If you have open borders, does that mean that a right to asylum is superfluous? It would seem that way because for the most part the right to asylum now signifies that someone has the right to stay in a country, and under open borders practically everyone has such a right anyway. Perhaps someone would receive more support as an asylee than otherwise. But that seems secondary and would probably follow from general humanitarian considerations alone, not from some right to asylum.

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Most countries in the 19th century had open borders or something that at least came close. And many countries also had some right to asylum. But the meaning of the latter was much narrower and quite different from how the term is understood today: An asylee could not be extradited. First, some other country had to demand extradition. And only then did it become important whether someone had to be considered an asylee or not.

Extradition was possible for common criminals according to a system of bilateral treaties that regulated when someone had to be delivered up. Usually, there were some restrictions, e.g. a country would not extradite someone if the „crime“ was not a crime according to its own legal system or the expected penalty appeared excessive. But in general, there was the perception that it was in the common interest of all countries to cooperate when it came to fighting crime. Basically, this has not changed since then.

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However, the exception were crimes that were „political“. Again, the word had a much more definite meaning than today. In current parlance, the adjective „political“ goes with „politics,“ a rather vague concept. But in the older usage, something was called „political“ if it referred to the „polity,“ or in other words that part of society organized on coercive terms: the state. Hence In the 19th century (and in a strict sense also today), „political crimes“ denoted acts that were directed against the state and the political order. Examples would be treason, high treason, an attempt to usurp the throne, participating in a coup d’etat, revolution, or an insurrection, and also acts of terrorism, such as assassinating or attempting to assassinate a head of state.

Here are a few examples for what was considered a political crime and made someone eligible for asylum. I take them from Franz von Holtzendorff’s book, published in 1881 (I have republished an annotated edition): „Die Auslieferung der Verbrecher und das Asylrecht“ (The Extradition of Criminals and the Right to Asylum):

• Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (1808-1873), later the French Emperor Napoleon III, grew up in Switzerland where he served in the army and became a citizen of the Canton of Thurgau. In 1836, he attempted a coup d‘etat in France which failed. He was imprisoned, but released on the condition that he went into exile in the US. He did that and moved to New York. But the following year, Louis-Napoléon returned to Switzerland when his mother was on her deathbed. France demanded his extradition, but the Swiss refused to comply. To put pressure on Switzerland, the French army mobilized, and a war was only averted when Louis-Napoléon went into exile in London.
• The Hungarian Revolution was surpressed by Austrian, Croatian, and Russian troops in mid-1849. The last insurrectionists under Józef Zachariasz Bem (1794-1850) fled to Turkey, where Bem, his officers and generals, as well as 6,000 Hungarian and Polish soldiers converted to Islam. Austria demanded their extradition. But the Sultan refused, backed by British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston. As Franz von Holtzendorff notes: „Also today it should not be forgotten that it was a Muslim government that protected persecuted Christians from the wrath of a Christian government.“ Giving in to further pressure, the Sultan transferred Bem, now a commander in the Ottoman army, to far-away Aleppo where he suppressed a pogrom against the Christian population in 1850.
• In 1854, Jules Jacquin, a French manufacturer and one of his workers, Célestin Jacquin, who both lived in Belgium, tried to blow up the train of Emperor Napoleon III with an „infernal machine,“ a load of dynamite triggered when the train moved over it. France demanded the extradition of the two assassins, but Belgium eventually declined. However, France pressured Belgium into changing its legislation in 1856, so that assassination of a foreign head of state was reclassified as a common crime and hence the perpetrator could be extradited. But this change was not applied retroactively to the Jacquins.
• In 1879, Leo Hartmann (1850-1913), associated with the „Narodnaya Volya“ (People’s Will), tried to blow up the train of Tsar Alexander II near Moscow. He fled to France which refused to extradite him to Russia. Hartmann was later expelled from France and went to the US, but eventually returned to France where he died in 1913 (Russian Wikipedia claims he died in New York in 1908).
• The backdrop to Franz von Holtzendorff’s book was the tense situation in 1881. After two assassination attempts on the German Emperor Wilhelm I in 1878, Bismarck had pushed his Socialist Law through which outlawed the Social Democratic Party and its organizations although the Social Democrats were not responsible for the attacks. The party moved their headquarters and press to Switzerland. When in early 1881 members of the „Narodnaya Volya“ finally succeeded in assassinating Tsar Alexander II, his son and successor Alexander III called on other countries to join Russia in its fight against terrorism. Interested in improving relations with an ally, Bismarck supported this move, and started to threaten Switzerland wíth an invasion if the Swiss did not extradite the German Social Democrats. But the Swiss did not cave in. On a rally in Zurich in support of the right to asylum, one militia captain named Bürgi even suggested that Switzerland become the 40th state of the United States of America. Only after a decade of further pressure, Switzerland eventually made concessions, but still did not extradite the German Social Democrats who just had to move on to Great Britain. The above caricature is from 1881 and appeared in the German satirical weekly „Berliner Wespen“ (Berlin Wasps): „Rothkäppchen“ (Little Red Riding Hood, „Schweiz“ (Switzerland) written on her skirt) carries a basket „Asylrecht“ (Right to Asylum). She taunts the wolves with: „Bangemachen gilt nicht!“ (Scaremongering doesn’t count!).

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Why were political crimes considered as in a different class so that extradition was ruled out? The main explanation that Franz von Holtzendorff gives goes something like this: Common crimes are crimes against common standards. Murder is always wrong. Different countries may have different definitions and different sentences for common crimes, but there is a major overlap. And so in most cases, a murderer in one country is also a murderer in another country. That’s why countries can work together and should do so.

Political crimes, though, are different because they refer to a specific political order. And political orders can and do change. E.g. whether someone has committed a political crime during a revolution depends on which side wins. As the saying goes: „One person’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist.“ And since there is no common standard, there is also no common ground for different states to work together as in the case of common crimes. There is rather a common interest in not cooperating. You could be on the losing side the next time, and then it would be good if other countries granted you asylum. And that’s why political crimes should be treated differently, and extradition should not be an option.

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There were vast differences between countries in the 19th century. The various states of the German Confederation (1815-1866)—with some exceptions like Hamburg or Frankfurt—often extradited those wanted in another state for political crimes because they had a common interest in suppressing the liberal opposition. As far as I can tell, also later Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia did not practice a right to asylum.

In most countries, there was no explicit right to asylum. The decision was discretionary and made by the administration without recourse to the courts. The one exception was Belgium which codified a right to asylum already in 1833, and where the courts made the decision and not the administration. In other countries, as far as I understand it e.g. in France, granting asylum was for some time not so much a matter of principle, but more or less opportunistic depending on general considerations. In other countries, like Switzerland, the UK, and the US, asylum was a strong customary institution.

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As the above examples show, the right to asylum in the 19th century had some rather astonishing consequences:

• Asylum cases were few, but very high-profile. Sometimes they could have extensive repercussions, especially for smaller countries like Switzerland or Belgium, and even create a situation where a war became likely.
• The right to asylum was only important if some other country demanded an extradition for political crimes, which probably is just as rare an event today as it was in the 19th century.
• Most reasons for granting asylum nowadays did not fall under a right to asylum at all. Religious or ethnic persecution, e.g. a series of pogroms in Southern Russia (now mostly in Ukraine) after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, meant that many Jews tried to emigrate. They could immigrate freely to countries like the UK or the US, and this had nothing to do with a right to asylum.
• Terrorists had a right to asylum, at least as long as their deeds could be interpreted as trying to affect a change of the political system. Killing a head of state would qualify, killing people on the street would not. Terrorism in the 19th century was mostly of the first type although there were some exceptions. E.g. Irish terrorists, mostly operating out of Brooklyn, at one point tried to sabotage the transatlantic traffic between the UK and the US with „infernal machines“ (bombs with a timer). And during the Fenian Dynamite Campaign, subway and train stations in London were bombed in 1883 and 1884. The „Narodnaya Volya“ (1879-1884) had a narrow focus on high ranking officials and the Tsar, but later terrorists in Russia (Socialists-Revolutionaries, Anarchists, and Social Democrats, both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) were less discriminating.
• Former heads of states, even if they might have been responsible for common crimes could not be extradited with a right to asylum. If an extradition was for a common crime, but there was a suspicion that this was a pretext to get hold of someone for a political crime, as a general rule, there could be no extradition. The most famous example was perhaps the German Emperor Wilhelm II who fled to the Netherlands at the end of WWI. The Allies demanded his extradition, but the Netherlands refused to comply.
• The right to asylum was not about being allowed into the country or being allowed to stay. That followed from other principles that were unrelated. Actually, it was possible that someone could obtain asylum and also be told to leave if he posed a risk (e.g. because the country wanted to avoid a war with a strong neighbor). An asylee was only safe from extradition to a country that wanted him for political crimes (or common crimes as a pretext).
• The right to asylum did not entail any support from the receiving country other than perhaps what anybody would have gotten. Since most of the asylees were well-heeled or had some organization behind them, there was probably no support at all for them. So what is now viewed as a central part of asylum was absent, namely humanitarian assistence. This would have been an entirely different issue in the 19th century, not part of a right to asylum.

When it became clear that Donald Trump would be the 45th president of the United States of America, quite a few Americans felt an urge to leave the country. The website of the Canadian immigration agency crashed. And one thing many perhaps realized for the first time in their lives: Borders are closed. It is not so easy to escape if it were necessary. Welcome to the real world!

Personally, I find the reaction understandable, but overblown. Yes, Donald Trump will be a horrible president, and he will make life hard for many people. That’s really sad, and words cannot convey how sad it is. But those will be illegal immigrants or travellers and potential immigrants from Muslim countries. He will be very careful not to go against most Americans because he wants to be re-elected in 2020 (start to get used to that thought). Comparing him to Hitler was hyperbole during the election campaign. Be very glad that it is not true.

In my view, a Trump presidency opens up a golden opportunity to draw a lot of good people to other countries. Or for economists: Lots of human capital trying to move elsewhere. If other countries were smart, they would grab this opportunity with both hands, and open their borders for Americans. As a German, I think Germany should do it ASAP. If the European Union is worth anything, it should do it on a European scale. I would not expect many immigrants, but I love the principle also in this case.

Now, there could be problems with American immigrants. They might come for the welfare, they might not be compatible with the culture here and not understand our sense of humor, they might work too hard and hate six weeks of vacation, they might be „böse people“ (= “bad hombres”) who commit crimes (the homicide rate in the US is more than five or even ten (!) times the homicide rate in Germany), and a few of you are even terrorists (Ted Kaczynski, Charles Manson, Timothy McVeigh, I am looking at you). That’s why I would want to make a proposal which may look a little complicated, but which I think can handle all this.

Actually, Germany should not only open borders for Americans immediately, but also for anyone from another developed country. Let’s say Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and so forth. I would also propose a gradual implementation of open borders with all countries along these lines, which might take some time because there are so many people who are probably interested. And, of course, I would also recommend that other countries follow suit. But Germany could do it unilaterally, no need to wait until the whole world agrees on this.

Here is my proposal. It consists of five steps:

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Permanent Tourist Visa

No American has to come illegally to Germany, and that’s why I’d be little lenient with those who do it anyway. It’s because I would think they might be a selection of people who have a reason to keep their stay secretive.

The reason why it should make no sense to come illegally is that any American can apply for a Permanent Tourist Visa that as a rule is granted. This would include a background check to exclude very specific people (e.g. whether your first name is Donald and you have a weird hairdo). You might also have to pay a small fee and supply a deposit in an escrow account that would be sufficient to support you for some time and to send you back to the US if that’s necessary.

If you have a Permanent Tourist Visa you can enter Germany at any time, travel around, and, of course, also leave. Unlike for a normal tourist visa, you can also rent accomodation. However, you are not allowed to work. Maybe we could make an exception if you are working extraterritorially (e.g. you do programming for an American company over the internet), but in that case, you would have to pay taxes in Germany.

As a Permanent Tourist you can stay as long as you want. You might have to renew your visa perhaps once a year and pay a fee, though. You will have to fend for yourself or find someone who supports you. You have no access to the German welfare state, except in urgent cases, and then you would have to pay out of your deposit first. If you run out of money and need support, Germany will not let you starve to death, but will send you back to the US and refer you to the American welfare state which is actually not that different from the German welfare state.

If you commit a crime, Germany will also send you back and bar you from the country for a time that corresponds to your expected penalty (let’s say five times average sentence for the crime). We will also guarantee that we will never extradite anyone for political crimes, if you have to expect cruel or unusual punishment (Germany does not have the death penalty) or due process in the US is in doubt: full right to asylum in an old sense. Also in a modern sense: We will not send you back if there is a civil war in the US or people like you have to fear for their life and liberty.

Never. Never ever.

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Guestworker Visa

You might want to work in Germany. Most people don’t have the money to retire early, most people do not have someone who pays for them forever. In that case you can apply for a Guestworker Visa. Since you can easily obtain a Permanent Tourist Visa you can come to Germany, find accomodation and a job. But you can also do that from home.

If you have a job offer and have passed a background check (e.g. whether your middle name begins with a J and you don’t want to show your tax returns), as a rule you get a Guestworker Visa which allows you to work in Germany for three years. Of course, you have to pay taxes like everyone else. You might also have to pay a moderate fee and supply a deposit like for the Permanent Tourist Visa.

Here is the deal: You can work, but you don’t have access to the German welfare state, except in urgent cases. Just like with the Permanent Tourist Visa, you will be sent back if you cannot make it in Germany: run out of money, need assistance and don’t have someone who supports you.

You might also have to pay part of your salary into the escrow account. You will be refunded, once you return to the US. And since this is like a German government bond, you will also be paid interest on it (just kidding: yields for German government bonds have been negative lately). This serves as an incentive that you indeed return if you have to.

If you commit a crime, you have to go back to the US and are barred from Germany for some time (see above). If there is no problem with you for three years, you can get another Guestworker Visa, or you can switch back to Permanent Tourist at anytime. In other words: you can stay as long as you want.

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Preliminary Permanent Residency

After some time, you might find that it is quite nice here, and living in Germany is on a par with living in the US (although one American cosmopolitan instantly went into „USA! USA! USA!“ when I told him that). Maybe Progressives and Liberals will be disappointed with the German welfare state if they experience it firsthand. But then also Libertarians and Conservatives are in for a surprise: We don’t have a gulag either. I am not kidding you: this is not socialism, you can do a lot of business here.

Now, if you find being a guestworker forever too unstable, if you resent always only paying to the German welfare state and never receiving anything in return, and if you uphold „no taxation without representation,“ Permanent Residency is the way to go. It works in two steps. The first one is Preliminary Permanent Residency. It is what it is called: you don’t have a time limit anymore (the rule), but there are some caveats (the exceptions).

You can apply after a Guestworker Visa and at least three years without any problems, and maybe another background check (e.g. you did not lie about your German ancestry and said you were of Scottish descent, but we know that your grandfather changed his name from “Drumpf” to “Trump”). You might also have to reach a minimum in taxes and contributions you have paid over time: your balance. But it is like with a fire or life insurance: you first pay premiums without coverage in the event, but then you receive coverage after some time.

You now successively obtain access to the welfare state which is not a blank check, but only kicks in for special cases. As a Preliminary Permanent Resident, at first you receive what a Guestworker does: nothing. However, that increases over time depending on your balance (what you paid in via taxes and contributions minus what you have received).

If you draw your balance down, you go backwards, and you might even return to the level of a Guestworker until you have built it up again. In lockstep with your balance you get more and more access to the welfare state like to an insurance. When you have reached a certain level you have full access. If you cannot make it in Germany even with that, we will still send you back. But that now becomes more and more of an exception.

The principle also applies to when you commit a crime. It depends on how far you have progressed. In the beginning, it is just like for a Guestworker, and you are out. But in the end, you are treated like any domestic criminal and there is no deportation anymore. There is maybe also a clause that you will be thrown out for extremely horrible crimes, let’s say, terrorism.

Your deposit is slowly paid out to you from the escrow account (plus interest) as you progress.

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Irrevocable Permanent Residency

After you have achieved a target for your balance, and have been a Preliminary Permanent Resident for at least three years, you automatically become an Irrevocable Permanent Resident. That means you have full access to the welfare state and under no circumstances can you be deported.

Actually, you are on the same footing as a German citizen. According to the German Basic Law, i.e. the constitution, a German citizen will not be extradited to any country outside the EU (it used to be for all countries).

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German Citizenship

I already appealed to „no taxation without representation“ and I meant it. Permanent Residents do not have the vote. They might still have problems with getting visas for third countries (German citizenship is the best in this regard: the most countries you can travel to without a visa).

After a few years of being an Irrevocable Permanent Resident, and maybe another target for your balance, you obtain the right to apply for German citizenship. There might be some conditions (e.g. something like a citizenship test) and some well-defined exceptions, but as a rule you cannot be denied German citizenship.

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Now, Americans, and fellow German citizens in spe, what do you think? I am talking about open borders for Americans with some minor hassles, and a way out of the country if it got really bad. And it would be such a smart move for Germany that, unfortunately, it goes beyond what German politicians can probably imagine. But maybe I am wrong.

What Angela Merkel had to say when she congratulated Donald Trump gives me some hope that Germans could understand what once made America great and make the country the Land of the Free if others have no use for it:

“Germany and America are connected by values of democracy, freedom and respect for the law and the dignity of man, independent of origin, skin colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views. I offer the next President of the United States close cooperation on the basis of these values.”

And more on a personal note: I’d so love to be swamped by Americans even if you bring your weird customs with you, like „Christmas pickles“ that are totally unknown in Germany.

Open borders for Americans!

In the past few months readers have likely been barraged with messages about how voting for Trump is equivalent to declaring yourself a bigot. My preferred radio station currently has a series of ads encouraging listeners to vote ‘against misogyny and racism’ this upcoming election. Let me make the case that neither major candidate for US president is the clear ‘Open Borders’ candidate and that OB advocates would better serve the cause through other means.

There are those who claim that Trump has normalized anti-migrant sentiment and Clinton should be supported as a symbolic gesture that one opposes such sentiment. As I often remind readers, I am an illegal alien. I bring this up because, although it is taboo to speak ill of migrants in polite company, it is still acceptable in most cases to speak ill of “illegal” migrants. “Legal migrants are hardworking and contribute to our society, but illegals are destroying our social fabric.” Throughout my life I have had to tolerate hearing some absurd claims ranging from low brow jokes (“Why doesn’t Mexico do well in the Olympics? Any Mexican who can run and jump is in the US.”) to outright racist comments.

The thing about this is that I’ve heard these things throughout my whole life. I can’t point to a time when they ceased. Even Trump’s locker-room talk video was in my opinion mild. Just a few weeks ago I overheard a group of office workers talk about how they didn’t like Mexican men, but they liked Mexican women because of how ‘exotic’ they looked. It is true that Trump’s speeches are especially absurd compared to his contemporaries, but they differ in degree not kind. I suspect that a subset of Trump’s opponents dislikes him because he makes them realize how awful they themselves are.

I am worried that after Trump loses (at time of writing Clinton has a 78% chance of winning in the betting markets) those who publicly opposed him will feel they have moral license to act against migrants. “I’m not racist, I voted against Trump.” Such an effect is not unprecedented. Political psychologists have previously found that endorsing Obama gave voters moral license to discriminate against – “I don’t dislike blacks, I voted for Obama”.

There are those who believe a Clinton presidency will mean the passage of comprehensive immigration reform, and so a vote for her is one towards Open Borders on the margin. I am unconvinced this is the case.

The republicans are likely to retain control of the House of Representatives for the foreseeable future (see the betting markets) and won’t allow legislative reform. It is possible congressional republicans would tolerate the passage of migration reform as part of an effort to re-brand the party – but I don’t see it happening. If the party had been serious about re-branding itself, it would have done so after Romney’s loss in 2012. I think in the near future party elites, from both major parties, will be too busy fighting their respective populist wings to enact any significant legislative reforms.

President Clinton could end up enacting reform through executive actions in the same way President Obama has but reform in this manner has sharp decreases in returns. She can expand deferred action for larger portions of the unauthorized migrant population, but the legal fiction of deferred action is that it’s goal is to prioritize the deportation of other migrants. I am a doctoral student in a liberal California university so I am personally low on that priority list, but I am still on it. As are countless others whose only crime is wanting a chance to work to feed themselves and their families.

At any rate what happens for those of us in the United States is of relatively little importance. We’re already in the United States. Deferred action expanded the number of opportunities for those of us here illegally, but we were here before it and will be here after it. As difficult as life in this status is, it is still a better quality life than what we could expect in our countries of origin. If it weren’t we would have gone long ago.

Those who suffer the most, and for whom deferred action means little, are those who haven’t been able to migrate through legal or illegal means. We Mexicans are lucky; we need to cross only the US border. North Africans are also lucky; they only need to cross the Mediterranean. Those who suffer the most are those in Central America, Sub-Sahara Africa, and so forth and so forth who must cross multiple borders. Deferred action is not enough.

If you are still undecided whether to vote for Trump or Clinton, do not feel compelled to vote for Clinton out of belief that she is the marginal pro-Open Borders candidate. She isn’t. Nor should you feel compelled to vote against Trump to signal that you aren’t anti-migrant. If you wish to signal your support for open borders you would be more effective by helping plan an event for Open Borders day,contributing to this blog, or countless other things. Victory for open borders relies on winning over minds, not votes.

The American election of 2016 is a bit like 9/11: a moment when it becomes suddenly clear what the #1 threat to American freedom will be for the foreseeable future. Then, it was radical Islamist terrorists. Today, it’s Trumpism. After 9/11, there was much discussion of the “root causes” of Islamist terrorism. Today, it’s urgent business to discern the root causes of Trumpism.

Immigration is an obvious candidate explanation. That anti-immigrant hostility is to the rise of Trump what anti-Semitism was to the rise of Hitler is obvious enough, but in both cases, the timing seems underdetermined. Why now? Or in Hitler’s case, why then? Anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant hostility had been around long before Hitler and Trump, always ugly, but they hadn’t previously triggered movements strong enough to overturn the political regime. And nothing in 1933, or 2016, seems to explain why these hatreds got suddenly worse.

Thus, in Germany, one might have expected that anti-Semitism would be declining, several decades after the legal emancipation of the Jews and when Christianity, a past spur to anti-Semitism, was losing influence to liberalism, socialism, Darwinism, and other modern currents of thought. Instead, the smoldering embers of anti-Semitism suddenly burst into flame. Likewise, in 2016, undocumented immigration has been on the wane for sometime, assimilation is proceeding apace, and the economy is picking up, to the point where we’re near full employment. Crime is near historic lows, and immigrants commit less crime per capita than natives. Why an immigrant-hating presidential candidate now? One must look to other root causes to understand the opportunities that Hitler and Trump exploited.

First, new media. The rise of totalitarianism in the early 20th century was fueled by radio, which destabilized public discourse, and gave leaders like Hitler and Stalin direct access to the masses, fueling unprecedented cults of personality. Radio didn’t produce totalitarianism in the Anglosphere, but it did produce dangerous demagogues like Huey Long and Father Coughlin. Franklin D. Roosevelt, though no totalitarian, had his radio “fireside chats” that made him the center of a personality cult of sorts, and he was one of America’s most collectivist presidents. Contemporary new media such as blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, have transformed public discourse, sometimes carrying it to new heights of thoughtfulness and lucidity, as exemplified by Bryan Caplan’s posts at EconLog, but sometimes descending to new depths of vitriol and propaganda, as exemplified by Donald Trump’s tweets. Anne Applebaum delivered one of the shrewdest judgments on Trump when she called him the spokesman for Internet trolls. The mainstream media and the party establishments have long functioned as elite gatekeepers in American politics, ensuring a certain minimum of civilized and democratic standards in our public discourse and politics, and muzzling the id of the masses. In 2015-2016, the media inadvertently helped Trump by giving him so much coverage, but they did so in ways that would in the past have guaranteed his swift political collapse, highlighting his outrageous statements and his obvious unfitness for office. But Twitter gave Trump direct access to his followers, and the Internet has allowed an angry underground to emerge, propagating its own myths and solidarities, so Trump couldn’t be deflated in the traditional way, and his ability to defy the traditional elite gatekeepers then added to his mystique. One of the shocking things about Nazism was that it arose in one of the world’s most educated, cultured, and industrialized countries, but that’s less surprising when you consider that its rise depended on new media, of which the most developed nations were the earliest adopters. Much of the postcolonial world experienced fascist-style regimes in the decades that followed. Let the rest of the world be warned, then, that new media has opened up new possibilities for vicious demagogy. Your Donald Trumps are probably on their way, if they haven’t appeared already. Let lovers of liberty be prepared to fight them.

The Iraq war is another root cause of Trump’s rise, since Trump used opposition to the Iraq war to upend the Republican establishment. This claim is orthogonal to support or opposition for the Iraq war. Critics of the Iraq war might blame the Bush administration for deceiving the country into waging an unjust and pointless war, thus shattering popular faith in the Republican party establishment and to a lesser extent the national government generally. My take is different. I think the Iraq war’s critics are to blame for systematically and deliberately failing to do justice to the Bush administration’s motives and the real merits of toppling a totalitarian regime, for undermining people’s attachment to liberty in general by devaluing Iraqi liberty, and for fostering a muddle-headed cynicism in the people, in their determination to delegitimize a high-minded and hopeful foreign policy venture that did a lot of good. Either way, the Iraq war of 2003 created a deep reservoir of cynicism and resentment in the American people, which Trump exploits. The Iraq war is to the rise of Trump something like what the Treaty of Versailles was to the rise of Hitler.

And of course, Trump’s supporters come largely from the white underclass described so potently in Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, its jobs and earnings opportunities dwindling in the face of skill-biased technological change, its family structures ravaged by the Sexual Revolution, its morals and customs unraveling under the baneful influence of moral relativism. I think it’s here that the most important causal factor is at work, but this is also where my argument gets most speculative, most difficult to articulate and verify. But I’ll make a brief attempt.

It used to be truism that the health of republican government depended on the virtues of the citizenry, and especially the familial virtues. The Roman Republic was founded when Lucretia, the archetypal good housewife, having refused the seductions of a Tarquin price and then been raped by him anyway, confessed to her husband and immediately committed suicide, triggering a revolution that overthrew the wicked foreign king. Romans of the classical era, and generations of classically-educated modern Europeans, took it for granted that the happy home was the health of the state, and that the Roman republic flourished while Roman virtue lasted and decayed when luxury and lax morals ate away its virtue from within. This historical truism is no less wise for having been forgotten of late. Too many Americans weren’t raised right, and don’t know first-hand, let alone take for granted, the wholesome happiness of a good family, so they can’t feel proper horror at a man so inimical to it as Donald Trump. Here again contemporary America resembles Weimar Germany, which like America in recent years, was a sexually decadent place. The 1920s were the heyday of Sigmund Freud’s influence. The Sturmabteilung was thick with homosexuality. Adolf Hitler was the son of a sexual profligate, conceived out of wedlock, and seems to have had an affair with his niece Geli Raubal before he came to power. It’s hard to imagine people like Hitler and Trump coming to power in a culture where strong family values prevailed. They’d fail the respectability test and be immediately disqualified. Ultimately, is it the gnawing misery born in broken families that makes nations eager to sell their souls to demagogues? Do people who have never known familial happiness yearn for leaders who will tell them that their problems are someone else’s fault, and go after that someone in crude, angry ways, without being restrained by old-fashioned notions of law and due process and civility and all that? Are people who have never known the real, wholesome happiness of a good family, and who are left yearning for they know not what, fatally tempted to throw the dice on crackpot authoritarians who peddle vague utopian visions? 

I’ve waded into deep psychological waters here, and I’ll leave the question unanswered, as too difficult for me at the moment. But a related and more pedestrian point is that Obergefell probably helped Trump’s rise by putting a nail in the coffin of constitutionalism– if the Constitution means whatever the Supreme Court, following the latest fashions, says it does, then why should Trump or his supporters respect it?– and by marking a definitive triumph of moral relativism. If political power could be used to overturn traditional morality for the benefit of gays, the alt-right felt, why not for the benefit of racists as well?

If Iraq, new media, and the Sexual Revolution explain the rise of Trump, is immigration irrelevant? Not quite. What I think Trump and Hitler, along with countless other successful fomenters of ethnic hatred and violence that have stained the last century of human history, show, is that it’s pretty easy to stir up ordinary people– not all of them, but enough to fuel a powerful political movement– to hatred of a minority that was already disliked, just by talking a lot about them, and saying publicly the things that people had long taken a guilty pleasure in saying privately, but that good manners and decorum had mostly kept out of the public sphere. Ambient hatreds are the perennial low-hanging fruit of democratic politics, always available for a cynical politician with the right kind of media reach to stir up and ride to power. They provide a cheap kind of skin-deep solidarity that people discombobulated by technological and social change often find comforting. Long before Hitler’s Final Solution, a lazy-minded and casual anti-Semitism was widespread among European nationalists and intellectuals. Similarly, too many generally decent American politicians have said “we have to control our borders, but…” Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, to be sure, are less evil than Donald Trump, but by not saying clearly and resolutely that the law of the land is wrong, they were his accomplices. For existing laws, if not themselves challenged, denounced, and delegitimized, provide a baneful legitimacy to anti-immigrant hatred. One can demand a vast program of ethnic cleansing, millions of people seized and uprooted from their homes and sent away to lands they’ve scarcely seen, and say more or less truly that one only wants to see the law enforced.

“When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent,” Pastor Niemoller famously lamented. “I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent. I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out. I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I remained silent. I was not a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.” Yes. Human rights are the proper basis for solidarity, and only when we all react to the violation of anyone’s human rights as if the offenses were against ourselves, can we expect, or do we deserve, for our own human rights to be respected. First they came for the immigrants. Year after year, hundreds of thousands have been deported, and many more lived in fear. Many otherwise decent, God-fearing Americans remained silent, because they were not immigrants. Now Donald Trump, carried to national prominence as an anti-immigration leader, along with his pet media, threaten all our liberties. Right now, they are going after Clinton, conducting the election as a kind of show trial, concocting phony scandals and threatening her with jail. If they win, who’s next? Bill Clinton? Ted Cruz? Ben Sasse? Democrats generally? Open borders advocates like myself? To Trump, anyone who opposes him at all is an idiot, a loser, a criminal. Expect the show trials to continue.

I’m voting for Hillary Clinton this year, which is something I never expected to do. I’ve always been a Republican. I’m pro-life, I was an ardent supporter of George W. Bush in 2004 and of John McCain in 2008, I’ve written a book against gay marriage, and I admire Mike Pence’s effort to protect religious freedom in Indiana. But that my conscience as a Christian and as a loyal American citizen prohibit me from voting for Trump was always as clear as day. Trump’s platform hardly matters. Donald Trump is a vicious sexual predator, whose business experience is a rampage of self-aggrandizement focused in sleazy, sinful industries like gambling, and fraught with fraud, failure, and bankruptcy, and such a man simply must never be given the kind of power that a US president has. To the extent that Trump has an ideology, what he essentially offers is an escape from freedom. His major stances– anti free trade, anti immigration, anti free speech, etc.– are consistently authoritarian. He’s an open admirer of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. His rhetorical style is distinctive among American politicians in that he doesn’t even pay lip service to liberty. The presidential oath, in such a man’s mouth, would be a travesty, and to vote for this would make me an accomplice in that travesty. The only question was whether to cast an effective vote against Trump, by voting for Clinton, or to abstain or vote for a third party. But after all the American republic has done for me, I think I owe it more than an abstention.

Trump’s signature campaign promise, to build a wall along the southern border (reasonable so far, even if I oppose it) and make Mexico pay for the wall (absolutely outrageous!) is chiefly interesting for the appalling light that it sheds on Trump’s own character, and on those of his core supporters. The idea of forcing a poor country like Mexico to pay for a wall meant to deprive their own citizens of economic opportunity, for the benefit of the far richer United States, is so stupid, mean, bullying, unchivalrous, and contrary to all norms of international law, that it beggars belief. It’s horrifying to think that there are Americans to whom such a thuggish, crazy proposal appeals. Trump’s appeal, indeed, is difficult for the educated to understand, but it seems to consist in a rebellion against what he calls “political correctness,” which in this case seems to mean civility, morality, the rule of law, and the dictates of conscience. I can’t shake the impression that the core Trump supporters are just sick and tired of being good. They are, as Hillary Clinton said, “a basket of deplorables”—in their political opinions, at least.

That qualification is important. I actually don’t think most of Trump’s core supporters are bad people, for the most part, only bad citizens. Most people’s political opinions, after all, are a very small part of their personalities. When we look back on former times, on slaveholding times, on colonialist times, on racist times, on times when national hatreds were universal and mandatory, when heretics were burned, or when wars of conquest were undertaken as casually as financial speculations are undertaken today, it’s easy to slip into the assumption that people of the past were monsters. But it’s possible for a person’s conscience to be numb to the wickedness of certain attitudes, beliefs, or social practices, even while he or she is quite high-minded and ethical in most of his or her personal dealings. If 99% of one’s social contacts are with white Christians, and one treats them beautifully, how much does it matter if one hates blacks and Jews? It does matter, certainty, but I would suggest that its weight in the scale of vices and virtues is rather small. The problem, ably diagnosed in Bryan Caplan’s Myth of the Rational Voter, is that democracy artificially amplifies the impact of people’s political opinions, which are often foolish and irresponsible because life doesn’t teach ordinary men virtue in political opinions as it teaches them virtue in private affairs. One learns a good deal of prudence, courage, temperance, and justice in the struggle to make a living, which, in a rough, everyday fashion, rewards virtue and punishes vice, starving the lazy and spendthrift and isolating the dishonest and intemperate, while those who are just, prudent, brave, and self-controlled usually see their assets and their circles of friends expand over time. But life doesn’t teach people virtue in political opinions, because one’s political opinions don’t really affect the daily business of one’s own life, so people’s political opinions are much more ignorant and biased than their opinions about things they have proper incentives to think about hard and fairly. In most societies, ordinary people’s political opinions don’t matter all that much, because they don’t control public affairs. In democracies, they do.

Americans have, historically, been unusually virtuous in their political opinions: unusually inclined to favor free speech even when they were offended; unusually ready to favor free markets and modest taxes and transfers even when they were poor; unusually deferential to the national constitution and the common-law tradition; unusually willing to accept the frequent frustrations of widespread popular preferences by the constraints that due process of law imposes on what the government can do; unusually insistent on high moral standards in their political leaders; unusually willing to accept adverse election results when defeated, and when victorious, chivalrously to ensure that vanquished candidates and their supporters retain life, liberty, and property, and the political rights they need to contest the next election. The widespread failure of real democracy to take root elsewhere in the world bore witness to a lack, on the part of many or most foreigners, of the kind of civic virtue and political enlightenment that has characterized America.

In the horrifying election of 2016, the American civic virtue that long upheld democracy has undergone a spectacular collapse. Trump’s core supporters are not worthy of democracy, in the rather precise sense that if everyone thought and acted as they do, tolerating and even applauding so much vice, thuggishness, ignorance, deceit, promises to violate human rights, and self-serving fantasy on the part of a political candidate, democracy wouldn’t long survive. Americans tend to feel we have some sort of mysterious divine right to be better governed than most of mankind, but we don’t. Democracy’s success here, imperfect as it had always been, has depended on the practice of virtue by politicians and ultimately by voters. If we vote for politicians destitute of virtue, like Trump, we’ll lose democracy, and deserve to lose it.Donald Trump is the ultimate un-American.

If Donald Trump is elected, American institutions will be put to the greatest test they have faced since the McCarthy era, if not since the Civil War. It’s possible that soldiers will disobey Trump’s orders to commit war crimes, courts will face down his intimidation and invalidate his illegal acts, Congress will block the laws he tried to pass and defund agencies that he turns to nefarious purposes, and in due course, when appropriate grounds have accumulated, will impeach him. A rising Trumpist dictatorship might be nipped in the bud by the American constitution’s checks and balances. Even in that case, damage would be done, but in some respects, the republic might be strengthened by its institutions having to flex their muscles against an evil elected executive. But it would be rash to count on this. One key American political institution, the Republican Party, which one might have hoped would simply refuse to accept a hostile takeover by a man whose personal character and political beliefs are inimical to its historic ideals, and would have gone on strike when a plurality of primary voters made an unacceptable choice, has already prostituted itself to Trump, throwing away a hard-won fund of trust that many Republican officeholders had won through decades of public service. The cowardice of leaders like Paul Ryan and John McCain, who clearly know that Trump is utterly unfit to be president, but who put partisanship before patriotism, is appalling. If Trump were elected, many other American institutions would probably follow suit, forsaking their principles in fear of Trump’s legal or extra-legal vengeance. To elect Trump would be to run a national version of the Milgram experiment. Alas, history shows how easily humans are corrupted by madmen in authority.

And even if Trump loses this year, his constituency has discovered their power. We can expect more Donald Trumps to come.

One of the ironies of Donald Trump is that, by losing, and bringing many other Republicans down with him, he seems likely to bring about an immigration amnesty. With luck, nativism will be burdened for years by the stench of Trump, allowing immigration liberalizers to make steady, pedestrian progress by letting more legal immigrants in, while respecting undocumented immigrants’ basic human rights and regularizing their legalization. But a deeper irony is that while Trump’s platform is allegedly “nationalist,” he has shattered whatever remained of American national solidarity. Many of the majority of Americans who despise Trump must, like me, be asking themselves what we have in common with people who can find such a disgusting man appealing, or who can desire that such a vile desperado be US president. The whole point of being an American was that Americans were too virtuous to vote for people like Donald Trump. That was why we could trust in democracy, why we could look back on our past with pride, why we could look on our future with hope, why we could claim leadership of the free world with an easy assumption that all mankind benefited from our doing so. That was the key to American greatness, the reason why America was a force for good in the world. I don’t want to be a rootless cosmopolitan or a stateless person, even if, as open borders advocates desire, the world became a much safer place for stateless persons than it is today. I was raised a patriotic American and want to stay that way, but I always understood America to be founded on certain values of which Trump is the antithesis, so I can’t help but regard Trump’s hard-core supporters as a kind of foreigners. I can get along with them well enough as neighbors. It’s just really scary to be part of a polity in which they have votes. That’s the problem. Is any solution possible?

It’s not feasible, of course, to gerrymander Trump supporters into their own polity (which would be a rather miserable place). It might be possible to substantially eviscerate the polity that Americans in my sense of the word, not mere juridical citizens but freedom-loving Americans who would never vote for Trump, are condemned to share with Trump supporters. We could look for ways to alienate power to local governments like states and citizens, to voluntary organizations like labor unions and churches, to international organizations like the UN, NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO, and to private corporations and free markets. Wouldn’t it be nice if the US president could gradually dwindle to a figurehead, a little like the king of England?

But the most promising way for real Americans to protect ourselves from the Trump voters is to elect a new people. We now know, from the rise of Donald Trump, that millions, if not tens of millions, of native-born Americans can’t be trusted to vote for liberty. There can be little doubt that tens, if not hundreds of millions, of foreign-born people are far worthier of being entrusted with votes in a free republic. And if we let them in, and enfranchise (at least some of) them, the Trump voters will be safely outnumbered. At this point, that seems like the best chance to preserve America’s republican liberties so that the next generation of Americans will be able to enjoy them.

As usual with Open Borders posts, the opinions expressed here are my own and not the collective opinions of the Open Borders team.

Despite the enthusiasm of many in the U.S. for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has called for building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, for expelling undocumented immigrants from American soil, and for banning Muslim immigrants, there are reasons for optimism about a future of increased political support for immigration into the U.S. These include demographic shifts between the two major American political parties and demographic changes to the country as a whole.

As those who have followed the American presidential campaign know, two of Trump’s core policy positions are opposition to free trade and undocumented immigration. David Brooks of the New York Times suggests that Trump’s emphasis on these issues may “smash and replace the entire structure of the American political debate.”  He notes that the debate over the size of government which has dominated American politics for decades could be transformed into one in which a “right-left establishment that supports open borders, free trade, cosmopolitan culture, and global intervention” competes with populists who advocate “closed borders, trade barriers, local and nationalistic culture and an America First foreign policy… When the frame of debate shifts to open/closed, sometime soon, the old coalitions will smash apart and new ones will form.” He also suggests that even if Mr. Trump fails to win in November, this new “open/closed” framework will emerge as the new political norm.

It is apparent that the Democratic Party would be the “open” party under the new framework, while the Republican Party would be the “closed” one. Notwithstanding large numbers of deportations under the Obama administration, in general Democratic politicians have been more receptive to immigration into the U.S. than Republican ones. For example, in 2013 all of the Democratic senators  in Congress voted for a bill that would have legalized millions of undocumented immigrants and increased legal immigration levels by 50 to 70 percent, while most Republican senators voted against the bill. Moreover, rank and file Democrats feel more positively about immigrants than do Republicans.

With demographic shifts between the two parties, support for immigration within the Democratic Party will only increase. Better educated white voters, who traditionally have voted for Republicans, are more likely to support the Democrat Hillary Clinton for president, while less educated white voters are increasingly abandoning the Democrats and supporting the populist Trump ticket. (See here, here, and here.)

David Wasserman and Thomas Edsall of the New York Times suggest that this shift is occurring regardless of the candidates in the current campaign, although the contest has quickened the pace. This is significant because apparently the better educated a person is, the more likely they are to be receptive to immigration.  As Edsall notes, the changes in the composition of the two political parties “have contributed to sharp changes, at least for the moment, in the outlook of Democrats and Republicans. Democrats, including the party’s elite, remain decisively liberal, and have become more cosmopolitan — more readily accepting of globalization, more welcoming of immigrants, less nationalistic — and more optimistic about the future.”

Better educated white voters will join with two other groups that lean Democratic: non-whites and millennials. Non-whites are even more likely than better educated white voters to both support Mrs. Clinton and be more positive about immigration. (See also here.)  Millennials lean left politically, favor Clinton, and are more positive about immigration than other age groups.  (See also here.) The unification of these three groups (which often overlap) within the Democratic Party ensures that it will push it to become even more pro-immigration.

Moreover, these groups provide great political strength for the Democrats. Even though only 36% of the non-Hispanic white population aged 25 or older has college degree or higher, the well-educated are more likely to actually vote in elections than those who are less educated.  Millennials are becoming a larger portion of the electorate, now equal in proportion to the Baby Boomers. The percentage of the population in the U.S. that is minority is growing, and, among children under five, whites are in the minority.  (See here and here) Moreover, the Democrats have been making gains among upper income whites (who overlap with the well-educated), further strengthening the party. Edsall adds that, despite the economic differences between its constituencies, the Democrats also will be more united than the Republicans.

The comfort Democrats have with immigration was evident in the reaction to a document released by Wikileaks, in which Hillary Clinton referred to her “dream for a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders…”  When she was asked about it during a debate, she stated that she was only talking about energy. It is unknown what her thinking was when she referred to open borders,  but her possible support for open borders, at least in one hemisphere, apparently didn’t weaken her support among Democrats. Any discomfort from the left seemed to be about the free trade portion of her remarks in the document.

The increasingly pro-immigration outlook of the Democratic Party and its strong prospects for future political success should eventually translate into policies that legalize undocumented immigrants in the U.S. and increase legal immigration levels. An open borders America may not be imminent, but it is moving in the right direction.