The Irish Problem

by Gene Callahan

The most asked and most interesting of the questions was, "Your article was good for a laugh and all, but does your analogy really hold?" In other words, are there deep similarities between babies and immigrants, or was I just employing a rhetorical trick? I hope to show that there are, and I was not.

Let's imagine we are in the US in 1850. Irish immigrants are pouring into the country. In the eyes of the bulk of the population of the US, they are of sub-standard intelligence, indigent, inebriate, disorderly, possessed of a bizarre culture (Celtic-Catholicism) that is at odds with the predominant US culture (Anglo-Protestantism), and just generally undesirable. The anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party is a dynamic populist force in US politics.

Let's further imagine that, by some miracle, the current American apparatus of anti-discrimination laws and "social" benefits suddenly appears full-grown in the next year. American residents are able to collect unemployment; receive AFDC, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid payments; and sue for discrimination in the workplace, in housing, and at places they shop.

Suddenly, all of those "No Irish Need Apply" signs are useless. The Irish can sue their way into places that don't want them. Furthermore, their drunkenness and idleness no longer concern just them and their neighbors -- they can now get on the dole. What was once a severe annoyance has now become a terrible burden.

I contend that, in the alter-1851 US described above, every argument that could be put forward against free Irish immigration would apply equally well against free Irish procreation.

We should first note that the Irish who had come in under more libertarian arrangements would be justly staying wherever they were at the time the new welfare state came to power. Therefore, there is no libertarian rationale for violating their rights to remain where they are.

Let us proceed to consider two situations: each Irish family decides to have ten children, or each family decides to have no children, but invite ten relatives from Ireland to come live with them. (If you want to include rental contracts forbidding non-immediate-family from living in an apartment in the picture, you can just suitably increase the number of invitees by the Irish-Americans who do not have such contracts.)

Now, it is clear that both sets of newcomers are justly arriving in the country, in that they are invited to live where they will be staying. The problem, from the point of those who are quite understandably worried about the "Irish question" under the new regime, is that they won't stay there. Whether children or immigrants, at some point they will tend to wander off the property.

Not only will they get off the property, but with public roads and anti-discrimination laws in existence, they can't be kept out of many places. People who detest the Irish will be forced to rent to them, sell to them, hire them, and so on. It's true that Irish babies won't be ready to head out and violate the property rights of Gaelophobes quite as quickly as will immigrants. But does anyone want to contend that a substantive issue of libertarian rights turns on a few years difference in when a potential rights violation will occur?

One solution I've seen proposed is to require that the "invitation to come" be made explicit by some current resident. Let's say a law is passed requiring immigrants to be invited to stay at the residence of a legitimate property-owner for one year in order to come to the US. I contend that will not solve the problem anti-immigration theorists want to solve at all, because there will arise a market in places to gain US residency. Such establishments would have a motivation to advertise in Ireland and might encourage even more immigrants to arrive.

Either babies or immigrants will tend to be more numerous than they would have been without government social programs in existence, although, of course, the incentives apply to the parents in the first case but to the immigrants themselves in the second. Similarly, both babies and immigrants would compete for jobs with established residents. It is true that an immigrant might be competing immediately with an Anglo-American, while a baby might only compete with the fellow's children. But again, would the difference decide a question of rights?

While the children might be slightly more Americanized than the immigrants, they difference would only be of degree, not of kind. The children would, most likely, remain Catholic, be raised in Irish ghettoes, attend Irish Catholic schools, and know mostly first- or second-generation Irish immigrants during their life. They will be scarcely less foreign than newly arrived immigrants.

If anti-immigration libertarians are taking their stance as a holding action, just trying to balance the forces of the open-border libertarians to keep the status quo from becoming more pro-immigrant, the technique may work. But if they really mean to reduce the number of immigrants from current levels, I must ask them if they have seriously contemplated the Federal expansion necessary to fully control the borders?

Such an expansion would be necessary if new laws were to do more than just shift the balance of legal and illegal immigration and perhaps create a small decline in total immigration. Since immigrants arrive by plane, boat, car, and foot, Federal surveillance of all parts of the country must be increased. The movements of tourists must be closely tracked to make sure they don't stay or work while they are "vacationing." (You'd be surprised at the number of illegal workers who "vacation" regularly in the US.)

An area of several square miles around my house is flooded by illegal immigrants every morning in the spring, summer, and fall. The aftermath of 8:16 into the local train station is a Mexican diaspora. Are my neighbors upset that the State has sent an invading force into their community? No, the illegals are going to work at their houses. Productive, private citizens and migrant workers are cooperating to evade the State and peacefully conduct mutually beneficial private transactions.

Given private individuals' complicity in the "law-breaking," it is clear that a serious effort to reduce immigration would have to investigate and punish those "criminals" as well. Private homes would be subject to search to ensure they were not housing or employing any illegals. Everyone's bank balance would be monitored and all suspicious payments traced.

Folks, that is not a pro-liberty scenario, unless you're of the "it can only get better by getting worse first" school of libertarian thought. (And I'm not arguing here that the school of thought is wrong. But if that is the line of thinking to which an anti-immigrant libertarian is adhering, it should be made explicit, i.e.: "I'm for an immigration crack-down because it will bring about a police state, hastening the day of full freedom.")

So, what can we do? I'd like to begin by telling anti-immigration libertarians that I don't dismiss your concerns in the least. The Anglo-American residents, in the imaginary 1851 US I depict above, had many valid reasons to be worried about "the Irish problem." I only say that we must address the problem in the most libertarian fashion available.

Fortunately, there are a number of reforms available to us that entail the government doing less for immigrants, rather than more to them (and residents):

• The US could close down citizenship or greatly extend the period after which it can be granted. Since libertarians don't believe that anyone should be able to vote away anyone else's rights, forbidding that power to immigrants does not take away anything from them that is justly theirs.
• Reserve automatic citizenship for the children of citizens. The argument follows that above.
• Forbid government benefits from going to immigrants. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and so on, should not be available to anyone. If immigrants are the group that we can wean off of them first, so be it. Proposition 187 in California was a successful example of such an initiative.
• Eliminate civil rights protection for immigrants. Once again, no one has the right to force himself onto another's property. Not applying anti-discrimination laws to immigrants might be a first step in ridding ourselves of such laws completely.

It would seem to me that the measures above could be agreed to by most libertarians. Furthermore, they obviate the risk that we will be the sponsors of a massive new Federal program, Operation Iron Borders, or whatever they would name it.

* * *

I'll close with a brief digression on Hans-Hermann Hoppe's ideas on a "natural order" in society where people segregate based on "ethno-cultures."

In that Hoppe's "likes associate with other likes" indicates that people will freely associate with those whom they prefer to associate with, then it is a tautology. If every free grouping of individuals -- a chess club, a band, a gardening society, and so on -- is termed an "ethno-culture," then who could object to his contention? For example, every week I attend the NYU Austrian Colloquium with a group of scholars from quite diverse ethnic backgrounds. But we are "likes" in that we all have an interest in Austrian economics.

But it is clear Hoppe means more than that, since he says of his natural order, "Whites live among Whites and separate from Asians and Blacks." Hoppe is engaged in social reductionism: We are "like" others in many ways, race being only one of them. Race is important to human action to the extent that the actor thinks it is important! There is certainly no a priori reason to suppose that race will predominate as most people's criterion of who is like them. An attempt might be made to base such an assertion on "historical laws," genetics, or something of the sort. But it won't do to simply forward an "insight" that "likes associate with likes."

Hoppe goes on to say: "Nothing like a society where members of different ethno-cultures live as neighbors or in close physical proximity to each other (as propagated by some American multiculturalists) emerges."

Presumably, Hoppe feels that such mixing as occurs is only due to government meddling. Unfortunately for his thesis, that isn't the case. In my own house, Whites do not live separate from Asians, and, at times, we have not lived separate from Blacks either. Yet, none of our arrangements involved any sort of government program!

Indeed, Professor Hoppe's own life is a counter-example to his thesis, for rather than choosing to remain in Germany, where the population was certainly "ethno-culturally" closer to him, he chose to emigrate to the US and live in Las Vegas, hardly a hotbed of German-American culture.

Hoppe quotes Mises, presumably trying to draw on support from the great man for his position: "...even if such a thing as a natural and inborn hatred between various races existed, it would not render social cooperation futile…." Inexplicably, Hoppe left out the previous two sentences: "Like the mystical sense of communion, racial hatred is not a natural phenomenon innate in man. It is the product of ideologies."

The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.

March 13, 2002  

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