All posts by Nathan Smith

Nathan Smith is an assistant professor of economics at Fresno Pacific University. He did his Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University and has also worked for the World Bank. Smith proposed Don't Restrict Immigration, Tax It, one of the more comprehensive keyhole solution proposals to address concerns surrounding open borders. See also: Page about Nathan Smith on Open Borders All blog posts by Nathan Smith

Illegal immigrants and runaway slaves

3 Comments

From my friend Seth Vitrano-Wilson, a Christian missionary:

Throughout the history of the United States, there have been people who didn’t have the freedom to go where they wanted to go. They couldn’t work for themselves in the US and earn their own money legally. If the government found them entering an area illegally, they would deport them back to where they came from. A lot of people believed none of them should be allowed to live freely and legally in the US at all, but even those who accepted they could be in the US free and legally made a distinction between those who earned their free presence in the US by following the rules, and those that broke the law by moving locations via a secret network of human traffickers.

Two hundred years ago, these people were called slaves.

Today, we call these people immigrants.

Nearly everyone today would agree that slavery is wrong, that sending a runaway slave back to their master is wrong, and that helping a runaway slave is right. We wouldn’t care if someone gained their freedom to move and work by “legal” or “illegal” means, because the whole premise that you could justly restrict people’s movement and employment via slavery is an affront to justice. We find it reprehensible that people would keep others as slaves simply for their own economic gain, or because of some supposed inherent superiority by birth, or because we fear how “they” will change the character of “our” country.

So why do we think differently about immigration restrictions today? Why is it wrong to restrict people’s freedom to live and work where and how they want if we call it “slavery,” but somehow right if we do the same thing and call it “immigration policy”? Two hundred years ago, runaway slaves were treated as criminals and deported back to their masters—a terrible stain on our nation’s history. Today, we do the same thing to illegal immigrants—breaking up families, ruining lives, impoverishing the impoverished.

If we look to the example of the abolitionists, the underground railroad, and the brave runaway slaves who risked their lives for freedom, we see just how hypocritical and unjust so much of our rhetoric about immigration is today. “Illegal” immigrants are brave defenders of the principles of freedom and justice. “Legal” immigrants are those blessed with masters kind enough to give them a sanctioned path to freedom. Would we ever dare tell a slave hoping for freedom to “get to the back of the line”? What line?? How many slaves could realistically expect to gain their freedom by legal means? And how many poor immigrants-to-be can realistically expect a legal visa under the current draconian restrictions?

Rather than debating about whether we should spend $20 billion versus $100 billion on the border patrol, or whether we need to catch 90% of the runaway slaves (I mean, “illegal immigrants”) crossing the border, we should be opening up the floodgates of freedom. Let people live and work where they will.

Editor’s note: See this much longer post on the lessons for open borders from the abolition of slavery.

Response to A. M. Fantini

3 Comments

The Freeman hosted a debate on immigration a few days ago (I’m not sure when exactly it was posted) between myself and A.M. Fantini, editor-in-chief of The European Conservative and secretary general of the Hayek Institute in Vienna, Austria. My arguments won’t be news to readers of this site, though this may be the most novel paragraph:

Open borders would undermine the legitimacy of the welfare state by taking away the border as blindfold. Such policies would make it obvious that the welfare state does nothing to help the world’s poorest, so why have it at all? Indeed, since open borders are far superior to foreign aid or the welfare state as means of helping the desperately poor, advocating open borders is by far the best way to seize the moral high ground against statists. And open borders would allow people to vote with their feet against predatory governments.

Let me focus instead on the arguments made by my interlocutor, Mr. Fantini. He starts by saying he sympathizes with many pro-open borders arguments and would “almost” like to advocate open borders…

But I can’t—not because I am heartless, but because of the fundamental importance I give to the classical liberal order and its prerequisites.

Fantini mentions that immigrants need to be denied access to “tax-funded goodies,” else “free migration only ends up growing the welfare state”– I more or less agree with him there– but his main argument is that “political communities have thrived so long as a majority of their members accepted certain principles—and the shared values that uphold them,” and “supporters of open borders fail to recognize the dangers of welcoming immigrants who are hostile to classical liberal principles and values.” Then he offers evidence:

The riots in Stockholm last month illustrate just such dangers. While some pointed to ethnic, racial, or religious reasons for the violence (others blamed bad schools, over-regulated labor markets, and the welfare state), few addressed the reality that most immigrants are simply not ready—or willing—to live and work in Swedish society. There is virtually no pressure nor incentive for immigrants to embrace Swedish values.

Over the past few years, there have been similar riots in other European capitals, with immigrants railing against their adopted countries. During September’s London riots, rioters cried out, “some of [you] were calling for freedom of speech and democracy—but isn’t it time we made an uprising?”

Such statements are reflective of a wider attitude among immigrant youths across Europe. In Austria, France, Denmark, Holland, and Germany, they blame society for their isolation, marginalization, and poverty. Never mind the civics courses, free language classes, welfare benefits, and subsidized housing; at their cores, these immigrant groups reject liberal democratic values.

How should libertarians respond if immigrants are aggressively opposed to their values? Should libertarians allow immigrants to move into a community even if they seek to undermine such values and formal institutions? Should the libertarian then become a refugee himself?

In Principles of a Free Society, I actually carved out of my pro-open borders position a possibly expansive exception for Muslim immigration, inasmuch as Muslims are arguably committed to a rights-violating ideology and therefore do not qualify as peaceful immigrants. Vipul challenged me on this point, and we debate whether the principles of freedom of speech and religion should extent to non-discrimination in immigration decisions on the basis of speech and religion. So I’m somewhat sympathetic to Fantini’s concerns.

That said, there’s something odd about a European libertarian complaining that immigrants “are agressively opposed to their values.” Isn’t the native European population aggressively opposed to libertarian values? Fantini complains that there is no pressure for immigrants to embrace Swedish values. Objection 1: If that’s the problem, the most direct solution is to create pressures for immigrants to embrace Swedish values, not to exclude them by force. But, Objection 2: Should libertarians really want immigrants to embrace Swedish values, that is, to embrace the values of a quite humane but also quite socialistic society? Fantini complains that immigrants are alienated despite “the civics courses, free language classes, welfare benefits, and subsidized housing,” but all those taxpayer-provided handouts are contrary to libertarian principles and teach immigrants anti-libertarian lessons.

If immigrants “seek to undermine… values and formal institutions,” I would ask two further questions. 1) Are the values and institutions they seek to undermine good or bad? 2) If they are good, are the immigrants likely to succeed in undermining them?

In Europe, immigrants are far from the only threat to democracy and free speech. A Swedish pastor was jailed for anti-gay remarks. Until recently, Mein Kampf couldn’t be sold in German bookstores. In Norway, Christian missionaries have been arrested for spreading the Gospel. Last year, a German court banned male circumcision, which of course is an absolutely fundamental violation of the religious freedom of Jews and Muslims. Meanwhile, the project of European unification has been progressively alienating power from national governments to a European Union regime with weak mechanisms of democratic accountability, in spite of repeated setbacks at the ballot box. I worry a bit that illiberal Europeans and illiberal Muslim immigrants will somehow collaborate in establishing a regime where an anti-Christian and socialistic bureaucracy concedes, first bits of turf, later vital principles, to rising Islamofascism. But the biggest problem for European libertarians is Europeans, not immigrants.

In a way, Fantini’s remarks were actually rather off-topic, since the topic was whether the US should open its immigration, and the problems Fantini cites in the European case hardly exist in America. In America, Muslim immigrants are patriotic.

I kind of like Fantini’s policy advice, precisely because I don’t think it would be effective. He suggests:

When considering immigration controls, it’s important to be guided by classical liberal principles—and avoid increasing federal involvement. There are alternatives to spending $4.5 billion on extended border fencing and “continuous surveillance” as proposed in current legislation.

For example, apply the principle of subsidiarity. In practice, this means addressing the issue in the most decentralized (local) way possible. As Hoppe has argued, this can be far more effective in controlling immigration than depending on the state, while also reinvigorating the “intermediate social institutions and hierarchies” in society—thus ensuring the survival of classical liberal principles.

I’ve responded to Hans-Herman Hoppe’s arguments before. It’s hard to understand what Fantini is envisioning here. The reason people want to control migration at the border, e.g., with expensive fencing and surveillance, is that once they’re in, immigrants automatically enjoy much of the freedom of movement that citizens enjoy. We don’t check the IDs of people who are walking around the streets, or riding public transportation, or as passengers in private cars. We sometimes check the IDs of drivers, and you need an ID to get on a plane, but still, localities just don’t really have the procedures to control migration. Should we establish them? Should towns, neighborhoods, state governments, or whatever be empowered to curtail people’s property rights by controlling whom owners can rent or sell real estate to? The notion reminds me of Cuba’s Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. That said, if there were a proposal to introduce state migration control while abolishing federal migration control, I’d support it as a lesser evil. Some states would liberalize, and state migration controls would be easier to evade. But it seems like a strange cause for a libertarian to support. I do favor gated communities. That is, I think it’s basically okay– though some questions remain to be asked on a case-by-case basis– to establish small territorially exclusive communities through private, consensual arrangements.

Are the linguistic externalities of open borders important?

2 Comments

One of the most obvious, automatic arguments against open borders is that people won’t be able to understand each other. “They don’t speak English,” is one of the knee-jerk complaints about (some) immigrants. People will tell anecdotes about how they went into the grocery store and wanted to ask where the soup was, and the employees couldn’t help them because they were only Spanish-speaking. I don’t think I’ve seen the movie  Now, as our linguistic assimilation page points out:

To the extent that the problem [of the failure of linguistic assimilation] is genuine, a keyhole solution to it is to impose linguistic and cultural fluency requirements as a precondition for migration.

And a billion people or more speak English, so that still opens up a huge amount of immigration. Of course, more would learn. But let’s set that aside for the moment. Suppose we’re thinking about the immigration of non-English speakers.

Let me respond first of all to the supermarket anecdote. The supermarket could presumably hire English-speaking employees. The supermarket would presumably have to pay more to English-speaking employees, reflecting their greater economic value and the greater opportunity cost of their time. The supermarket would pass through the costs associated with their higher wage bill to customers. So customers face a trade-off: English-speaking staff, or higher prices. The question is not, would you rather have English-speaking staff in the grocery store, but, is it worth it to pay 1% or 5% or whatever more for your groceries to have English-speaking staff? If most customers think it is worth it, the supermarket, to remain competitive and maximize profits, would presumably give customers what they want by raising prices and hiring English-speaking staff. So, the fact that the supermarket has hired non-English-speaking staff is evidence that most customers prefer lower prices. Maybe you’re not most customers. Maybe you’d be willing to pay 5% extra for your groceries so that the supermarket staff would be able to tell you where the soup is in English. But why should the government use force to make your preferences prevail over other consumers’ preferences? Notice, by the way, that the conflict is not, for the most part, between English-speakers and non-English-speakers, but among English-speakers with difference preferences over grocery prices versus ease of communication with supermarket staff.

Moreover, the customer who wants English-speaking help may not have to do more than drive down the street to a different grocery store. Typically, free -market capitalism offers a wide variety of goods and services, catering to all tastes, and even minority and niche markets get served. It’s quite possible that the customer who complains about the non-English-speaking staff is actually, at the same time, revealing his preference for non-English-speaking staff plus low prices, by shopping at the supermarket that employs them when other supermarkets, who insist on good English, are available, albeit they charge more. In that sense, it’s improper to regard the lack of linguistic assimilation as a downside of open borders at all. I should be careful not to exaggerate here. Real world markets are imperfect, and the rough-and-tumble of markets probably will see some consumers’ welfare fall, more or less randomly, because of the interaction of these imperfections with their preferences. If you live in a small town with only a few shops, the arrival of immigrants really might deprive you of your preferred shopping environment as other people’s preferences create a new, less English-speaking equilibrium. In the same way, if white hats become fashionable, black hat lovers may suffer as stores don’t bother to carry the unpopular item. But such effects will be small, and society as a whole will enjoy gains from trade with immigrants.

A certain misunderstanding is worth guarding against at this point. Suppose we compare two worlds, in the first of which a country’s 300 million people speak a few dozen languages and have no language in common, whereas in the second, the country’s 300 million people speak those few dozen languages plus they all speak another language which is the common language of the country. Clearly the second situation is better. But that’s simply because the second country has been given, ex hypothesi, a large endowment of extra human capital. In reality, there is an opportunity cost to acquiring human capital. So this is the wrong thought experiment with which to evaluate the effects of open borders.

The starting point of an economic analysis of the effects of linguistic diversity must be that (a) linguistic human capital is valuable, but (b) immigrants who come to a country despite their lack of the appropriate linguistic human capital reveal that they gain thereby, and (c) natives who do business with immigrants despite their lack of the appropriate linguistic human capital reveal that they gain thereby. Markets and prices should accurately value linguistic human capital, and should efficiently resolve the question of whether it is worth it for this or that non-speaker of a country’s dominant language to immigrate or not. The only case which is definitely an exception to this market efficiency argument is when people use language for non-market cooperation, e.g., when you go up to a stranger on the street and ask him for the time, or for directions.

Now, being able to ask strangers for directions and rely, not on getting them since they might not be able or willing to help, but at least on having a common language, certainly has some economic value. The inconvenience of asking two or three people for directions and finding that they are non-English speakers, thus wasting one’s own time and theirs, is certainly a negative externality likely to be associated with open borders. Given the rarity of the event in question, however, I am inclined to rate the importance of the negative linguistic externalities of open borders as low to the point of being trivial. But since this argument pops up again and again, am I, perhaps, missing something? Are the negative externalities of lacking a common language somehow much more important than I suppose? Why? How could this be measured?

Immigration, identity, nationality, citizenship, and democracy

16 Comments

A subtle danger for open borders advocates is that we may devote too much attention to arguments from eloquent restrictionists who, however, are themselves well outside the mainstream. Restrictionists like Steve Sailer at least have arguments that can be answered. But those arguments tend to have a “hard right” flavor that would probably alienate most Americans, who, however, are not open borders supporters, either. Unlike the restrictionist hard right, the mainstream is largely destitute of arguments, dealing rather in arbitrary and groundless moral assertions, e.g., “we have to control our borders,” or in wildly false claims of fact, e.g., “all we’re asking is that they put forth some effort and come in legally.” The great fact that we live in a world apartheid regime where most people are excluded from birth from the United States and generally from the most prosperous countries and because of this are subject to far more poverty, violence, and political tyranny than the favored few, is not something that the mainstream has come to grips with and cold-bloodedly endorsed. It is something that the mainstream is largely ignorant of. They suspect; they hear rumors; they could inquire further and neglect to do so; but the moral test still largely lies in wait for them. The main task of an open borders advocate, then, is less to answer a body of coherent arguments, than to wander in a kind of shadowland of ignorance and be prepared to counter all manner of naive claims that might jump out of the darkness. What people will ultimately say when they’ve realized the nature of the world apartheid regime we’re living in is hard to predict. They might say anything or nothing. They might become instant, skin-deep converts to open borders, only to flip as soon as the word “illegal immigrant” is mentioned, or the likelihood that some natives would see their wages fall. Or they might make any of the arguments in the drop-down menus at this site, or others… although come to think of it, the background articles at this site do seem to do a pretty good job of outlining the major themes in the inarticulate mainstream resistance to open borders. Anyway, it’s probably more important to answer this mainstream resistance than to duel with Steve Sailer and other articulate restrictionists who, however, are almost as far outside the mainstream as open borders advocates themselves are.

Now, my sense is that the focal point of mainstream resistance to open borders, which prevents people from seeing the issues clearly in the first place, and shapes their reactions when they have understood it, lies, somehow, in the intersection between the five concepts mentioned in the title of this post: immigration, identity, nationality, citizenship, and democracy. Who are we? to begin with, as the title of Samuel Huntington’s book asks. If people immigrate, who are they? Are immigrants them or us? What nationality is an immigrant? What about citizenship? On what basis can and/or should citizenship be granted or withheld? Do “we”– whatever that means– have the right to grant or withhold citizenship as we see fit, or are there some principles of justice at stake here, constraining what we can do? If there are principles, what are they? If citizenship can be withheld from other people, can it not be withheld… from (thinks the ordinary person) me? Why not? What we’re up against is not so much a set of convictions as a set of confusions. As long as everyone you deal with is a citizen and a national and a resident, etc., of one’s own country, as long as we’re all “the same,” all these questions don’t arise. That’s a nice, secure feeling. Immigrants cast doubt on all the usual categories.

Democracy is relevant here because it gives all these questions particular urgency. As I always say, democracy is a good form of government because the people who live under the laws have a say in what they are, and immigration restrictions are the mathematical limiting case of undemocratic law because the set of people who are on the receiving end of them is the exact inverse of the set of people who have a say in making them. This argument will probably strike anyone but a dogmatic restrictionist as plausible, but it is problematic because the suggestion that foreigners ought to be given votes does not lend itself to any obvious structural realization. Should the entire human race get to vote in American elections inasmuch as they touch on foreign and immigration policy? How would that work exactly? “One person, one vote,” runs the democratic slogan, but we don’t actually mean that every single person gets one vote. Children and felons aside, we mean that every single… well, citizen… or maybe, national… gets to vote. In short, every one of us? But again, who are “we?” Open borders advocates can respond to the electing a new people argument by saying: Let them in, but don’t automatically let them vote. But where does that leave “one man, one vote?” Where does that leave democracy? Immigrants are a threat partly in the same way that the returning heir of a deposed dynasty is a threat: he may not be doing any harm for the time being, but his mere presence is a challenge to the reigning principles of legitimacy.

Ideas about nationality and citizenship vary greatly around the world. This was brought home to me during my travels in the Caucasus, where I was often asked Kto ty po natsionalnosti?— “What nationality are you?” I would say Amerikanets, “American,” but they would object, Net, eto — grazhdanstvo. Kto ty po natsionalnosti? “No, that’s a citizenship. What nationality are you?” For people in the Caucasus, nationality vs. citizenship is a fundamental distinction. States and empires have come and gone, making and bestowing and revoking and altering various citizenships; and people move about, too; but Azeris, Georgians, Ossetians, Armenians, Lezgins, Russians, Chechens, Avars, Kabardins, Ingush, and so forth remain. You can’t become an Azeri; you’re born one, or not; at any rate, that’s the local ideology. It’s not true. A colleague of mine had an Armenian name but was Azeri and Russian by blood. In the chaos of the revolution, her grandfather had simply put an Armenian aristocratic suffix on his name because he liked it, as if I were to call myself Nathan O’Smith because I like the Irish, or Nathan von Smith from pretensions to be a Germanic philosopher descended from some castle-owning baron. Of course, I couldn’t get away with that here, but literate history is not very deep in the Caucasus, and many personal and place names have been Russified, though Russian rule dates no earlier than the 18th and 19th centuries. But the local ideology assigns people to “national” categories by birth, and treats citizenship as a political superficiality overlaid on the ancient facts of nationality. Since there are no ancient demographic facts (not even pretended ones) in America (Amerindians aside), people in the Caucasus don’t accept “American” as a nationality. I insisted: Amerikanets. I have some English and Norwegian roots, of which I know little and care less. They are not the most fundamental fact about who I am. They are not, to an American, really important. The point, though, is not that the American view of nationality and citizenship is better or worse than that of the Caucasus, but simply that concepts of personal and collective identity vary greatly, both in the world today and over the course of history. The former Soviet Union is the region that I know best, other than the US, but co-blogger Grieve Chelwa discusses the artificiality of borders in Africa, and my impression is that in the Middle East, tribal identities on the one hand and pan-Arab and even pan-Islamic identities are more important than “national” ones, while in Latin America solidarity within countries is impeded by racial divisions and class stratification and nationality is somewhat eclipsed by regional identity among the Catholic Spanish speakers ranged from the Tierra del Fuego to the Rio Grande. The US, parts of western Europe, and a few East Asian countries, where nationality = citizenship supplies a powerful source of identity that unites polities, are exceptional.

Why does identity matter? Voter status aside, is it– to broaden a question recently raised by co-blogger Sebastian Nickel– morally relevant? Before answering that, what kinds of identity are there? We classify human beings in many ways: nationality, citizenship, class, caste, religion, gender, family, tribe, civilization, race, education, profession, place of employment, place of residence, political party, membership in clubs and societies and organizations, honors and achievements, and no doubt many others. Answers to the question “Who are you?” might identify a person in any number of ways, but virtually always they will help to define and distinguish a person while also establishing their membership in one group or another. “I am a Christian” or “I am a Communist” establishes one as a member of a broad community of believers. “I am an American” defines a nationality and a citizenship; “I am an Azeri” establishes a nationality but not a citizenship, for there are Azeri citizens of Russia and Georgia as well. One might also say, “I am a parishioner of Holy Trinity parish,” or “I am a member of the American Economic Association,” or “I am a sculptor,” or “I am Joseph’s brother-in-law.” People have, not one identity, e.g., American, but many identities, overlapping and interacting in complex ways, sometimes in tension, sometimes reinforcing each other, sometimes compatible but not particularly relevant. One can be an economist and a Republican or an economist and a Democrat: both combinations are entirely feasible, though a Republican economist is probably a somewhat different kind of economist (more free-marketeer) than a Democratic economist, as a Lutheran plumber is probably not different from a Presbyterian plumber.

Now, it’s not too hard to see why some of these kinds of identity are morally relevant. Religious identity, for example, is morally relevant because believers in various religions feel morally bound to abide by the various rules of those religion (though of course they don’t always live up to this), and also because religious rituals tend to regulate participation according to religious status. It would be immoral for a non-Catholic to commune in a Catholic church, for example, because at least from the Catholic point of view this is sacrilege, and there should always be a presumption against doing things that are gravely offensive to others. Professional identity is morally relevant, because professional skills qualify one to do things that non-professionals can’t do safely (or even legally). It would be immoral for a non-pilot to fly a commercial airplane, or for a non-doctor to conduct a surgery. Family identity is morally relevant: it is all right for a woman to sleep with her own husband, but not to seduce another woman’s husband; it is all right for a man to tell his own children what to do and punish them for disobedience, but not (usually) for him to order around, or punish, other people’s children.

Let me try some more challenging suggestions. Might it be morally unacceptable for a philosopher to accept a traditional prejudice for which he could discover no arguments in favor, yet at the same time, morally acceptable for a laymen (non-philosopher) to accept the same traditional prejudice? The layman doesn’t have the time or talent to reason things out for himself with any kind of depth or thoroughness, so the best he can do is largely to believe what he’s told. But the philosopher is capable of thinking things through, of doubting, of demanding, seeking and appraising evidence, and of exploring alternatives, so for him, to accept a traditional prejudice that critical reasoning tends to challenge or overturn, would be culpable lazy-mindedness. Again, might it be acceptable for a peasant to run away in the face of danger, but unacceptable for a knight to do the same? In the knight, perhaps, but not in the peasant, there has been inculcated a certain ethos of valor which is both noble and useful, and society expects him to take risks and fight for what he thinks is right; but the peasant has never been taught such virtues, and what society tacitly asks of him is merely that he labor to support his family. How about this case: a certain Leader, not possessing any particular legal authority but full of wisdom and experience and commanding deference from many people thanks to his prestige and charisma, has ordered you and me to look after and protect each other. The Leader is a busy man and did not stay to hear our answer, and we only exchanged glances with each other, yet each of us expects the other to fulfill the Leader’s expectations. Has a kind of social contract been created, even without explicit consent, with some force to bind me to protect you in time of danger, and vice versa? Is such a thing possible?

From arguments like the above I would derive an argument that countries tend to be morally relevant, though I think virtually any parallelism between the “countries” of the contemporary world is without merit, and while countries are morally relevant, they are relevant in very different ways. For example, consider the issue of how the cultural legacy of mankind is to be preserved. We cannot all learn all there is to know about all cultures: that’s far too much to fit into any human being’s mind. But it is desirable that much of mankind’s cultural legacy be preserved. Not all of it: there is an opportunity cost to preserving cultural artifacts, and many, many cultural artifacts just aren’t worth preserving. But it probably is desirable that many people have read Shakespeare, and Hemingway, and Tolstoy; that many people are Bob Dylan fans or know how to square dance; that many people have thoroughly absorb the ethos of Dostoyevsky; that many people understand Kant and Hegel and the whole brilliant succession of German philosophers; and so forth. And it might be quite a wise division of labor for many people to give a priority to mastering the treasures of “their own” culture, for Germans to know something about Kant and Russians something about Dostoyevsky and Americans something about Dylan. Aside from being (probably) an efficient way to preserve mankind’s cultural legacy, this is also likely to give German, Russian, and American neighbors something to talk about with each other. And fellow nationals can help one another master the national curriculum. It is surely easier to find someone to introduce you to the genius of Dylan in America than it would be in Germany.

Again, in matters like disaster relief or national defense, mere informational and logistical considerations can do much of the work in establishing a principle that people should prioritize their own compatriots. Americans, it may plausibly be suggested, are better able to discern how much aid hurricane-hit New Orleans needs, and what kind and when, than Europeans are. When it comes to customs and manners, the best thing to do morally may often be to learn whatever customs and manners prevail locally and practice them, so as to ease communication and cooperation and hospitality. There are obvious advantages to having people who live near one another speak the same language, and this makes a certain degree of linguistic segregation efficient. It does not follow that non-English speakers can be excluded from America by force, but that linguistic homogeneity is a reasonable desideratum for societies is clear enough.

Yet in spite of all these arguments, I don’t think there is or ought to be a general answer to the question “What is nationality?” It means different things to different people, and all the things it means have their own histories and their own usefulness. The sovereign nation-state paradigm of politics which has been universalized since World War II attempts to organize the world on a national principle, treating this as a universal feature of human nature and human society, when it isn’t. This leads to all manner of awkwardness.

When it comes to citizenship, the famous dictum of John F. Kennedy, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” is instructive by how quixotic and irrelevant to contemporary affairs it sounds. In the United States, citizenship is automatic and doesn’t demand anything of us. It can’t legitimately demand anything of us because it’s automatic. Conscription used to demand a real sacrifice of citizens, which was rather unjust, since citizens hadn’t agreed to be citizens. But at least, in the time of conscription, it was not bogus to speak of the duties of citizenship. Well, there is jury duty, too. And taxes, only they are not a duty associated with citizenship, for people with low enough incomes need not pay them, while resident foreigners who are earning wages do have to pay them. Citizens do not have to vote, but “good citizenship” is nonetheless a plausible explanation of why so many people do vote, and devote considerable effort to following politics in order to decide whom to vote for. Volunteering for the military might be another way to practice “good citizenship,” but only a small part of the population does that. If citizenship involved more duties to go with the privileges, one could argue that immigrants be allowed to perform the duties and thereby earn the privileges of citizenship.

I argued earlier that there are many kinds of identity. Let me add that it is quite false to suppose that there is some natural or necessary hierarchy among these kinds of identity, such that national identity is somehow the most important or basic or fundamental. One person might be an American first, Christian second; another might regard Christianity as his only real ultimate loyalty and being an American a mere practical asset; a third might consider himself a sociologist first and foremost and at home only in the international community of sociologists. I believe that the primacy which our own age attaches to nationality and citizenship vis-a-vis other forms of identity is anomalous and problematic. We may need to give freedom of association more respect, and allow other forms of identity to flourish, while at the same time we need to be more generous in recognizing and defending the rights simply of human beings as such. The trouble is that one of the functions of identity is to provide a moral structure for society, and people are justifiably nervous that if we deny the moral relevance of countries, we’ll end up with a society deficient in structure, excessively fluid and chaotic. There are many ways to answer the questions Who am I? and Who are we? but there probably is some danger that people will ultimately be left saying, “I don’t know,” or with answers so haphazard, subjective, and changeable as to be almost empty. Such, at any rate, is my attempt to diagnose the vague fears of the mainstream about open borders.

Hospitality in The Odyssey

1 Comment

Restrictionists frequently try to marginalize the arguments of open borders by claiming that, as Steve Camarota put it in our TV debate, “all societies, all sovereign states throughout all history have always had the idea that they can regulate who comes into their society,” or more generally, by treating state sovereignty as a universal norm of human life and migration restrictions as an essential element of sovereignty. In fact, passport controls were the exception rather than the rule until the early 20th century, and as far as I have been able to judge the evidence (but more research would be useful), there is little by way of analogous institutions in former times. What there is evidence for is a norm of hospitality across many cultures.

In particular, hospitality is perhaps the foremost moral theme of The Odyssey, one of the two great epics of ancient Greece. It was written (according to tradition) by Homer, who was also the author of the other great Greek epic, The Iliad. The Odyssey and the Iliad were to the Greeks a little like the Bible to the Jews: major source books of ethics, theology, and history; central reference points for the culture; definers of the Greek identity. The great difference in character between the Greek epics and the Bible expresses very well the great difference in character between the Greeks and the Jews. I previously wrote about the immigration policy encoded in the Mosaic law of the Old Testament. Having formed my open borders views, and even written a book about it, long before I studied the Old Testament teachings on the treatment of the foreigner, I was amazed at the extent to which the Bible confirmed my views, if indeed it does not go even farther than I had dared to go in insisting that strangers be welcomed and well-treated. In its own, quite different way, yet hardly less emphatically, the Odyssey, too, gives open borders supporters all they could ask for.

Odysseus, the hero and namesake of the Odyssey, is a Greek king from the heroic age, who participated in the great war that ended in the destruction of Troy. That war originated in the pollution of hospitality by Paris, the Trojan prince who was a guest of Spartan king Menelaus and seduced his wife Helen. Hospitality is a two-way street. Guests as well as hosts have obligations. On his return voyage, however, Odysseus runs into all sorts of troubles and disasters that keep him from getting home. The epic begins about twenty years after the fall of Troy, by which time Odysseus’s house has been overrun by men– “the suitors”– who are wasting his goods and seeking to marry his wife. The suitors, those unwelcome guests, are the villains of the epic, who in the climax of the story are slaughtered by the returning Odysseus. Again, hospitality is a two-way street, but it would be a stretch to compare the suitors to illegal immigrants, for it is not their mere presence in the household, but their theft of Odysseus’s goods and their hopes of marrying Odysseus’s wife that seem to make them the villains. Worse, at one point they plot to murder Odysseus’s son. Moreover, when Odysseus returns in the guise of a wandering beggar, they treat him with great inhospitality. Thus they deserve their fate.

Meanwhile, Odysseus is a love-slave on the island of the goddess, Calypso, but in spite of her divine embraces, yearns to return home. At last, the gods grant him to sail to the country of a people called the Phaecians, where they know, but Odysseus does not, that he will be well-treated and given passage back to his home country of Ithaca. After a rough sea voyage he is wrecked on the Phaecian coast, where he says (this is in Book VI):

“Alas,” said he to himself, “what kind of people have I come amongst? Are they cruel, savage, and uncivilized, or hospitable and humane? I seem to hear the voices of young women, and they sound like those of the nymphs that haunt mountain tops, or springs of rivers and meadows of green grass. At any rate I am among a race of men and women. Let me try if I cannot manage to get a look at them.”

Note the dichotomy Odysseus makes here. A people may be (a) cruel, savage, and uncivilized, or (b) hospitable and humane. Hospitality, humane treatment of guests, is the first, defining feature of civilized peoples. Of course, it might only be uppermost in Odysseus’s mind because he will soon be obliged to seek their hospitality. Still, the identification of hospitality with civilization shows the importance of this norm.

Shortly afterwards, Odysseus (known to the Latins as Ulysses) finds himself in the court of King Alcinous of the Phaecians, where (in Book VII) he presents himself as a suppliant:

So here Ulysses stood for a while and looked about him, but when he had looked long enough he crossed the threshold and went within the precincts of the house… Every one was speechless with surprise at seeing a man there, but Ulysses began at once with his petition.

“Queen Arete,” he exclaimed, “daughter of great Rhexenor, in my distress I humbly pray you, as also your husband and these your guests (whom may heaven prosper with long life and happiness, and may they leave their possessions to their children, and all the honours conferred upon them by the state) to help me home to my own country as soon as possible; for I have been long in trouble and away from my friends.”

Then he sat down on the hearth among the ashes and they all held their peace, till presently the old hero Echeneus, who was an excellent speaker and an elder among the Phaeacians, plainly and in all honesty addressed them thus: “Alcinous,” said he, “it is not creditable to you that a stranger should be seen sitting among the ashes of your hearth; every one is waiting to hear what you are about to say; tell him, then, to rise and take a seat on a stool inlaid with silver, and bid your servants mix some wine and water that we may make a drink-offering to Jove the lord of thunder, who takes all well-disposed suppliants under his protection; and let the housekeeper give him some supper, of whatever there may be in the house.”

When Alcinous heard this he took Ulysses by the hand, raised him from the hearth, and bade him take the seat of Laodamas, who had been sitting beside him, and was his favourite son. A maid servant then brought him water in a beautiful golden ewer and poured it into a silver basin for him to wash his hands, and she drew a clean table beside him; an upper servant brought him bread and offered him many good things of what there was in the house, and Ulysses ate and drank. Then Alcinous said to one of the servants, “Pontonous, mix a cup of wine and hand it round that we may make drink-offerings to Jove the lord of thunder, who is the protector of all well-disposed suppliants.”

In this passage, it is clear that King Alcinous has some authority to decide who will be received in his hall, though it does not follow that he gets to decide who is present on the territory of his kingdom. But the king is not exactly at liberty to exercise this authority simply as he happens to prefer. Echeneus, who is characterized as an “old hero,” suggesting an exemplar of virtue, declares that it is “not creditable” to treat “a stranger” otherwise than to welcome him by giving him an honorable seat. Moreover, there is a theological justification for this: “Jove [Zeus] takes all well-disposed suppliants under his protection.” Here there is a striking parallel with the Old Testament, where it is written that God “defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing” (Deuteronomy 10:18). Clearly, Echeneus is not making this up, but rather expressing the conventional wisdom, “speaking plainly and in all honesty,” and the king quickly echoes him, saying that “Jove [Zeus] the lord of thunder… is the protector of all well-disposed suppliants.” Continue reading Hospitality in The Odyssey →