We are where we are. Either mass-immigration must be stopped with the means currently at hand, or it will not be stopped. This means passports and visas, and agencies empowered to seek out and return those who slip through the first line of immigration control. Where the refugees in Calais are concerned, it means deporting them to the last non-European country they left, and making sure that no more of them are allowed to reach the northern shores of the Mediterranean.
This is, I hasten to add, only part of the solution. Our governments must also stop turning much of the Third World into slagheaps soaked in human blood. They must stop veering between support of local tyrants and their more recent insistence on forms of government inappropriate to actual conditions. They must, so far as possible, leave other peoples to work out their own destinies in their own ways. This will, I have no doubt, reduce the outward push behind the migrants. Even so, we must secure our own borders.
Now, for many of those libertarians who accept the existence of a problem, this solution is itself a problem. An ideology that cannot be followed in extreme cases must be a false ideology. If the non-aggression principle is not to be consistently applied, is it worth applying at all?
I appreciate the difficulty. At the same time, it is a manufactured difficulty. It would not have been recognised as a difficulty by most of our intellectual ancestors. If many libertarians, when they think about mass-immigration, are now beginning to look like scared ostriches, or the more double-joined Indian fakirs, this is not because of any defect in the libertarian fundamentals. It is because, over the past few decades, libertarianism has been re-interpreted in ways that part company with reality. To be specific, the non-aggression principle has been raised from something to be desired within circumstantial constraints to an abstract and absolute imperative. If the only legitimate use of force is to protect individual rights, all other uses of force are illegitimate, and must be rejected out of hand by libertarians.
Let us consider how distant this imperative is from reality.
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