For Open-Borders Libertarians, Or: How To Invade A Libertarian Nation-State
September 2, 2012 17 Comments
Question for open-borders libertarians:
One day, a large group of men, say 500,000 strong – one might say, an ‘army’ – approaches the border on foot and in (street-legal) vehicles. They’re all wearing identical clothing, olive-green – one might call them ‘uniforms’. They carry weapons. They wish to pass.
Morally speaking, the border agents have to let them in, right? They haven’t initiated force against anyone. They haven’t violated anyone’s rights. And you don’t know that they will.
Maybe, you will get hung up on the weapons in my hypothetical. Probably it’s a crime to carry a weapon across the border or something (although, aren’t you opposed to that? If not why not?) so you have an ‘out’ here by saying they should be stopped on that basis. Very well, let’s change the hypothetical: they carry no weapons. But they have arranged for some large shipments, all legal, to some in-country destination point, and that’s where they’re all headed…
I’m pretty sure a libertarian nation-state’s government would have to conclude it has no right to prevent this sort of invasion of itself.
Or they could just skip the whole “moving an army in to overwhelm the security forces of the target” and just move their entire population over the border.
Then they simply vote in the conquering government. No need for any weapons at all. Just need to out breed the target country.
True. But we already know open-borders folks are ok with that. I’m trying to get to the boundary of what they’ll tolerate. That isn’t it.
But why even bother with the army? You have to train them, buy uniforms and weapons, feed them, maybe even pay them, and all you get out of it is control of the territory of your neighbor.
Much much more efficient to simply tell everyone in your state to move to the other state and simply vote for whatever government you’d have used your army to impose.
My hope is that a libertarian somewhere thinks this over and instead of thinking “my premises lead to ridiculous conclusions – therefore those conclusions only seem ridiculous if you’re unenlightened” thinks “my premises lead to ridiculous conclusions – maybe I should rethink my premises“.
For that discussion it helps to start with a conclusion that libertarians actually believe is non-ridiculous.
racist poles.
irrational fear of ‘the other’, no doubt
I’ve always felt that ‘initiating force’ does not begin when a guy hits me, but when starts his swing. Maybe when he stomps up with a certain look in his eye.
If I were Pope of this country, I would conclude that 500,000 soldiers under arms [1] walking into my country do constitute ‘initiating force’. And it’s time to do whatever this Utopia does in those circumstances.
Maybe I’m too rational to be a capital-L libertarian.
[1] One can be under arms and not actually toting a rifle.
Yeah, you don’t sound like a very purist libertarian then. It’s like you’re in favor of prior restraint. What about their rights?
Heck, you don’t even need arms and uniforms, cf. the Green March. Even vehicles aren’t really necessary.
We’re postulating 100% zealously ideologically motivated invaders rather than conscripts or mercenaries, right? I’d hate to be the morale officer who has to explain “nobody defect, because if somebody does defect then he might survive while the rest of us get arrested or shot before we know the plan’s foiled”. Even with 99% zealotry, a 500,000-way non-iterated prisoners’ dilemma has only one real solution.
Even given a perfect conspiracy among the invaders, the libertarian solution of “shoot at the aggressors when they are clearly the aggressors and are surrounded by an armed and alert population on the latter’s home turf” is not obviously much less effective than “shoot at the aggressors when they try to cross the Maginot line”.
Nothing so fancy in my scenario. This is a real invasion, by the real army, ordered by its real command structure. They promise they will shoot their own defectors, etc. once they’re over the border; but if they aren’t given permission to cross within X hours, their orders are to attack overtly. I think this largely avoids your Prisoner’s Dilemma…
It’s just that they didn’t announce the invasion overtly to us (and let’s say we don’t have any usable intelligence about it). So the libertarian government can’t ‘prove’ their intent or at least (I assume?) needs to issue a bunch of subpoenas and go to court and have some lengthy trials in order to prove that intent.
Where do you get ‘clearly the aggressors’? It’s a bunch of guys wanting to cross the border. They’ve harmed no one and initiating force against no one. They asking permission to cross the border. Heck, they’re very polite. They brought muffins.
So what right does the U.S. government have to pick and choose who crosses the border? At the very least, surely there must be some kind of due process…
Or perhaps U.S. government *does* have the right to pick and choose who crosses their own border? Naw, that can’t be right….
This is one of the reasons why so many libertarians opt to become anarcho-capitalists, the real voluntarists. Abolishing the state eliminates the threat of it being overwhelmed by the voting patterns of whatever Third World population this article is referring to.
In a libertarian society, while there won’t be state borders, there will be private ones. Look at the us/mex border rancher and how they are denied the right to defend their property. Read the book “Freehold” to see how zealously a free people defend their “borders.”
That makes some sense, but applied consistently it just means that libertarians who advocate that the *current* US nation-state have open borders are making an error, putting the cart before the horse, right?
True, much as many libertarians want to end easy welfare policies before opening borders. Incentives matter.
Them: 500,000 guns.
Us: 270 million guns.
In any case, we need help with the grape harvest.
I will admit that a small nation might have some reason to control immigration. This is one reason I am not a fan of secession.
I think a real libertarian state would have such bad crime that any invading army would have all their fancy tanks and stuff stolen within 15 minutes.
I would argue that immigration is another case where partial regulation is worse than either full regulation or no regulation. Illegal immigrants get social services. They are not subject to minimum wages, which encourages employers to hire them and indirectly encourages them to come. And many of them come here because their own government has mismanaged their own country.
Keeping them out amounts to another case of “we need this government interference to balance other government interference”.