Immigration As a Right?
Daniel Sutter
I have been dismayed by libertarians arguing for immigration as a human right. The saying, “No human is illegal” has a warm feeling to it. But the rights claim conflicts with the property rights of others. Here’s my hypothetical. Suppose one of America’s large, privately-owned ranches became an independent country. As part of the United States, the owner clearly possesses the right to exclude others; persons entering without permission would be trespassing. How can gaining sovereignty take this property right away from the owner? People from across the world cannot move to this privately-owned country without permission.
Murray Rothbard made a similar point in a 1994 Journal of Libertarian Studies paper, “Nations by Consent.” Professor Rothbard also sees incompatibility, based on anarcho-capitalism, or abstracting to imagine an entirely private nation. He observes:
. . .on rethinking immigration on the basis of the anarcho-capitalist model, it became clear to me that a totally privatized country would not have “open borders” at all. If every piece of land in a country were owned by the same person, group, or corporation, this would mean that no immigrant could enter there unless invited to enter and allowed to rent, or purchase, property. A totally privatized country would be as “closed” as the particular inhabitants and property owners desire. It seems clear, then, that the regime of open borders that exist de facto in the U.S. really amounts to a compulsory opening by the central state.
https://mises.org/power-market/immigration-right
