 And so I'd like to introduce a person who's very well known to all of you, who runs maybe the most indispensable libertarian website on earth, lurockwell.com, and also the founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, someone who's been at this for many, many decades, and who's going stronger than ever, and someone to whom we all owe a lot, Lu Rockwell. So I want to talk about something controversial today, unlike everybody else. We'll talk about open borders of libertarian reappraisal. They're talking about illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America, or birthright citizenship, or the migrants coming from the Middle East and Africa, subject of immigration, been very much in the news and widely discussed for months now. It's an issue fraught with potentially perilous consequences. So it's especially important for libertarians to understand it correctly. This Mises circle, which is devoted to considering where we go from here, seemed to me an opportune moment to raise this momentous question. I should note that at the outset that in searching for the correct answer to this problem, I do not seek to claim any originality, of course. I draw much of what follows from two people whose work is indispensable to a proper understanding of the free society. That's Murray and Rothbard and Hans Hermann Hoppe. Some libertarians have assumed that the correct libertarian position on immigration must be open borders, or the completely unrestricted movement of peoples. Superficially, this appears correct. Surely we believe in letting people go wherever they want to go. But hold on a minute. Think about freedom of speech, the other principle people associate with libertarians. Do we really believe in freedom of speech as an abstract principle? That would mean I have the right to yell during a movie, to disrupt a church service, the right to enter your home and shout obscenities at you. What we believe in instead are private property rights. No one has freedom of speech on my property, since I set the rules on my property. In the last resort, of course, I can expel someone. You can say whatever he likes on his own property or on the property of anyone who cares to listen to him, but not on mine. The same principle holds for the freedom of movement. Libertarians do not believe in any such abstraction in the abstract principle. We do not have the right, I do not have the right to wander into your house, into your gated community, or onto Disney World, or onto Jay-Z's private island, or someone's private beach. As with freedom of speech, private property is the relevant factor here. I can move on to any property I myself own, or whose owner wishes to have me there, but I simply cannot go wherever I like. Now, if all the parcels of land in the world were held privately, the solution to the so-called immigration problem would be evident. In fact, there would be no immigration problem. Everyone moving somewhere knew would have to have the consent of the owner of that place. When the state and its so-called public property enter the picture, though the things become subtly more murky, and it takes extra effort to uncover the proper libertarian position, I'd like to try to do that here today. Shortly before his death, Murray Rothbard wrote an article in the Journal of Libertarian Studies called Nations by Consent Decomposing the Nation-State. He'd begun rethinking the assumption that libertarians are committed to open borders. He noted, for instance, the large number of ethnic Russians whom Stalin had settled in Estonia. This was not done so the Baltic people could enjoy the fruits of diversity. In fact, it never is. It was an attempt to destroy an existing culture so that to make the people more docile and less likely to cause problems for the Soviet Empire. Murray wondered, as a libertarian, am I required to support this much less to cheer it? Or might there be more to the immigration question after all? And here Murray posed the problem just as I have in a really private property society. People would have to be invited on to whatever property they traveled through or settled on. Every piece of land in the country were owned by some person, group or corporation. This would mean that no person could enter unless invited to enter and allowed to rent or purchase property. A totally privatized country would be as closed as the particular property owners wished it to be. It seems clear then that the regime of open borders that exist de facto in the United States and Western Europe today really amounts to a compulsory opening by the central state in charge of all streets and public lands, public buildings. It does not genuinely reflect the wishes of the proprietors. In the current situation, on the other hand, immigrants have access to public roads, public transportation, public buildings, and so on. Combine this with the state's other curtailments of private property rights and the result is artificial demographic shifts that would never occur in a free market. Property owners are forced to associate and do business with individuals they might otherwise avoid. Quote, commercial property owners such as stores, hotels, and restaurants are no longer free to exclude or restrict access as they see fit, wrote Hans. Employers can no longer hire or fire whom they wish. In the housing market, landlords are no longer free to exclude unwanted tenants. Furthermore, restrictive covenants are compelled to accept members and actions in violation of their very own rules and regulations. Hans continues, by admitting someone onto its territory, the state also permits this person to proceed on public roads and lands to every domestic residence doorstep, to make use of all public facilities and services, such as hospitals and schools, and to access every commercial establishment, employment, and residential housing protected by a multitude of non-discrimination laws. It is rather unfashionable to express concern for the rights of property owners in such situations. I know and indeed I can already hear the sympathy for migrants expressed by left libertarians, but whether the principle is popular or not, a transaction between two people should not occur unless both of those people wanted to. This is after all the very core of libertarian principle. In order to make sense of all this and to reach the appropriate libertarian conclusion, we have to look more closely on what public property really is and who, if anyone can be said to be its true owner. Hans has devoted some of his own work to this question. There are two positions he says we must reject. The first is that public property is owned by the government, that public property or that public property is unknown, and is therefore comparable to land in the state of nature before individual property titles, particular parcels of land have been established. Certainly we cannot say that public property is owned by the government, since government may not legitimately own anything. Government acquires its property by force, usually via the intermediary of taxation. A libertarian cannot accept that land or property acquisition is morally legitimate if it's done by force since it involves again the initiation of force against the innocent through the extraction of tax dollars. Hence governments pretended property titles are illegitimate, but neither can we say that public property is unknown. Property in the possession of a thief is not unknown, even if at the moment it does not happen to be held by the rightful owner. The same goes for so-called public property. It was purchased and developed by means of money seized from the taxpayers. They are the true owners. This incidentally was the correct way to approach desocialization in the former Soviet regimes in Eastern Europe. All these industries were the property of the people who had been looted to build them, and these people should have received shares and proportion to their contributions to the extent it would have been possible to determine those. In an anarcho-capitalist world, with all private property owned, immigration would be up to each individual property owner to decide. Right now, on the other hand, immigration decisions are made by a central authority. The wishes of property owners are completely disregarded. The correct way to proceed, therefore, is to decentralize decision making on immigration to the lowest possible level. So we approach more meticulously and closely the proper libertarian position on which individual property owners consent to the various movements of peoples. Ralph Raco, our great libertarian historian, once wrote, free immigration would seem to be on a different category than other policy decisions, in that its consequences permanently and radically alter the very composition of the democratic political body that makes those decisions. In fact, he said the liberal order where to the extent it exists is the product of a highly complex cultural development. One wonders, for instance, what would become of the liberal society of Switzerland under a regime of open borders? Switzerland, in fact, is an interesting example. Before the European Union was involved, the immigration policy of Switzerland approached the kind of system we are describing here. In Switzerland, localities decided on immigration and immigrants, or their employers had to pay to admit a prospective immigrant. In this way, residents could better ensure that their communities would be populated by people who would add value and who would not stick them with a bill of laundry list bill of benefits. Obviously, in a pure open border system, the Western welfare states would simply be overrun by people seeking tax dollars. As libertarians, we should, of course, celebrate the demise of the welfare state. But to expect a sudden devotion to laissez-faire to be the likely outcome of such a collapse in the welfare state is to indulge in naivete of a especially preposterous kind. Can we conclude that immigrants should be considered merited, invited, excuse me, by the mere fact that they have been hired by an employer? No, says Hans, because the employer does not assume the full cost associated with his new employee. The employer partially externalizes the cost of that employee on the tax paying public. Hans says, equipped with a work permit, the immigrant is allowed to make free use of every public facility, roads, parks, hospitals, schools, and no landlord, businessman, or private association is permitted to discriminate against him as regards housing, employment, accommodation, and association. That is, the immigrant comes invited with a substantial fringe benefit package paid for not only partially by the immigrant's employer who allegedly has extended the invitation, but by domestic proprietors as taxpayers who had no say whatsoever in the invitation. These migrations, in short, are not market outcomes. They would not occur on a free market. We are what we are witnessing are examples of subsidized immigration. Libertarians defending these mass migrations as if they were market phenomena are only helping to discredit and undermine the true free market. Over as Hans points out, a free immigration position is not analogous to free trade as some libertarians have erroneously claimed. In the case of goods being traded from one place to another, there was always and necessarily a willing recipient. The same is not true for free immigration. To be sure it is fashionable in the U.S. to laugh at words of caution about mass migration, why people made predictions about previous ways of immigration were told, and we all know those didn't come true. Now for one thing, those waves are all followed by swift and substantial immigration reductions during which time society adapted to these pre-welfare state population movements. There is virtually no prospect of any such reduction today. For another, it is a fantasy to claim because some people incorrectly predicted a particular outcome at a particular time. Therefore that outcome is impossible and anyone issuing words of caution is simply a fool. Fact is politically enforced multiculturalism as an exceptionally poor track record. The 20th century affords failure after predictable failure, whether it's Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Pakistan and Bangladesh, or the Malaysia and Singapore. By the countless places where ethnic and religious divides have not yet been resolved to this day, the evidence suggests something very different from the tale of the universal brotherhood of man that is such a staple of leftist folklore. Though not some of the new arrivals are perfectly decent people despite the US government's lack of interest in encouraging immigration among the skilled and the capable. But some will not be. The three great crime waves in US history, which began in 1850, 1900 and 1960, coincided with periods of mass migration. Immigration may not have not been the only factor at work, but it was indeed a factor. Crime isn't the only reason people may legitimately wish to resist mass immigration. Four million Americans showed up on the shores of Singapore for admission that country's culture and society would be changed forever. And no, it's not true that libertarianism would require that the people of Singapore shrug their shoulders and say, well, it was nice to have our own society, but all good things must come to an end. No one in Singapore would want that outcome and in a free society, they would actively prevent it. In other words, it's bad enough to be looted, spied on and kicked around by the state. Should we also have to pay for the privilege of cultural destructionism, an outcome the vast majority of the state's tax-paying subjects do not want and would actively prevent if they lived in a free society and were allowed to do so. The very cultures that the incoming migrants are said to enrich us and the Europeans with could not have developed had they been constantly bombarded with waves of immigration by peoples of radically different cultures. So the multicultural argument doesn't even make sense. It's impossible to believe that the US or Western Europe would be a freer place after several more decades of uninterrupted mass migration on welfare. Given the migration patterns that the US and the EU government encourage, the long-term result will be to make constituencies for continued government growth so large as to be practically unopposable. Open borders libertarians active at that time may scratch their heads and claim not to understand why their promotion of free markets is having so little effect. Everyone else I would argue will understand why. Thank you.