Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Immigration Analysis Failure

[jabowery]

Hans-Hermann Hoppe's critical intellectual failure in his thinking about immigration policy is embodied in the following quote from "On Free Immigration and Forced Integration":

Now, if the government excludes a person while even one domestic resident wants to admit this very person onto his property, the result is forced exclusion (a phenomenon that does not exist under private property anarchism).

In this he is presuming there is no option for what pre-Austrian-school libertarian philosopher Lysander Spooner called a "mutual insurance company" where a voluntary agreement may be reached between private owners of land that restricts what individual participants in the mutual insurance company may do with their land.

His prescription is therefore ill-founded:

The best one may hope for, even if it goes against the "nature" of a democracy and thus is not very likely to happen, is that the democratic rulers act as if they were the personal owners of the country and as if they had to decide who to include and who to exclude from their own personal property (into their very own houses).

In the absence of eliminating government, the best approximation to humane action is for democratic rulers to treat their position as officers or board members in a mutual insurance company formed by contractual agreement among the shareholders who each hold one voting share.

With this correction, other aspects of Hoppe's analysis are rendered valid since it is true that, for example in the United States treated as a company, there are by-laws that demand free internal migration of shareholders. This means the only protection the shareholders have is at the boundary of their mutually insured land holding and that, therefore, the officers and board members of the company have a fiduciary responsibility to control that boundary.

[HigherVision]

The problem with mass immigration today is that the people we're letting in are fiercely anti-capitalism anti-liberty. Many libertarians support open immigration because it feels good, but the consequence may be that libertarianism is increasingly made less possible to ever be realized politically because the statists are constantly gaining new immigrant voters. And the idea that oh we'll just convert them all to being for liberty is again, an idea that may feel good but in the real world probably is not going to happen.