why aren’t immigrants treated as treasures of the earth? Why aren’t politicians the world-over competing with each other to lure these valuable human resources to their land in the same manner that they compete to lure capital investment or oil, the products of human labor? Why aren’t immigrants seen as an inspiration to liberty – as were the immigrants Mikhail Baryshnikov, Enrico Fermi, Irving Berlin, Albert Einstein, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises?

Except for well-to-do tourist, student, and business visitors, newcomers typically cause xenophobic fear among many Americans today. This fear will not stop immigrants from the most natural of human impulses, the striving for freedom and opportunity.

The nation with the greatest concentration of immigrants, with the greatest population density in the world, is also one of the most prosperous. Hong Kong has developed so rapidly in the past fifty years that because of immigration and a free society it now enjoys greater prosperity per capita than its former colonial ruler, Great Britain. And all those people are better off today than if they had been left to die at sea or in some communist prison.

The ethics are clear: if I do not have the right to stop a person from peacefully pursuing freedom and opportunity, then I do not have a right to ask a politician to do this for me. The law may declare someone illegal, but if his or her actions are moral, then it is the law that is immoral and must be opposed.

SLOTH?

One of the most frequent arguments used by Americans against opening borders is that immigrants come for welfare and that innocent US taxpayers will be compelled to pay for these slothful immigrants. It is an interesting contrast: people fear immigrants for working too hard and “stealing” jobs and simultaneously people fear immigrants for working too little and taking away welfare. So which is it?

I am always asking my economics students about the work ethic of immigrants. I ask them to imagine being an employer who is facing two prospective employees. Little is known about the job applicants except this: one is an American citizen and the other is an immigrant. Now which prospective employee do the students identify as the harder worker of the two: the American citizen or the immigrant? They always expect that the immigrant would be the harder worker.

Many Americans are hard workers, no doubt. But immigration from anywhere is a selective process. Those who move from one country to another are often the most energetic, the most courageous and enterprising. Up to ten million Americans live abroad today and they, too, are often highly energetic, courageous, and enterprising.

When immigrants start businesses in America, hire Americans and offer to sell products to Americans, it is the right of consumers to buy from these immigrants if they choose. It is the right of employers to hire them if they choose. And it is a moral courtesy to be grateful for their contributions to our prosperous life instead of being sour, ungrateful, and resentful.

Is it correct to suppose that in-migration is caused by the existence of a welfare magnet? If it is true that immigrants come to America for the welfare, then it would follow that once in this country, immigrants would move to the states with the most welfare. My research proves that the opposite is true. Both the native-born population and the foreign-born population flee states with the highest welfare and move to those with the lowest welfare.

There are some high-profile exceptions, but most migration results from a desire for opportunity, not for welfare. People who are too lazy to work are also too lazy to leave everything that is familiar to them and go to a place that is unfamiliar and potentially hostile. This is even more true of people who move across national borders at great personal risk.

In refuting the ‘welfare magnet theory’, the ethics of individual liberty oblige us to hold people accountable for their own actions, not “collectively” for the actions of others. Immigrants are no more responsible for the politicians who create welfare laws in the US than they are for tyranny in the country they are fleeing.

Indeed, it is wrong to compel people to pay for the welfare of others. But this is true for the native-born as well, not just immigrants. This is true for all kinds of welfare, including corporate welfare and foreign aid to corrupt tyrants abroad. Better to exorcize the politicians who create such systems of legalized theft.

THE ETHICS OF LIBERTY 

Every Fourth of July, the people of America proudly reaffirm the bold words of Thomas Jefferson that, "WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men Are Created Equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." The seventh protestation in that Declaration of Independence was against King George III for standing in the way of newcomers: “He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither…” The Founders’ words,  that they believed worthy of risking their lives, are derived from principles of liberty, not mere convenience.

It comes to this: We should not be devising schemes and rationalizations for the restriction of liberty. Rather, we should take part in the fight against fear, prejudice, custom and law to champion freedom. This is practical, humanitarian and, above all, ethical. Let us be a part of the drive for liberty. Let us champion the multitude of immigrants who are seeking liberty in the same manner that we would if we were in their shoes.